Archive for the 'Money' Category

The true nature of the anti-Bitcoin animus

Monday, June 20th, 2011

MTGox, we discover, was the victim of an internal leak of their database. They were not hacked, and they are the victims of a criminal act of theft.

The facts in this matter do not concern the people who are gloating over this event. There are a group of people who are violent in nature, and who despise Bitcoin because they understand exactly what it represents; a direct threat to their sick and violent society which is based on coercion, the absence of freedom and the application of force.

Imagine a world where everyone had access to personal force fields via an artificially created gland that was made to grow into their abdomen by a nano machine / virus. These force fields could be activated either by the fear response or by the direction of your will, in the same way that you use your will to direct your arm to throw a ball.

Everyone would be able to protect themselves from any sort of physical attack, and all would be able to use similar technology to protect their houses.

It would then immediately become impossible for the State to send their agents to your house to rob you with bailiffs. They would no longer be able to force you to pay anything that you did not want to pay, and you would be able to protect yourself and your property from the other criminals and predators that are not sent out by the State.

In such a world, all flows of money would be voluntary by default. There could be no coercion of any kind, since violence against the person and her property would have been abolished by the advent of force fields.

The entire world would switch from one based on violence to one based on voluntary exchange.

This is exactly what Bitcoin is doing.

It is going to make it impossible for the state to stop people transacting at a distance, in any amount that they choose. It is going to remove the State from the equation as the unwanted third party in all transactions.

This is the true source of the animus against Bitcoin, and it explains why people like Tim Worstall and the other writers are dismissing Bitcoin so flippantly. Here is what I am talking about. These are quotes from an article by Tim Worstall that has just appeared:

The Bitcoin community faced another crisis on Sunday afternoon as the price of the currency on the most popular exchange, Mt.Gox, fell from $17 to pennies in a matter of minutes. Trading was quickly suspended and visitors to the home page were redirected to a statement blaming the crash on a compromised user account. Mt.Gox’s Mark Karpeles said that the exchange would be taken offline to give administrators time to roll back the suspect transactions.

Tim Worstall asserts that Bitcoin is finished because a single exchange has technical problems if this is the level of expertise operating at Forbes, you might be forgiven for taking everything that they publish with a big pinch of salt. There is no relation between the fictitious ‘Bitcoin community’ and MTGox, in fact, its a stretch to assert that there is a Bitcoin community at all. Is there an ‘internet community’ simply because people who peer on the network can send email to each other?

Not a good start!

For the record, Tim Worstall works as a consultant and dealer in scandium and other exotic metals. We can assume that he knows a little about how exchanges work, that there is normally more than one exchange for every commodity, and that you can get a feel for the price of a commodity not by looking only at one exchange, but by looking at them all at the same time.

He must also know that Bitcoin is in its infancy, and as other exchanges open, the problem of a single exchange running into difficulty will greatly suppress the triggers that initiate widespread panic. He should also know that a single technical fault in an exchange cannot be translated into a true loss of value in whatever it is the exchange deals in.

These fundamental facts and logic must be known to him, so why has he written this piece? What is the purpose of it?

The initial problem leading to the price collapse was that one user tried to sell more than the market could absorb. For of course the value of anything is determined by the balance of supply and demand for it. Thus the price crashed (and you can see a chart of how quickly it did here). However, it appears that this isn’t the only problem:

This demonstrates Mr. Worstall has at least a basic grasp of economics and how markets work. What he does not tell you, is that the sales were made not by one user, but by over 400 users simultaneously, who were all being controlled by a single attacker. Facts are stubborn things. Had this breach not taken place, the quoted price for Bitcoins on MTGox would not have dropped as it did. Worstall cannot distinguish between a wrongly quoted price and the true price of a commodity in a market.

Since I began writing this, it has emerged that details of more than 60,000 users have been stolen from the Mt Gox exchange. The compromised information includes hashed passwords.

No, the doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the Bitcoin experiment, but it’s a pretty good indication of it.

This is a baseless assertion, which other violent Statists will use in a faulty appeal to authority attack (“it came from Forbes, a trusted source”) against Bitcoin.

This event is not an indication of anything, other than that some of the user accounts at MTGox were exposed. If we apply this faulty logic to the other recent mass disclosures of usernames and passwords, we should expect Worstall to come up with similar nonsense lines:

The recent hack of SONY, where the credit card numbers, dates of birth and real names of TWENTY FIVE MILLION users were copied…
The recent hack of SEGA…
The loss from HM Revenue and Customs…

  • So, That’s the End of Credit Cards Then
  • So, That’s the End of SONY Then
  • So, That’s the end of SEGA Then
  • So, That’s the end of Her Majesty’s Government Then

Do you see what I did there?

Take a look at this if you want to gain some perspective on the matter of large scale data breaches, something that the Tim Worstall’s of this world seem to lack:

http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/6712283280/major-data-breaches.

The MTGox event doesn’t even appear on the radar.

While we are at it, in the case of Parliament, the breach of the government data really should have instantly spelled the end of ContactPoint and the ill conceived, ill fated ID Card, but of course, it did not. Also, the breach of 25 million credit cards should put pay to the Coalition’s absurd plan to use credit cards as ID Cards to access government gateways. We have written about this recently:

Credit card fraud is rampant, and using credit cards to interface with the state will allow everyone with a fraudulent or duplicated credit card to masquerade as someone else when identifying themselves to a government portal.

Look no further than the recent SONY breach where the credit card details, dates of birth, names and addresses of SEVENTY MILLION people were copied.

The population of Britain is 61,838,154 – 2009 That means that a number of people, larger than the population of Britain had their credit card details copied.

It means that if such a thing happened in the UK, every single person who identifies themselves to the state with their VISA could be impersonated with ease. This means more benefit fraud, GUARANTEED.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=3031

but that is another story.

The fact of the matter is that writing irrational pieces like this cannot be an accident. This is not an opinion piece, though the hatred of Liberty oozes out of every vowel. I want to know who is directing these drones to write hit pieces against Bitcoin. I am not the only one (not that that means anything in and of itself) to suspect that the organised chorus of anti Bitcoin propaganda, and it is propaganda, is just too perfectly in tune to be the random warbling of computer illiterates. Or maybe they are all perfectly brainwashed to the same tune piped out by the Government schools and State mandated curricula? Who knows?

Here is another piece in the key of Fail; Fortune ran this piece recently which everyone can see is a, “…thrown together and completely fact-optional piece. Seriously, this reads like somebody who spent 2 hours reading other news coverage headlines and decided to fill in the rest with make-believe.”

Oh dear.

The mainstream media and its gatekeepers have a terrible problem on their hands. They cannot tell a story without directing people to the facts that will disprove their propaganda. They are only a click away from every hit piece they write.

Anyone with curiosity can Google Bitcoin for themselves, download it and then run it. They can start accepting Bitcoins. They can integrate it into their websites and start getting paid for anything that they do.

Once they get a first hand feel for it, the lies that are being propagated about Bitcoin are instantly washed away. As more people use it, and the client improves, it will become harder and harder to lie about Bitcoin, and then the MSM drones will have to capitulate and start accepting it themselves. Once this happens, it will be forbidden by the editors of these rags to write an anti-bitcoin piece, because they would be being paid in Bitcoins themselvs.

That will be the tipping point; just as the newspapers all decided they needed to have online editions of their lie machines on the internet, and when they adopt anything, like social networking and Twitter feeds, eventually they will all have to accept Bitcoin or its successor. This is absolutely inevitable. For those that are interested, all of the websites of the newspapers are running some sort of Open Source Software. They might not like the economics or the philosophy of ‘free’ but they are all using it to spread their lies.

Forbes.com is running Apache on Linux and so is fortune.cnn.com. Both of these organizations would have railed against Open Source software from every possible angle, with FUD, “its not as secure as proprietary software”, “the business model cannot work”, “its not ready for the desktop” etc etc, and yet, they have all capitulated, and no one even discusses it any more, save to note how far and wide the software is spreading.

This is how these people operate.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

We are at the ‘ha ha’ stage now. It is only a matter of time before Tim Worstall or some other hack calls for Bitcoin to be banned or regulated. And for the record, you can replace Tim Worstall’s name with the name of any journalist that has written a piece like this. Even people who claim to be scientific in their thinking manage to write garbage about Bitcoin. They all share the same attributes (lies) and one is replaceable with any other, and the newspaper name or slant doesn’t matter either. I could cite dozens of shabby articles, but why bother, they are all pretty much identical in theme, deception, sneer and ignorance.

For there are certain things that we want from a currency. A medium of exchange, a store of value, we’d also like to it be liquid and security is important as well.

Once again, we have the ever present WE of the collectivists. What Worstall means by ‘security’ of course is the unfettered ability of the State to be able to interpose itself in all transactions so it can tax. Without it, his beloved collective dies, and Bitcoin is the first actual financial tool that could pull it off. This is why everyone who loves and lives by the State, its predations, its illegitimate regulations, its stolen loot, its bureaucracy and all the other vile stuff in its ecosystem where violence is the lubricant, hates Bitcoin with a passion.

With Bitcoin, people have the choice to opt out of their sick society. Bitcoin is the force field that protects the individual’s money from the State. Its mass adoption would collapse the income of the State, forcing it to completely re-assess its relationship with people everywhere. On a side note, we can expect the State to ramp up the violence to eleven on the dial, before they throw in the towel.

No currency can have all of these features (and humans have used some pretty odd things as currency over the centuries, from copper sheets to cowrie shells via butter, salt, gold, silver and even pieces of paper with Dead Presidents on them, surely the final lunacy?) to perfection but a currency which doesn’t have any of them in appreciable quantities isn’t going to last very long.

This is simply not true. There can be a currency that has all of these features; just because you cannot imagine it that does not make it so. Three years ago, anyone you asked would have told you that the double spending problem could not be solved, because digital files are infinitely copyable. Lo and behold, a single man with a vision has solved the problem and his solution has applications beyond currency. Computer illiterate collectivists cannot even begin to see the sort of world that would emerge out of the idea behind Bitcoin. No matter. The world will change wether they like it or not.

As for odd currencies lasting a long time, did you know that the longest running currency was the tally stick? A strip of wood with notches cut in it that was then split in half; one half being spent out and the other reserved by the issuer.

The tally stick system lasted seven hundred years as a form of money.

Bitcoin can be used to send stored value across the world, in the same way that tally sticks were used. It can last a long time, and bring many benefits to the people who use it. Bitcoin, and the ideas that drive it are in no way ‘over’.

Bitcoins aren’t secure, as both the recent theft and this password problem show.

This is simply false, and betrays a complete ignorance of what Bitcoin is and how it works. All of the problems that have been falsely attributed to Bitcoin have not been a problem with Bitcoin itself, but have instead, been directly related to the platforms in which it is being used.

MTGox had a problem with their physical security; nothing to do with Bitcoin itself. The man who lost 50,000 Bitcoins had them stolen from a laptop running Microsoft Windows, either by physical access or remotely by a Trojan; nothing to do with Bitcoin itself.

Even if someone finds a flaw in the Bitcoin client, the idea of it is sound and has changed everything forever.

More people today are thinking about what money is, and understand what Fiat Currency is and how it is evil and institutionalised theft. That is thanks to Bitcoin. More people today have a real grasp of how simple money transfer over the Internet could and should be, if only the State would get out of the way. That is thanks to Bitcoin.

PayPal and the Credit Card companies and their processors are shaking in their boots; you will never have your Bitcoin account frozen. You do not have to make any declaration of any kind, swear an oath, divulge personal information or suffer any State mandated humiliation to start receiving and spending Bitcoins worth millions of dollars. There are no artificial limits on how much Bitcoin you can receive and spend, and where you can spend it and what on. The only loser in all of this is the State and its army of cronies, clients, parasites and thugs.

The next Rebecca Black on YouTube will put her Bitcoin address in the description, and she will reap millions from her fans… even the ones who hate her.

Actually, thats an argument against Bitcoin, sorry.

They’re not liquid, nor a store of value, as the price collapse shows and if they’re none of those things then they’ll not be a great medium of exchange either as who would want to accept them?

This is, of course, nonsense. Lets take it one by one:

“They are not liquid”

What Does Liquid Asset Mean?
An asset that can be converted into cash quickly and with minimal impact to the price received. Liquid assets are generally regarded in the same light as cash because their prices are relatively stable when they are sold on the open market.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/liquidasset.asp

Bitcoins, are becoming more and more liquid every day. You can trade them in the street, and there are services popping up that help you find people who want to sell or buy Bitcoins close to you, using geolocation.

“nor a store of value”
This is demonstrably false. If you can spend Bitcoins, they are a store of value by definition, just as the tally stick was, just as gold is and paper money is. This is nonsense on stilts, and we have addressed this before when we took apart Grant Babcock’ assertions.

“as the price collapse shows”
There was no price collapse, this is a falsehood. MTGox, a single exchange, suffered a technical problem not related to Bitcoin itself, and the price recovered immediately. The trades are going to be reversed where possible, and as you can see in this video:

the price at that broken exchange recovered. This is not reporting, or real journalism. It is utter rubbish.

“they’ll not be a great medium of exchange either as who would want to accept them?”
You can file this under the same nonsense like, “guitar bands are finished” (Beatles) or “no one wants internet access, because no one is on it yet”, or “the internet will amount to nothingClifford Stoll.

Note, attentive readers, that Clifford Stoll’s famous, “it will never catch on” piece appeared in Newsweek, a world class mainstream media lie machine, with a vested interest in killing anything that stops people from being free, reading the truth or from them selling dead trees. They have been dragged kicking and screaming into the future…. but you know this!

True, Bitcoin does still offer anonymity:

Not really, but why should we expect you to get this right?

but then so do copper sheets to cowrie shells via butter, salt, gold, silver and even pieces of paper with Dead Presidents on them.

There are moves afoot and plenty of evidence to prove you wrong Mr. Worstall. Just ask this gentleman who was stopped at an airport simply because he was carrying his own money. So much for the anonymity of cowrie shells and fraudulent pieces of paper with Dead Presidents on them.

It’s difficult to see what the currency has going for it.

http://blogs.forbes.com/timworstall/2011/06/20/so-thats-the-end-of-bitcoin-then/

Its only difficult to see what Bitcoin has going for it if you are an ignoramus in the literal sense of that word.

If you understand how cash works, then you should understand what Bitcoin offers its users and what it has ‘going for it’. But I think this article’s author knows full well what the potential of Bitcoin is, which is exactly why he has written this piece as he has.

No one born in 1963, who writes for ‘newspapers” and trades metals as a profession doesn’t know what the internet has done for man. People like that have experienced the internet revolution first hand, as it has transformed the way everyone works, plays, communicates, learns, spends money and thinks.

Bitcoin, its future iterations and its inevitable successors, are going to change the world again, in ways that are very difficult to predict, though we can have a crack at it for fun. It is a fact that Bitcoin already has changed the world.

One thing you simply cannot do in the face of something like this is intone, “it will never work” or “I can’t see the point in it”. These sorts of predictions, especially when they are related to technology are almost always wrong or short sighted, and in today’s day and age, with all of the experience of the last two decades under our belts, such an attitude is inexcusable stupidity.

Ethics-Ra vs Moralzilla in the Sausage Factory

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

We return to the subject of health and rights.

There exist many groups with well-intentioned wishes to provide assistance on a global basis to people they classify as ‘less fortunate’ or ‘undeveloped’.  These groups actively lobby for certain global health policies which fit with their own, morally-defined and often colonialist world-view..  The list of these groups is endless (start with WHO, UNICEF, UN-Women, DFID, WHA, UNDP, World Bank…. and go from there).

These groups are lobbying, with much success, for policies such as the global fortification of flour and iodination of salt.  They promote lifestyle interventions in developed and developing nations (often without any strategic input from representatives of these nations; hence the new colonialism), are demanding global regulation of the food industry (reducing salt, sugar, restricting advertising, banning trans fats and so on), banning alcohol adverts and demanding punitive taxes, and are pushing very hard to achieve a reduction to <5% of global population as smokers in the next 5-10 years through similarly aggressive measures against the tobacco industry.

These policies are listed here, albeit briefly, so that you may think of how one may go about trying to implement one of these policies globally.  First the policy process is developed in various agencies (over several years minimum), lobbied for through more agencies, pushed at sub-UN (e.g. WHO, WHA) and then at UN level meetings and finally adopted as a global UN Treaty and implemented on the ground by those countries who choose to ratify the UN declaration.  Implementation occurs even if this means changing local law, as has been done with tobacco use in public places (see the FCTC).  This entire process costs unimaginable sums of money… and the point here is to remember from where exactly that money comes.

There is now an enormous political push for global public health governance (you can see here that this idea reached UN level many years ago, with sponsored publications from 2002. Nota bene the direct links with trade/economics).  The prospect has spawned a whole research field, with institutes and conferences to boot!

This push will of course necessitate the setup of yet another organisation to coordinate research, implementation and monitoring of policy.  However, these global bodies are always skint, and member nations are failing to keep up their UN subscriptions.  But this little fact does not put off those interested (and self-interested) parties, oh no!  And why not?  Because they all know that there is a vast source of money out there which can be accessed if only they can persuade the other politicians (since at this level the interested parties are all represented by politicians, no matter their previous or current professional background) to squeeze it just a little harder.  That source is the taxpayer.  And in global policy, that means every taxpayer, everywhere.

It can be concluded, from directly witnessing these types of discussions, that the main reason why the implementation of global policy (and of global public healthcare policy in particular) is taken so incredibly seriously, is that the population is considered to exist for, and is amenable to, behavioural modification and exploitation as these global bodies see fit:  ALWAYS in regard to ECONOMIC GROWTH.  The only way a policy, medical or otherwise, will be approved at UN level is if it is sold to politicians as a driver of economic growth or in terms of improving human productivity and life-years at productive age.

The terms used at this level to describe ‘people’ are dehumanising, indicative of the single value of a plebian life only in terms of contribution to economic growth.  Its contribution to the economy is far more important in driving policy than any consideration of humanitarian or ethical concerns.  There are, of course, interest groups which deal in ethics, such as the Nuffield Council on BioEthics in the United Kingdom.  They advise political groups and others, with the aim of acting as an ‘honest broker’ of information.  As such they have, for example, developed a ‘ladder of intervention’.  One may describe the ladder as running from Libertarian at the bottom to Dictatorial (or UN Treaty) at the top.  These people, some of whom I know, deal in ethics, yet it is hard to be clear whether they act pragmatically rather than ethically, exhibiting an apparent requirement to demonstrate their own relevance to politics and policy-shaping.

