By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Guest Writer

Nov 8, 2007, 01:00

The US dollar is still officially the world’s reserve currency, but it cannot purchase the services of Brazilian super model Gisele Bundchen. Gisele required the $30 million she earned during the first half of this year to be paid in euros.

Gisele is not alone in her forecast of the dollar’s fate. The First Post (UK) reports that Jim Rogers, a former partner of billionaire George Soros, is selling his home and all possessions in order to convert all his wealth into Chinese yuan.

Meanwhile, American economists continue to preach that offshoring is good for the US economy and that Bush’s war spending is keeping the economy going. The practitioners of supply and demand have yet to figure out that the dollar’s supply is sinking the dollar’s price and along with it American power.

The macho super patriots who support the Bush regime still haven’t caught on that US superpower status rests on the dollar being the reserve currency, not on a military unable to occupy Baghdad. If the dollar were not the world currency, the US would have to earn enough foreign currencies to pay for its 737 oversees bases, an impossibility considering America’s $800 billion trade deficit.

When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, foreigners will cease to finance the US trade and budget deficits, and the American Empire along with its wars will disappear overnight.

[…]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2616.shtml

And so, another BLOGDIAL, ‘Told you so’ post.

We TOLD YOU over and over again that the way to stop the war machine is not to demonstrate, but to shun the thing that fuels the war machine: bad money in this case, the dollar. Now that this is happening world wide, the great and the good are saying what we said, if the dollar dies, the war machine dies.

No amount of protesting, candlelit vigils or anything else like that solved the problem. Simply doing what you do every day and refusing to fund the war machine is enough of a tactic, in fact, it is the best tactic of all, because only the bad guys lose and everyone else wins.

For the record, no one that I know wanted this. We only wanted the war machine to die. If it could have been killed without dismantling america, that would have been preferable, but now, with Iran on their minds and in their cross hairs, it is clear that there is no other option.

For the n^th time, there is one country on the earth that can recover, even from this. And that country, is the USA. It now looks as if they actually have someone who can pull it off too.

Sadly, none of this will restore the lives of the millions of mass murdered peoples who were the victims of the war criminals.

The Homeland Security Department is trying to squash criticism of its slow development of an exit piece to the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program.

Robert Mocny, US-VISIT director, said yesterday the agency has decided a piece of the exit program will require airlines to collect biometric data of visitors leaving the country when they check in at the airport. Mocny said DHS will issue a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register by January 2008 detailing the program.

“We don’t have too many details yet,” Mocny said during a conference on identity management sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America in Washington. “The technology worked fine during the pilots, but we want to see what infrastructure is out there already.”

DHS has conducted an experimental biometric exit program at 14 major airports in the past three years.

DHS discontinued a pilot exit program May 6 based on radio frequency identification technology. DHS stopped requiring foreign nationals to use RFID-equipped US-VISIT kiosks to check out as they leave the country. Some described those kiosks as difficult to use, and the RFID tags used in the exit program proved to be unreliable.

Mocny said he would like to see airlines volunteer for the program, but many companies are against this concept, fearing it would delay check-in times.

He added that DHS’ bigger challenge will be creating an exit system for land ports.

“Our goal is to have an exit system for air and sea ports by December 2008,” Mocny said. “The exit system is important, but it was not the first thing we wanted to do. The entry system was more important.”

Despite these plans, lawmakers remain frustrated about DHS’ slow pace in developing the exit system.

Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology, said he would like to see DHS focus more on the program.

“We ask about US-VISIT every time secretary [Michael Chertoff] testifies because we are worried about visa overstays,” McCaul said. “We are still not satisfied with their response. I think it has been on the backburner because [the Secure Border Initiative]-Net has been their priority focus. I understand why, but I would like to see more focus on US-VISIT’s exit system.”

McCaul added that there is a lot of interest in Congress on secure identification cards. He pointed to a host of bills requiring technically advanced identifications such as H.R. 98, which calls for the Social Security Administration to produce cards with encrypted machine-readable electronic identification strips and an electronic eligibility database with citizenship and resident work status that employers could check potential employees against.

But he also warned that getting some of these bills passed may be tougher than before.

