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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Doesn’t all of this sound VERY familiar?

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

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

Mises Daily by Yuri N. Maltsev

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3650

And in case you missed them, BLOGDIAL on Gardakil:

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

Soon you will be told to bend over.

You will have to decide whether to grab your ankles, or resist.

Greece is planning mandatory swine flu vaccination.

The Mediterranean country, which receives about 15 million tourists every year, has confirmed more than 700 swine flu cases and no deaths, but world health experts say the true number of cases globally is far higher as only a few patients get tested.

“We decided that the entire population, all citizens and residents, without any exception, will be vaccinated against the flu,” Health Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos said after a ministerial meeting.

Greece has already earmarked 40 million euros for vaccines and has placed orders with Novartis, Glaxo and Sanofi for 8 million vaccine doses, to be received gradually by January.

Vaccine experts say people will likely need two doses of vaccine to be protected from H1N1 swine flu, so Greece would need a total of 24 million doses to vaccinate its entire population. Other countries are taking similar steps.

“Greece will order 16 million more doses from the same companies in the future,” a health ministry official who declined to be named told Reuters.

UAE is forcing all students over the age of 5 to be vaccinated.

Vaccination against swine flu will be mandatory for all students of private and public schools in the UAE when schools open in September, the director general of the Ministry of Health has said.

Vaccination will be mandatory for the country’s 630,000 students and will be free of charge, Dr Ali Bin Shakar told UAE daily Emarat Alyoum.
Only children over the age of five are included in the programme, which will cost the government around AED3.2m ($871,000).

Mandatory vaccination will be coming to your town, sooner or later.

And it could be enforcable, literally.  Uncle Sam is already telling its people that this procedure is constitutional!

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has put states on notice that swine flu vaccinations will begin in October. The editor of the popular blog “Pissed Off Former Democrat” phoned the legal council at the Arkansas State Health Department to seek advice about obtaining waiver forms for a future mass swine flu vaccination program. Only to be told that mandatory vaccines were constitutional and could be enforced at gunpoint by the government if necessary.

Similarly;

“the federal government will buy vaccine from manufacturers and share it for free among the states, which must then “try and get this in the arms of the targeted population as soon as possible,”

The UK has already been ‘primed’ to expect mass vaccination.

They seem to have decided

You need It.

You will get it.

Whether you like it or not.

All this is in the contest of less than 1000 deaths WORLDWIDE, from millions of cases.  For some US perspective, for example: “regular winter flu, […] kills 36,000 Americans a year” … and there’s no mandatory vaccination.

In the UK, which has had around 30 deaths so far; “In a normal outbreak of seasonal flu, some 6,000 people lose their lives. And in the last epidemic, that of 1999/2000, flu killed 21,000.“

In its lethality, swine flu is milder than vanilla flu.  Much milder.  From reported cases we are told that “the swine flu outbreak, still only in its early stages, is already worse than last year’s winter flu, which was itself the biggest outbreak for nine years.”  Yet last year many thousands of people died from winter flu.

Did you hear the calls for mandatory vaccination? No?

Therefore, given this push to inject anyone and everyone whose government can pay for the vaccine, one must ask the question: WTF!?!?!

That is, in this case, WHY THE FUCK!!!!???

If we start with a paranoid question, we could ask exactly what is it that They want you to bend over and be injected with?  One could rationally argue that, given the poor medical justifications, neither the US or UK govs would risk a mandated programme (with all the public order problems that entails) just for a swine flu vaccine.

Of the more paranoid suggestions I have heard, one maintained that this was to be the first of a two-part ‘killer’ jab  The second part would be given at the ‘next pandemic’, thus bringing about the mass population reduction desired by The Elite/Bilderberg/NWO.

It’s immunologically possible (I don’t know about chemically possible, but I assume so); they could try and sensitise people to a certain antigen and then induce disease (autoimmune type or acute allergy-type rather than bug-mediated) with a second dose of that same antigen.  But its a very roundabout route.

The problems are that it would be a bit blatant, and needs a different pandemic for the second mandatory jab. It would be much easier just to release a really vicious virus. To which They would already have a vaccine, obviously.

Thus, having excluded the paranoid, we are left with the probable, which is all too obvious.  This is nothing more than, as one clever person put it, “sheep-shearing on a grand scale”.  You are being used as fodder for a corporate machine to make money. Nothing more, nothing less.

Drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline predicts swine flu gold rush

Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical company is preparing to sell £3bn worth of swine flu drugs this year, it emerged today.

GlaxoSmithKline revealed its vaccine, one of the world’s first, could be available by September after the UK government placed advance orders for 60m doses.

It also disclosed that international governments were stockpiling large supplies of GSK’s anti-viral treatment Relenza, which can relieve swine flu symptoms.

Worldwide sales from the two drugs are expected to reach £3bn by January, but the company rejected claims it was exploiting the pandemic – stressing that profits would be much lower once development costs were taken into account.

Or, according to the FT…

Drug groups to reap swine-flu billions

Some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies are reaping billions of dollars in extra revenue amid global concern about the spread of swine flu.

Analysts expect to see a boost in sales from GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis when the companies report first-half earnings lifted by government contracts for flu vaccines and antiviral medicines.

Not bad in a global recession, eh?  We could go on, but you know where the G is.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?

So, lets assume you’re still feeling a bit worried about swine flu and are still considering letting them give you a skin pop. Just read this update on why not to have the vaccine… from the WHO H1N1 site:

The reason why GBS developed in association with that specific vaccine has never been firmly established. The potential for the development of a similar risk with future vaccines can never be firmly excluded. However, the influenza A (H1N1) vaccine will be manufactured according to established standards and post marketing surveillance will be conducted to monitor potential development of any serious adverse events following administration of vaccine. Safety monitoring systems are an integral part of strategies for the implementation of the new pandemic influenza vaccines.

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_questions/vaccine_preparedness/safety_approval/en/index.html

In other words;
If you die we will know the vaccine is Not Good.
You are the guinea pigs.
Do not complain.
You have been warned.
We already have your money.
NO REFUNDS.

“National regulatory authorities have put into place expedited processes that do not compromise on the quality and safety of the vaccine.”

No compromise necessary since there is no quality control or safety testing until it is in your arm.

Looks like India is on a massive catchup spree; first ID cards for everyone there, and now a compulsory school attendance law:

India makes education compulsory and free under landmark law

The Indian parliament has passed a bill to provide universal, free and compulsory education for all children aged between six and 14.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi

The law, passed more than 60 years after India won independence, has been hailed by children’s rights campaigners and educationalists as a landmark in the country’s history.

India’s failure to fund universal education until now, and its focus on higher education, have been cited as factors in its low literacy rates. More than 35 per cent of Indians are illiterate, and more than 50 per cent of its female population cannot read.

Official figures record that 50 per cent of Indian children do not go to school, and that more than 50 per cent of those who do drop out before reaching class five at the age of 11 or 12.

Campaigners say children from poor families are often discouraged by parents who need them to work, while financial obstacles are put in the way of families who would like their children to be educated. Families are often deterred by the cost of school books and uniforms.

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill will now guarantee 25 per cent of places in private schools are reserved for poor children, establish a three-year neighbourhood school-building programme, and end civil servants’ discretion in deciding which children will be given places.

[…]

Telegraph

First of all, the headline is incorrect. This education is not going to be ‘free’ someone is going to pay for it. A little Googling tells us that the state is going to pay for each child who sits in the 25% of places that are reserved for the poor. That money has to come from somewhere.

I think we have all had more than enough of ‘children’s rights campaigners’ and ‘educationalists’ don’t you?

Its clear, even from this article, that the Indian state cannot provide an education infrastructure like the western countries do; that is why they are going to simply take the resources from the private schools to meet their needs.

Once again, how people run their affairs in their own countries is non of our business. I am simply observing and asking obvious questions, like, “how are they going to pay for this, and the ID Cards, and the sanitation problem, and whatever else they have coming down the pipeline? By inflating their currency?” As far as I can tell, the Rupee is a fiat currency, based on nothing, that they can print whenever they like in whatever quantities they like.

Hmmmmmmm!