Whatever, a mere digression.  Returning to a coordinated global health policy, implemented from on high, the major problem is that these things cost money.

Most existing and future local (national) tax has been promised to The Bankers to compensate them for all the losses they incurred in their private businesses while exploiting the public purse.  The children and grandchildren of two continents are already beholden to as-yet unborn Bankers, indentured slaves who will grow up knowing no other life, unless they find a red pill.

So the only way a new global public health policy will be implemented – and it will be implemented, and it will not be the only policy implemented in this way – is through new, global taxes.  Global Government developing and implementing Global Policy funded by Global Taxes extorted by the same Global Government.  Are you paying attention yet?

There will soon be a global ‘Tobin Tax’ on financial transactions, although this is likely to be inconsequential and serves as window-dressing to convince the workforce that The Rich Suffer Too.

Other revenue streams under serious consideration are a global tax on aeroplane tickets, and one on internet service providers (suggested by Sarkozy, who now also wants more internet regulation).  Of couse, a new global body will be needed to manage and monitor these taxes… you can see where this leads.  At least, you’d better see!

Finally, if we manage to hold down our rising bile, suspend our disbelief and assume that there is indeed a humanitarian drive behind many global policies, we may return briefly to Ethics and Morals.  Is it ethical to extort money, however morally correct the purpose to which that money is put?  Is it ethical to ‘eliminate choice’ or otherwise intervene and thereby punish by restricting the liberty of even one person in order to benefit your own moral judgement of what is good for the majority?  Is it ethical to impose, by force, your own moral judgement on others?  In the reality of global politics, the answer to all these questions is a resounding YES.

The reason is because these questions are all filtered through the screen of greed-based economics.  Thus we see the question as “Is it ethical to impose, by force, your own moral judgements on others, if that judgement leads to economic growth (and, by default, increased upward flow of wealth)?”  In the sausage factory there are no ethics, there are no morals, there is only money.

Analysing the Anonymous ‘Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America’

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

That acephalous, elusive, networked, autonomous, intelligent and revolutionary construct Anonymous, has published a statement called “An Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America”, wherein they demonstrate that Anonymous is rapidly iterating towards Libertarianism.

They have a few more cycles to go however.

We have written about Anonymous before; it is interesting because it is a fulfilment of the prescient observations of Jean Baudrillard, with his assertion that there is a “mass”, with characteristics closely matching what Anonymous is and how it reacts to stimuli.

This statement is significant not only because it demonstrates that Anonymous is moving towards the locus of Libertarianism, it is also interesting in the type of thinking displayed at this iteration; Anonymous clearly understands far more than previous generations, but it is still hampered by some fundamental illusions, misconceptions and illogic, and this has prevented it from coming up with a coherent statement.

Anonymous has lofty goals. It clearly, explicitly, is seeking Natural Rights. This is a very specific goal, and one that is not compatible with some of the goals listed at the end of the statement.

Thankfully, Anonymous is full of highly intelligent, computer literate people who, once exposed to the truth, accept it as the truth, just as computer programmers must accept the syntax of a language if they are to use it, and mathematicians must accept that 1+1=2.

Let us parse through this announcement, correcting it and analysing as we go along…

Dear us citizens,

The people who live on the ‘North American Continent’ are human beings; they are not citizens or slaves of the United States Government, living in farms like cattle. It is crucial, when attacking these problems, that the persons thinking about them understand what human beings are, and what their true relationship to government and other human beings is.

Human beings are not the property of other human beings. They are individuals with inherent rights that do not come from government. Being ‘born a US citizen‘ is tantamount to being born into slavery. Anyone who wants Natural Rights for themselves rejects the idea of being born a citizen, of any state, no matter what it is called, or how that state came to be.

We, Anonymous would like to offer you, America, the opportunity to join and support our movement.

This offer cannot be made to ‘America’. It can only be made to the individuals who happen to live in what has come to be called ‘America’.

We are a group that formed on the internet – one that knows no constructs or absolutes, and one that has recently grown exponentially.

There most certainly are absolutes. There is right and wrong; stealing is wrong, for example. There are constructs also; Natural Rights is one of them. You cannot on the one hand, say that there are no absolutes or constructs, and then on the other, call for Natural Rights.

We would like to introduce an Operation. An Operation that involves Americans getting our Natural Rights and dreams back.

Your Natural Rights cannot be taken away from you. They can only be denied expression. For example, the property rights you have in paper can be denied to you if you choose to write an essay or print instructions that the state determines that you may not distribute. You have the absolute right, at all times, to own and publish; the state merely uses violence to stop you from exercising that right.

Right now, you can help by passing on the Information. Information is power. Share the power of the Information with other like minded individuals. The more people we represent, the more Power we have, both as individuals and as Anonymous. Thank you for your time and power.

I would suggest that information, that is true, needs to be shared between the like minded and the yet to be like minded.

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Many events have taken shape over the course of only a few years, and slowly our system has been working towards the gains of itself rather than the gains of the people.

It is completely wrong to characterise the State as ‘our system‘. It never was, is not, and never will be ‘our system’. Even if it were to become some sort of collectively owned, internet mediated Communist Utopia, this is completely contrary to Natural Rights.

The State does not work towards the gains of itself; it is not a living entity with its own goals, separate from those at the levers of the controls. The State is the violent apparatus through which a small number of people (who are indistinguishable from Mafia gangsters save in scale), rob, steal murder and destroy for their own personal gain.

Before you try and understand any of the problems facing free people, it is essential that you understand the true nature of the source of the trouble; the State. It is also crucial, when trying to describe this problem, to not use collective pronouns when talking about it. It is not ‘our taxes’ or ‘our schools’ or ‘our government’. These things are the property of the State. You do not own them, do not control them, and should not refer to them with a collective pronoun. Ever.

While we have all watched and rallied against the system working against us, there have been other gains of the system that have gone without a peep as back-room deals and and bargaining allow for the passing of legislation and research funding that has resulted in the loss of more liberties such as censorship, phone and internet surveillance and eminent domain laws.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with back-room deals. This message from Anonymous was, no doubt, written in such a back-room fashion; in private as it were. The assumption here is that the State is legitimate in principle, and that if its dealings were done in the light of day, this would ameliorate the problems faced by the human beings living under them. This is completely incorrect; the State is not legitimate, and wether or not its laws, deals and strictures are negotiated in public or private is immaterial to this fact.

Research ‘funding’ is of course, stolen loot redirected to corrupt scientists and crony capitalists. Censorship is the violent curtailing of property rights in paper, CD ROMS servers and bandwidth. Surveillance is a similar violation to censorship, since it involves interfering with private property to carry it out. Eminent domain is simple theft.

All of these violations have one thing in common; they all come from the State. When you peel away the layers of illogic, groupthink and brainwashing, the State emerges as the common enemy and problem behind all the usurpations, violence and evil that Anonymous opposes.

Not to mention the higher taxes, lower wages, and loss of work due to exports deals.

Taxation is violent theft by the State. Wages are a private contract between two people or a person and a company. You cannot on the one hand, call for Natural Rights, and then in the same breath, call for the violent State to guarantee you high wages by threatening violence to those who provide jobs. This is pure illogic.

Loss of work, in every form save natural disasters and entrepreneurial miscalculation, is caused by the State and its distortion of economic activity through its minimum wage laws right up to the Federal Reserve, fiat currencies, legal tender laws and monopoly on setting interest rates. Anonymous seems to understand this partially, as ‘End the Fed‘ is high up on its list of priorities, but you cannot call for the end of the Federal Reserve system, and then say that the State should guarantee wages or interfere in economics. There is some confusion here, that will hopefully be cleared away in the next iteration.

We repeat the history of our mistakes instead of evolving our society.

There is no ‘we’ in any of this, only individuals with Natural Rights. There are no collective mistakes, and there is no ‘our society’, collectively owned by everyone. These are collectivist brainwashing terms, used to prevent people from understanding the true nature of the problem by stopping them from identifying the State as the cause of all problems.

Generations in the past spoke of what we face as current issues, the only difference being that of our technological achievements. We have forgotten such words our society has found guidance and value in:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This is very problematic for anyone who wants to exercise their Natural Rights. The pursuit of happiness is not a right, and rights are not secured by or granted by government. The State cannot derive power from the governed; this is a fallacy. The State cannot do things that individuals cannot do, and cannot be ceded powers that individuals do not have. You cannot, by dint of a vote, cede the power to steal, murder and destroy to the State, because you do not have that power yourself.

The declaration of independence is a beautiful document, no doubt about it, but it is fundamentally flawed in its outlining of what rights are and where they come from, and what makes government legitimate.

No one has a right to institute a government that controls people who do not consent to be governed by it, no matter how it is formed. This document can only lead to tyranny, and that is exactly what has come to pass; a monolithic Federal Government that murders at will, like an out of control monster.

This document, and its ideas should be rejected by all people who desire the expression of their Natural Rights, for as soon as you accept its principles, you are on the way down a slippery slope to despotism, theft and every vile thing that decent people loathe today.

“In the past few months, Anonymous has made headlines through the actions of a few. The media tries to instill fear of which Anonymous is as a “group”, and in the process failed to recognize it as an “ideal” that is gaining momentum.

Ideals are good, as long as their foundation is sound.

Anonymous is an ideal that the people can use to further help other people.

People helping other people is good. Voluntarism and Natural Rights is the key to prosperity. Statism, collectivism and coercion are pure evil and should be rejected by all decent people.

In this case, you’re not being heard and transparency in government operations is non-existent in many matters.

Once again, if someone is stealing from you right in front of your face, transparently, it is still immoral theft. The fact that theft is hidden or not is not material. The meme of ‘Transparency‘ is Statist brainwashing designed to keep you from coming to the conclusion that the State itself is illegitimate. There are many such brainwashing terms, ‘have your say‘, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ – all of these are patent nonsense. If you are having your money stolen from you, and you have your say in where it goes to any extent, this does not mean that you have not been violated by theft. If the money that was stolen from you was accounted to you, i.e. “we stole 58% of your pay-check this year”, this does not erase the immorality contained in the fact that money has been stolen from you through violence.

All of this brainwashing must be eradicated and the actions of the State put into their proper context, if you are to attack this problem correctly.

Mobilize yourself to find your information, and we’ll be giving you resources to further help you. Take the information you find and tell your government your demands.

It is not ‘your government’. You have no right to demand that the State take its stolen money and do your bidding.

We want AMERICANS to wake up! We want AMERICANS to read! We want AMERICANS to think,and above all question all things! We want AMERICANS to analyze, criticize, critique and learn to read between the lines, to expose and to deconstruct! We want you to believe in the infinite power of the people! We want you to learn that we’re all truly brothers and sisters in humanity regardless of all the artificial barriers that have been set up to separate us!

Waking up is a good thing, but make sure that you wake all the way up and not just half way, like in Inception.

If you are going to read, read Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Manifesto as a starting point to your complete awakening. Its easy to read and understand, and after you have read it, you will never think about government and rights in the same way again.

It is crucial to question all things, but you must make sure that you really are questioning from the correct frame of reference, and not inside a box provided for you by the State and its brainwashing schools.

“Think For Yourself, Question Authority” -Timothy Leary

Reject authority, end the State.

Inform. Educate. Guide. Evolve. Wake up the People. The time for the next step in our species’ social evolution has come!

Social evolution is nonsense. Man has one nature and one nature only. The people who call for social evolution are of the same ilk as the Fabian Socialists, who want to destroy the family and recast populations into inhuman morasses of degradation and total control.

To effectively reform the system that has enslaved us, we must consider following the advice and

The system cannot be reformed, because it is fundamentally flawed and immoral. Government cannot draw legitimacy from the people; this is a lie, and anyone that understands Natural Rights already knows this.

example of those who have preceded us. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK are good places to start.

Abraham Lincoln was a monster, and should only be held up as such.
Teddy Roosevelt was pure evil.
JFK gave us the NASA moon landing.

All of this thinking is the result of brainwashing in government schools, especially the nauseating worship of Abraham Lincoln.

All took fierce positions against central banking, government corruption and corporate power.

This simply is not the whole story, and as you move towards the Libertarian position, the great historians who are Libertarians will dispel many myths for you. JFK through executive order 11110 tried to attack the criminal and fraudulent Federal Reserve System directly, and some say, this is why he was executed. Andrew Jackson put pay to The United States Bank that took root in the USA.

Finally, for the record, the moon project of John F Kennedy was a boondoggle where billions of stolen dollars were diverted to corporations to build the systems for NASA, for example. That is government corruption and corporate power writ large.

Americans and many other people are steeped in the myths dogmas and untruths found in the religion of the State. They accept as fact its assertions and its telling of history as related in its government schools, and it was very difficult before the internet to break through and get at the truth of it all. Now there is no excuse. You have the internet, you have the ability to read and can reason. You have no choice but to accept the world as it actually is.

The time has come for us to unite, the time has come for us to stand up and fight! You are Anonymous!

We are in the information era.
We are Anonymous,
We are Legion,
We do not forget,
We do not forgive,
Expect us.

For great justice.

Below: Grievances and demands
A starting point for reform could be established by citing a list of worthy objectives provided by ampedstatus.com;

These objectives are contradictory, based on violence, and stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what rights are and where they come from.

Enforce RICO Laws

RICO Laws are illegitimate:

Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering. Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all monies and interest in any business gained through a pattern of “racketeering activity.” RICO also permits a private individual harmed by the actions of such an enterprise to file a civil suit; if successful, the individual can collect triple damages.

It has been speculated that the name and acronym were selected in a sly reference to the movie Little Caesar, which featured a notorious gangster named Rico. The original drafter of the bill, G. Robert Blakey, refused to confirm or deny this.[1] G. Robert Blakey remains an expert on RICO;[2] his former student Michael Goldsmith also gained a reputation as one of the nation’s leading RICO experts.[3]

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

And they are a perfect example of the illegitimacy of the state, for a number of reasons. Without listing all of them, you should be suspicious that the author of this odious piece of legislation is now one of the foremost experts in RICO law.

Break Up the Big Banks

The phrase ‘break up’ gives you a clue to wether this is moral or immoral. This is nothing more than a call for violence to be carried out by the state on behalf of the mob. The state should not be interfering with economics. If you want to run your own bank, that is your affair; the state should not have the power to license, regulate or control banks or deposits in any way whatsoever. They should not insure deposits, bail out banks or do any of those things. If you do not accept this, then you are not for Natural Rights.

End the Fed

The Federal Reserve System is a creature of the State, and it should be abolished. The State should not have a monopoly on the creation of money.

Break Up the Mainstream Media / encourage citizen journalists

Once again, this is a despicable call for violence to be carried out by the State on behalf of the mob. Decent people who are for Natural Rights do not call for violence to be done to others, under any circumstances. The State should not be interfering in people’s affairs by encouraging one type of trade over another; in the UK, they call this ‘picking winners’. If you want to be a journalist, that is an entirely private choice, where you exercise your right to own and distribute paper, or own space on a server connected to the internet. It has nothing to do with government whatsoever.

End Closed Door Lobbying

The state itself should be ended; lobbying is nothing more than a pimple on the hideous face of the real, and very ugly problem.

Increase Government Transparency

See above.

End Corporate Personhood

People who understand Natural Rights know that you have the right to contract with others on terms that are suitable to you and your partners. This is an absolute right, derived from your property right in yourself and what you have lawfully acquired.

The idea behind corporations is that groups of people create a vehicle through which they can invest in a project without fear that should the enterprise fail, the investors would not be liable for the debts of the project. Before this idea, if your business suffered losses, you could lose all of your stored capital which may have taken your entire life to accumulate. Limited Liability protects you from this sort of catastrophe, and anyone can take advantage of incorporation; its not just ‘for the rich’.

There is nothing wrong with this in principle, as long as everyone who deals with every entity involved knows what they are becoming involved with and enters into agreements voluntarily.

If you have a particular dislike of corporations, then it is your choice not to deal with them. What you cannot do is impose your personal opinion on others with violence.

The railing against corporations is one of the pillars of the socialists, who have insinuated their diseased thinking into the minds of otherwise right thinking people. As soon as you scratch the surface of this thinking with a Libertarian fingernail, the lie of the ‘end corporate personhood’ argument becomes abundantly clear; this is Statism, coercion and violence under the cloak of ‘power to the people’. Its nonsense from beginning to end.

Amend Campaign Finance

Democracy is illegitimate. Majority rule is illegitimate. This is a call from inside the framework that holds that government as it is currently structured is legitimised and made moral by voting. It is not, never has been and never will be legitimate or moral, and so how campaigns are financed are totally irrelevant, when we consider that the true aim should be the ending of the State itself.

Verify All Votes

Votes, wether they are verified or not, do not confer legitimacy to governments. Once again, this is a call from inside the matrix, within a framework designed by the State to stop you from understanding that voting itself is illegitimate.

Investigate War Profiteers

The State is the source of all war. End the State and you end war. Investigating war profiteers is pointless while the State persists.

Investigate War Crimes

Rubbish. End the State.

End the Wars

End the cause of war; the State.

Restore Civil Liberties

The State is what restricts your liberties. End it, and the restoration of your liberties will follow as day follows night.

Uphold the Constitution

The constitution is a document that binds people who have not given their consent to be governed by it. That is illegitimate on its face. Worship of the Constitution and the principle that a State is legitimate when it has one is deeply ingrained in the minds of the brainwashed.

Clean Air, Water & Food

See Lew Rockwell’s Environmental Manifesto. The State cannot provide these things for you.

Reduce Healthcare Costs, Profiteering

This is straight out of the immoral Socialist thought process. There is nothing wrong with Profit. If you want to help people, it is up to you to help them. You cannot call for the state to steal to help people.

Make Healthcare a Human Right

Healthcare is a good, not a right. Rights cannot be created out of thin air by the State.

Improve Education For All, Reduce Costs

Once again, like healthcare, education is not a right, it is a good. Literacy and academic achievement have been destroyed by the State and those who call for ‘Education for all’. Costs have skyrocketed precisely because the violent statists have brayed for the State to step in and make Education a ‘right’. The State should be completely removed from the business of education. If there even is a State.

Reform Prison System

Many of the acts the State defines as crimes are not crimes at all. America has the world’s largest prison population because prison is a business outsourced by the State. Without the State, this problem would, like many others, disappear.

Reform drug laws (Stop spending so much money on drugs! NYC spent $75million alone on marijuana arrests.

The source of this is, again, the State. All laws in this area are illegitimate. They should not be ‘reformed’ they should be abolished, along with the State that created and enforced them.