“The new Congress shifted toward more American Civil Liberties Union driven,” McCaul said. “It is not as much about security, but what the government is doing wrong in not protecting citizen’s privacy. It is a good debate to have, but in some areas such as the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act it is going the wrong way.”

McCaul said Mike McConnell, head of the Director of National Intelligence, said the government would have to go through the FISA court to get permission to capture 70 percent of all communication.

[…]

http://www.fcw.com/online/news/150554-1.html

Post tipping point; use the Google to find out what we have to say about this.

Vote Ron Paul.

There has been a request for Gardasil to be examined. The main question/accusations from the request being:

According to the numbers given above, they want to spend £100,000,000 to possibly prevent cervical cancer in 700 people each year.

That is the sole justification for this.

What this article doesn’t count out are the numbers of people who will certainly be permanently damaged by this vaccine:

‘We have concerns about the inadequacy of the safety trials that have been conducted on the HPV vaccine.
‘They have been tested on adult women meaning we do not know whether they are safe for boys and young girls.’

So, basically, we need to know whether Gardasil works, and if getting an injection of Gardasil is safe or not. Is there a chance of permanent injury? For this we need the original data of the peer-reviewed article published to support the claims of Gardasil effectiveness and safety. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a well-respected clinical based journal.

This may seem like a hard read for the lay person, but all we need focus on is this:

By comparing vaccine to placebo, we see no serious significant differences between the groups. Just having a jab gives ‘adverse reactions’. Here’s what Merck says on safety of Gardasil. I would guess most of the adverse reactions are due to the use of alum as an adjuvant. Not something to worry about particularly, and certainly not for inducing ‘permanent damage’.

According to the CDC, four fatalities occurred near the time of the patients’ Gardasil injections. One patient died three hours after receiving the Gardasil vaccination; blood clotting was listed as the cause of death.

I can find no reference for this, either in the quoted article, or in the google. This info cannot be trusted.

There are now 7 reported deaths. Here are a few excerpts from those reports.

19 year old female — Echocardiogram revealed very enlarged right ventricle & small left ventricle as well as large blood clots within both the right atrium & right ventricle.

15 year old female — Consult states had HPV vax at PCP on 3/2 & no other recent vaccines.

11 year old female — She experienced cardiac arrest, required lung bypass (ECMO) and “may not have expired.” It was also reported by the same nurse that the physician from the hospital said that “the death was due to an anaphylactic reaction to Gardasil.”

Unknown — Information has been received from a physician who attended a conference that mentioned two patients who were vaccinated with Gardasil. Subsequently the patients died.

I can’t find any original medical evidence for Gardasil-associated fatalities either on the wider web, or in PubMed. [search ‘gardasil’ and ‘fatal’ or ‘death’]. It would help if those with axes to grind would show us their grindstones.

However, this doesn’t mean Gardsil is a lovely safe thing. I highly recommend reading this very well-written article, also in NEJM. In summary, this article dissects the clinical trial data, and says what YOU SHOULD ALREADY KNOW; that the trial was devised and designed to maximise any potential benefits of Gardasil, that the measurements used are the most generous available while remaining acceptable to external reviewers, that the study groups do not match the likely patient groups. And so on. To summarize, Gardasil works to some extent, over a relatively short period (5 years protection from 3 jabs is pretty poor, immunologically speaking), but is not apparently dangerous in itself, depite the misgivings of a few unreferenced articles.

So, why make an HPV vaccine? Well, cervical cancer is worth preventing and it is kind of ‘proof of principle’ for other potential cancer vaccines. And prevention is better than cure in this case. But there are public health and parental choice concerns.

If you have access to a print library/doctor/medical school get a copy of the BMJ and read this article.

Seems like there are plenty of clinicians ready to air their scepticism at exactly why this drug is being pushed on such a large population, and with little or no patient choice.

The vaccine is undoubtedly set to be a blockbuster product for Merck. Twenty US states are considering bills that would make the immunisation a requirement for school attendance, which could net Merck billions of dollars

Gardasil now mandatory in Texas for your 10-12 year old daughters…

Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass state laws across the country mandating Gardasil for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

And what else did you expect? We’ve told you this scenario before, with chickenpox vaccine. A pretty low health risk, but a potential fortune for the drug company that gets in first and persuades YOUR government to LEGISLATE to MAKE YOU TAKE IT UP THE ARSE.