This brings us neatly to the this great blog post:

Most libertarians agree public schooling is a form of slavery and morally evil. In addition to this moral argument, the utilitarian case against public schooling is a strong one. While many libertarians and social theorists have written on this, Ivan Illich should not be missed. I recently came across his works and found great insight in the following article: “Why We Must Abolish Schooling.” It is no wonder he was referred to in the Libertarian Forum so much.

I just wanted to highlight some great quotes from the article. (I am guessing his excellently-titled book, Deschooling Society (Open Forum), will come out from the Mises Institute at some point.)

This is a long quote (below), but very insightful. I have thought for a while about the socially negative effects that stem from education. But Mr. Illich points out how the process vs. substance outcome has led to such effects. This is in every aspect of where taxpayer’s money is spent. I think this is where the real value of an economist comes into play, or perhaps when the economist as social or political theorist is so useful. Pointing out the economic and social effects of bad ideas and policies–especially where this requires seeing the unseen cause and effect relationships, and some creativity–separates the better from the best economists imho.

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. Not only education but social reality itself has become “schooled.”

I maintain the belief that it is a widespread myth that government helps the poor in any significant way, at least when compared to a free society. Mr. Illich wrote about this modernization or institutionalization of poverty with great clarity:

Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. 

The more I read this article the more amazed I am at Mr. Illich’s profound insights. Most people think poverty comes from a lack of money. In contrast Mr. Illich wrote: 

The poor in the US are in a unique position to speak about the predicament which threatens all the poor in a modernizing world. They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary. The poor in the US inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a “schooled” society is built.

What about the social effects of public schooling?

Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system. Countries are rated like castes whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating which is closely related to per capita gross national product, and much more painful.

And the economic effects?

The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discourages both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for non-schooled learning. The US is proving to the world that no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing: because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system, the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce.

Again, I highly recommend checking out Mr. Illich’s works, most of which seem to be available here. Finally, this will be the last quote:

Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system which promotes it.

[…]

http://austro-libertarian.com/the-great-ivan-illich-on-abolishing-schooling/

It would be great if everyone in India could read. Heck, it would be great if everyone in BRITAIN could read (one in five adults in Britain are illiterate).

I read somewhere that ten percent of all software development is now happening in India. Its clear that the schools that are running in India are producing world-class results. I wonder if there is another, more 21st century way to increase literacy levels. A country full of software developers should be able to come up with a solution. That law seems to me to be a retrograde action, especially in a country where there have been successful new models like the micro credit projects started by entrepreneurs.

As for the Libertarian position on schools, it makes perfect sense, and the way schools are transforming into the most shocking and brutal crime ridden, ultraviolent, prison like, terrible places is just one aspect that demonstrates this.

You need to pay particular attention to that last link… UNBELIEVABLE.

Finally from another Austrian:

The formal education of a child is the natural prerogative of his parents. They possess custodial rights of the child and exercise them for his physical, mental, and spiritual development. Parents are in a position to know their child and care for the development of his personality. They bear the responsibility of attaining this end and are in a position to tailor formal education to the strengths and weaknesses of their child by either their own tutoring or the hiring of appropriate specialists to instruct their child. Parentally directed tutoring, then, is the best type of formal education since it is most apt to result in learning harmonious with the natural development of the child’s personality.

Private primary and elementary schools, with one teacher and many students, have been a compromise from parentally directed tutoring made out of economic necessity. In precapitalist societies only the richest elite had sufficient wealth to indulge in private tutoring. Most parents consumed their day with the labor necessary to scratch out a subsistence living.

As wealth has expanded under capitalism, it has become increasingly possible for middle-class parents to do what the rich have always been able to afford, i.e., private tutoring. Today, middle-class parents are wealthy enough to indulge in substantial private tutoring and could do much more if they were free from the burden of financing state schools. And even where wealth is not yet sufficient and parents choose schools, a market of private schools would suppress the deficiency of schooling as parental spending would guide schools to find the most effective arrangements for developing each child’s personality. As with thymological knowledge that the child gains from his own actions, formal education proceeds naturally and privately.

[…]

Mises Daily by Jeffrey M. Herbener

I don’t think that there is a single Home Educator out there that would disagree with that.

What people need to achieve academically is not state funding for schools, but a very small state that does not interfere with the free exchange between individuals.

The wealthier people are, the more able they are going to be to educate their children thoroughly. The very act of the state trying to provide everything for the people living in a country impoverishes them, and this is true across everything, from health care to education and everything else in between.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pulled his ‘new world currency’ from his pocket at the G8:

There is a website for this currency. Lets see what its manifesto says:

Manifesto

ART. 1
"Unity in diversity" is the foundation that drives this initiative, which started up in 1996. Its aim is to bring people together and go beyond national stereotypes. Its historical importance is even greater than its economic one; it is a goal built on faith, common hope, and the unification of cultural and spiritual roots.

ART. 2
The relationship between Europe and America, and between the United States and many Countries from the five continents, is based on common cultural traditions and sustained by a parallel vision of the world. It is driven by the highest concepts of brotherhood and peace. These relations are cultivated through global dynamics whose purpose is to fulfill social, political and economic objectives, in full respect of the values and national identities that found countries' respective constitutions.

ART. 3
It is therefore our wish to bring to life the project for a common currency, which has been given the provisional names, "Eurodollar/Dollaeur" (initially), "United Money", then "United Future World Currency". It would symbolize not only the economic, but also the human, social, political, and spiritual bonds between the Nations of different Continents that hold similar ideals.

ART. 4
The common currency project is a highly important step towards bringing people together. It is a means of understanding, provides reference and reinforces different identities that share principle objectives. Competition in respective markets remains free, and the basic principles of participating countries' national identities will be safeguarded.

ART. 5
We are determined to raise awareness of this project among as many people as possible in all Continents. We are focused particularly on the active involvement of young people, especially from schools. Indeed, young people represent the strongest, most concrete vehicle for spreading this initiative. They are also the potential future beneficiaries of this large step forward towards unification and the creation of a world that responds better to the requirements of the new Millennium, as it gradually breaks down social and ideological barriers.

ART. 6
Renewed cultural interest in the Economy comes as a result of shifting perceptions of currency as a whole. This follows on from the debate opened by the introduction of the Euro. Through this Project, students, including from a very young age, can become familiar with basic economic issues. The latter are increasingly important in a new society of widespread wellbeing.

ART. 7
A joint Committee will be selected. It will include experts from a wide variety of disciplines. Everyone will be free to offer their own contribution to the project. This committee will also form the Jury that selects the most interesting ideas, proposals and projects demanded by different initiatives underway.

ART. 8
There will be an information and support campaign to coordinate working groups, committees and clubs, implemented through organizations, bodies and associations. There will be a consideration period for all contributions regarding the expansion, comparison and development of: issues and technical problems; optimizing legislative instruments and procedures; and fulfilling the obligations of the new Currency.

ART. 9
Trials will be carried out at important international events, aimed at awareness, education and promotion. "United Money" currency (banknotes and coins) trials will be entrusted to the best international professionals and experts in the appropriate fields.

Time will be set aside to explore technologically-advanced security and counterfeiting issues, which a future Currency will have to keep in check. This will involve the most prestigious and trustworthy public and private bodies, including universities and companies.

ART. 10
It will be the responsibility of the world's future citizens and the governments they put in place to make our Project a reality. This project is driven by a firm belief in the unification and co-existence of different peoples. It aims to promote an increasingly equal distribution of the planet's resources and human intellect.

Rome and Brussels, March 21st 1996
New York, January 12th 2000.
Milan, February 17th 2009

[…]

http://www.futureworldcurrency.com/

FAIL.

Notice the words and phrases that are missing from this manifesto:

Inflation.
Fiat Currency.
Control of Money Supply.
Hyperinflation
Economics.

and the most glaring omission…

GOLD.

What is this money backed by?
What is it made of?

Unless this new currency is made out of Gold that will be distributed directly to the people who are going to use it, i.e. the public, it will be no better than any of the other Fiat Currencies that are currently circulating. All of them are flawed, all of them rob the people who ‘own’ them by inflation.