Immigration Reform

In a place where there is no State, immigration is not a problem. You need to understand that immigration is only a problem because there is a State. There are arguments to the contrary. Either way, the State is not the answer to any problem, no matter what it is.

Rebuild Infrastructure

Translation: “steal more money to give to contractors to fix roads and bridges and lay down fibre optic cable”. Be careful what you ask for, because by doing so, you create more of the problem that you are trying to get rid of. You cannot be against Eminent Domain, but at the same time, be for stealing property so that roads can be built on them by the State for ‘infrastructure’.

Protect Internet Freedom

There would be no problems of censorship, interception and internet freedom were there no State to cause these bad things like net neutrality.

Empower States’ Rights

No. States do not have rights, only men have rights. There are no gay rights, black rights, women’s rights or animal rights. Only man has rights, and all men have the same rights. Remember this quote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. That much of it is true. All men ARE created equal, without distinctions in terms of their rights. This is different to being entitled to any sort of service by your fellow man of course.

End Corporate Welfare

End the State that steals money to give it.

Fair taxes for everyone!

No. Stealing is never ‘fair’, and the word ‘fair’ is another brainwashing term.

Enforce corporate responsibility

There is no such thing as ‘corporate responsibility’, and in any case, you cannot be against the idea of corporations and FOR corporate responsibility at the same time!

Force corporations to apply local labor laws in their global operations

Which is it, for or against corporations? As for ‘labor laws’, they are all illegitimate strictures of the State, and unwarranted immoral interference in economics.

Strengthen environmental laws and force corporations to clean up their act

More calls for violence.

Work for a real separation of church and state – and a real split between corp and state?

There should be no State to separate from the church. And if there are no corporations, as is being asked for, there would be no corporations to separate from the State.

Reinstate Habeus Corpus

End the state that arrests people for non crimes like Prostitution and smoking marijuana.

Allow felons who have paid their debt to restore voting rights

Voting is not a right. End the State that creates felons in the first place. Realise also, that the idea of a ‘debt to society’ is completely fallacious.

Stop prison labor from competing with local businesses

End the State, and its prison industrial complex.

Additional objectives
End lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States is illegitimate, as are the laws it rules on.

Abolish the “Patriot Act”

Abolish the State that enacted it.

Abolish the lobbying system (no paid lobbyists)

Abolish the State that lobbyists attend to, and for whom they go to get their vicious laws passed, like the Mickey Mouse Copyright extension law and ACTA to name but two.

Close Guantánamo

End the state that owns it, and relinquish the illegitimately acquired property upon which it stands in Cuba.

Establish and define “financial terrorism” as a treasonous act and prosecute offenders vigorously

This is pure in the matrix thinking.

This is a call for the State to create a crime, based inside the financial system controlled by the State and its cronies at the Federal Reserve.

Without the Fed and the State, in a land where sound money flowed freely, this idea would be a nonsense. If you want to solve this problem, end the State that steals money through the printing press at the Fed, and switch to sound money in the form of gold and silver coins.

Treason is a crime against the State. Only the brainwashed and the Statists believe that such a thing is a ‘crime’. Calling for prosecution is calling for violence obviously, the end result being the perpetrators sent to the hell holes of the prison industrial complex, at the expense of the ‘taxpayer’.

This is a perfect example of thinking three levels inside the box; illogical, irrational and incapable of framing the problem correctly because all the givens are provided by the State.

If you REALLY want to do something to End the Fed and stop the criminal crony capitalist fractional reserve bankers, do what Max Kieser suggests as your next Anonymous Operation… GOLD FINGER!

Enshrine gender equality in the constitution

Freedom is not free, free men are not equal and equal men are not free. You cannot on the one hand call for Natural Rights, and then call for the constitution to enshrine ‘gender equality’ (the violent enforcement of laws upon free people) as an amendment. This error flows from the incorrect idea that women have rights that are separate from men; they do not. All human beings have the same rights; and these are all derived from the right of property.

End corporate money in the election process

See above, and pull the cable from the back of your head.

“Reduce non-emergency military funding”

The war machine is a creature of the State. There is no such thing as ‘funding’ it is theft, pure and simple.

And there you have it. There was only one item in that list that was legitimate; End the Fed.

For those who have not read any of the books, seen the lectures or read the articles cited above, you have alot of work to do, but you will be amply rewarded with an air tight way of thinking about the world at no cost to you other than your time.

As the iterations fold over and calculate in the hive mind GPU, Anonymous will come to these conclusions, as they are all inescapable now that the internet is everywhere. Thankfully Anonymous is iterating in internet time, and it will not be long before it will be calling for measures and thinking in terms that are consistent, logical and Libertarian.

Here we go again: the Times Education Supplement calls for the creation of ContactPoint 2.0

Monday, February 21st, 2011

The Times Education Supplement is wrongly named.

It should in fact be called The Times School Supplement. The people who work there believe that education can only happen in a school.

Of course, they are wrong, but their whole economic and ideological ecosystem revolves around children being in schools, and children being educated outside of schools means that the TES and the teachers and companies that are connected to it in one way or another by six degrees of separation, will no longer have forced access to other people’s children and stolen money from the State, which is both how they earn their living and the substrate upon which they base their every thought.

In an attempt to increase the power of the Sate and to make sure that every child becomes a profit stream for the TES and teachers, ‘journalist’ Kerra Maddern has written a thinly veiled attack piece on home education, parents, the family and anyone who rejects the idea that education can happen outside of school.

I am now going to pull it to pieces.

Analysis: Without a national system local authorities are failing to keep track of children who drop out of education, sparking fears that they may be at risk of abuse. Kerra Maddern reports

This analysis is flawed. What this woman means by ‘national system’ is a successor to the paedophile catalogue ContactPoint, the nightmare central database where all eleven million children in the UK were to be registered by force (a ‘national system’) that over one million government workers were to be given access to, and from which celebrities, the ultra rich and MPs were to be exempted.

We wrote about ContactPoint many times, pointing out the lies, faulty reasoning, computer illiteracy and immorality of it. It seems that Kerra Maddern is on the side of those sick and stupid people.

Almost 12,000 children are officially “missing” from education, a TES investigation has revealed, with many at “serious risk” of physical, sexual and mental harm.

The thinking behind this number is flawed. Just because the State does not know what a child is or is not doing, this does not mean that they are ‘missing from education’.

The whole premiss of this article starts from the incorrect position that children are the property of the State, which of course, they are not. The State has no right to know what every child is doing and where it is at all times. Only fascists and paedohiles desire such information.

Similarly, just because the State does not know where a child is, it does not immediately follow that those children are at any risk of anything whatsoever. Only in the sick minds of the statist does ‘unknown to the State’ immediately translate to ‘in potential danger’. In fact, children in the care of the State are more likely to be abused than those that are not.

Leading children’s charities and Ofsted

Ofsted, which should be abolished, exists by making money off of children. They serve no useful purpose, as we and others have pointed out. Children’s charities, who are against home education to a man, also exist by making money off of children. All of these people make a living off of children. They will do and say anything to remove the responsibility for children from parents. They are in the Child Exploitation Industry and as far as they are concerned, the parent is their number one enemy, because parents have the power to cut off their streams of revenue – children.

say they are deeply concerned by the findings, which show that 11,911 children have fallen out of the education system and that schools and local authorities do not know the location of significant numbers of these young people.

Once again, the state not knowing about the location of a child cannot be extrapolated to anything whatsoever.

The last official estimate from the Government – made five years ago – put the total number of children missing from education at 10,000, suggesting that the problem has since deteriorated.

…or that it has improved; no one knows. Of course, it is in the interests of the Child Exploitation Industry to claim that everything is getting worse, because worse means more stolen loot (State ‘funding’, ‘grants’) for the exploiters; the charities, Quangos and the cronies of the State.

The TES statistics, obtained from every English local authority through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the challenges of trying to keep track of thousands of transient families who move between regions.

There is no ‘challenge of trying to keep track of families’; it is not now nor has it ever been the business of the state to keep track of families and children. This is a non existent problem looking for a solution; it is precisely this sort of bad thinking that caused ContactPoint to be developed. It was bad thinking then, and is bad thinking now.

Children classed as missing from education have not been taught in school for at least a month.

This is simply a lie. Education can take place anywhere, including to some degree, in a school. It is absolutely impossible that the author of this piece does not know about all the facts swirling around the Graham Badman Report; that scandalous and outrageous report that galvanised an unprecedented revolt amongst home educators. It is impossible that she does not know about what home education is, how it works (so well) and all the issues around it. For her to now say, without qualification, that children who are not in school are missing education, and to mean it, is not credible. She must be deliberately misstating the facts to bolster her faulty argument. Very shameful, shabby behaviour.

Some are victims of over-crowding in schools, with local authorities struggling to find them places. Some are being taught at home, while others are school “refusers”. But local authorities say more than 1,500 others are “untraceable”. This has prompted concerns for their safety.

Once again, just because they are ‘untraceable’ it cannot be assumed that they are not perfectly safe and well, and this is not sufficient cause to put every child in Britain in a national database like ContactPoint, which is what the author is suggesting.

Even if you did create a system like ContactPoint, there would be no way to police it, keep the records up to date etc, and of course, no database, ID Card or technological solution can keep anyone safe. This is the central flaw in the thinking of people like Kerra Maddern; they have a child-like magical belief in technology and the State; it is stupid, dangerous and expensive, both in terms of money and Liberty.

Large urban areas have the highest numbers of children missing from education. Experts from Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society say that not enough is being done to ensure that vulnerable pupils remain in school.

These two charities would of course say that not enough is being done, and that children belong in school. They are a part of the industry that exploits children. They are hardly going to say that they are not needed, since out of the eleven million children in Britain, a vanishingly small number are at risk, and most of these are discovered and dealt with by the systems that are already in place. Why, if they were to say that, they would be out of a job, and could not extract more stolen loot from the State.

The Children’s Society claims that they are motivated by their Christian values. On the page describing this and the one that follows it, the word ‘parent’ does not appear. You can make of that what you will; the fact of the matter is the coalition ‘austerity’ measures are cutting off the funding from these ‘charities’ and they are desperate to justify the money they are getting. That means they have an interest in spreading fear about children – the source of their income – as far and as wide as possible. That is why we have seen a spate of questions in the House of Commons recently, and an article in the bird cage liner The Independent, which, mysteriously, quotes the exact number of ‘missing children’ that the TES does. Did the TES do its own investigation, or have they been given this number and the ‘facts’ by a PR company?

Make no mistake; these articles, questions in the house and what is to follow do not appear by coincidence or accident; someone is paying a PR company or staffer to coordinate all of this propaganda. You can tell by the similar wording in each article, the similar numbers and the similar conclusions in each article.

While each local authority has to keep a census of how many children are “missing” in their area, there is no national system for tracing children or transferring information between councils when they move.

Yes, that is correct. ContactPoint was proposed as that system, and it was rejected as inherently immoral, impossible to secure and a completely bad idea.

A legal duty to identify children missing from education was imposed on local authorities four years ago, but there is no requirement for parents to tell councils when they change address.

There should be no legal duty to identify children missing from education. Education is the duty of the parent, not the responsibility of the State.

The ID Card and NIR would have allowed councils to keep track of the location of all families; when you changed address, if you did not inform the State, you would have been fined £1000. The mass uprising against ID Cards caused that scheme to be abolished also. Kerra Maddern wants the paedophile catalogue and the ID Cards to be brought in so that her mythical ‘children missing education’ can all be rounded up and frog marched into school.

This woman is on the wrong side of history. And everything.

Leicester has the highest single number of children officially missing from education – a total of 2,611. Of these, 313 are waiting for a school place, but council officers are investigating why 2,298 are not attending lessons. Many attended state-run nurseries but have not moved into primary schools.

The fact of the matter is this; Leicester cannot run the schools it is already in charge of. They do not have enough places for all the students that desire one. If they find all these phantom children, where are they going to put them?

This is a perfect example of the illogic of the State and people like Kerra Maddern. The State system is hopelessly broken, and yet, they want everyone to be forced into it. They decry the decline of society, the feral children running wild, but do everything they can to undermine the authority of the parent and the central role of the family.

These people are completely insane.

The city council says its high numbers are the result of a “ruthless” process to trace the whereabouts of all children. “If we don’t know where they are, we do everything we can to find out where they have gone,” says head of behaviour and attendance John Broadhead. “Other local authorities do not do as much, but we treat this very seriously.”

Unbelievable. They are ‘ruthless’ in tracking down their prey. Remember there is no evidence whatsoever that the people they are hunting are in any danger of any kind. The only crime they have committed is that they once lived in or went to school in Leicester, and then stopped living or going to school in Leicester. These people spend stolen money and resources to hunt perfectly innocent people down, whilst for years their schools have been falling apart. Other local authorities have better schools, perhaps, because they spend their time and resources on teaching instead of playing at bounty hunters.

The council employs one member of staff just to track down missing children, assisted by 20 education welfare officers. Headteachers can alert the local authority to pupils who cannot be tracked down via a live database, introduced five years ago.

Absolutely astonishing. Twenty one people are paid a salary to track people down, whilst the schools are failing. They spend money on a database to track children, instead of spending money on pupils. Of course this is exactly what happens when you are spending other people’s money. In a properly functioning country where Liberty exists, these people would not be able to misallocate other people’s money, and the schools would be highly efficient and entirely productive places.

You couldn’t make up this insanity if you tried… unless you were from Leicester. You must realise also, that this spending is discretionary, “Other local authorities do not do as much, but we treat this very seriously.” that means they are choosing to spend money on this rather than the education they are providing in schools.

The TES investigation shows that a total of 67 local authorities claim they have no missing children and 29 have fewer than 20. But Kent County Council is unable to trace 618 children, Leeds reports 558 and Camden more than 100 (see tables, right). Because there is no national system, different authorities record children missing from education in different ways, making it difficult to understand the reasons so many have fallen out of the system.

This is the ‘problem’ that ContactPoint was going to solve. Once again, this is the discredited ‘national system’ that everyone came to understand as an unacceptable intrusion into the lives of the British people. Clearly Kerra Maddern didn’t get the memo. Or perhaps the contractor who got paid to develop ContactPoint is trying to drum up business for ContactPoint 2.0 through Kerra Maddern and her ‘journalist’ friends?

Who knows?

Someone is paying for this PR, that is for certain. Follow the money; see who is buying all these articles and then you will find out who is pushing for this.

Former Barnardo’s chief executive Martin Narey says the situation is “deeply troubling”. “School is somewhere that every child needs to be every day,” he says. “For many of our most vulnerable young people it is the only stability they know, the only time when a little chaos is taken out of their lives, the only time when they are required to behave reasonably.

We already know that Martin Narey thought that the peadophile’s dream database ContactPoint was a good idea:

It has been welcomed by children’s charities and organisations, including Barnardo’s, KIDS and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. Martin Narey, chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said it [ContactPoint] “would make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services”.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1747

School is NOT a place where EVERY child needs to be every day. This is just simple minded NONSENSE, and Martin Narey knows it. There are only a small number of reasons why he would say something that he knows is completely wrong. He is either deliberately setting out to deceive, or he is completely incompetent.

Everyone and their dog is sick of the lying, spinning, sickening child exploitation industry. The light at the end of the tunnel is the economic collapse, which will hopefully sweep these parasites away once and for all.

“It is the one place where poor life expectations can be reversed. So for thousands of children – inevitably those most in need of education – to be missing from school is deeply troubling. We need to keep children in school or, when removal is necessary, as it sometimes is, ensure alternative provision is always made available in a timely manner.”

No. Charities need to be funded only by charitable contributions from the pubic, and never from stolen money supplied by the State.

The job of a charity, in the case of education, is to facilitate education, either in school or in other places where it may take place. It is not the business of charities to force children to go to school, or to lobby the State to force children to go to school or to do any of those things that involve coercion.

This is why the charities that exploit children are fundamentally immoral; they use stolen money and attempt to coerce people into doing things that they would rather not do, instead of restricting their activities to helping people. These are not charities at all, but are instead, Crony Charities, similar to the Crony Capitalists that operate in serpentine symbiosis with the State.

Children’s Society policy director Enver Solomon says: “It is vital children don’t disappear from the school roll. There’s a danger this could happen to vulnerable pupils if schools just focus on attainment and their welfare is overlooked.

The school is not the parent. The State is not the parent. Schools should only focus on attainment; that is what they are for. Parents and families are solely responsible for the welfare of children.

“The most marginalised children have the most complex needs: they must be given additional help to remain in education.”

If you want to help them, stop taking stolen money from the state and help them. Stop trying to undermine the family and destroy home education.

Ofsted has also been critical of local authorities for failing to work together in identifying and helping children who drop out of school (see box, opposite). Patrick Leeson, the inspectorate’s director of education and care, says: “Children and young people who are not receiving education are at serious risk of under-achieving and falling behind. When their whereabouts are unknown they may be particularly at risk of physical, emotional and psychological harm.

This is of course, a lie. Ofsted is in danger of being abolished; they are flailing around their tentacles trying to insert them into every aspect of life that involves children, and with their sharply toothed suckers, attaching themselves so that they cannot be removed. They already provide useless ‘inspections’ of all schools; if they could somehow wiggle their way into home education and children missing education, the stream of salaries would be ongoing and enormous.

“Ofsted inspectors have found that local authorities, schools and partner agencies need to share information more effectively and systematically to identify children and young people who are missing from education, particularly when their whereabouts are unknown, and to take concerted action to remedy the situation.”

Ofsted’s brief does not include inspecting children who are not in school. They exist to inspect schools and generate reports. All of these disparate groups, that have the exploitation of children in common, fake charities, Ofsted, the TES, Local Authorities, all have a vested interest in getting information on children and then sharing that information. Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that all of these different groups, all with a profit motive, are all calling for the reinstatement of something that has been roundly denounced?

New arrivals to the country account for a substantial group of those missing from education, according to councils. In Sheffield, for example, 460 children without places are from Slovakia, and are receiving council help in applying for school places.

Then these people are not ‘missing from education’ they are waiting for school places. No ‘national system’ like ContactPoint will help them get school places, and they are not in any danger by Kerra Maddern’s own definition, since they are known to the State.

Other children are not in school because their parents refuse to send them.

And that is their ABSOLUTE RIGHT. and sometimes its their DUTY also.

In Peterborough, 248 pupils are missing from rolls having turned down offers of places, mostly because the schools were too far away from their homes.

So these people will also not be helped by a national system either; they have been offered places in schools that are too far away; they are known to the state, the parents want their children to attend schools and the State could not accommodate them. These children are not in any danger whatsoever either.