2007 is turning out to be a terrible year for the music industry. Or rather, a terrible year for the the music labels.The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies (meaning there is perfect competition and zero barriers to entry). Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero as more “competitors” (in this case, listeners who copy) enter the market. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.

P2P networks just exacerbate the problem (or opportunity) further, giving people a way to speed up the process of creating free copies almost to the point of being ridiculous. Today, a billion or so songs are downloaded monthly via BitTorrent, mostly illegally.

Eventually, unless governments are willing to take drastic measures to protect the industry (such as a mandatory music tax), economic theory will win out and the price of music will fall towards zero.

When the industry finally capitulates and realizes that they can no longer charge a meaningful amount of money for digital recorded music, a lot of good things can happen.

First, other revenue sources can and will be exploited, particularly live music, merchandise and limited edition physical copies of music. The signs are already there – the live music industry is booming this year, and Radiohead is releasing a special edition box set of their new album for £40.00 simultaneous to the release of their “free” digital album.

Second, artists and labels will stop thinking of digital music as a source of revenue and start thinking about it as a way to market their real products. Users will be encouraged (even paid, as radio stations are today) to download, listen to and share music. Passionate users who download music from the Internet and share it with others will become the most important customers, not targets for ridiculous lawsuits.

The price of music will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iTunes and Amazon can continue to charge something for quality of service. With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus. Or a poor quality copy. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as BitTorrent exists, or simple music search engines like Skreemr allow users to find and download virtually any song in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

Of course, we wrote about this and released our entire catalogue under the FMP in 1999, before there was a Creative Commons, Bittorrent or any of the cool ways that people use to share music.

The Conet Project is a perfect example proving what we did was correct, and how it can work for other people. It has been downloaded over 200,000 times from the Internet Archive alone (it is mirrored at Hyperreal where they do not keep any stats) so I would guess that the number is at least double that taking all the mirrors past and present into account, and all the private sharing that we encourage.

We have sold many copies of TCP and demand is still strong for it; opening your archive allows you to reach more people than ever, and those that value what you do will buy other products from you and license your work.

It has taken eight years for people to finally start to wake up to this, and even today, there are still buggy whippers who trott out the same rubbish arguments against freeing music railing against Prince for example, for giving away his new CD.

The above article is very good, and there is a howler in there:

With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus.

MP3s cannot contain viruses…heh.

but lets go further. The impact on music culture will be absolutely enormous. Everyone everywhere will be able to get any music they read about as they read about it or have it reccomended, and not only that, you can now get the entire catalogue of an artist in a single movement, so that you can study their body of work, become familiar with it and then use it to inform your own work.

This is a highly significant development. In the past, it was very difficult to do this both in terms of tracking down the physical sound carriers and then paying for them. This was especially true of classical music. People used to use cassettes to trade rare music, which once again, involved buying of cassettes, the manual copying of them and distributing them. All of these steps made the cassettes more valuable than the music on them, and because they were ‘bootlegs’ the psychology surrounding them bumped the price up because someone was taking a risk to bring this sound to you. I wont go into the generational loss of quality caused by making tape to tape copies.

Today however, none of this is a factor. Getting any music you like is a near frictionless process; the only barrier being the one time initial learning curve; understanding where the music lives and how to use the tools to get it. Once you have those in place, the only problems you encounter are that there is not enough time to listen to everything, finding people you can trust to introduce you to new music, and a place to store it all.

There are also some other effects that we have an interest in.

If the quality of people who make music is low, we might never again see a flourishing of amazing groups. If the quality of music makers is high, then access to everything that has been recorded will be used as a blacklist ensuring that we get something really new and interesting. If word of mouse works efficiently however, it will bring us whatever small number of great artists who are out there and they will instantly rise to the top of who is being downloaded / listened to; that is the other payoff of this new era – ‘the death of the underground’. No one will be stuck in the absurd ghettoes of the past, where artists were ‘underground’ thanks to the inefficiencies of the market, meaning, money, distribution and journalists. Money doesn’t count anymore, distribution is now frictionless, and music journalists are almost completely irrelevant, since anyone with an MP3 blog and good taste is as powerful as any journalist.