They have some interesting crypto enhanced banknote ideas:

but it is meaningless when we are talking about the nature of the money itself. The fact of the matter is that counterfeiting of banknotes is not what causes instability of currencies; it is the printing of banknotes by governments that causes inflation and currency instability. Of course, the government will have the private keys to sign every banknote – an infinite number of them if it wanted to. These notes will have no more intrinsic value than the now totally discredited dollar.

That image is from a page called ‘The Tests’. If this currency is made of 999.9 gold, there is no reason to test anything. I will accept it myself. Why? Because GOLD IS MONEY. Once it is in my hands, it cannot be devalued by inflation. It retains its value. It is, in fact, the perfect store of value. A commenter on a Grauniad article about the ‘financial crisis’ said that, “we need to have a standard of money that we understand in the same way that we understand what a meter is”. DUH Grauniad socialist, that thing is GOLD.

Sadly old ‘Dimi’ and his cohorts didn’t have the balls to simply declare a Gold Ruble and have done with it. The silly name of this currency and all the fluff surrounding it, like that absurd manifesto makes this thing reek of unseriousness. I could be wrong, and this could be the beginning of the restoration of real money. I might have missed the part where it says this is a money made entirely of gold, and where the notes are backed by gold. Lets see.

One thing is for sure though, if it does not conform to the laws of Economics, then it is doomed to fail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We call it ‘Idiocracy‘.

Coming soon to a hyperinflated fiat currency near you!

Money: Cheaper than paper!

Later this year the venerable incandescent lightbulb is going to be banned in many countries in the west. The reasoning behind this ban is that the bulbs are ‘inefficient’, and that removing them from use will save energy and reduce the amount of ‘carbon’ that is released into the atmosphere by the people who use them.

As a replacement for these bulbs, ‘energy efficient’ fluorescent light bulbs are planned to replace the incandescent light bulb, by the force of law.

All of the production lines that used to produce the incandescent light bulb have either been stopped or are in the process of being stopped. Capital has been diverted to the production of fluorescent light bulbs, and manufacturing capacity of the factories that make them has been increased to meet the demand caused by the ban on incandescent bulbs.

The incandescent light bulb is an old technology, developed and patented by Thomas Edison, and refined over many decades. They are cheap to manufacture, made of simple, 100% recyclable non toxic parts (glass, steel and tungsten), and there are literally billions of receptacles that have been designed to accommodate their shape.

The new ‘Environmentally Friendly’, ‘energy saving’ compact fluorescent lightbulbs are expensive to manufacture, have plastic parts, are not simple in design and contain poisons like mercury, making it necessary to dispose of them carefully, lest the mercury escape, polluting the environment and poisoning people.

The new bulbs also produce a hideous, unpleasant light that flickers at the frequency of the electricity mains. These bulbs have been demonstrated to have deleterious effects on people who are sensitive to their light, causing them migraine headaches and eye strain.

Now, as the ban on the incandescent light bulb is about to come into force, we read the following:

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

Incandescents nearing extinction: Impeccable timing, everyone
By Lewis Page

Posted in Physics, 1st June 2009 11:03 GMT

Just as authorities in much of the Western world have moved to phase out the incandescent lightbulb, American boffins believe they have developed a process which can make the oldschool lights more efficient than energy-saving lamps.

Optics boffins at the Rochester Uni in New York state say they’ve developed a process in which an ordinary lighbulb is zapped with a femtosecond-long pulse of extremely high-energy laser light. The laser blast travels through the glass to hit the tungsten filament, causing complex nano- and micro-structures to form on its surface.

Once the lasered light bulb is than powered up, according to the Rochester scientists, it emits a lot more light for the same energy compared to an untreated bulb – equivalent to 40 per cent energy savings. The process of lasing incandescent bulbs wouldn’t be expensive, apparently, so they’d remain cheap compared to fluorescent energy-saving jobs.

According to Rochester Uni:

The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb. Despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet, meaning that when the process is refined, implementing it to augment regular light bulbs should be relatively simple.

It seems that Professor Chunlei Guo of Rochester hit upon the idea of brightening-up lightbulb filaments following earlier experiments in which he and his team used laser zapping to turn metals completely black. This worked so well that Guo and his cohorts wondered if they could reverse the process.

“We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament,” says the prof. “When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb’s energy usage.”

It seems that Guo and his team of lightbulb-blasting boffins can also produce other strange effects, getting incandescent bulbs to emit partially polarised or differently-coloured light – without the energy-wasting filters that would normally be necessary.

It’s the efficiency-enhancement aspect of the studies which could make headlines, however. Both the US and European Union governments are now committed to firm timetables which will see incandescent bulbs phased out in favour of more energy-efficient alternatives, such as fluorescents. This is being done in order to save energy and so lower carbon emissions. But if it’s as simple as Guo suggests to enhance an incandescent with his laser process, this may turn out to have been an unnecessary or even retrograde step.

Guo’s research has been accepted for publication by the journal Applied Physics Letters, but isn’t out yet. In the meantime, there’s a pop-sci release from the university here.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/light_bulb_laser_blast_enhancement/

This is a perfect example of why the state should have no say in what technology firms must use to produce their goods and which goods people can and cannot have access to.

In their zeal to ‘protect the environment’ the state has diverted capital and resources away from the well established incandescent lightbulb production lines, by force, to the new fluorescent lightbulb lines, that have had their  manufacturing capacity ramped up in order to meet the artificially stimulated demand for the new bad bulbs.

The decision to ban the incandescent lightbulb was made with all of the information the legislatures had to hand; i.e. all the relevant facts about the different types of bulb that were available in 2007/2008. What they did not and could not take into account was the research in the above article, which, had they known about it, may have prevented them from legislating for the ban.

This is the central problem with the state interfering with technology; no one can predict the future. Now that the law is about to come into force, we are in a situation where capital has been wasted and misdirected, resources wasted and misdirected and depending on the state of the decommissioning of the incandescent bulb lines, no costless way back to the manufacturing of incandescent lightbulbs.

The state, by its nature, is incompetent. They cannot predict the future and they are not omniscient. In order to be able to legislate effectively, especially where technology is concerned, they would need to be omniscient, with perfect knowledge of every piece and field of ongoing research and technology, and the potential of each piece and field of research and technology.

The enormity of this amount of knowledge is beyond the capacity of any man or group of men; it would mean being able to apply each existing technology (implemented or not) and each piece of research against each other (in the case above, femtosecond lasers and incandescent light bulbs), considering the effect of multiples of them upon each other in succession, and then considering the knock on effects of each of these, say, ten levels down on the tree. This would produce a multi dimensional matrix / tree with a size bigger than the universe. Only then would they be able to synthesize an optimal plan that would maximize the production and movements of capital to reach any particular goal, and of course, who has the moral authority to choose the appropriate goals is something to consider…. for another post.

Applying a femtosecond laser to incandescent lightbulbs is one solution that has produced significant increases in efficiency. Who knows what other treatments, changes in filament formulation, the glass envelope etc etc will produce? Certainly, the state cannot possibly predict them. What the state can do however, is prevent research and innovation, destroying potential breakthroughs, efficiencies, savings and progress.

The state is a bumbler, a reactive and ignorant dealer; they are like a cave man being tasked to turn off a diesel engine that has been left running. Instead of getting into the car by actuating the door handle and turing the key counter clockwise, the caveman takes his club out and beats against the hood covering engine until it stops running. Of course, he claims success when it stops, when in fact the tank has run out of gas and the engine cuts out of its own accord. But I digress.

This femtosecond laser process, an inexpensive, and easy addition to any incandescent lightbulb production line, would have saved billions in electricity bills, spared the environment – and our bodies – from tonnes of mercury poisoning, eliminated the need to build light bulb recycling plants and spared the health of many millions of people, with all the costs attendant on that. Then there are all the other applications of this femtosecond laser technology that are now going to be delayed or which will not now come into existence.

Think about it; the widespread deployment of femtosecond flashers would mean designing modular systems for resale to manufacturers; out of that design and manufacturing process, other processes will have emerged. Secondary uses of these flashers would have been subsequently discovered, which would have other knock on effects. The innovation cascade resulting from this process is what the state has destroyed.

When you apply this example to any other industry or technology where the state legislates, and take into account the default incompetence that inheres in the people that make these decisions, you can begin to get a glimpse of the suboptimal world that we are now in.