This article, by listing the types of children missing, is whittling down the numbers considerably. If they did the rest of their homework, they would find that the number of ‘children missing education’ who were also in danger is vanishingly small in proportion to the eleven million children in Britain. There is no money in that calculation however.

Children from the traveller community are at particular risk of vanishing from the education system.

The traveller community, as has recently been seen, contains children that are perfectly safe, girls who are chaste and very strong families where divorce is a rare exception. Look at the phrase ‘traveller community’; these people are a community of the type that the rest of Britain so badly needs; one made up of strong, self reliant families made up of people who know who they are and who are not ashamed of who they are. They know their own minds, are not afraid to speak their minds and are perfectly happy just as they are. They do not want or need your ‘education system’ or anything else that your ‘culture’ has to offer.

Linda Lewins, vice-president of the National Association of Teachers of Travellers, says it is “vital” that traveller education services are maintained by local authorities. “Children from the gypsy and traveller community are much more likely to miss school,” she says. “Many families notify teachers they are leaving, but the local authority often finds it difficult to discover where they have gone.”

The National Association of Teachers of Travellers is a group established in 1980, “in order to address the isolation of teachers of Travellers and to support and encourage their work”. In other words, they have a vested interest in keeping track of the children of Travellers, so that they can get access to them and receive a salary. If Travellers and their children cannot be tracked, then the numbers of traveller children attending school by force will drop, and this is bad for business.

All you need to know about this group is summed up in this paragraph from their site:

NATT+ is now the nationally recognised voice of Traveller Education Services. It represents and supports members at a national level by addressing Gypsy, Roma and Traveller issues with a number of organisations including the DCSF and other government departments.

My emphasis. Birds of a feather, flock together!

A Department for Education spokeswoman said it expects local authorities to identify children missing from school and to allocate places as quickly as possible.

An unnamed spokeswoman, who doesn’t know what she is talking about.

But with no plans to put in place a robust national system to track and identify missing children, a rapid decline in their numbers appears unlikely.

ContactPoint is not coming back, should not come back, and is not needed. If you want to send your child to school, you can do so, though there may be a waiting list in some places, and you might not get the school you want or one that is close to your home.

If you do not want to send your child to a government school, or any school at all, that is entirely your business, and the State should not take any interest in you or your problems, or successes.

SAFEGUARDING – Families are strangers to councils

Ofsted inspectors found in a report published last year that many councils were failing to fulfil their safeguarding duties because they did not know enough about children in their areas.

Here we go again with the Orwellian doublespeak

It is clear that something is most definitely ‘up’.

These paid PR pieces appearing in different newspapers is a coordinated campaign to introduce ContactPoint 2.0, which is the only solution to this non-problem.

It will mean that mandatory registration of home educators will be back on the table at some point, under the absurd pretext of ‘safeguarding’.

Thankfully, all the arguments against this have been thoroughly explored and documented. If you have anything to say about it, it will be possible to refute any of Kerra Maddern’s and the other propagandist’s untruths by referring to the many documents that were generated in the last three years and that are on line.

It is nauseating that Kerra Maddern, the lazy editors who reprint press releases verbatim don’s have the intelligence to think about these subject clearly. Its also nauseating that they have no moral centre, no understanding of rights or the proper role of government. Finally, its nauseating that we have to go over this again, when it seemed like the tide had turned and everyone except the unrepentant monsters in the shadow cabinet finally understood just how evil the Big Brother nanny State was becoming.

It seems, once again, that some people like Kerra Maddern didn’t get the memo. This can be forgiven; not everyone is paying attention to everything or is born intelligent.

As for the others who exploit children for money….

LOIC, Wikileaks, boycotts, Bitcoin and game changing

Friday, December 10th, 2010

If you have been paying attention at all, you will have read about the mass manifestation, the acephalous Anonymous and their successful attacks on MasterCard, Visa and PayPal:

What is interesting about all this is not that the sites of these large organisations have been bumped offline, but the slick consumer grade tools that are being used to do it.

LOIC is an acronym for ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’. It is a piece of software that runs on Windows Mac and Linux, and every instance of it presents the user with this simple interface:

It is easy to install and run, and when you run it, the twenty five people who direct the Botnet created by thousands of installations of LOIC can pour traffic onto any website they desire.

What is interesting about this is that LOIC, which does a sophisticated job in an interface that a child can use, is now spreading everywhere because one man, Joe Lieberman, made a public statement attacking Wikileaks, where he claimed that anyone who helped the site could be committing a crime.

Glen Greenwald dispels this lie very efficiently here:

With his single act, Lieberman’s words have had the unintended consequence of spreading the knowledge of how all of this works and LOIC itself into the machines of many tens of thousands of irate, dedicated internet users and the knowledge into the minds of millions of people who previously didn’t know anything about the workings of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Indeed, I didn’t know what LOIC was until this event took place. So many people are talking about it, Google has a realtime results box on the main results page for the search term.

The perfect storm of this consumer grade DDOS tool, social media, Wikileaks, Joe Lieberman and the cowardice of the online payment systems has spawned a game change in how the internet is going to work in the future.

These tools and the ones that will surely follow, can never be stopped. In a perfect world, where companies like MasterCard, VISA and PayPal work only in the interests of their customers, these tools would not not be used to pop them off of the internet, if they existed at all.

But that is not what is really interesting.

Its clear that there is a problem with the way payment systems on the internet are structured; they are top down in shape, with a single point of failure, forcing two parties that want to transact to use the services of a third party.

This point of failure is a problem if you are like Wikileaks and have your account frozen and your ability to receive and send money stopped. It is a problem if you want to donate to a cause the state would rather see die. Its also a problem if copycat groups styling themselves on Anonymous decides that you are evil and that you should be ‘punished’.

With a single point of failure, both the customers and the companies that run the payment services are at risk of having their business disrupted.

The same is true for DNS; the state is arbitrarily, without warrants, charges or any legal process at all, seizing domain names to shut down access to websites. Clearly DNS and the way it works is a huge problem, especially when we are talking about Wikileaks and the sites like it that will surely follow. There are already plans afoot to create a distributed DNS system; hopefully it will be robust enough to protect everyone and their domains.

As for the question of money, a system like Bitcoin is a possible solution to the problem of companies like MasterCard, PayPal and VISA who do not have the best interests of the customer uppermost in their minds:

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency. ”Peer-to-peer” (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or to keep track of the transactions. Instead, those tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. ”Anonymity” means that the real world identity of the parties of a transaction can be kept hidden from the public or even from the parties themselves.

[…]

http://www.bitcoin.org/faq#What_is_Bitcoin

This sounds good. In the Bitcoin system, there are a limited number of ‘coins’ the number of which cannot be increased; when the system is twelve years old there will be 21,000,000 coins in circulation:

New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain calculational problem (i.e. creates a new block), for which an average solution time can be calculated. The difficulty of the problem is adjusted so that in the first 4 years of the Bitcoin network, 10,500,000 coins will be created. The amount is halved each 4 years, so it will be 5,250,000 in years 4-8, 2,625,000 in years 8-12 and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21,000,000 over time.

This is very interesting indeed. It means that there is now a greenback style currency that the state can have no control over, cannot monitor and which people can use to exchange goods. It seems to take the best parts of Chaumian e-Cash, whilst removing the bad parts, i.e. centrally controlled mint in a centrally controlled location, owned by a single corporate entity, constituted under the laws of a state. It does have some serious flaws however, one being that everyone can see your transaction history if they have your address… yikes!

The source for Bitcoin is available, so if you are minded to do it, you can set up your own identical network. Its all very intelligent, and it costs you nothing to try it out. You could even fix its flaws and release an improved version.

This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be done to solve the problems sketched out above.

Using LOIC to knock websites off the internet doesn’t pass the BLOGDIAL demonstration test; once the act is over, just as in a demonstration, all the problems are still there:

  • Wikileaks can’t receive donations.
  • Wikileaks is still having its websites attacked by the state.
  • The online payment systems still cut anyone off with only a phone call from the state as a reason.
  • Other websites still capitulate without a phone call; a television statement will be enough.

All of this is predictable from the beginning, and so, using LOIC ‘to make a point’ doesn’t make sense in the long run.

It is however, and hopefully, an iteration. Once the futility of DDOSing sites dawns on Anonymous, they might turn to writing pieces of software like Bitcoin, or simply running the Bitcoin client to help the creation and spread of the currency. Or as has just been announced something else.

They might get the millions of people who are following them to contribute financially to the effort to create a distributed DNS. They might even reproduce the work of Operation Clambake where the ‘Sacred Documents’ of Scientology were so extensively mirrored on the internet that if you search for OT3 Operating Thetan you can read it all – which is exactly what the Scientologists do not want.

MasterCard, VISA and PayPal have made a massive long term business error. In their knee jerk response to appease Joe Lieberman, they have awakened millions of people to the fact that their money and access to goods on the internet is not guaranteed if you use their services. They have awakened a software developer somewhere who is going to write the equivalent of ‘Bittorrent for Money’ that will completely eliminate their dominance of the online payments market; remember; credit cards are a 1970’s idea that has been superimposed onto the internet. It is inevitable that this system of cumbersome numbers married to plastic cards is going to be superseded. Bitcoin might be this system, it might not be. It might be one of several replacements. Either way, these new systems are coming now, guaranteed, and there will be nothing that anyone can do to stop it.

Think about this; imagine that Bitcoin is huge, with millions of users. It is running not only on laptops and desktops, but on mobile phones. It is integrated into tens of thousands of websites through its API. Some of those users run exchange services; they sit in Cafes or in dorms or offices, and they will trade ‘street money’ for bitcoins. Social networking brings these parties together to transact. Now there is an interface between the real world and the Bitcoin ecosystem that will be impossible to shut down or even monitor. You might be able to pick off one or two of the people who provide this service, but for all intents and purposes, it will be as impossible to stop this Bitcoin economy as it has been for the state to stop the illicit drug economy in its ridiculous ‘war on drugs’.

Had MasterCard and its like taken a stronger stance against the state, they would not face this inevitable circumstance in the near term, and might have been able to transition to the new styles of online payment; now it is too late – no one trusts them.

Finally on to the subject of boycotting Amazon for kicking Wikileaks off of its hosting service.

Amazon, being the rightful owner of its servers has the absolute right to refuse to serve anyone. The consumer has the absolute right to refrain from using Amazon services for whatever reason.

Think about this; imagine if Amazon was knowingly selling sex slaves or ‘murder to order’ through its service, ‘because it could’. This reprehensible and unambiguously immoral trade would be enough to cause you to boycott them. On the other extreme, because Amazon sells pornographic novels, there are some who would not use them by virtue of that taint.

Somewhere between those two poles is the Wikileaks case.

Wikileaks, by exposing the lies of the mass murdering, thieving and destroying state is a benefit to you directly. Amazon, in the act of kicking them off of their service, without being forced to do so, i.e. voluntarily, is wilfully aiding and abetting the state in its aim of covering up its deception, mass murder and theft. That means that Amazon is working directly against your interests as a human being.

Amazon is not a victim of the state, and I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few days; they are a willing participant in covering up the evil of mass murderers. They acted without a court order, national security letter or any other direct attack from the state. Had they received such an attack, they would be victims of an attack, but since no such attack came to them, they are and were not under direct threat.

In this instance, a boycott is justified in my view; these people are directly attacking me and everyone else by arbitrarily deleting the Wikileaks site; and it must be pointed out that they did not delete the site during the previous Wikileaks expose ‘Collateral Murder’.

Once again, if they want to delete Wikileaks, they have the right to do so; its their property. What you cannot claim is that Amazon is a victim, because that simply is not true.

Its been a very interesting week. Whatever the truth is behind Wikileaks, there have been unintended consequences that will change the internet in ways that the state has not factored in to its responses or plans, depending on what you think about the origin of Wikileaks and the people who run it.

The state is not all powerful. They cannot predict what people will do with software, and that is the truly profound game changing factor. LOIC is just the latest in a long line of pieces of software that change the way people think; Napster, Gnutella, Bitorrent, are all predecessors of this trend, Bitcoin is a new one and there are others in the pipeline. One thing is certain; the state cannot keep up with all of the developments, because there are too many people out there developing the tools and using them once they are deployed.

When the next perfect storm of software and a cause comes around the effects will be even more intense and more unstoppable; this is the trend that the state cannot resist. As they clamp down harder, the internet pushes back with an exponentially greater force.

The sound it makes is the sound of inevitability.

Rioting is the new marching

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

So students think that breaking stuff will change something, will win them back a ‘free’ ticket to university?  Right there is the proof that these people are uneducated!

[T]hat’s another big problem, the people who can’t separate the authority and the people who have the authority vested in them. You see that a lot on the demonstrations, they have the concept that The Law and Law Enforcement are one. They’re demonstrating against the Police Department, actually against policemen. Lenny Bruce

Unfortunately, education is now considered a human right.

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit…. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among … racial or religious groups….”
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26

[Snarfed fromhttp://www.pdhre.org/rights/education.html]

Not only is education a right, but “Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.”

Thus is another false market created. How can education be ‘free’, unless teachers work for nothing, all materials are provided gratis… and so on.  Someone is paying!  Are you educated enough to work out who?

Bank Run 2010, Eric Cantona forces the tipping point

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

As we wrote recently, there is going to be a massive, Europe-wide bank run on December 7th.

This is entirely a good thing, and it is precisely the sort of action that BLOGDIAL has advocated for years; we have been saying over and over that demonstrating in the streets is completely pointless, and we were and are completely right.

This call for a bank run has people in ‘authority’ very worried:

Valérie Ohannesian, of the French Banking Federation, said she thought that the appeal was “stupid in every sense” and a charter for thieves and money-launderers.

“My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic,” she told the Observer. “One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought.”

Grauniad article on the bankrun and Cantona

If that is all they can come up with, they must be shitting their knickers.

For a start, everyone now knows that ‘money laundering’ laws are not there to catch ‘criminals’ but are instead for the ordinary people who are trying to protect their money from the ravaging, rapacious state.

She goes on to very stupidly mock the idea with the fact that Cantona would need ‘several suitcases’ to withdraw his money. Of course, he would not need suitcases to withdraw his wealth if the money in his account was worth anything in the first place.

The hollow sound of desperation in print.

As we posted before, this bankrun is an entirely good thing, but what has to happen is a complete exposure and defining of the problem, before it can be fixed.

It seems that the people behind this bankrun are highly intelligent, media savvy people; lets go through this statement from the Bankrun 2010 site.

Dear media,

For a short time, the international press reported the call for a bankrun that we launched on Facebook to invite all those who wish to follow us to withdraw their money from their accounts on the 7th of December, 2010.

Since the publication of our call, people around the world mobilized to translate the text into their language to recreate the event in their country, to promote our initiative by all possible means and invite their contacts to do the same. Our call has met with a success that we did not dare to hope for. We are very happy about it and thanks to the personal investment of all those who, like us, want to enjoy a healthy banking system, equitable, affordable and accountable, we hope that over the weeks we can convince enough people in the world to finally be heard by our respective Governments.

Good. There is only one problem however; a healthy banking system cannot be equitable; a bank exists to hold your money for you and to facilitate transfers for you and to do other services that you require of it, in return for fees. What those fees are is a matter of negotiation, since you are entering into a private contract with a company or an individual.

This is why it is not smart to ask for an ‘equitable’ or an ‘affordable’ banking system; market forces produce the best possible banks, and therefore, banking should be left completely up to those forces, in the same way that the operation of self storage units are left to the market.

The problem with banking is not deregulation, it is regulation and interference from the state.

For clarification purposes, we do not speak on behalf of any political party or from any labour union or religion. Our action is a civic involvement that keeps its distance from any form of hate or conspiracy theories that could be made on behalf of our movement, by others during their interventions on any areas of discussion, which is beyond our control. We only speak for ourselves and for no other organisations. We do not seek to harm anyone in particular. It’s towards a corrupt, criminal and deadly system that we decided to oppose, as far as our ability our determination and respect for the law are concerned.

Very good.

Why have we launched this action?
First of all, we wanted to raise public awareness on the functioning of the monetary system.
The overwhelming majority of holders of a bank accounts, savings accounts or even a pension plan, are unaware the way money is created or what the banks are doing with the money that ‘they are given. They know nothing about the principle of money as debt. They do not know the reality behind words like “asset bubbles”, “Treasury bills”, “Hedge Funds” or “securitization”. Hence the media in general make little effort to inform in an objective, transparent and accessible way to all. The only thing the public really understands is that most major financial crimes and insider trading remain mostly unpunished, but they are the first to pay the consequences.

True. People are almost completely ignorant of what money is, how banks work and what the current role of the state and central banks is. They cannot define inflation, do not understand that it is deliberately caused, do not understand that the money in their accounts (so much as it even belongs to them) is worthless and that this is all by design.

Not only do we deplore how many questions posed by ordinary citizens on the economic situation remain without clear answers in your columns,

There are highly intelligent commenters who regularly destroy the nonsense some ‘journalists’ peddle about all of this. We are past the tipping point; its GAME OVER for this immoral system.

We do not need journalists anymore; what we do need is a free internet, millions of awakened people and one or two very famous people to stand up and push the snowball down the hill.

It has finally happened.

but we also regret your lack of zeal in denouncing the measures that have allowed the global economic situation get to the point where it is today: a situation that has bought our heads of states and Governments to their knees before the rating agencies, trembling with fear at the idea that our currencies are deteriorating.

Our politicians can’t meet both the interests of financial markets and those of its citizens. So, it is time to remind them who they were elected to serve.

Strikes and demonstrations are no longer useful because whatever we do, we are not heard. And whatever they do, we are not consulted. So we decided to hit the system at its core – THE BANKING SYSTEM

MY EMPHASIS!!!!……

At long last, they are beginning to understand!

For YEARS we have been saying this; demonstrations DO NOT WORK, and you are an ignorant PART OF THE PROBLEM if you call for them, or a GATEKEEPER in service of the STATE and THE WAR MACHINE.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

This is true about everything, including demonstrating to stop war or to make government do what you want it to do. You cannot keep calling for demonstrations and expecting the bad things to stop, when it fails to work; doing so is irrational and stupid. Demonstrations and violence are failure tactics, and the idiotic students who smashed Tory HQ are completely wrong in every way you can be wrong.

Think about it; 50,000 students, all of one mind are an army and huge potential financial force that could make a huge change; on the most basic level, that many people could buy a full page advertisement in a national newspaper once a month for ONE POUND EACH.

That would be far more effective in getting a message across, rather than marching in the streets like animatronic showroom dummies.