The pyramidal structure of music culture has been dismantled and it is now in the shape of a two dimensional network of nodes, each listener being a transmitter and receiver of the music itself and information about the music. With LastFM, the very act of listening to music turns you into a node that recommends and promotes music.

All of this is a good thing. Combined with the astonishing tools that are now available to everyone for free, if the people who make music are up the challenge, they can make whatever they want and find people to listen to them. And not only find people to listen to them, find all the people in the world who are capable of understanding what they are doing. This is a very important and significant step forwards.

The old evils of the huge record companies will die with them, but this does not mean that the ecosystem that surrounds music will completely die. The lawyers will always have a role to play. Music still belongs to the people who create it, and those laws need to be enforced. Licensing and the revenues from music need to be controlled and monitored – in the short term, people will still make a fortune from radio airplay for example.

What has happened is that an inefficiency and an evil have been removed from the music distribution equation, but more importantly, human beings will have better, more enriched lives thanks to freed music. We will inevitably, I believe, get more variety and richness from new artists, and certainly there is for all intents and purposes an infinite amount of old music to charm and thrill us.

We are also at the very beginning of a greater understanding in the general public of just what it takes to produce music. Radiohead fans are showing that they are not irresponsible; they understand that the group need money to live and they are paying for the music they are downloading – even though they can get it for a price of zero. This is highly significant, and demonstrates that people are not actually stupid, and will pay to get more music if that is what they need to do. This means Radiohead get all the advantages of free music AND the advantages of running a central place to download from. I have no doubt that other groups will follow Radiohead, and that still more groups will devise their own tweaked systems to nickel and dime their fans to keep everything running.

Finally, what happens next is that the people who came up with these ideas in the first instance and those that saw it coming and who put their money where their mouths are will get the credit that is due to them. The people who thought and who still think that freed music is ‘no good’ (“I worked very hard to make my music, I don’t just want it out there for anyone to get for nothing”) will of course, not be heard or hear-able by anyone, and they will totally disappear from culture.

These maps cost us £110m. We can’t give them away for free

Were Ordnance Survey to lose its sales income, the quality of its data would decline, says Scott Sinclair

The Guardian Technology section’s Free Our Data campaign believes that Ordnance Survey’s core mapping, along with other public-sector information, “should be made freely available to the knowledge economy” (Digital Norway sweeps away barriers to information sharing, September 27).

At the same time, any moves we make to widen access, such as launching a new website for people to share walking routes, are simply seen as not good enough. You quote an Ogle Earth blog attacking us for “entering a market niche that is serviced much better and for free by the private sector” (Government opens data channel as Ordnance Survey takes a walk, September 20).

It is no surprise that the spotlight in this campaign is often on us. Mapping is incredibly popular and has a whole range of uses. The ambulance that arrives at your front door in the middle of the night, the sat-nav that takes you to your remote holiday cottage, and the local-authority call centre that lets you report the location of an abandoned car all rely on Ordnance Survey.

But in repeatedly calling for our core information to be given away, the campaign ignores the fact that someone still has to collect supposedly “free” data, and that it needs to be supported by an appropriate infrastructure. Out-of-date or poor-quality data is useless.

It cost Ordnance Survey £110m to collect, maintain and supply our data last year, but we are not “paid for by taxes”, as the campaign often claims. Instead, we depend entirely on receipts from licensing and direct sales to customers for our income – we receive no tax funding at all.

If we are successful, we can cover our costs, encourage widespread licensing through partners, and stay focused on providing value for users. Under licence, there are many examples where our data is free at the point of use. This does not mean there is zero cost.

Many local-authority websites and free-to-air services from private-sector companies embed Ordnance Survey information. We offer an emergency mapping service that helped in the response to the summer flooding. More than 30,000 university students and staff download free mapping from us.

We make a free OS Explorer Map available for every Year 7 pupil in Britain. Around 4 million children have benefited from this, making it the biggest initiative of its kind in British schools. We also provide free access to GPS survey control data over the web – vital for utilities and the construction industry.

Underpinning all of these examples is accurate and up-to-date information, which requires investment. Experience from around the world, and even from our own history between the world wars, shows that underinvestment can lead to a severe deterioration in quality.