Imagine what sort of world it would be had the state not interfered in any way with any technology. To put it into perspective, think of the ubiquity of cheap mobile phones, and then apply that example to every expensive technology that the state has controlled in any way… like the automobile. Imagine how much more efficient, inexpensive, clean and beneficial cars would be had the state stayed out of the business of the details of car manufacture.

‘Consumer advocates’ would tell you that cars are safer now only because the state intervened in the manufacturing process. This may or may not be the case, but what is certain is that cars would be safer than they are now had the state not interfered with the manufacture of cars.

I do not know of a single person who would not pick a safer car over an unsafe one, and since competition is fierce in car manufacture, this fact would be taken into account at every point the design stage, producing just the sort of cars that people want, and cars that people did not know that they wanted. Think iPhone here; once you see it, you want it; you did not know that you would want it before it existed, but now that you have seen it, you want it more than any other mobile phone… the same could be said for the very idea of the cellular phone itself.

Extrapolating from all of this, it is clear that in many aspects of the way we live, we are existing in a world that is grossly distorted and sub-optimal. This world could be better in every way by orders of magnitude had the destructive and disruptive state not interfered with the innovations and interactions of men.

The single worst interference in technology has been the system of Patents. The system of state granted monopolies on ideas has been a total disaster, causing distortion and disruption for generations, throwing us off the optimal path down the years leading to a future that is literally retarded by a century or more of compounded diversions. See ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘ for the full, and truly horrifying story of this.

If you are one of those people who have not drunk the Environmentalism Kool-Aid, then you will realize that state intervention in technology is the worst possible thing to do to protect the environment. Only when technology is unleashed can the imaginations and inventions of men be applied dynamically across the maximum number of fields to produce the sort of efficiencies that are needed to keep the environment clean.

Then again if you have drunk the ‘E Kool-Aid’, by definition you have no imagination, are science illiterate, irrationally anti business and are incapable of understanding any of this.

Nick Clegg chimes in on the Guardian with a well crafted piece demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of what the real problem is. I was going to entitle this post ‘Foxes call for chicken coop redesign’. But thought better of it.

Nick Clegg: Bar the gates. No summer holiday before the overhaul
Warm words and rhetoric are easy. We must seize the mood and enact a radical programme of reform within 100 days

Why the rush nick? The British Form of Government^®, whatever your opinion of it, took ONE THOUSAND YEARS to get to this state. Do you really think that you have not only the right, but the capability to redesign it in ONE HUNDRED DAYS. That is the very definition of conceit. You people are so full of FAIL, so terrible, so spineless, murderous, rudderless and worthless that you could not be trusted to design a new milk bottle, let alone a form of government that is ancient.

Furthermore, if everything is to be torn up, why should YOUR voice be louder than anyone else’s? Just who the hell do you think you are?

Finally the dam has broken, and everyone is talking about changing Britain’s political system. For decades reformers have been thwarted by Westminster inertia. But the MPs’ expenses scandal has overturned old certainties and made change possible.

As bad as it may seem this ‘crisis’ is not enough of a reason to destroy something that is 1000 years old, wether you agree with it or not, and certainly the insane people who sit there should not be the ones who ‘reimagine’ it.

This moment must be seized by all who want a different kind of politics. Warm words, rhetoric and consideration are not enough; indeed, they are a guarantee that little will happen. So let us bar the gates of Westminster and stop MPs leaving for their summer holidays until this crisis has been sorted out, and every nook and cranny of our political system has been reformed.

This is so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

You want to reform Parliament, while all of the electorate in the country are away on THEIR holidays, sunning themselves in Dubai, while you make everything WORSE without anyone watching…..ROTFL!

Today I’m setting out a plan of action to get all the changes we need delivered in just 100 days

What’s the rush? The evil that has been emanating from that house has been going on for years; why the need to act quickly? If you want to do something quickly, why not remove all laws from the statute books that are the cause of everyones anger? The expenses scandal is merely the pin that has popped the boil. It is the final straw. How is it that you cannot see this?!

– making it possible for MPs to be sacked by constituents,

Irrelevant; if your MP sits and votes your rights away, and then you sack her, what does that do to the legislation she voted for? NOTHING. Nick Clegg and his party of FAIL are sour grape class warriors, interested in punishing everyone and not in the real things that matter

abolishing the House of Lords,

See what I mean? 70’s style class war that is the hallmark of the sour graper. No one cares that there is an unelected upper house; in fact, they have been useful in resisting the excesses of the lower house. This obsession with abolishing the lords is like journalists interviewing journalists about journalism. The only thing that matters in this, the real crisis, is the killing of the British people by the incredible burden of laws and the police state. A house of lords in a country where everyone’s rights are respected is completely tolerable; after all, someone has to organize the street sweepers. As long as that is all they are doing, who cares how they got there?

getting corrupt money out of politics and changing the electoral system to give everyone a voice.

Proportional representation; this will benefit only Nick Clegg’s party. It is a non issue when put against the core problem; power itself. A proportionally represented parliament that votes for illegal wars, ID Cards and ContactPoint is just as bad as one that is elected the old way.

People will say it isn’t possible – parliament can’t act that quickly.

‘Some people say‘? Actually, we say that it doesn’t matter wether or not it is possible. But you read that.

I say the innate conservatism that marks out our political establishment is part of the problem. Let’s stop all this self-congratulatory hype about the mother of parliaments and get on with improving it.

No one cares. Dismantle the police state and the 3000+ police state laws of Tony Bliar and everything else, using the old system, before you start tearing down parliament and replacing it with Parliament 2.0.

Momentum will ebb away unless we act quickly.

Its always best to act after careful thought and never in haste. This demonstrates that you are not fit to lead a donkey.

Delay would be a victory for those who want to confine change to the bare minimum – the two establishment parties who will talk up reform long enough for the storm to pass, then kick it into the long grass for good.

The whole thing is over…. that is what you DO NOT UNDERSTAND Mr FAIL!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/27/nick-clegg-a-new-politics

Who is the ‘We’ in this? In this case, it means the foxes who want to design a streamlined chicken coop with racing lines on the outside.

No thanks Nick Clegg… 100% FAIL.

If you want to discover the truth about Bretton Woods, the Dollar and how ‘your’ money has been debased, read ‘What Has Government Done to Our Money?‘. It gives the entire history of the aspects of money that are relevant to you right now.

The hardback edition costs seventeen Federal Reserve Notes. It is a beautiful edition; I strongly recommend that you buy it.

Madeline Bunting writes at the Grauniad.

She has penned a breathtaking piece of trash; terrifying in its ignorance, its basis in illogic and bone shaking fear.

It is terrifying because she is an example of the devotees of the new secular religion of Environmentalism who are polluting our internets and taking up our time with their increasingly shrill and absurd claims.

And these shrill noises are going to get worse as more and more data emerges to destroy their false religion. They will do anything for their religion and because they are irrational and have no holy book to follow, they can change the focus of their religion at will.

First the threat to the environment was the coming of a New Ice Age. Then it was Global Warming. Now it is Climate Change. Each time, as the data shows that what they believe is not true, they change what they believe.

I have no problem with people following the religion of Environmentalism. They can believe in Santa Claus for all I care. the problem I have with the religious devotees of Environmentalism is that these people are ready and willing to make blood sacrifices on the altar of their new religion, and the blood they will be sacrificing will be yours and the families of other people.

Similar to the Malthusian “mass cull” enthusiasts Attenborogh and Porritt, Madeline Bunting wants everyone to be entered into the most fantastic and fine grained totalitarian system of absolute control in order to satisfy her insane Environmentalist agenda of complete degradation and subservience to Gaia.

These people feel a deep seated guilt at having lived in comparative prosperity, and they are desperate to ‘pay back’ for what ‘they’ have ‘taken’. The problem is, they want to superimpose their guilt onto everyone who lives in their part of the world. Like the Eugenics boosters who will not kill themselves and their children, Madeline Bunting is not willing to suffer alone as a dignified religious fanatic; she must CONVERT everyone, and drag them down into her pit of excrement.

Read the rest of this entry »

A valiant soldier alerted me to this:

Another arsehole here…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8057785.stm

Advocates of home birth have, within the last month, claimed that “the vast majority of women have low-risk pregnancies”.