But enough of that…

Are we aware of the economic consequences that would result from the success of our action?

We are especially aware of the consequences that the deregulated and uncontrollable global financial system will have on our jobs, our health, our education, our pensions, our industries, our environment, our future, our dignity, the dignity of the citizens of countries that the system has enslaved by debt that they will never be able to repay to better appropriate their resources. This is the fate that awaits people if we in the West do not take ourselves in hand.

We are aware of the role this system plays in the prosperity of industrial empires whose interests depend on armed conflicts, diseases, food shortages and poverty prevailing in the countries that provide labour and natural resources at minimal cost. We are aware that this system will never have anything to gain from a world of peace and prosperity and that continuing to entrust our hard and honestly earned money to this sick system, we make ourselves accomplices of its thefts, for its crimes, its wars and the misery war generates.

Beautiful; they can actually see!

The only problem here, is that they are talking about deregulation being a problem when it is not. If these people were able to form their own bank, and run it however they please, they would be an international force unparalleled in its size and transparency, as everyone moved all their money to it en masse.

The reason why they cannot have their bank is because the state regulates banking so that the war machine can be run. They stop anyone honest from running a bank, and they use legal tender laws to prevent honest money from emerging. Once again, the problem is not deregulation, but regulation by the state.

There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. What is wrong is the wealthy using the state to murder people with its war machine. This is called Crony Capitalism, which is very different from Capitalism.

What do we want?
We, the citizens of the 21st century, heirs of generations who have sacrificed so that we may live free and dignified, demand the creation of a CITIZENS BANK- serving citizens, a bank that would put our money away from speculative fever, free of all financial bubbles designed to burst one day, free of operations that transform our loans & assets and use our debt to buy other assets.

This is a very good idea. The only thing stopping you from creating this bank is the state. Remove the state’s ability to regulate banks and then you can have your ‘Citizens Bank’, and you will be able to run it in any way that you like.

We want banks that lend only the wealth they have. Banks that help small and medium enterprises to relocate jobs, & bank lending at zero rate. (*) Banks that support projects that benefit citizens rather than the “market”. Banks where we can deposit our money, which will then create a peaceful conscience within ourselves. Banks we will not have to be worry about. Banks whose success will sound the death knell of the merchants of death, disease and slavery. On the ruins of the old system, we want to build a banking system that will no longer sacrifice more human dignity on the altar of profit.

This is error.

You want ‘banks’ that only lend the money they have; NO, you must make your own bank that does that; you cannot force people to run their businesses to serve you. Your only recourse, as it should be, is to remove your money from banks that are evil and to put them into an honest bank. You cannot on the one hand, say that you want a world free of violence, and then at the same time, call for the state to do your bidding via violence on others. Start your own bank, and if the state tries to stop you, confront them. You can be sure that the existing banks will be pushing for the violent suppression of you and this bank run right now; that is all they have left to fight with; the apparatus of the police state.

You will be able to set your own interest rates, lending requirements and ultimate purpose. There is a desperate need for such a bank, and you have a captive population of over one hundred million to start with.

I’m afraid that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. You are in the trouble you are in now because you trusted the existing banks and the state to take care of you, and like the predators they are, they fed on you. You will never be able to not worry about banking.

As for the ‘altar of profit’ this is just total nonsense; there is nothing wrong with profit, and you are conflating profit with Crony Capitalism and its evil practitioners. Profit, price signalling and all the other elements of real economics are essential to bringing into existence the prosperity, freedom, peace and the kind of bank that you want to be able to use. You cannot deny the laws of nature, and economics is governed by rules that are as firmly set as the laws that cover physics. Learn these rules, and you will make a bank that is more likely to be a long term benefit.

Finally, the old system must be swept away completely. There is absolutely no reason why a new, clean, moral bank should be set up on the ‘ruins of the old system’. If your plan is that you are going to start with a bad foundation, you might as well not even begin.

Dutch lawmakers have already considered laws to outlaw calls for bank runs. The state and its Crony Capitalist masters are going to use everything they can to destroy you so that they can continue with their insanity.

It is only through peaceful voluntarism that you will ever get a lasting solution to this problem. Forcing banks to obey you by using the state makes the state more powerful, and it is the state that is the true enemy.

We, the people have finally been awakened by poverty and despair afflicting the most vulnerable among us – pensioners, welfare recipients or working poor – and is now threatening what remains of the middle class & entrepreneurs. Even these are exploited as milking cows, and we now simply want the cancellation of the public debts generated by the sick system that we no longer want.

Once again, this is true; this debt belongs only to the people who authorised it; you cannot be made liable to a debt incurred by a third party, without your written consent, and NO, voting in an election does not constitute consent to be made a debtor.

We do not want our taxes, our efforts, our resources to continue to feed this bottomless pit.

Oops, its not ‘your money’ once you have payed it to the state; this is a common error that people make; they believe that the state, “works for them”, and that, “its our money”. It is not. You have no claim whatsoever over that money once you pay it. Its gone, toast, spent.

If you want your money to be used for good purposes only, you have to stop paying it to the state. Period. And I and others predict that that is the next psychological breakthrough that these people are going to make, very soon!

We want to regain the power to coin money and free ourselves from the guidelines imposed on us by the European Union, which was built against the consent of the majority of people consulted by referendum, not to mention those whose country of origin have no organized popular consultation.

This is absolutely key to the entire problem; without the power to decide what money is best for you, you are nothing more than a slave to the European Central Bank, the Private Federal Reserve and all other central banks, who steal money via the inflation tax.

Everyone who understands money knows that the best money is gold and silver coins, held and used directly by the people who transact with money.

Gold and silver money cannot be inflated, controlled or used against you by a central bank, and of course, central banks themselves should be abolished, and would be if this Citizens Bank took off; there would be no need for central banks if every country had its own Citizens Bank, working in cooperation with other similar banks around the world, only for the benefit and convenience of the depositors.

This is why its crucial to:

  • remove the power to make money from the state
  • remove the power to regulate banking from the state

Without these two in place, it will be impossible to get to the place that the stopbankque organisers want.

(*) What the Islamic banks to successfully achieve by refusing usury for religious reasons, we can do for civic reasons.

Oops, ‘Islam was right’?! Don’t tell Geert Wilders!

To conclude
We draw your attention to the fact that even if we manage to relocate jobs, advanced technologies and machines have replaced human labour in a growing number of areas. They can produce more, faster, cheaper, and for these reasons, they create fear to those who wonder how they will earn their living tomorrow. This is unfortunate because since the invention of the wheel, technology is meant to improve the living conditions of mankind. If progress was meant to serve citizens rather than serve the market, we could make a quantum leap in technology development today paralyzed by special interest groups that are the primary beneficiaries of this system.

This is completely wrong; technology does not put people out of jobs, this is The Luddite Fallacy.

Progress serves citizens though their freedom to choose one service over another. Sadly, Europeans are still steeped in the sticky, hallucinogenic treacle of socialist thinking. They want the state to continue its tyranny unabated, only with them at the helm. Sorry guys NO $A£€!

We already have the knowledge to free humanity of its needs in fossil and nuclear fuels and to produce and deliver drinking water throughout the planet at a lower cost, to produce fruits and vegetables, from ice fields to the desert. Poverty only exists on our planet because of the lack of political will of industrialized countries, subject to market forces. Pollution and waste of resources are the sad consequences of this obsolete system which we must put an end to.

Sigh…You cant have it all it seems… Market forces are the only way to eradicate poverty. The state, and ‘political will’ will NEVER do it, and if they try, it will mean giving up the very rights that the stopbankque people are calling for.

As for pollution, we know about that don’t we?

We, the inheritors of chaos, we have a world to rebuild. A world where work is no longer seen as slavery, and lack of work as a tragedy because we have been able to rethink how mankind of tomorrow will ensure its survival, education, well-being and old age.

In order for work not to be slavery, you need to be able to keep the fruits of your labour, that you voluntarily contract for. If the state takes even a penny of it by force, you are reduced to the level of a slave. Everything they do with your money after that, is insult added to injury.

We invite all those who want to follow us on this path – including you, dear journalists – to overcome their fears of the unknown and to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the system that will replace the current one, which with or without us, will eventually collapse when it has taken everything from us. We prefer not to wait until it arrives, or even worse, if in order to save the economy a new war would be declared.

We thank the footballer Eric Cantona for having instilled the idea that we have taken literally. The die is cast. Time will tell whether we were right. (07/11/2010)

http://www.bankrun2010.com/

Don’t hold your breath for the journalists to come on board; they are in the pay of the newspapers that are owned by the same people or colleagues of the people who own the war machine; why do you think these evil scribblers are for war with Iran? They are for war because they are being told to write pro war pieces. They cannot be relied upon or trusted – thankfully we do not need them. We have the internet, we have myriad ways of spreading information that does not include their channels. These new channels are being put to good use, finally, now all that remains is to formulate a plan and then execute it.

This means:

  1. setting up a bank that is outside the control of the state
  2. buying gold en masse with all the worthless paper money that has been withdrawn from the system
  3. depositing that gold in the new bank

The honest money that you require already exists; GOLD.
The forms of banking you require already exist 100% RESERVE BANKING

Like we told you, someone is already doing it.

First things first; DESTROY the system through peaceful disobedience, starting with the money!

The December 7th Bank Run versus the force of entrepreneurial genius

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

This video ‘Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America’:

Describes on many levels, why the collectivists, the socialists and all the brainwashed people who believe in ‘democracy’ are nothing more than human cattle.

On the first level, there is a story in this video about how three women living in the same town save and borrow money.

Ms Fitts describes how, with a simple piece of software, it is possible to cut out the bank that is massively charging one of the women a high interest rate, by connecting these three people locally.

This is the sort of thing that entrepreneurs do, and which the socialists cannot even begin to imagine.

The socialist will blame the bank for the ‘problem’ of high interest rates, and then call on the violent state to force the bank to charge less.

The entrepreneur is smarter, and more importantly, ethical.

She understands the true nature of the problem and solves it in a way that not only is better for the consumer, but which has the side effect of completely destroying the business model of the bank. All without any coercion or violence of any kind, all done on the back of the power of human imagination, and voluntary exchange.

As you may have heard, there is a call for a bank run throughout the EU on the 7th of December:

French stop banque Facebook page

German stop banque Facebook page

Italian stop banque Facebook page

Greek stop banque Facebook page

English stop banque Facebook page

Dutch stop banque Facebook page

[…]

http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/starve-the-beast/

This is a good idea, but what is going to happen after the run is over?

The socialist wants to destroy, but he cannot create. He wants to hurt the system, but he wants to leave it all intact so that he can sit in the seat of power and run everything to his own bitter taste.

This is the difference; the freedom loving entrepreneurs who create and benefit everyone, versus the socialist control freaks who are inherently evil and destructive of capital and human life.

Had all the people now going berserk in France taken the opportunity to form their own banks that run on rules they fix for themselves, on a purely voluntary basis, none of them would have the need for what they are doing right now.

One thing is for sure; with all of those people withdrawing their money from the banks, this is an great opportunity to start just the sort of bank that the organisers of this bank run would want to see and use… do they have the brains to do it?

You Might Be a Fascist

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

August 28th, 2010 by Militant Libertarian, Originally published on March 9, 2004.

by Russell Madden

Fascism: a political-economic system in which citizens retain title to their property but in which the government determines how that property may or may not be used.

    You might be a fascist if you …

  • believe that the proper way to decide whether a casino should be built in your hometown is to vote on the idea.
  • object to individuals gambling in their homes unless they’re playing the state-run lotto.
  • think that your neighbor needs the blessing of the historical commission in order to renovate his aging home.
  • feel the urge to report the guy down the street who has a painting truck parked in his drive but no orange building permit stuck to a front window.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • experienced a sense of glee when Microsoft had to spend millions in legal fees and was convicted of monopolistic policies.
  • see nothing wrong with your city government awarding a single cable franchise while those guys who sell dishes must charge extra to customers who wish to receive local broadcast channels.
  • are grateful that the FCC dictates to cable and phone providers how they can do business because you are afraid that otherwise the big media companies would have too much power.
  • would rather have the government pass a law and set up another bureaucracy to restrict telemarketers than spend fifty bucks of your own money to purchase a screening device.
  • do not object when others are forced to pay more for their goods so you can earn a higher income while your trade restrictions put other citizens out of work.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • nod in agreement that individuals must show proof of identity in order to open a bank account because otherwise the terrorists will win.
  • don’t object to money laundering laws that make snitches of your banks so the drug dealers and the terrorists won’t win.
  • never complain about airport security checks and bag screening and weapon confiscation in order to keep the terrorists from winning.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • tremble at the thought that the person sitting next to you in the restaurant might be carrying a gun without a license.
  • want to eliminate and confiscate all guns in private hands in order to be safe since guns cause violence, unless the cops are the ones carrying the guns.
  • applaud extra taxes on guns and ammunition, prohibition of sales between private parties, licenses for gun dealers, limits on the number of firearms someone can own or buy, and bans on brass knuckles, nunchucks, pen knives, big knives, pepper spray, stun guns, sword canes, or anything else that can be used to defend against a criminal.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • laughed when an aging hippie comedian who sold drug paraphernalia via the Internet was thrown in jail but thought a well-known talk show host addicted to painkillers should receive rehab.
  • accept the widespread drugging of young boys but recoil in horror from the thought of adults receiving pleasure or relief from illicit drugs.
  • champion zero tolerance for children who bring toy soldiers to school but think the heroes at Ruby Ridge and Waco got what they deserved when they were promoted for killing women and children.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • think that taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
  • smile when the rich have to pay an even greater proportion of taxes than they do now.
  • kid yourself that Social Security and Medicare taxes are investments or premia rather than a way to pay for more welfare for old people.
  • maintain that you have a right to health care, housing, retirement income, food stamps, or government-guaranteed student loans.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • squint your eyes at the idea of parents educating their children at home.
  • want child-free people to pay for your offspring’s schooling because everyone benefits.
  • question the ability of parents to decide what their children should study, whether those youngsters should go to school at all, or how they should learn to make their own ways in the world.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • seek assistance from the government to protect you from your own mistakes.
  • ask the government to protect other people from what you believe are their own mistakes.
  • abhor the thought of foreigners flooding your country and taking jobs you don’t want at wages you would refuse to accept.
  • contend that you have a right to a job but an employer does not have the right to fire you because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a woman, a racial minority, fat, or handicapped.
  • think SUVs should be banned, seat belts and airbags required, gas mileage minimums enforced, gasoline formulations determined by the feds, and that more money should be spent on light rail systems that no one uses.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • see all lawyers as heroes.
  • hope to win the lawsuit lottery.
  • refuse to accept that legal questions can be properly answered by anyone other than a state-accredited lawyer.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • like the notion of mandated low-flow toilets and shower heads but see no problem with subsidized water so farmers or residents can work and live in deserts.
  • rejoice that grease monkeys can no longer put Freon in your air conditioner.
  • sneer at anything smacking of price gouging during disasters such as floods or hurricanes and would rather have shortages of goods than see someone make more than what you believe is a fair price.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • promote the idea of the government owning even more wilderness land.
  • are appalled that oil companies might drill offshore for natural gas.
  • wonder what all the fuss is when homeowners are forced to abandon their houses in the woods when the government destroys the access roads.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • support sending our troops to a foreign country that poses no imminent threat to us in order to liberate the natives and engage in nation-building.
  • declare that foreign aid helps the average citizens of those countries that receive it.
  • want others to pay for your humanitarian impulses.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • would rather police focus their efforts on arresting ticket scalpers and prostitutes than on tracking down, convicting, and incarcerating violent criminals.
  • want to impose your moral code on strangers.
  • itch to make other people act as you believe they should act.
  • do not accept that we still have involuntary servitude in this nation.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • operate from the premise that morality is relative.
  • condemn logic, reason, and objectivity as tools of white male oppression.
  • equate non-coercive choice and actions of which you disapprove with fascism.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • object to the examples in this essay.
  • think you are free.

Originally seen here.

Brent Council and ‘compulsory’ recycling

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Old Holborn has an interesting post about rubbish collection:

When I purchase something with money I have earned, I was under the impression that it belonged to me, to do with as I wished. It is my “property”.

Apparently Brent Council do not agree. With recycling now being big business, the London Council has decided if you don’t want it anymore, it belongs to them and failure to hand over valuable aluminium, glass and paper will see you the recipient of a £1000 fine. No, really.

http://www.oldholborn.net/2010/08/rubbish-police.html#idc-cover

Old Holborn then goes on to repeat the sanctions the council will use for those who refuse to recycle their garbage, which include surveillance, hand delivered letters, visits from ‘officials’ and ultimately a fine of £1000.

The answer to all of this is simple, and Old Holborn’s impression is completely correct.

The things you buy really do belong to you; that means the packaging that they were delivered in and all the goods you do not consume that become your waste.

When you throw your waste away, you should contract with a private garbage collector to remove it.

You then do not have to deal with eco loon control freak socialist councils and their absolute nonsense. I say its absolute nonsense because it is:

RUBBISH: In Palo Alto, California, citizens are ordered to separate their trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

In Mountain Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the government has just ordered the same recycling program, increased taxes 53% to pay for it, and enacted fines of up to $1,000, and jail terms of up to six months, for scofftrashes.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made sense – economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship – we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast- food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always impressed me as malarkey. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 % was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. The real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do – they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can’t know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/anti-enviro.html

From the priceless ‘Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto’. And of course, once you have your own garbage collected privately, you can deduct the amount that that council is charging you for their ‘service’ since you do not avail yourself of it. Old Holborn already does this for the services he does not require from his council.

Once again Libertarian principles, specifically the property right you have in things you have voluntarily exchanged for, offer the best solution to a problem as opposed to the inherently immoral solutions put forward by collectivists, coercion the state and its insanity.

But what about the economics of it all? If garbage has a value after it has been collected, then someone will sort it and extract what is valuable. This is what it looks like:

The problem with this system is that it is entirely efficient. If private enterprise sorted garbage like this, the loony left salary addicted control freaks at Brent would not be able to justify going out to people’s homes and threatening them.

Furthermore, have you ever seen a garbage compactor in the kitchen of a UK household:

One of the consequences of people having to pay private contractors to remove their waste is that normally you are charged by volume for what you have removed from your household. If you have less volume of garbage to remove, the cost of removing it is less, so there is a great incentive to squeeze as much trash as you can into the smallest possible space.

That is why in many American kitchens, you find garbage compactors; an under the counter machine that you throw your waste into day after day, that compacts it all into a very small shape that is easy to handle and which dramatically reduces your waste disposal costs and storage hassles.