The key aim of the Free Our Data campaign is to force us to give everything away. We believe this would seriously threaten the quality of our information at a time when more people are relying on more of it in more ways than ever before.

Scott Sinclair is head of corporate communications at Ordnance Survey

corporatecommunications@ordnancesurvey.co.uk

Guardian

Looks like Scott Sinclair has Pronoun Problems^™

First of all, the facts:

Ordnance Survey (OS) is an executive agency of the United Kingdom government. It is the national mapping agency for Great Britain,[1] and one of the world’s largest producers of maps.

[…]

In recent years there have been a number of criticisms of Ordnance Survey. Most of these centre on the argument that OS possesses a virtual government monopoly on geographic data in the UK.[2] Although OS is a government agency it is required to act as a “trading fund” or commercial entity. This means that it is totally self funding from the commercial sale of its data whilst at the same time being the public supplier of geographical information.

The Guardian newspaper has a long-running “Free Our Data” campaign, calling for the raw data gathered by the OS (not to mention data gathered on its behalf by local authorities at public expense) to be made freely available for reuse by individuals and companies, as happens, for example, with such data in the USA,[3] although the campaign rarely makes any comparison between the quality of the OS data and the quality of the data available from these free sources.[citation needed]

On the 7 April 2006 the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) received a complaint from the data management company Intelligent Addressing[4]. Many, although not all, complaints were upheld by the OPSI, one of the conclusions being that OS “is offering licence terms which unnecessarily restrict competition”. Negotiations between OS and interested parties are ongoing with regard to the issues raised by the OPSI report, the OS being under no obligation to comply with the report’s recommendations.

[…]

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

Ordnance Survey is run by HMG. But the taxpayers do not pay for it. That is completely wrong. Either ORdnance Survey goes private and competes like everyone else, or it belongs to government and government pays for it, and the data is made available to anyone who wants it.

The ‘£110m’ Scott Sinclair is whining about is £10m more than HMG are going to spend on Gardasil every year, and orders of magnitude less than they are spending on the immoral illogical and murderous Iraq invasion. There is money for this essential service.

There is absolutely no reason why something as important as Ordnance Survey should not be totally financed by the public, and the public given free access to all the data.

If ‘These maps cost us £110m’ and we pay for them, then they will belong to US since WE will have paid for them.

You say, “any moves we make to widen access”.. YOU are an EMPLOYEE of the state, and that means that YOU WORK FOR THE TAXPAYER in ordinary circumstances. It is not for YOU to say what YOU will and will not withhold from YOUR EMPLOYER.

You say, “The key aim of the Free Our Data campaign is to force us to give everything away. We believe this would seriously threaten the quality of our information at a time when more people are relying on more of it in more ways than ever before.”

This is nonsense, and you have deliberately missed a step. Giving away the data will not “seriously threaten the quality of our information”, underinvestment is the cause of that, by your own words. If the investment stays the same and the data is given away, the quality remains high and the benefits to everyone go through the ceiling because there are no artificial barriers to getting the data.

Better luck next time.

Unfortunately, the position of OS is rather odd; it is a state run organization that is not funded by the state. Once that flaw is fixed, then they will not have a leg to stand on.

What this man should be doing, to be on the right side of history, is joining the campaign; the argument about no money causing the map quality to deteriorate is valid. What he should be saying is, “we would love to give it away, but until HMG funds us 100% we cannot cut off the licensing model, otherwise our data quality will suffer”. This is an entirely reasonable line of argument and approach. He would not look like a luddideish, buggy whip cracking data hoarder and maybe the campaign would actually be able to pull it off.

This article says that BOYS should be given the anti HPV vaccine Gardasil:

Boys should be vaccinated against the sexually-transmitted disease which causes cervical cancer, a leading specialist said yesterday.
While it is only a minor complaint in boys, the human papilloma virus can be passed on to unvaccinated partners.
Ministers have already announced that girls aged 12 will be given the jab against it in the hope of saving around 700 lives a year.
Now Dr Anne Szarewski of Cancer Research UK says 12 and 13-year-old boys should also receive the jab on the Health Service.

I’m not making this up.