In fact, by all accepted standards, more than half of women have, or will develop, risk factors that make home birth unwise.

He FAILS by not pointing out – or not even realizing, more likely – that the “accepted standards” are those which he and his ilk have determined.

100% correct.

Now.

This article was written by Professor Philip Steer who is a man, not a woman. He is, “British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology editor-in-chief”.

What is ‘Obstetrics’?

Obstetrics (from the Latin obstare, “to stand by”) is the surgical specialty dealing with the care of women and their children during pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium. Midwifery is the non-medical equivalent. Veterinary obstetrics is the same concept for veterinary medicine.

[…]

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

So, now you have all that you need to know.

This man, this MALE, has based his entire career on treating pregnancy and birth as if they were a medical condition and not a perfectly natural occurrence that does not, on average require intervention of any kind.

I can tell you this; if MEN gave birth instead of WOMEN, NO MAN ON THIS PLANET WOULD PUT UP WITH THE NONSENSE THAT THE OBSTETRICS INDUSTRY FORCES UPON WOMEN.

The fact of the matter is that only in the west are women subjected to the complete insanity and degradation of unnecessary obstetric procedures.

The fact that there is a ‘population problem’ in the world proves that obstetric intervention is totally over the top in the west. The majority of women in the world give birth OUTSIDE OF A HOSPITAL, and it is so successful, that there are ‘TOO MANY PEOPLE BEING BORN’.

The fact of the matter is the people who practice Obstetrics are doing it mostly for the money. They attack midwifery and home birth because midwives and home birth, should they become the norm, would totally decimate their incomes, industry and prestige.

All the statistics show that Home Birth is safer than hospital birth. There is no refuting this; what the BBC has done, once again, is promote the medical industrial complex by publishing its propaganda. They do it all the time. Here is another piece that just appeared saying that everyone should be taking medicine to lower their blood pressure as a matter of routine:

Blood pressure pill action urged

Everyone aged 55 and over should be taking drugs to lower their blood pressure, a London-based expert says.
Epidemiology expert Professor Malcolm Law said blood pressure drugs cut the risk of heart attack and stroke even for those with normal blood pressure.

His conclusion, published in the British Medical Journal and backed by other experts, is based on a review of 147 studies, involving 464,000 people.

However, the Stroke Association warned the drugs could have side-effects.

This is yet another article from the BBC without a named author. They do this to protect the identity of the person who accepted money to write this story on behalf of the PR companies that work for the drug companies. They know perfectly well that if the name of the author was given in every instance, someone would be able to correlate the stories and trace them to PR companies and cash payments for placement of these stories on the BBC news website.

This is why they deserve all the contempt that they get.

But I digress.

The facts about childbirth are that sometimes, a mother and her unborn child can get into distress during labor, and at those times, obstetricians can save lives. That is a fact, and I am thankful for obstetric practitioners, for the work that they do, and the lives of the mothers and children they have saved.

But.

If obstetricians try and influence the direction that birthing takes away from natural birth and towards the mechanized birth by using FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt), simply because they do not want to lose clients and money, then they need to be sharply put in their places.

Women are not animals, and pregnancy is not a medical condition. It is up to the woman to decide how she should give birth.

If she wants to give birth alone, that is her affair. If she wants an elective Caesarean that is also her business. If this is not the case, then women become a form of property, that falls under the control of the state or some other monster; in the west, pregnant women are increasingly the property of the state under the control of Obstetricians. This is totally unacceptable, and as I say above, no man would ever accept it.

What is worrying about this article is the following lie:

In fact, by all accepted standards, more than half of women have, or will develop, risk factors that make home birth unwise.

Think about the words:

‘By all accepted standards’…. WHOSE STANDARDS?
‘Risk factors’ … WHOSE ASSESSMENT OF RISK?
‘Unwise’ … WHOSE WISDOM?

The standards of an obstetric practitioner will be different from another person’s standards. Because we are dealing with PEOPLE and not MACHINES, the wishes of the mother trump everything, no matter what anyone says. The same goes for risk; it is up to the mother to decide what level of risk she wants to take with ANYTHING she does, not just pregnancy and birth. If an obstetrician can make a decision or assessment of risk and force a decision on a pregnant women, then that woman becomes PROPERTY at that instant.

Women are wise. The know how to give birth, (especially after the first time) and they know how to assess risk. They have a right to assess risk and to make decisions for themselves and their children. Anyone who gets in the way of that by force is a beast, and should be put down like one.

Women in the west are now sharing information about home birth, and finding that they want to give birth just like everyone else in the world does. Medical professionals are LIVID that they are going to be pushed out of the loop. Well, thats just tough shit. Women come before your desires for money, and if all women in the west want home birth, you have no choice but to accept that and sit patiently until your services are needed.

All of my friends who have children have opted for home birth. They all did it at home, and some of them delivered their children by themselves. The return to natural birth is now unstoppable. Medicalized birth will fade into history like the prohibition of alcohol; it will be seen as an insane aberration of the twentieth century.

The choice the medical community have to make is wether or not they want to be the enemies of their patients or their dutiful servants. I am sure that all women would prefer the latter.

Finally, ‘home birth’ is not anti technology any more than people who choose organic food are anti technology; they are exercising quality control. Take for example, the services of Caroline Flint, whose services are not about home birth, but about the woman having total control over her pregnancy and birth. She will look after you during your pregnancy, and if you want an elective Caesarean, she will arrange that for you. This is the thing the Obstetricians fear the most; being supplanted by and having their incomes at the mercy of Midwives.

ContactPoint, the pure evil paedophile directory invented by the monsters of New Labour and developed by Capgemini, has ‘gone live in a local authority pilot’.

The reprehensible and vile BBC News has a nauseating article, that has an inappropriate picture, and which trots out all the lies HMG want you to swallow unchallenged. Of course, you and I know better.

Since we have been through ContactPoint sufficiently, we can now turn to something fascinating that is related to ContactPoint tangentially.

This is an article, a dreadful article, from ‘CIO‘: “Business Technology Leadership”. This is from their ‘about’ page:

CIO is the leading information brand for today’s busy chief information officer. Available online at www.cio.co.uk and in print via our monthly magazine, CIO addresses issues vital to the success of chief information officers worldwide. CIO provides technology and business leaders with analysis and insight on information technology trends and a keen understanding of IT’s role in achieving business goals.

Ok…… if this is piece of writing is an example of what they describe above, it is no wonder that there are people out there who say things like:

The database is only intended to be accessed by professionals working with children, such as social workers, doctors and the police, and the government has said users cannot download the contents from ContactPoint.

That line was repeated in print, unchallenged by ‘Siobhan Chapman’ in Computerworld UK, who commits an unpardonable sin. Either this idiot is a paid liar for HMG, or she is computer illiterate, or completely immoral or as stupid as they come; whatever way you slice it, that she has written this article is deeply shameful and disgusting. That two magazines / websites that pretend to have expertise in IT can accept and reproduce a piece of writing like this that is clearly full of nonsense / propaganda makes them look bad and is absolutely astonishing.

Every schoolboy knows that it is IMPOSSIBLE to create a database system accessed by browsers that can prevent the users of the system from copying the entries. The fact that ContactPoint holds ‘minimal’ (more on that later) details makes it easier to copy entries, since they can all fit in a small space in the browser and can be copied with a single click of the mouse. And remember, we are talking about COPYING entries; to use the word ‘download’ is disingenuous. The point about the dangers of this database is that the entries can be copied, will always be copyable and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop copying, short of not having a database at all. It is very important that right now, some journalist puts up a bounty for a photograph of a ContactPoint entry to demonstrate that anyone can make a copy of a ContactPoint entry, and that those copies can be transmitted to anyone anywhere, and the idea that the entries are ‘not downloadable’ is purely farcical.

Now, lets get onto the insanity of Siobhan Chapman:

ContactPoint children’s database rolls out

Not so. It has not been ‘rolled out’ it is being piloted. This is important; it is easier to stop ContactPoint and the escape of all the data on the children living in Britain at this early stage. To imply that it is a fait accompli is to be on their side; the side of the paedophiles, child farmers and monsters.