These compact cubes of refuse greatly increase the efficiency of garbage disposal; trucks can carry more garbage, make fewer rounds, you use less bin liners, put garbage into external bins less often and into fewer bins etc etc.

All of this efficiency is lost thanks to the crazy as a coot collectivist crap of councils like Brent.

Even fast food restaurants use them:

The side effects of the free market in terms of efficiency are always beneficial. Other desirable side effects are that the need for nosey parkers sniffing around in your trash is completely eliminated.

That is why the statists hate private enterprise. Sadly in the UK, people are so inured to the idea that ‘the council’ is in charge of everything, from leisure to garbage collection, that it appears that they cannot imagine even the most simple solution to everyday problems without invoking the state in some way as facilitator.

Pilger is wrong: prosecuting Blair is pointless

Friday, August 6th, 2010

John Pilger has an article at Lew Rockwell, saying that Tony Blair “must be prosecuted”. Anyone that has an interest in permanently stopping the war machine and ending the state knows that prosecuting Blair, as satisfying as that event might be, will do nothing to stop the war machine and its murderous intentions towards Iran.

Lets do it.

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson.

I for one, am sick and tired of the soap opera of political personalities and the writers who promote it by talking about it. It hasn’t done anything to stop the war machine in the past, and it will not going forward. This sort of thinking distracts from getting to the solution, as people vent all their energy on hating a single individual instead of the war machine itself.

There are an unlimited supply of Blairs waiting to fill his shoes. Anything other than an idea to stop the next Blair from taking the levers of the war machine in his hands is a waste of time.

Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now consider Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenseless country, which the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the “paramount war crime.” This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.

I could not care less about how much money Blair makes from his memoirs. If the price of stopping the war machine for all time is that Blair becomes a multi billionaire, so be it.

This is nothing more than jealousy politics wrapped in a cloak of moral outrage over the genocide committed by Blair. Once again, this is a complete distraction from what sensible people should be thinking about; the next ‘Blair’ and Iran.

People like Pilger, by failing to get to the solution and distracting everyone with his brilliantly crafted exposés is actually a part of the problem. Like Tony Benn and StopWar, these people are not spreading the solution; they are diffusing the anger of the vast majority who are sick of war and want a stop put to it.

In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter “liberated” by the British) are now revealed as higher than those at Hiroshima. “UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,” the Defense Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic “antipersonnel” weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and American forces.

We know all of this, and all of it is now irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is the next war and how it is to be stopped. Nothing can be done to de-poison Iraq, and an eloquent recital of the crimes committed there will do nothing to stop the attack on Iran. We know this, because similar writing was done before the Iraq colonisation for decades; from Agent Orange on the crimes of the war machine have been carefully documented and exposed. More exposure will not stop the next outrage. John Pilger, who is deeply experienced in all of this, knows this perfectly.

Such carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed. On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, “We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq ….” Last month, the former head of the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot inquiry, “There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad.” Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, “Substantially.”

Once again, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

The bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s actions.

Only in the sense that he personally ordered it to happen. Are you shocked by that accusation? You need to watch this documentary.

Documents released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the “best way” to ensure UK nationals were “securely held.”

So what? Blair is out of office and Labour are not in government. What do you have to say about what is happening NOW and what is being planned NOW? And is what you say going to make any difference? These are the questions that need to be asked; these are the points that need to be made, not all of this emotion stoking garbage.

Instead of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed.

Once again, who cares if Blair shows remorse? Will that bring back the dead, or clean up the mess he left behind? Will it stop Iran from suffering the same fate? Of course it will not; Pilger (an author himeself) only cares about how much money Blair is making through his lucrative publishing deals, “I do not murder anyone and I cannot sell the number of books Blair does. I am telling the truth, history is on my side, I have the moral high ground, why can I not sell as many books as a mass murderer? ITS NOT FAIR!”.

Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated an estimated £20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with the Bush administration. The House of Commons Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets £2 million a year “advising” the American investment bank J P Morgan and undisclosed sums from financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.

More jealousy, more nonsense, all of it irrelevant to the next act of mass murder and none of it able to bring back a single life.

In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s “peace envoy” in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which awarded him a $1 million “peace prize.” In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W. Bush, the bloodbath in Iraq.

No mention of BDS which is the best way of making people change their ways. Why not? This article is a complete waste of time!

His collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed “justice secretary,” suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband, sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran as the next “threat.”

So, what should be DONE about the personalities who are about to step into the cockpit of the war machine? We know they are all for mass murder, no matter what their names are. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soap opera!

Journalists who once fawned on Blair as “mystical” and amplified his vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along.

And if they were critics all along, what difference would that have made? None whatsoever.

As for the media’s gulling of the public, only the Observer’s David Rose, to his great credit, has apologized. The WikiLeaks’ exposés, released with a moral objective of truth with justice, have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism. Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in Blair’s rejuvenation of “enlightened” imperialism, remain silent on the “moral truancy,” as Pankaj Mishra wrote, “of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary world.”

All of this, except the Wikileaks exposé is irrelevant.

Apologies are irrelevant.
Journalists are irrelevant.
Historians are irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is what is going to happen next, and how it can be stopped. If it is true that the majority do not want more war, then war can be stopped. The massive march against the Iraq invasion showed that there are literally tens of millions of people in the UK alone who do not want any more war. The question is, what can they do (or more likely refrain from doing) to stop it.

We know that marching again would be totally pointless, and that for every one of the two million people who marched on that day, there were probably five people who would have gone but who did not make it. We wrote about this before.

Something oblique, unexpected, unstoppable, simple and effective needs to be unleashed. That is the only way an attack on Iran will be stopped. What is for sure is that this strategy will never come from a journalist or a historian.

Wikileaks has demonstrated that it is possible to damage the war machine. So effective is its operation, run by a handful of people with almost no money at all, that there have been open calls for its public face to be assassinated.

That is what we need; a harnessing of all the tools we have to hand to make it impossible for the war machine to operate. Wikileaks does what it does without marching, demonstrating, picketing or any of the other now discredited 20th Century methods of changing the world.

Even in the face of this revolution, the Pilgers of this world keep harping on like its 1999.

Is it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron government understands the “threat” of a law that makes Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger, who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the care of a fugitive.

If Blair is collared, then what? All of the above still applies, and if Kissinger is a war criminal, and you compare Blair to Kissinger, then Blair has a long life of influence and wealth ahead of him, no matter what you say or write.

Two recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a “crime committed by a political or military leader which by its character, gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United Nations] Charter.” International lawyers described this as a “giant leap.” Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute that created the court and is bound by its decisions.

But not retroactively, and its over broad, as what is or is not a ‘crime’ is open to debate (dumping the dollar might be construed as an act that in its character, gravity and scale could be construed as a ‘crime’ by some). Statists want more state power knowing (or not) that this leads to more war, more aggression as people are forced to conform to artificial ‘norms of society’.

On 21 July, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing at the Commons despatch box, declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. For all the later “clarification” that he was speaking personally, he had made “a statement that the international court would be interested in,” said Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London.

I have a new phrase to describe Pilger, StopWar and all the other well meaning statists who incessantly whine about the war machine without offering any solutions ‘The Cathartics‘. I like it!

The Cathartics grasp onto any word or slip of the tongue and then scream and shout about it like it means something when it means precisely nothing. The House of Commons is the one of the centre stages of the soap opera, and Pilger quoting lines from its script is no better than a scarf wearing washer woman recounting what happened on Coronation street last night as if it were real.

Tony Blair came from Britain’s upper middle classes who, having rejoiced in his unctuous ascendancy, might now reflect on the principles of right and wrong they require of their own children. The suffering of the children of Iraq will remain a specter haunting Britain while Blair remains free to profit.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger86.1.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Blair, reflecting on what he did means nothing. What Pilger actually means is he should feel ashamed of making so much money out of his publishing deal and post PM contracts. Get over it Pilger; Blair lining his pockets is not the problem.

As for the principles of right and wrong he requires of his own children, that is an entirely personal matter that is also, not the problem, and I guarantee you that Blair is not haunted in any way by what he did. He believes that what he did was of benefit in the long run, and nothing you can say will change that. Finally, venting jealousy is a poor substitute for a solution to the end of the war machine.

What a total waste of time; Lew Rockwell, one of the biggest websites in the world, where articles are not only read but copied, re-posted and emailed by the millions; a platform of extraordinary reach, has been used by this man to spew a completely pointless jealous rage piece, repeating what everyone already knows about Iraq, singularly failing to mention even a single possible solution to the next war crime. Even offering a bad solution would be better than nothing. Not a single hyperlink to any resource that could help stop the possible attack on Iran… but there is a link to Amazon so you can buy his book.

If the attack on Iran is to be stopped, do not look to John Pilger for an answer. It will emerge from the internets via social networks, and then, all of a sudden, the war machine will be shut down.

What we are waiting for is a text; a small piece of writing containing the very simple instructions that everyone needs to follow to bring down the machine. The idea is coalescing in the mind of someone somewhere, and soon, it will arrive in your inbox, or in your timeline and it will hit you with its simplicity and its beauty. You will commit to doing it and you will forward it to all your friends and re-tweet it, and the machine will die on that day.

[INSERT COUNTRY]s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

This is a MUST READ for all Europeans, Americans and [INSERT COUNTRY], with a special ‘do not miss’ notice for Home Educators and those delusional parents in Spain who still believe that government knows best in democracy:

[…]

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”

[…]

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

Sound familiar?

‘Lord’ Clive Soley and ‘Baroness’ Ruth Deech are two exemplars of the repulsive human trash superclass that this priceless article eloquently describes and dismantles. Their contempt for you is naked, their predations unceasing and every time you run to them, or vote for them, or pay taxes into their system you make them stronger.

Angelo M. Codevilla has done you a great service by writing this piece. I suggest you spread it far and wide.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard rides the D-Notice razor edge

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph about ‘The Death of Paper Money’. Anyone who has been woken up by Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and the Austrians knows that this is in fact inevitable, and in the end, is a good thing, because it means that government can no longer steal your money from you while you sleep, spending that money on mass murder:

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. “My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice,” said one well-connected woman.

“You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged — not in the streets — but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for.”

Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who — by luck or design — had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something.

A conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as “Judefetzen” (Jew- confetti), hinting at the chain of events that would lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.

While the Weimar tale is a timeless study of social disintegration, it cannot shed much light on events today.

[…]

My emphasis.

Cannot shed much light on events today?

This is so irrational, contradictory and ridiculous that we could be forgiven for concluding that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is working under the constraints of a D-Notice, preventing him from spelling out explicitly what is about to take place for fear of the disruption that would ensue, should the emperor’s naked state be publicly declared.

What he has done in this article is the next best thing; he obliquely spelled out the precise nature of what is going to happen in the USA, UK and all over Europe should hyperinflation suddenly kick in, and then put in a disclaimer right at the end of the section, to indemnify himself and get past the Telegraph editors.

That is the only explanation for this line. All of the factors are here for an inevitable hyperinflationary event. The parallels to the German hyperinflation are eerily similar, including the mass ignorance of what inflation is, what money is, etc etc.

So, what should you do to protect yourself from this coming hyperinflation? Evans-Pritchard tells you in this section:

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. “Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else,” said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

[…]

The message is clear; you need to hold currencies other than the ones that are about to go critical mass in a hyperinflationary spiral. You need to own gold. You need to own Swiss Francs. You should not own the Euro and under no circumstances, should you own the Federal Reserve Note (the ‘US Dollar’).

So what about the Pound Sterling? What are its characteristics, and why does Evans-Pritchard believe that it is immune from hyperinflation? Why has Evans-Pritchard completely (deliberately?) ignored the Pound and its nature in this discussion? He says:

This is not a picture of America, or Britain, or Europe in 2010.

Why not? What is the precise difference between the money used in the Weimar hyperinflation and the US Dollar, or for that matter the Zimbabwe Dollar (which no longer exists)?

The answer is that there is no difference.

Now, lets do what Evans-Pritchard is apparently forbidden from doing, using only the Google, and ask a fundamental question.

What is the Pound Sterling?

The pound is a fiat currency, supervised by the Bank of England.

The Pound is redeemable for nothing:

The contemporary sterling is a fiat currency which is backed only by securities; in essence IOUs from the Treasury that represent future income from the taxation of the population. Some economists term this ‘currency by trust’ as sterling relies on the faith of the user rather than any physical specie.

The bank of England has outsourced the manufacturing of its notes to the private company De La Rue:

De La Rue announces that it has been selected by the Bank of England to be its preferred banknote printing supplier. This follows an announcement by the Bank today that it has decided to contract out its banknote printing operations at Debden, Essex, to a commercial company. This will enable the Bank to lower the costs of the supply of its banknotes, while for staff it opens up the possibility of bringing in more work to Debden.

So. In five minutes we discover that the pound is worth precisely nothing. It can be printed at will in any quantity the Bank of England desires for any purpose that the state chooses, without any constraints whatsoever.

If you also factor in fractional reserve banking where UK banks are legally permitted to create money at will, you have a system, just like the one about to implode in the USA, the Federal Reserve System, that cannot possibly be immune to collapse.

If Sterling is immune from collapse, I would like to know precisely how it is different to every other paper money fiat currency that has ever existed.

Did you know that:

At heart, this economic crisis is in fact a currency crisis. Throughout history no paper currency (or “fiat currency”, since it is accepted as money by virtue of Government fiat or decree) has survived, and this time will be no different. The average lifespan of fiat currencies has been 16 years*. The present system is unique in that it has survived for 38 years and for the first time ALL countries throughout the world are on a fiat money standard. This means that the resulting crash will be on the scale of something the world has never seen.

[…]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/coming-financial-tsunami

My emphasis. Wether or not the figure of sixteen years is accurate, ALL fiat currencies eventually collapse. These are the countries that have already tasted it: Angola 1991-1995, Argentina 1975-1991, Austria 1921-1922, Belarus 1994-2002, Bolivia 1984-1986, Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1993, Brazil 1986-1994, Bulgaria 1996, Chile 1971-1973, China 1948-1949, Free City of Danzig 1922-1923, Georgia 1993-1995, Germany 1922-1923, Greece 1942-1944, Hungary 1945-1946, Israel 1970-1971, Japan 1948-1951, Krajina 1992-1993, Madagascar 2004-2005, Mozambique 1977-1992, Nicaragua 1987-1990, Peru 1988-1990, Philippines 1942-1944, Poland 1989-1991, Romania 1998-2005, Russia 1921-1922 and 1992-1999, Turkey 1990-1995, Ukraine 1993-1995, United States 1861-1865, Yugoslavia 1989-1994, Zaire 1989-1996, Zimbabwe 2004-2009.

All of the countries in this list experienced government created hyperinflation in the twentieth century. If each of these countries had not had government monopolies on the creation of money and legal tender laws, opting instead for a completely market driven commodity money system of currencies created by entrepreneurs whose business it is to manufacture money, they would not have experienced this problem. The sole exception in the above list in terms of the century of hyperinflation is the USA which had its experience in the nineteenth century, so they are about to have a second experience of it.

This is what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will not touch in his articles… and its understandable why he does not touch upon this matter. Why should he do anything that might precipitate the inevitable collapse of Sterling? What can he possibly gain from telling the truth that anyone who is reading his article, and who therefore can use the Google, can access for themselves? He will only be made a scapegoat for the collapse which is going to happen wether he writes about it or not. We have all seen how governments and the press will use anything and any person as scapegoat to deflect blame from the true causes of a ‘financial crisis’.

Pity is what you should feel for Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, knowing the inevitable, desperate to warn everyone but unable to do so, either because of orders from above or his instinct for self preservation.

Top ten ways you can avoid being tracked

Monday, July 12th, 2010

An article from Activist Post has gone demi viral. It lists the top ten ways the ever-present collectivist ‘we’ are being tracked.

It has some good points in it, but as usual there are two sides to every story, and that article only gives one side; the side of the omnipotent, ill defined ‘Big Brother’ abusing the little people.

Here is the other side; how you can avoid being tracked, the reality of this ‘tracking’ and who is truly responsible for these abuses.

GPS — Global positioning chips are now appearing in everything from U.S. passports, cell phones, to cars. More common uses include tracking employees, and for all forms of private investigation. Apple recently announced they are collecting the precise location of iPhone users via GPS for public viewing in addition to spying on users in other ways.

First of all, RFID is not the same as GPS. The article linked from this section, from 2005, says only that the US is requiring RFID in passports. The fact of the matter is that ‘your’ passport (many countries assert that the passport remains the property of the issuing government, even after you pay for it to be issued to you), if it has an RFID chip in it, and if that chip is broken, is still acceptable, world-wide, as a travel document. The danger from an RFID passport is that people can copy its contents (your picture and personal details) without touching the passport. You can stop this by hammering your passport as soon as it is issued to you. Of course, as you travel, the secondary ways of registering your entry and exit from a country kick in. But the RFID part can be nullified. You CAN take control of that aspect.

Now for the ‘GPS’ that GSM phones use. Some phones have a true GPS chip in them that uses the Global Positioning System. iPhones like the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 have it, the iPhone 2G does not. The iPhone 2G and phones that do not have a GPS chip in them use triangulation, or Mobile Phone Locating. In either case, if you do not want anyone to know where you are, you can either refrain from using mobile phones or turn the phone off when you are not using it. Knowing your location is a trade off for the utility of having a mobile phone. The choice is yours wether or not you accept this trade off.

Internet — Internet browsers are recording your every move forming detailed cookies on your activities. The NSA has been exposed as having cookies on their site that don’t expire until 2035. Major search engines know where you surfed last summer, and online purchases are databased, supposedly for advertising and customer service uses. IP addresses are collected and even made public. Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor. It has now been fully admitted that social networks provide NO privacy to users, while technologies for real-time social network monitoring are already being used. The Cybersecurity Act attempts to legalize the collection and exploitation of your personal information. Apple’s iPhone also has browsing data recorded and stored. All of this despite the overwhelming opposition to cybersurveillance by citizens.

Internet browsers can be set to not “record your every move”. They do not “form” cookies. A cookie is a file containing information placed by websites on your computer. You can set your browser to reject all cookies, and all modern browsers have this ability. If you do not want the NSA to put cookies on your computer, then do not visit websites owned by the NSA, or do so from a computer that is not your own. Even if you do visit a website owned by the NSA, and they set a cookie with an expiry date of 2035, you can delete it from your computer. The same goes for major search engines. If you do not want your IP address to be recorded by a website, use a proxy service to change your IP before you surf to sites that you do not trust.