Dr Szarewski told GP magazine that just vaccinating girls sends out ‘a bad public health message.

This is correct; its sends the message that you can have sex without any concerns if you have this vaccination. That is the message it sends, and it is a bad public health message on every level.

‘Not vaccinating boys will increase the risk that homosexual men will become infected.’

Homosexual men do not pas on HPV to women. This vaccine was developed (so they calim) to prevent Cervical cancer. Homosexual men have nothing to do with the equation.

This is from The Daily Mail.

Now, lets THINK about this.

According to the numbers given above, they want to spend £100,000,000 to possibly prevent cervical cancer in 700 people each year.

That is the sole justification for this.

What this article doesn’t count out are the numbers of people who will certainly be permanently damaged by this vaccine:

Jackie Fletcher of the antivaccination campaign group JABS said: ‘It would make far more sense to start offering the cervical cancer smear test to women of a lower age than introducing a new vaccine to the cocktail they already receive.
‘We have concerns about the inadequacy of the safety trials that have been conducted on the HPV vaccine.
‘They have been tested on adult women meaning we do not know whether they are safe for boys and young girls.’

If it is to be given to 100 000 000 / 300 = 333 333.333 and ten percent of these are damaged what this means is that THREE THOUSAND girls will be damaged to POTENTIALLY ‘save 700 lives’:

According to the CDC, four fatalities occurred near the time of the patients’ Gardasil injections. One patient died three hours after receiving the Gardasil vaccination; blood clotting was listed as the cause of death.

A 12-year-old was co-vaccinated with Gardasil and a vaccine targeting Hepatitis A on March 1, 2007, and died six days later.

[…]

http://media.www.loyolaphoenix.com/

And then:

This article is to all you sheeple who have daughters and who believe the lie of better health through chemistry need to read this. Here is an update of the injuries this vaccine is causing.

When I wrote my Medical Alert article July 22, 2007, there were 2207 reported cases of adverse effects from the “wonder vaccine” Gardasil. Today, September 19, 2007, the reported cases are now at 3137. That is am increase of 930 young girls that have had an adverse reaction to the vaccine. So in a little less than 2 months we have had almost 1000 more girls affected.

I think it is safe to say that the number should rise to 940 by the time the two months are over. With that in mind I am going to do some calculations for you.

This would mean that approximately 465 girls are affected each month.

465 girls X 12 months would equal 5,580 young girls will have been hurt or disabled by this vaccine in one year.

There are now 7 reported deaths. Here are a few excerpts from those reports.

19 year old female — Echocardiogram revealed very enlarged right ventricle & small left ventricle as well as large blood clots within both the right atrium & right ventricle.

15 year old female — Consult states had HPV vax at PCP on 3/2 & no other recent vaccines.

11 year old female — She experienced cardiac arrest, required lung bypass (ECMO) and “may not have expired.” It was also reported by the same nurse that the physician from the hospital said that “the death was due to an anaphylactic reaction to Gardasil.”

Unknown — Information has been received from a physician who attended a conference that mentioned two patients who were vaccinated with Gardasil. Subsequently the patients died.

All this sounds so reassuring that the vaccine is safe. NOT

44 were considered life threatening an increase of 13 in two months

1921 were admitted to the emergency room an increase of 536 in two months.

581 at the time of the report had not recovered an increase of 130 in two months.

64 are disabled at the time of the report an increase of 13 newly disabled young people in two months.

The adverse effects of this vaccine were so severe that 94 girls were admitted to the hospital.

One thing you need to remember is that these reports are only for the United States. This vaccine is being administered to girls in many countries around the globe. So, I feel that these numbers could be increased by 3–4 times. That is staggering.

[…]

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/janak/070919

Astonishing.

According to this government document the total number of deaths in the uk for 2005 was 511,071

Deaths from MRSA in 2005 are documented here and were over 2000. It must be pointed out that this number is “the number of death certificates specifying MRSA” in other words there are certainly people in the system who are dying of MRSA complications and this is not being put in the record. You know why.

This £100,000,000 would be FAR better spent cleaning up the filthy hospitals rather than trying to save the small number of lives that MIGHT be saved by this hugely expensive vaccine, from a disease that is acquired by promiscuity and not accident. That is not a judgment on promiscuity obviously, just a statement of fact.