System has been dogged with security faults

This is a magazine about IT. What on earth is a ‘security fault’? The people who write for this magazine should know that ContactPoint cannot be secured. They should know how databases work, how browsers work, how operating systems work, and they should have a good understanding of what data is. Someone who fits that bill would not use the phrase ‘security faults’ – it is meaningless.

A controversial database featuring the details of every child in England has become available to childcare professionals today.

Up to 800 social workers, head teachers and health officials will be able to use the new system, called ContactPoint, as it begins its national roll-out in the north west. Eventually, the system will be rolled out across the country.

This is underplaying the horror of ContactPoint. We know that over 300,000 ‘professionals’ will have access to it. To say that 800 people have access makes it sound like only a carefully selected few will have access to it, when it fact, a million people will have access. The implications of this have been discussed on BLOGDIAL, at length.

The system, which cost an estimated £224m has been dogged with data security fears and has been delayed twice due to faults.

Once again, this is a magazine for IT professionals; what were the ‘faults’ that you are writing about? And as for ‘dogged with data security fears’ have the people who created ContactPoint changed the nature of the universe and solved the problem of the security of the data on this database? If you are competent, you should know that it is impossible for them to secure ContactPoint. These are not ‘fears’ they are FACTS.

ContactPoint has also come under heavy criticism from civil libertarians. A report written by information policy experts at Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust described the database as “almost certainly illegal”, and warned that storing information leads to vulnerable people, such as young black men, single parents and children, being victimised.

If it is illegal, a legal challenge should be mounted immediately. I have £100 to contribute right now to the fighting fund.

In 2007, Deloitte and Touche said in a report that the project could never be totally secure.

And what is the opinion of Siobhan Chapman? How is it that CIO has no opinion on this dastardly database? How can a magazine like this not lambast ContactPoint? Do these idiots not have families of their own? It beggars belief. They are busy talking about greening their CIO activities as a part of corporate citizenship, but do not attack ContactPoint, which is pure evil and a clear and present danger. Absolutely pathetic.

In March, the launch was delayed after a fault sometimes exposed the information of vulnerable children, including victims of domestic violence and those in witness protection schemes.

This is nonsense. All the children on ContactPoint are vulnerable by virtue of being on the database. Since every entry on it can be copied, the system exposes all children’s information by default, no matter who they are. There are few things more annoying than a person without brains writing about something like this.

Think about it; if all the people who access ContactPoint are trusted, then how can it be a bad thing that the details of ‘vulnerable children’ are exposed to them? Surely these people, being good, can do no harm by seeing the details of ‘vulnerable children’?

The truth of this statement is that the details of the children of the rich and famous was found to be not hidden from the users of the system, meaning that curious ContactPoint users would be able to look up the details of people who have had their details ‘shielded’. If it is necessary for the rich and famous to be shielded because of harm from the supposedly trusted users of ContactPoint, how is it that the children of everyone else are safe from these trusted users? The whole thing doesn’t make any sense!

But Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary (pictured) said there has been “important and careful work” to build ContactPoint over the past four months.

Including lines from Ed Balls is…..balls.

No matter what this aparatchick says, ContactPoint is immoral and a danger to children. To repeat his words is give credence to the logic of a paedophile violator who would sell the children of Britain to a company for money.

“If we are to do our best to make sure children are protected and that no child slips through the net, then it’s crucial the right agencies are involved at the right time and get even better at sharing information,” said Balls.

This is utter garbage. To protect children, just like the children of the rich and famous, ContactPoint must be dismantled. The children of the rich and famous are vulnerable by virtue of being on the database, that means that ALL children are vulnerable by default.

Also, all of the recent cases involving abuse, like the ‘Baby P’ case were known about by social workers in detail, and yet, in each case, the worst possible outcome was the result. This database will not prevent people from being hurt, will not stop criminals from committing crime and will do nothing but violate people on an unprecedented scale, and put children at risk.

“ContactPoint is vital for this because it will enable frontline professionals to see quickly and easily who else is in contact with a child.”

Once again, total drivel, and of course, unchallenged by Siobhan Chapman, who lets this monster get away with lying in an article under her name. Absolutely horrible collaboration with evil. There is no need whatsoever to put EVERY child in the country in a database because an extremely small number of children are at risk. The common sense thing to do would be to put only those children on a list of vulnerable children not every child by default. Even then, since the state has insane ideas about who and who is not at risk (gypsies being regularly targeted for abuse from the Local Authorities) you would regularly get children put onto ‘ContactPoint 2.0’ because Local Authorities are staffed by racists. ContactPoint is a bad idea, plain and simple.

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 “would make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services”.

And so what? Barnardo’s is not a part of government, and will not even have access to ContactPoint; who cares what they think? Martin Narey is an imbecile, clearly. Since when does the opinions of imbeciles justify the violation of millions of children? Once again, Siobhan fails to challenge this by asking the obvious question; HOW is ContactPoint going to, “make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services?”. He is bullshitting of course, as is Ed Balls, and you let them get away with it Siobhan. SHAME ON YOU.

ContactPoint, built by Capgemini, is described as an “online tool” that holds “minimal” identifying information of around 11 million under 18 year olds in England, including names, addresses, dates of birth, gender and contact details for parents or carers. Each child is also given a unique identifying number, as well as contact details for the child’s school, GP practices and any other practitioner services involved.

This is incredible. To describe the information as ‘minimal’ is an abuse of the English language. There is enough information on ContactPoint to UNIQUELY identify the parents and children of all families in Britain. There is nothing ‘minimal’ about that at all, in fact, it is quite the opposite. It is more than the Nazis had when the rounded up undesirables with the help of IBM. A tatooed number on your arm is ‘minimal information’ is it not? After all, its ‘just a number’. Of course, we cannot rely on the likes of Siobhan or the anonymous propaganda repeaters at the BBC to tell us this!

The database is only intended to be accessed by professionals working with children, such as social workers, doctors and the police, and the government has said users cannot download the contents from ContactPoint.

CIO

This article appears in two different magazines, with the same unchallenged garbage. The editors of both publications failed to stop this propaganda from hijacking their platforms. This is what we call a ‘lapse of standards’.

We can only hope that a legal challenge is forthcoming, or a Tory victory and the scrapping of this, the NIR, and ID Cards; preferably all of them, all at once. One thing is for sure; with ‘people’ like Siobhan Chapman and the inexcusably inept rags she writes in propping up the propaganda, the task of getting the fact out in the public is made that much harder. We expect nothing but evil from the BBC, so that is par for the course. Thanks you jackasses.

Anyone who boosted ContactPoint, who let propaganda for it pass by them unchallenged, who coded for it, argued for it, made excuses for it, allowed data to leave their office to enter it; everyone who helped make this happen is going to BURN IN HELL for what they have done. It is inexcusable, unforgivable and totally horrible. Any council worker who touches it, trains people for it or even makes a single telephone call where the number came from it, is also going straight to the lake of fire, where they will join the concentration camp runners, PW Botha and all the other villains of history.

ContactPoint is a particularly nasty thing because it uses children it farms children for money; there is no other way to describe it. The company that developed it, Capgemini, has become the greatest abuser of children in the history of the world, along with the government that commissioned it. They are making money out of children; they will have priced for the work they did based on the size of the database, i.e. the number of children it records; they were paid per child. This is a sin in every culture in the world. How these people can sleep at night is beyond me, and the irony is clearly lost on them that they are using children to make money and justifying it by saying that the act of using ALL the children in the UK to make money is going to stop the abuse of children.

You can’t make stuff like this up…. and these days, you don’t have to. That is the problem; every dystopian nightmare is trying to come true right before our eyes.

Finally, do not suffer under the illusion that just because they have put all the pieces in place that ContactPoint cannot be completely dismantled. It CAN be dismantled, and all the data erased. The DNA database climb-down is the most recent demonstration of what it looks like when HMG is forced to stop doing evil. Not only should all the data be erased, but it should be illegal for anyone in government to create a database of children that is accessible to people outside of a council. Capgemini can keep their fee. That money will condemn them forever.