If you have concerns about browser security, you should not, under any circumstances, use Internet Explorer from Microsoft. Use instead, either Firefox or Google Chrome. Both of these browsers are free, it is easy to migrate to them, and so you have no excuse whatsoever not to use them. Google Chrome even has an ‘incognito’ mode, which:

For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Here’s how the incognito mode works:

  • Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren’t recorded in your browsing and download histories.
  • All new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you’ve opened.

Changes made to your Google Chrome bookmarks and general settings while in incognito mode are always saved.

And since these browsers are Open Source, they are less likely to be compromised by your enemies to spy on you with built in back doors.

Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor.

Governments can flag sites all they like. This has no effect on you being tracked. Even China cannot block sites that it wants to censor, so this is simply not the case, and once again, has nothing to do with tracking you.

You should not use social networking sites in a way that will compromise your security. Do not post photos of yourself, for example. Photos of you and your friends can and will be scanned with facial recognition software, putting names to faces for anyone who has the money to pay the social networking provider for access to your network of friends. Scrips erint.

UPDATE: Told you so: Billionaire entrepreneur Marc Cuban has just invested in a facial recognition startup that has the explicit aim of harvesting identified, recognised and tagged faces of users from Facebook to create an application that will be able to identify you via cameras owned by the company that are placed in stores, in hotels, and on billboards. Just like these scenes from Minority Report.

UPDATE NUMBER 2

Details of 100m Facebook users collected and published: Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant.

Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

Mr Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information.

The file has spread rapidly across the net.

On the Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users.

One user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as “awesome and a little terrifying”.

[…]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10796584

Download the file of 100,000,000 Facebook users for yourself Even if you were smart enough to set your Facebook profile to private, your friends who were not so smart have exposed your details simply by being ‘friends’ with you.

END UPDATE

Once again, the iPhone’s ability to store a list of the sites you have visited is something that you can erase. You cannot erase the GSM internet access providers list of sites you have visited of course. If you volunteer to use these services, that is the price you have to pay. Your duty is to know this, understand that you have a choice, and then to make an informed choice.

RFID — Forget your credit cards which are meticulously tracked, or the membership cards for things so insignificant as movie rentals which require your SSN. Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more. RFID “proximity cards” take tracking to a new level in uses ranging from loyalty cards, student ID, physical access, and computer network access. Latest developments include an RFID powder developed by Hitachi, for which the multitude of uses are endless — perhaps including tracking hard currency so we can’t even keep cash undetected. (Also see microchips below).

Credit cards are a voluntary service provided by private companies. No one would use them if the credit card companies did not keep a list of all the money you had spent on them. These lists are an essential part of the credit card service. What the companies do with that list, above and beyond keeping it for the purposes of accounting is another matter entirely of course, but the core fact remains that you are not obliged to use a credit card and so any tracking that emerges from it is something you are entering into voluntarily.

If you have an SSN (and many people do not) it is up to you to refuse to divulge it to anyone. If you believe that your privacy is worth less than the value of a movie rental, then that decision is yours, and you cannot blame anyone but yourself if your SSN and its associated details appears in databases where it should not.

It is not factually correct to say that, “Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more”. Many people do not carry these cards, precisely because they are aware of the privacy implications. Those people who have chosen to carry those cards do so because they are getting a financial benefit from them. They have traded their privacy for a small amount of money or convenience. They may not have made an informed choice, but nevertheless, they have voluntarily entered into an agreement with a private company. If you do not want people to know what you are spending your money on, you must choose not to carry these cards.

Student ID is once again, a voluntary contract between the student and an educational institution. Physical access (I assume, in the workplace) is once again, part of the terms of a contract between you and your employer. Neither of these is compulsory.

RFID powder embedded in currency is an entirely bad thing. Sound money is the private property of the rightful owner of it, and banknotes that are the property of the state, even though you have earned that money, are illegitimate on their face. This is quite apart from the fact that Fiat Currencies are entirely counterfeit and inherently immoral.

If you do not want to have your money tracked, you should first understand what money is, buy gold to store your savings and support all efforts to remove the power to create money out of the hands of the state, by rejecting paper money. ‘We’ can keep cash undetected. Once again, there are ways to stop the state and its agents from tracking you; you simply have to understand what it is you are doing and then stop doing what is harmful to you.

Traffic cameras — License plate recognition has been used to remotely automate duties of the traffic police in the United States, but have been proven to have dual use in England such as to mark activists under the Terrorism Act. Perhaps the most common use will be to raise money and shore up budget deficits via traffic violations, but uses may descend to such “Big Brother” tactics as monitors telling pedestrians not to litter as talking cameras already do in the UK.
Computer cameras and microphones — The fact that laptops — contributed by taxpayers — spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous. Years ago Google began officially to use computer “audio fingerprinting” for advertising uses. They have admitted to working with the NSA, the premier surveillance network in the world. Private communications companies already have been exposed routing communications to the NSA. Now, keyword tools — typed and spoken — link to the global security matrix.

Public sound surveillance — This technology has come a long way from only being able to detect gunshots in public areas, to now listening in to whispers for dangerous “keywords.” This technology has been launched in Europe to “monitor conversations” to detect “verbal aggression” in public places. Sound Intelligence is the manufacturer of technology to analyze speech, and their website touts how it can easily be integrated into other systems.

Now we come to an important distinction that must be made when we think about theses systems. It is the distinction between the state and the private.

The things that you allow the state to do to you in its capacity as the holder of a monopoly on violence are completely different to your voluntarily entering into contracts with private companies.

If you do not understand this distinction, then you do not understand the proper role of government and your relationship to it. You can be confused by the simple distinction between the problem of the state knowing everything about your shopping habits, and the fact that your supermarket loyalty card firm knows all of your shopping habits through your voluntary interaction with it.

Articles like this emerge from a deeply seated need and thirst its author feels for freedom. You cannot even begin to identify, address, quench and fulfil the true nature and source of this ache unless you have all your definitions and distinctions in order.

Now to continue….

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) is an affront to all decent people, and in the UK there are moves afoot to regulate it. This is a matter that civil disobedience would be well suited to. There are not enough police in any country to prevent an outbreak of mass disobedience, and in the meantime, there are counter measures you can take to prevent your car from being caught by these cameras.

It must be said also, that if you are caught by one of these systems, you have the option of simply not paying whatever fine they write down on paper and post to you. Every day in London, which is ringed by a ‘Congestion Charge Zone’, many tens of thousands of people simply refuse to pay without any consequence whatsoever. Diplomats do not pay of course, but here I am talking about ‘ordinary’ people who simply ignore the fines and notices that are sent to them. This story is kept out of the news because it is well understood that if everyone knew that a significant number of people were not paying, the system would collapse. And by system, I mean the fact that out of every eight pounds charged to drivers, only three pounds is sent to the state. The London Congestion Charge is nothing more than a racket designed to fleece drivers, and a pretext to give police real time access to the details of every car entering central London.

ANPR is a problem that goes to the root of how countries are run and private property. This is something you need to think carefully about as you spray ‘your’ number plate.

The same is true for CCTV cameras. The new government in the UK is making sounds that it wants to roll back this nightmare, but the same general attributes apply; these cameras do not prevent crime of any kind and are an affront to all decent people. Just how corrosive these cameras are is made clear when you step off of a plane into a country where there is no CCTV. The presence of cameras everywhere is oppressive, dehumanising and completely at odds with a free country.

The fact that laptops — contributed by taxpayers — spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous.

What is outrageous in this case is that people have had money stolen from them to provide laptops to other people. If you accept a stolen laptop in this way, with all the conditions attached to it, then you have only yourself to blame, for entering into an immoral contract with the state.

You are not obliged to use Google’s services. If they track you, it is because you consent to being tracked by them.

Your traffic going through NSA scanners is a part of how the internet works. If you do not want anyone to read your traffic, then you are at liberty to encrypt your connection and communications, using any of the many free tools that are readily available. You will then have the benefit of the internet without the surveillance of the content of your communications.

There is no excuse for not encrypting your communications, and it is unacceptable for thinking people to continually complain about email privacy when easy to use and unbreakable military grade tools are available to use for free.

Public sound surveillance, like CCTV is an immoral affront, and all instances of it should be met with whatever civil disobedience is required to have it permanently stopped.

Biometrics — The most popular biometric authentication scheme employed for the last few years has been Iris Recognition. The main applications are entry control, ATMs and Government programs. Recently, network companies and governments have utilized biometric authentication including fingerprint analysis, iris recognition, voice recognition, or combinations of these for use in National identification cards.

Iris scanning for entry control is done by employers. You should not enter into contracts with employers who use these systems. If a bank requires your fingerprint to provide services to you, then you should close your account if they refuse to accept your custom on terms that are satisfactory to you. Government programmes that involve compulsory fingerprinting should be met by civil disobedience and absolute refusal. As for National Identification cards, readers of this blog know our record in this regard.

DNA — Blood from babies has been taken for all people under the age of 38. In England, DNA was sent to secret databases from routine heel prick tests. Several reports have revealed covert Pentagon databases of DNA for “terrorists” and now DNA from all American citizens is databased. Digital DNA is now being used as well to combat hackers.

Microchips — Microsoft’s HealthVault and VeriMed partnership is to create RFID implantable microchips. Microchips for tracking our precious pets is becoming commonplace and serves to condition us to accept putting them in our children in the future. The FDA has already approved this technology for humans and is marketing it as a medical miracle, again for our safety.

The blood taken in the ‘heel prick tests’ the author is talking about is for the Guthrie Test . What they do not tell you when this test is done upon the birth of your baby is that these blots of blood on paper cards are then used for purposes other than the single purpose of testing for diseases. They are stored in ‘DNA Banks’ for who knows what uses.

If you want to avoid having your child’s DNA profile extracted, stored and used, then you need to plan ahead and have a home birth. Under the care of private midwives, you have complete control over what happens to your child. You can refuse all vaccinations, the Guthrie test, absurd silver nitrate drops in the eyes, vitamin K injections, ridiculous ‘clicky hips’ tests and every other, routine, mechanised, offensive, unnecessary, reflexively and thoughtlessly administered medical industrial complex procedure.

Digital DNA is something that has nothing to do with biology, and it should not be conflated with human DNA and the implications of its misuse.

The same goes for implantable RFID chips; this should not appear with and has nothing to do with DNA, but is in fact related to passports.

This is not nitpicking. It is crucially important, as the pace of innovation accelerates, that anyone with any concern for their privacy be able to distinguish between different entities and disciplines properly. If you do not know the difference between “Digital DNA” and the double helix that can be used to identify you, then you are less likely to be able to understand what is meant when someone claims that when you touch a keyboard in an internet cafe, your DNA can be used to identify you.

Facial recognition — Anonymity in public is over. Admittedly used at Obama’s campaign events, sporting events, and most recently at the G8/G20 protests in Canada. This technology is also harvesting data from Facebook images and surely will be tied into the street “traffic” cameras.

All of this is leading to Predictive Behavior Technology — It is not enough to have logged and charted where we have been; the surveillance state wants to know where we are going through psychological profiling. It’s been marketed for such uses as blocking hackers. Things seem to have advanced to a point where a truly scientific Orwellian world is at hand. It is estimated that computers know to a 93% accuracy where you will be, before you make your first move. Nanotech is slated to play a big role in going even further as scientists are using nanoparticles to directly influence behavior and decision making.

Facial recognition can best be described as a set of software tools that can be used recognise a face in a digital image. If you buy iPhoto 9, you can use these tools to help you organise your photos. Facial recognition is not bad in and of itself, in the same way that guns or hammers are not bad. All things can be put to bad uses, and facial recognition is just another tool.

CCTV combined with facial recognition in the hands of the state is a bad thing. Once the CCTV cameras are removed by mass civil disobedience, then facial recognition used in that system becomes a moot point. I have already covered the issue of the voluntary submission and cataloguing of your personal photos and information on Facebook and social networking sites.

Predictive Behavior technology can be likened to earthquake prediction technology. You can predict the arrival of ‘The Big One‘ down to the minute and second, but that will do nothing to stop the complete destruction of entire cities.

When the pressure of these compulsory totalitarian systems becomes too great, there will be a seismic event that will topple governments. With their systems, they may be able to time its coming, but they will not be able to prevent its consequences.

Above all, this is what people need to understand when they read fear-mongering pieces like this Activist Post pice. There is nothing the state can do in the face of total civil disobedience.

Many of us are asking: What would someone do with all of this information to keep us tracked, traced, and databased? It seems the designers have no regard for the right to privacy and desire to become the Controllers of us all.

You see? The fact is that no matter what data they collect, (most of it handed over and organised voluntarily by individuals) they cannot control everyone. There are not enough of them.

The beginning of the change will come when the people who believe that demonstrating is a useful tool wake up and realise that demonstrations are a form of control. When these millions turn their hands to tactics that are effective, non violent and with discreet ‘deliverables’ in the form of goals the ground will shake and all of these evil surveillance systems will be no more.

The Price is Right

Friday, June 25th, 2010

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

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











Watch it for yourself:

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

And the music is to die for.

KILLIAN IS LYING TO YOU!

Coerced association: the state mandates it

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Lew Rockwell has a great article about the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?

Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that speaks to who is in charge: the state or individuals.

We live in anti-liberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can’t even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have travelled from the Age of Reason to our own times.

Referencing the great controversy about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Karen De Coster put the issue to rest by turning Rachel Maddow’s question on its head. She demanded to know whether a white businessman has the right to refuse service to a black man. Karen asked: does a black businessman have the right to refuse service to a Klan member?

I don’t think anyone would dispute that right. How a person uses the right to associate (which necessarily means the right not to associate) is a matter of individual choice profoundly influenced by the cultural context. That a person has the right to make these choices on his or her own cannot be denied by anyone who believes in liberty.

The right to exclude is not something incidental. It is core to the functioning of civilization. If I use proprietary software, I can’t download it without signing a contractual agreement. If I refuse to sign, the company doesn’t have to sell it to me. And why? Because it is their software and they set the terms of use. Period. There is nothing more to say.

If you run a blog that accepts comments, you know how important this right is. You have to be able to exclude spam or ban IP addresses of trolls or otherwise include and exclude based on whether a person’s contribution adds value. Every venue on the internet that calls forth public participation knows this. Without this right, any forum could collapse, having been taken over by bad elements.

We exercise the right to exclude every day. If you go to lunch, some people come and some people do not. When you have a dinner party, you are careful to include some people and necessarily exclude others. Some restaurants expect and demand shoes and shirts and even coats and ties. The New York Times includes some articles and excludes others, includes some people in its editorial meetings and excludes others.

When business hires, some people make the cut and others do not. It is the same with college admissions, church membership, fraternities, civic clubs, and nearly every other association. They all exercise the right to exclude. It is central to the organization of every aspect of life. If this right is denied, what do we get in its place? Coercion and compulsion. People are forced together by the state, with one group required at the point of a gun to serve another group. This is involuntary servitude, expressly prohibited by the 13th amendment. One presumes that a freedom-loving people will always be against that.

As Larry Elder says: “This is freedom 101.”

What about the claim that government should regulate the grounds of exclusion? Let’s say, for example, that we do not deny the general right of free association, but narrow its range to address a particular injustice. Is that plausible? Well, freedom is a bit like life, something that is or is not. Slicing and dicing it according to political priorities is exceedingly dangerous. It perpetrates social division, leads to arbitrary power, mandates a form of slavery, and turns the tables on who precisely is in charge in society.

[…]

And this is precisely why racialists, nationalists, and hard-core bigots have always opposed liberal capitalism: it includes and excludes based on the cash nexus and without regard to features that collectivists of all sorts regard as important. In the imagined utopias of the national socialists, the champions of commerce are hanged from lampposts as race traitors and enemies of the nation.

That’s because the market tends toward an ever-evolving, ever-changing tapestry of association, with patterns that cannot be known in advance and should not be regulated by federal masters. In contrast, government’s attempts to regulate association lead to disorder and social calamities.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/freedom-of-association145.html

Indeed; all of this is absolutely true, and I agree with it.

Government has no business forcing association or preventing association by law. Which puts into sharp relief the next part of this post.

It seems like the arguments questioning the logic of forcing anti discrimination by asserting that the state does not force people to enter restaurants or forbid people from engaging in boycotts are deflated in one aspect. It is indeed illogical that the state forces restaurants to serve but does not force patrons to enter… actually, they DO force people to trade with each other, and forbid boycotts.

In the USA, the Federal Government has enacted a law that forbids people from boycotting Israel.

What they are saying is that american firms are FORCED to deal with people that they may, for whatever reason, prefer not to deal with.

From the ‘Bureau of Industry and Security’, a department with a distinctly un-American name:

Antiboycott Compliance

The Bureau is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain Moslem countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott. Compliance with such requests may be prohibited by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and may be reportable to the Bureau.

Boycott Alert

U.S. companies continue to report receiving requests to engage in activities that further or support the boycott of Israel. U.S. companies may receive similar requests in the future. If you have questions, please call (202) 482-2381 and ask for the Duty Officer or you may contact us by email.

This is a law that forbids private companies from refraining from association.

Antiboycott Laws:

During the mid-1970’s the United States adopted two laws that seek to counteract the participation of U.S. citizens in other nation’s economic boycotts or embargoes. These “antiboycott” laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). While these laws share a common purpose, there are distinctions in their administration.

Objectives:

The antiboycott laws were adopted to encourage, and in specified cases, require U.S. firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction. They have the effect of preventing U.S. firms from being used to implement foreign policies of other nations which run counter to U.S. policy.

Primary Impact:

The Arab League boycott of Israel is the principal foreign economic boycott that U.S. companies must be concerned with today. The antiboycott laws, however, apply to all boycotts imposed by foreign countries that are unsanctioned by the United States.

Who Is Covered by the Laws?

The antiboycott provisions of the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) apply to the activities of U.S. persons in the interstate or foreign commerce of the United States. The term “U.S. person” includes all individuals, corporations and unincorporated associations resident in the United States, including the permanent domestic affiliates of foreign concerns. U.S. persons also include U.S. citizens abroad (except when they reside abroad and are employed by non-U.S. persons) and the controlled in fact affiliates of domestic concerns. The test for “controlled in fact” is the ability to establish the general policies or to control the day to day operations of the foreign affiliate.

The scope of the EAR, as defined by Section 8 of the EAA, is limited to actions taken with intent to comply with, further, or support an unsanctioned foreign boycott.

What do the Laws Prohibit?

Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under the EAR includes:

  • Agreements to refuse or actual refusal to do business with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
  • Agreements to discriminate or actual discrimination against other persons based on race, religion, sex, national origin or nationality.
  • Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about business relationships with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
  • Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about the race, religion, sex, or national origin of another person.

Implementing letters of credit containing prohibited boycott terms or conditions.

The TRA does not “prohibit” conduct, but denies tax benefits (“penalizes”) for certain types of boycott-related agreements.

Note the double talk, the act does not prohibit conduct, but penalises for agreements. Later on the page says:

Penalties:

The Export Admnistration Act (EAA) specifies penalties for violations of the Antiboycott Regulations as well as export control violations. These can include:

Criminal:

The penalties imposed for each “knowing” violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 or five times the value of the exports involved, whichever is greater, and imprisonment of up to five years. During periods when the EAR are continued in effect by an Executive Order issued pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the criminal penalties for each “willful” violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 and imprisonment for up to ten years.

Administrative:

For each violation of the EAR any or all of the following may be imposed:

  • General denial of export privileges;
  • The imposition of fines of up to $11,000 per violation; and/or
  • Exclusion from practice.

Boycott agreements under the TRA involve the denial of all or part of the foreign tax benefits discussed above.

When the EAA is in lapse, penalties for violation of the Antiboycott Regulations are governed by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The IEEPA Enhancement Act provides for penalties of up to the greater of $250,000 per violation or twice the value of the transaction for administrative violations of Antiboycott Regulations, and up to $1 million and 20 years imprisonment per violation for criminal antiboycott violations.

[…]

http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm

Amazing isn’t it? It does not prohibit conduct, but puts you in GAOL for doing it, removes your ‘export privileges’ (doing business is a privilege?), imposes incredibly large punitive fines, and finally (I presume) can revoke your license too practice your trade.

Absolutely immoral and illegitimate.

On the other hand, you have many states that enforce a boycott of Israel, which is an illegitimate and immoral denial of the right of association.

Not only do all of these countries violate the right of association, but they are violating the right of individuals to freely enter into contracts.

If someone wants to draw up a contract that contains a boycott clause, it is the absolute right of the parties to agree to this. Period. Obviously, the mandating of the insertion of such clauses is a clear violation; you should be able to remove or add clauses as both parties see fit.

Take a look at a representative sample of the clauses:

Office of Antiboycott Compliance

Examples of Boycott Requests

Following are recent examples of boycott requests that have been reported to the Office of Antiboycott Compliance. These examples are illustrative and not exhaustive. Companies should call our advice line (202) 482-2381 with questions concerning these or any request to comply with restrictive trade practices or boycotts.

BAHRAIN

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Purchase Order:

“In the case of overseas suppliers, this order is placed subject to the suppliers being not on the Israel boycott list published by the central Arab League.”

Reportable boycott condition in an importer’s purchase order:

“Goods of Israeli origin not acceptable.”

Reportable boycott condition in a letter of credit:

“A signed statement from the shipping company, or its agent, stating the name, flag and nationality of the carrying vessel and confirming … that it is permitted to enter Arab ports.”

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Contract

“Israeli Clause:
The Seller shall not supply goods or materials which have been manufactured or processed in Israel nor shall the services of any Israeli organization be used in handling or transporting the goods or materials.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Contractor shall comply in all respects with the requirements of the laws of the State of Bahrain relating to the boycott of Israel. Goods manufactured by companies blacklisted by the Arab Boycott of Israel Office may not be imported into the State of Bahrain and must not be supplied against this Contract. For information concerning the Boycott List, the Contractor can approach the nearest Arab Consulate.”

Prohibited Condition in a Letter of Credit

“Buyer shall in no way contravene the regulations issued by Bahrain Government and or Israel Boycott Office. Buyer shall not nominate a vessel blacklisted by the said office.”

BANGLADESH

Prohibited Boycott Condition in instructions to bidders on a contract

“No produced commodity shall be eligible for … financing if such commodity contains any component or components which were imported into the producing country from Israel and countries not eligible to trade with … the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The equipment and materials must not be of Israeli origin. The supplier/bidder who are not black listed by Arab boycott of Israel will be allowed to participate in this bid.”

IRAQ

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Questionnaire

“1. Do you have or ever have had a branch or main company, factory or assembly plant in Israel or have sold to an Israeli?”

“2. Do you have or ever have had general agencies or offices in Israel for your Middle Eastern or international operations?”

“3. Have you ever granted the right of using your name, trademarks royalty, patent, copyright or that of any of your subsidiaries to Israeli persons or firms?”

“4. Do you participate or ever participated or owned shares in an Israeli firm or business?”

“5. Do you render now or ever have rendered any consultative service or technical assistance to any Israeli firm or business?”

“6. Do you represent now or ever have represented any Israeli firm or business or abroad?”

“7. What companies in whose capital are your shareholders?” Please state the name and nationality of each company and the percentage of share of their total capital.”

“8. What companies or shareholders in your capital? Please state the name and nationality of each company and the percentage of share of their total capital.”

“N.B. The above questions should be answered on behalf of the company itself and all of its branch companies, if any.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Contractor shall, throughout the continuance of the Contract, abide by and comply in all respects with the rules and instructions issued from time to time by the Israel Boycott Office in Iraq.”

Prohibited Condition in a Trademark Application

“Requirement for the registration of pharmaceutical companies:

Certification letter regarding the boycott of Israel (i.e., do not comprise any parts, raw materials, labor or capital of Israeli origin).”
“Requirement for the Registration of Medical Appliances, Disposables producing companies, and Laboratory diagnostic kit manufacturers:

Certification letter regarding boycott of Israel.”
Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“Supplies of our purchase order should never be consigned or shipped by steamers included on Israel Boycott list.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The bill of lading shall bear a note that the vessel delivering the cargo is not on the “Black List” and does not call at Israeli ports.”

KUWAIT

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Custom’s document

“[The vessel entry document asks the ship’s captain to certify that,] no goods, dry cargo, or personal effects listed on the document of Israeli origin or manufactured by a blacklisted firm or company are to be landed as they will be subject to confiscation.”

Prohibited Boycott Condition in Letter of Credit

“We hereby certify that the beneficiaries, manufacturers, exporters and transferees of this credit are neither blacklisted nor have any connection with Israel, and that the terms and conditions of this credit in no way contravenes the law pertaining to the boycott of Israel and the decisions issued by the Israel Boycott Office.”

Reportable Boycott Condition in Letter of Credit:

“Importation of goods from Israel is strictly prohibited by Kuwait import regulations; therefore, certificate of origin covering goods originating in Israel is not acceptable.”

Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“All shipments under this order shall comply with Israel Boycott Office Rules and Regulations.”

Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“Goods must not be shipped on vessels/carriers included in the Israeli Boycott list.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The vendor (as person or organization) or his representatives should not be an Israeli national. So the vendor should not be owned, managed, or represented by any companies that carry an Israeli nationality and there should not be any sub-contractors that carry Israeli nationality.

The vendor should not involve any person or representatives that carries the Israeli nationality in importing or exporting the software or hardware mentioned in this contract and its appendices and the vendor should provide all documents that support the above information.”

LEBANON

Prohibited Boycott Condition in Power of Attorney from Lebanese firm

A Lebanese firm sent a power of attorney affidavit to appoint a local agent in Iraq to a U.S. firm. The affidavit asked that U.S. firm answer a series of questions concerning the Arab boycott. These questions included whether the firm had a plant in Israel, has sold to Israel, had offices in Israel, owned shares in an Israeli firm, had provided services for an Israeli firm, or had granted any trademarks, copy or patent rights to Israeli persons of firms.

Reportable Boycott Condition in letter of credit:

“Certificate issued by the shipping company or its agent testifying that the carrying vessel is allowed to enter the Lebanese port…”

LIBYA

Prohibited Condition in a Letter of Credit

“Original commercial invoice signed and certified by the beneficiary that the goods supplied are not manufactured by either a company or one of its subsidiary branches who are blacklisted by the Arab boycott of Israel or in which Israeli capital is invested.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Second Party shall observe the provisions of the Law for Boycott of Israel or any other State which the provisions for Boycott are applicable and shall ensure such observation from any other sub-contractor. In case of contravening this condition, the First Party shall have the right to cancel the contract and confiscate the deposit by mere notice by registered letter without prejudice to his right of compensation.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“Boycott Provisions:
The Contractor shall observe and comply with all the provisions and decisions concerning the boycott to Israel or any other country the same is valid. The Contractor shall secure the respect of such boycott by any other party he might have subcontracted with him.”

Prohibited Condition in a Certificate of Origin

“The goods being exported are of national origin of the producing country and the goods do not contain any components of Israeli origin, whatever the proportion of such component is. We, the exporter, declare that the company producing the respective commodity is not an affiliate to or mother of any company that appears on the Israeli boycott blacklist and also, we the exporter, have no direct or indirect connection with Israel and shall act in compliance with the principles and regulations of the Arab boycott of Israel.”

[…]

http://www.bis.doc.gov/antiboycottcompliance/oacantiboycottrequestexamples.html

Did you know that if you have a stamp from Israel in your passport, none of these countries will issue a VISA?

In the USA, it is clearly illegal for a greengrocer to require a wholesaler to only provide products that do not come from Israel. The law says that it is illegal to participate in foreign boycotts, but how can anyone separate a foreign boycott from a USA led boycott? If the terms are exactly the same, and a foreign boycott started first, then how could you prove that your domestic boycott is not an extension of a foreign one?

The people who drafted this law knew that the constitutionality of this law would have been challenged immiediately if it had been an outright ban on boycotting, so they put it in the context of foreign boycotts to get around that pesky piece of paper.

It’s an interesting question.

There are certain trades, like the gem trade, where people from these two supposedly separate spheres, who publicly are unalterably opposed, do business together as if they were members of the same family.

They make agreements on a handshake, where vast amounts of money are involved, and everyone behaves like rational human beings.

This is what happens when you remove the malevolent influence of the state. Without the state interfering, on both sides, people behave rationally and manage to live together without conflict.

This is the truth, it always has been the truth, and the only people who are against the sort of peace that we all expect are the statist collectivists who, with their foul and artificial divisions of humanity, cause every act of violence in the world.

Vince Cable, destroyer of prosperity

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

Simon Heffer sounds like a member of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, with his recent piece on the completely mad, anti growth, anti freedom, anti prosperity antics of Vince Cable, LibDem fail artiste extraordinare:

One of the worst features of Leftists – such as Vince Cable, the Business Secretary and inventor of the idiotic proposal to raise capital gains tax (CGT) – is that they believe people with assets exist purely to be taxed. Furthermore, they seem to believe that the so-called rich (in other words, anyone who has been putting money away regularly for his or her retirement) will not only not mind this happening, but will be in some way grateful to have their guilt at being “rich” assuaged by being kicked in this way. They could not be more wrong.

The whole principle of CGT – even at the existing level of 18 per cent – is unacceptable. Most people who make a capital gain these days do so using money they have earned, and which has already been taxed. They have often made capital gains by investing in the stock market, and therefore putting their money to the service of helping another enterprise to grow, and to create prosperity. Unless we create prosperity, other people won’t have jobs, but will instead have to throw themselves on the mercy of the state; and if they don’t have jobs, they don’t pay income tax, which means a shrinking pool of those in work must fund everything society deems it needs: hospitals, schools, pensions and the rest. More to the point, encouraging people to save for their long-term future is entirely sensible because of the burdens it removes from the state. So why decide to punish such positive behaviour?

Excessively taxing people’s thrift, enterprise and hard work is not only morally offensive: it is also bad for the financial health of our country, and for our ability to raise our standards of living for the future. When Labour introduced its 50 per cent tax band, it barely went through the motions of pretending that it was for any reason other than spite, and to appeal to those who enjoy the politics of envy. Dave, I hope, has recognised this, in his remarks to this newspaper last weekend about scrapping the rate if it raised no money. But would the Lib Dems let him do that? Indeed, given his obsession with the sentiments of focus groups comprising largely Labour voters, would he really want to do it himself?

I know we have a hideous deficit that we have to reduce, and shocking levels of debt that must be repaid. There are ways to do that, however, other than by yet again picking the pockets of middle-class people whose only aim in life has been to provide for themselves and their families, and to avoid asking for help from the state. The £6 billion cut in spending this week doesn’t even make a dent in it. The Tories never wanted to sack the socially unproductive members of Gordon Brown’s client state, who cost billions to employ and have jobs purely to encourage them to vote Labour. With the Lib Dems now holding the whip hand, the chance of rebalancing our economy by shifting resources from the public to the private sector appears to be a non-starter.

Yet it is, however much the coalition refuses to admit it, the only way to get us back on track.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/7779988/Capital-gains-tax-and-the-politics-of-envy.html

Now go and read this absolutely wonderful essay by Lew Rockwell, which lays out beautifully why Vince Cable and his thieving bedfellows Ed Milliband and all the New Labour prosperity destroyers have got it all wrong:

I’m sure that you have had this experience before, or something similar to it. You are sitting at lunch in a nice restaurant or perhaps a hotel. Waiters are coming and going. The food is fantastic. The conversation about all things is going well. You talk about the weather, music, movies, health, trivialities in the news, kids, and so on. But then the topic turns to economics, and things change.

You are not the aggressive type so you don’t proclaim the merits of the free market immediately. You wait and let the others talk. Their biases against business appear right away in the repetition of the media’s latest calumny against the market, such as that gas station owners are causing inflation by jacking up prices to pad their pockets at our expense, or that Wal-Mart is, of course, the worst possible thing that can ever happen to a community.

You begin to offer a corrective, pointing out the other side. Then the truth emerges in the form of a naïve if definitive announcement from one person: “Well, I suppose I’m really a socialist at heart.” Others nod in agreement.

On one hand there is nothing to say, really. You are surrounded by the blessings of capitalism. The buffet table, which you and your lunch partners only had to walk in a building to find, has a greater variety of food at a cheaper price than that which was available to any living person – king, lord, duke, plutocrat, or pope – in almost all of the history of the world. Not even fifty years ago would this have been imaginable.

All of history has been defined by the struggle for food. And yet that struggle has been abolished, not just for the rich but for everyone living in developed economies. The ancients, peering into this scene, might have assumed it to be Elysium. Medieval man conjured up such scenes only in visions of Utopia. Even in the late 19th century, the most gilded palace of the richest industrialist required a vast staff and immense trouble to come anywhere near approximating it.

We owe this scene to capitalism. To put it differently, we owe this scene to centuries of capital accumulation at the hands of free people who have put capital to work on behalf of economic innovations, at once competing with others for profit and cooperating with millions upon millions of people in an ever-expanding global network of the division of labor. The savings, investments, risks, and work of hundreds of years and uncountable numbers of free people have gone into making this scene possible, thanks to the ever-remarkable capacity for a society developing under conditions of liberty to achieve the highest aspirations of the society’s members.

And yet, sitting on the other side of the table are well-educated people who imagine that the way to end the world’s woes is through socialism. Now, people’s definitions of socialism differ, and these persons would probably be quick to say that they do not mean the Soviet Union or anything like that. That was socialism in name only, I would be told. And yet, if socialism does mean anything at all today, it imagines that there can be some social improvement resulting from the political movement to take capital out of private hands and put it into the hands of the state. Other tendencies of socialism include the desire to see labor organized along class lines and given some sort of coercive power over how their employers’ property is used. It might be as simple as the desire to put a cap on the salaries of CEOs, or it could be as extreme as the desire to abolish all private property, money, and even marriage.

Whatever the specifics of the case in question, socialism always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and replacing that capacity for decision making with an overarching plan by the state. Taken far enough, this mode of thought won’t just spell an end to opulent lunches. It will mean the end of what we all know as civilization itself. It would plunge us back to a primitive state of existence, living off hunting and gathering in a world with little art, music, leisure, or charity. Nor is any form of socialism capable of providing for the needs of the world’s six billion people, so the population would shrink dramatically and quickly and in a manner that would make every human horror ever known seem mild by comparison. Nor is it possible to divorce socialism from totalitarianism, because if you are serious about ending private ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending freedom and creativity too. You will have to make the whole of society, or what is left of it, into a prison.

In short, the wish for socialism is a wish for unparalleled human evil. If we really understood this, no one would express casual support for it in polite company. It would be like saying, you know, there is really something to be said for malaria and typhoid and dropping atom bombs on millions of innocents.

Do the people sitting across the table really wish for this? Certainly not. So what has gone wrong here? Why can these people not see what is obvious? Why can’t people sitting amidst market-created plenty, enjoying all the fruits of capitalism every minute of life, not see the merit of the market but rather wish for something that is a proven disaster?

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/love-capitalism.html

Jealousy politics is a very ugly, anti human impulse that has ravaged Britain. You see it everywhere, in the towns where slit eyed, shorn headed, shell suited ‘yoofs’ wander around looking for violence. Where young girls with dirty, oily hair slicked back into a single pony tail, sporting tattoos and multiple piercings push prams around with cigarettes in their hands arguing at the top of their lungs with hoarse voices . You see it in the streets ruined by foul architecture, CCTV everywhere… if you live in the UK, you know exactly what it looks and feels like. Its all completely wrong, hideous and sad at the same time, and the older you are, the more you have to mourn.

Lew Rockwell is right; everything you love comes from capitalism, and in particular, everything you love in the UK came from capitalism. The super abundant wealth, unprecedented in the history of the world is what made everything in Britain possible, and she has been living off of the momentum of the market for over half a century. It is only now that the momentum is finally running out. People are leaving the sinking ship as fast as they possibly can, and even the political class understands on some gut level that the engine is about to grind to a halt; hence the ‘triage team’ mentality of this coalition government.

Britain is not going anywhere unless this government gets out of the way. Already people are taking evasive manoeuvres to avoid having their money stolen. This will distort the housing market, and every other market where this foul, loathsome and entirely illegitimate ‘Capital Gains’ tax touches.

The most sickening thing about this is that the British already know how to run a successful economy. They did it in Hong Kong. The form of a successful economy is well understood. The architects of it are the British. The question now is, why will they not just implement it and be done with this insanity?

And for all of you who stumble across BLOGDIAL for the first time and who reflexively bristle at the idea that capitalism is actually good thanks to efficient brainwashing, here is a reading list for you:

Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

Irwin Schiff – How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t

Those two books, the latter one being free to read online, will properly define for you what capitalism is, so that when that word is used you will understand exactly what it is referring to. It will also reveal to you wether or not the writer who is using that word understands what the word means; so many people misuse it out of either brainwashing or ignorance its meaning is badly distorted in the majority of pieces where it is printed.