Think about it; under what circumstances would a council need to keep a database of all children in its ward? The schoolmasters know how many places there are and who is applying for places, the doctors know who is on their (preferably paper) records and do not need to be served by a database run by the council or central government; for decades everyone has done without this ‘service’, so why should the privacy and dignity of families be violated in this way? The general census provides enough data for planning, so why do they need to do this? For ‘efficiency’? If that is the criteria, then why not take all children from their parents at birth and house them in a central Kibbutz, where efficiency is absolutely maximized? I’m sure that this idea appeals to the New Labour monsters, but most normal people would reject it outright.

Efficiency is not everything and certainly people should not be violated to provide the state with greater efficiency. Inefficient systems that protect people and their dignity are infinitely preferable to efficient systems that violate people. That is why a doctor’s office that runs on paper, even though it may be less efficient than a doctor’s office that runs on databases, is far preferable than the latter. Paper is private. Paper is decent. Paper protects the sacred oath of confidentiality that all doctors pledge. That it takes more time to organize the information of a patient in a ‘paper practice’ is NOTHING compared to the loss of confidentiality, and as we have seen with ContactPoint, there are unintended consequences to ‘modernization’, like the automated uploading of confidential patient records to the NHS Spine, the elimination of prescription privacy and everything else that flows from the availability of digital information.

Unintended consequences lead to what we call ‘feature creep’. We see that ContactPoint is going to be used to see who is and who is not ‘fully recorded’. The ‘minimal information’ that is supposed to re-assure everyone that ContactPoint is benign is actually extremely intrusive. For example, by keeping a list of what doctor you have, should there be a blank in the ‘GP’ field, (because your child has never needed to see a doctor for example) a Local Authority worker will immediately say that you are an abuser because your child does not appear to have a GP. And make no mistake, ContactPoint will allow the Local Authority to print a list of all children who have missing fields; that means children not registered with a GP, children who are not registered at a school, etc etc.

At the very least, the Local Authority will generate automated letters to all the parents from these records. That means that millions of letters generated from ContactPoint will be in the post, presumably with the child’s unique identifying number. As we saw before with the stolen child benefit DVDRs, the letters that were sent out to apologize to parents ended up being sent to wrong addresses, exposing the private information of families to strangers.

This is the sort of nonsense, and worse, that we can expect should ContactPoint be allowed to go live.

ContactPoint must be scrapped and the data permanently deleted. Nothing like this must ever be attempted again. There is no justification for it by any stretch of the imagination, an you should do everything in your power not to be touched by it. It is pure evil, a recipe for multiple disasters and for sure, a child is going to die as a result of this database.

Celente Calls for “Revolution” as the Only Solution

Kingston NY — Taxed to death, angry at government bailouts, outraged by Wall Street greed, and bitterly resentful of a system that rewards the undeserving rich, the American public is ready to revolt.

“The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution,” said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute. “But they are not enough. Much stronger and directed action is required. Our call for ‘Revolution’ will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.”

The Revolution Celente proposes is unique in concept and bold in execution. It is about a lot more than just “taxation without representation.”

“Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America,” said Celente. “We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system. Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds. These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative. Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

The country is restless, and ripe for radical reform. There is no doubt protests will proliferate and intensify. In response, the government will call out the troops and bring in the police. They will use the Patriot Act to silence, detain, harass, persecute and prosecute groups and individuals exercising their Constitutional rights.

But Celente’s Revolution need not degenerate into violence or open warfare.

“Intellectual Revolution”

“I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’. I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’ This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades. It’s about brain power – not brute force.”

For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up. Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.

What are America’s prime information sources? CNN, “The most trusted name in news”? Fox, “Fair and balanced”?

CNBC, “First in Business Worldwide”? The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”?

Who do the people listen to? A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions. Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats, pretending they’re the people’s voice.

Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.

TV tough guys, broadcast big mouths and Beltway blowhards have now been joined by featherweight comics throwing powder puff punches at sitting targets.

[…]

Yonkers Tribune

We like people who can predict the future; it means that they have all the facts to hand and are able to synthesize a very small number of highly probable futures that must result from those facts. It means they are more likely to know what they are talking about now, in the present, since they knew what they were talking about before. Those are the people who will reward your scarce attention.

What I imagine people like Celente are waiting for is the tipping point of popular outrage, after which they will be able to openly call for a physical rather than intellectual revolution.

Calling for a physical revolution too early is pointless; no one will stand up and you will be picked off. At the same time however, calling for feel good actions pushes the tipping point back, since it is the opposite of feeling good and secure that is the fuel for revolution. If the criminals manage to finish the job before everyone wakes up and the tipping point occurs, they win. The question is, do we have time to wait for a tipping point that might arrive too late?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

Imagine a country where this intellectual revolution had happened, and everyone from coast to coast knew the entire facts and was informed to the level that Celente is. Once that point is reached, clearly there has to be a second step, the ‘real revolution’ that puts a stop to the criminals once and for all.

The media and all the know nothing (as opposed to the know everything bloggers) clowns who work in it are never going to change sides (either because they are too thick or are deliberately keeping a lid on public outrage). That means every chance we have to ‘go viral’ with a message should be taken as an opportunity to organize a real action that ‘fixes the hole in the roof’. Anything that is just a protest, which is a feel good, ‘Yellow Ribbon Moment‘, or which will have no effect is not a good thing. It is in fact, quite the opposite.

Its like draft dodgers in the 70’s having a tea party to protest going to VietNam and then showing up obediently for basic training and shipping off to fight ‘Charlie’. No, what you do is BURN YOUR DRAFT CARD and then do not show up.

Imagine 10 million people all having a ‘tea party’ and then BURNING their 1040 forms. Imagine millions of people demanding that they be paid the full amount of their wages, without any withholding of any kind, or they all go on STRIKE. Those two actions when done in the tens of millions are not something that can be ignored; demonstrations, tea parties, rock concerts, petitions – all of those things can and will be ignored. That is why we keep saying that it is pointless to do them.

Without a doubt, there is an information war going on, and educating the great mass of television fed flesh is an ongoing task. It is the furnace in the steam ship that needs to be constantly stoked. It is not however, the end goal; the end goal is Liberty in Perpetuity, and education is a means to that end.

And as for protests causing the police to be called out, once again, protesting is pointless.

Lets try and imagine an optimal revolution.

Its a revolution where no one is killed, and there is no violence. It would look something like the fall of East Germany.

All that is required for this revolution to take place is for everyone to stop obeying. That means everyone, to a man, refusing to obey anything and everything to do with the state.

That would be a revolution, an amorphous, nebulous, static swarm of disobedience, which could not be countered, any more than a truncheon wielder can batter a cloud to sweep it away. Without the compliance of everyone, the state would simply cease to exist; the monsters who control it would scream and shout hysterically at first, but would very quickly want to associate with the static mass as they desperately try to reposition themselves for a role in the new disorder. Those creatures are very good at sensing the right time to jump ship – when its about to do down – they are after all ‘political animals’ (rats).

I heard the other night, a commenter saying that if we start to win, “these people (the rats) are not going to go quietly into the night…”. That’s probably true. They will make a huge noise, but just like the aparatchicks in East Germany who lost their status and jobs, they were defeated and they did lose power there is no reason why this cannot happen via an unprecedented campaign that reaches tens of millions of people at the end of their tether. Many millions of people are ripe for it, ready for it, and as things get worse, will prefer it to having to take up arms.

The means to make this happen are at the tips of our fingers. Every month a new tool is written that shortens the time to critical mass. There is no reason why a peaceful transition to… something resembling a free country, cannot be done. It would happen in a very small amount of time; it may coincide with this event:

The Fed’s plan to increase the money supply 15-fold

But the real story starts to unfold when you realize the Federal Reserve is now hell bent on multiplying the U.S. money supply by a whopping fifteen times in 2009! This excellent article explains how this number is derived: http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/…

Now think about this: If the Federal Reserve increases the U.S. money supply by a factor of fifteen, that means your dollars will be worth only 1/15th the value they represent right now. So a loaf of bread that costs a dollar right now could cost $15 when all this extra money ripples through the system. (Which will obviously take a couple of years, but 2009 will be the beginning of it.)

This is called “hyperinflation.” We’re talking about a loss of over 93% of the purchasing power of the dollar. That, my friends, is called a collapse of the currency.

And once it starts, the floodgates will be opened and the tsunami of investors and nations offloading dollars will be catastrophic and irreversible. By the time it’s all done, the dollar might end up losing 99.9% of its value, and you can use greenbacks to light a fire or wipe your back side, as they will be useless for anything else.

[…]

http://www.counterthink.com/025688.html

Unbelievable. It’s still hard to accept that the money really has already been wiped out, and that hyperinflation is already on its way like a mudslide coming to destroy everything in its path. It seems that either way, wether there is a revolution or not, the dollar is toast. People will either kill it trying to get out of it, or they will have their purchasing power wiped out by this 15-fold story high wave of dollars that are going to devastate everything in their path.

Anyone old enough to remember Pan Am knows what it is like to have to imagine life without something so huge, so integral to an industry, something so ‘too big to fail’, that its non existence seems an impossibility, and yet, Pan Am is no more, its just a memory…only its beautiful corporate identity remains. Pan Am also teaches us that nothing is too big to disappear from the face of the earth. No company, no system of money, including the dollar, no government (history should already have made THAT clear); literally nothing that exists is going to last forever, or even a few years if the conditions are right.

Once you accept that, the possibility of restored liberty does not seem like something in the far distance, but instead takes on the appearance of something within striking distance.

We at BLOGDIAL have blogged about this subject a few times before:

By David Coates, The Detroit News, via AP

In Detroit, three downtown businesses have created a local currency, or scrip, to keep dollars earned locally in the community.

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.
Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

“We wanted to make new options available,” says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. “It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace.”

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

By law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States, says Claudia Dickens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

“We print the real thing,” she says.

Yes, we know; THAT IS THE PROBLEM!

The IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Tom Ochsenschlager of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “It’s not a way to avoid income taxes, or we’d all be paying in Detroit dollars,” he says.

Pittsboro, N.C., is reviving the Plenty, a defunct local currency created in 2002. It is being printed in denominations of $1, $5, $20 and $50. A local bank will exchange $9 for $10 worth of Plenty.

“We’re a wiped-out small town in America,” says Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels, which accepts the Plenty. “This will strengthen the local economy. … The nice thing about the Plenty is that it can’t leave here.”

[…]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-05-scrip_N.htm

Now.

Imagine if all the dimwitted and destructive demonstrators got together to disseminate the ideas behind sound money and then print and promote their own money.

Wouldn’t that be effort better spent instead of smashing an RBS office? Or gathering impotently in the streets to be corralled like cows?

We have been over this again and again and again:

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.
Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

Join Amnesty
Visit and sign up online:
web.amnesty.org/pages/join-eng
Join Liberty
Visit and sign up online:
www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/join
Email Your MP
Demand to know what they are doing about the issues raised in the film:
www.writetothem.com
Join the Mass Lone Demos
Demonstrations take place 5pm to 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, forms [MS WORD] [PDF] must be handed in or sent by recorded delivery 1 week beforehand.
[…]

Joining Amnesty will not cause one law to be repealed, nor will it stop new bad legislation from being enacted.

Similarly, Joining liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

Emailing the very people who pass the laws that enslave you is just STUPID.

And joining demonstrations we know about, don’t we?

Telling the truth is not enough. Acting is not enough. Correct Action is the only thing that will change what you want changed.

But you know this!

If you want to fix a problem, DO SOMETHING TO FIX THE PROBLEM, DO NOT do something THAT WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM.

If your problem is a currency that is being inflated by a criminal government who is stealing your value to give it to their partners in crime, and you cannot change the government, CHANGE THE CURRENCY YOU USE AND ACCEPT, since THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Demonstrating against bailouts is like dancing to stop the damage to your car caused by hailstorms.

GET YOUR CAR UNDER COVER IF IT STARTS TO HAIL.

Demonstrating against taxation is like applauding to stop your drive from being blocked by snow in a blizzard.

IF YOUR DRIVE IS BLOCKED BY SNOW, GET A SHOVEL AND DIG YOURSELF OUT.

Demonstrating against a leaking roof is like waving a banner to stop being hungry.

IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, MAKE YOURSELF A SANDWICH.

It’s simple really, but to my constant amazement, even intelligent people persist in believing that demonstrations are a good thing. They are not, not because they are inherently bad, but BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WORK!

FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME

By Paul Craig Roberts

Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, is not unknown to Americans.

My last column noted the absurdity of Obama lumping the upper middle class in with the rich. The income distribution in the US is so skewed that the rich are found in the top one percent. The truly rich with the accoutrements associated with that class are in the top half of one percent.

Those points were lost on those Americans who regard anyone slightly better off than themselves as “rich.” A slightly bigger house in a better neighborhood, a BMW instead of a Toyota, and the ability to go on vacation without going into debt is all it takes to be rich in the minds of those whose eyes are green with envy.

This observation led me to the realization that freedom has been lost to envy.

Americans no longer know what freedom is. Historically, the definition of a free person is one who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves were not free, because they do not own all of their own labor.

An income tax is inconsistent with the historical definition of freedom. Today in America government has a claim on every person’s labor, just as feudal lords, the government of that time, had claims on the labor of serfs and nineteenth century plantation owners had on slaves.

Understanding that an income tax was serfdom, our Founding Fathers wrote the US Constitution in a way that prevented an income tax. This was altered in 1913 with a constitutional amendment that some claim was not properly carried out.

This first step in the enserfment of the American people was taken in envy. The rich were the targets of the income tax. Once in place, the income tax was extended by law and by inflation until ordinary people were being taxed at rates several times as high as the original top rate for the rich.

After almost 100 years of income tax, generations have been born into serfdom and accept the government’s claim on their labor as normal, even just. Some say they don’t mind paying taxes to help the poor. They should look to see what share goes to the poor and what share to war, armaments, and the bailout of the Treasury Secretary’s rich friends.

The problem with a tax on a person’s labor is that it subtracts from a person’s independence. Without independence, it is difficult to exercise constitutionally protected rights, such as free speech.

In former times, family farms and businesses provided a measure of independence for many Americans. Today, most work for wages and salaries. The only real avenue to independence is to save part of one’s earnings and acquire enough wealth upon which to live. For most Americans, the government’s claim on their labor makes this impossible.

This is even more the case when government fails in its regulatory responsibilities and allows banksters to join in the plunder of the hard-pressed citizens.

The inheritance tax, another product of envy, has also done much to destroy the independence of the citizenry. For example, family owned independent media, once a source of independent power that held government accountable, has been lost to corporate media chains in order that families could pay inheritance taxes.

The same people who complain of rule by giant corporations support the inheritance taxes that transformed the face of American business. A family owned business has community roots and loyalties. A corporation’s owners are spread across the country and abroad. Their interest is the share price. The consequence has been that many corporations no longer even have national loyalties.

A corporation’s existence is not threatened by inheritance taxes, but a family owned business is. An inheritance tax is a tax on assets accumulated from income that has already been taxed. To raise the cash to pay the inheritance tax, businesses have to be sold or taken public. Eventually, their ownership is divorced from the community.

In the past, great wealth accumulations found their way into endowments of private universities, museums and public libraries, institutions that also contributed to the independence of citizens from government control.

Today even private universities and tenured faculty have lost pieces of their independence. There are subjects that cannot be investigated and opinions that cannot be expressed. We can rationalize the inhibitions by saying that they are proper subjects for censorship. However, once the process of suppressing thought and speech begins, it spreads.

The Tax Foundation has calculated that tax freedom day arrives on May 29 this year if the federal government’s budget deficit is included, as it should be, in the tax burden. That means that Americans work 42 percent of the year for the government, a higher tax rate than was endured by medieval serfs and one approaching that of a nineteenth century slave.

In the nineteenth century, there were “underground railways” that slaves could use to escape to freedom. In our time, “underground railways” are known as “tax havens.” Just as slave owners sought to abolish “underground railways,” our owners today seek to outlaw “tax havens.”

Some Americans will reject these analogies. They can test the validity of the analogies by refusing the government’s claim on their labor. Perhaps the best evidence of American serfdom is that most Americans do not even have the ability to test the validity of the analogy, because the government takes its share in withholding tax before wages and salaries are paid to us serfs.

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090405_freedom.htm