Imagine if they spent £300 on cleaning for each NHS hospital patient each year. Or even £150. MRSA would be wiped out.

The answer is simple: Merck should be given the cleaning contracts for the NHS!

Merck could charge the same money that it would be receiving for Gardasil and the absurd Varivax chickenpox vaccine, and be guaranteed a long term and huge revenue stream without endangering the health of the human cattle that the British Public have become.

As a brilliant immunologist said on this very blog, the chickenpox vaccine is a pure money-making exercise and nothing more, and the vaccine doesn’t even provide life long immunity like REAL chickenpox does.

No doubt we will shortly have a full rundown on Gardasil. In fact…I demand it!

Finally, the graphic above says 1000 women a year are killed by cervical cancer, and Gardisil might save 700.

What about the other 300?

New laws going into effect today in the United Kingdom make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

After the ‘perpetrator’ comes out of gaol, does the ciphertext magically decrypt by itself?

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.

We know that these laws written specifically for ‘terrorism’ are routinely used for everything OTHER than that, like shutting up 82 year old hecklers.

The law can only be applied to data residing in the UK, hosted on UK servers, or stored on devices located within the UK. The law does not authorize the UK government to intercept encrypted materials in transit on the Internet via the UK and to attempt to have them decrypted under the auspices of the jail time penalty.

So, if you run an IMAP account with the servers in another country, there is nothing they can do to force you to decrypt your email. Similarly, if you have a .Mac account and keep all the files encrypted, HMG cannot compel you to decrypt those files, even though they appear as a mountable drive on your laptop or desktop.

It is completely absurd on its face.

The keys to the (United) Kingdom

The law has been criticized for the power its gives investigators, which is seen as dangerously broad. Authorities tracking the movement of terrorist funds could demand the encryption keys used by a financial institution, for instance, thereby laying bare that bank’s files on everything from financial transactions to user data.

Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton said in May of 2006 that such laws would only encourage businesses to house their cryptography operations out of the reach of UK investigators, potentially harming the country’s economy. “The controversy here [lies in] seizing keys, not in forcing people to decrypt. The power to seize encryption keys is spooking big business,” Clayton said.

“The notion that international bankers would be wary of bringing master keys into UK if they could be seized as part of legitimate police operations, or by a corrupt chief constable, has quite a lot of traction,” he added. “With the appropriate paperwork, keys can be seized. If you’re an international banker you’ll plonk your headquarters in Zurich.”

Not only will they relocate to Zurich, but they will run all their corporate email from there. Essentially, all this data will ‘go dark’. HMG will have to enact laws saying that any banking that happens here must be done on servers located here. That is clearly undoable.

The people who wrote this nonsense legislation are computer illiterate and clueless. They do not understand the world they are living in, and they do not have the sense to take advice from the people who do understand the complexities.

The law also allows authorities to compel individuals targeted in such investigation to keep silent about their role in decrypting data.

This is a page straight out of the PATRIOT act.

Though this will be handled on a case-by-case basis,

All crime is handled on a case by case basis. This is nonsense speak.

it’s another worrisome facet of a law that has been widely criticized for years. While RIPA was originally passed in 2000, the provisions detailing the handover of cryptographic keys and/or the force decryption of protected content has not been tapped by the UK Home Office—the division of the British government which oversees national security, the justice system, immigration, and the police forces of England and Wales. As we reported last year, the Home Office was slowly building its case to activate Part 3, Section 49.

here comes the bullshit:

The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals—all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.

Paedophiles, if they were locked up permanently when caught, would not be a problem. But I digress; sex criminals cannot be stopped by decrypting files. If they have enough evidence to suspect that someone is engaged in this unforgivable activity, like, credit card info (which is how they caught thousands of people recently) they do not need to decrypt files all they need to demonstrate is that the person bought access. These people are serial offenders; it is easy to catch them if the police are willing to do REAL police work. That means setting up honeypot sites, compromising the owners of sites that sell the images and then locking them up FOREVER and not just for three or four years.

Terrorists do not use encryption. That is a fact. They do not use Steganography, PGP, GPG or any of those tools. We have been over this a million times. This is about maintaining access to banking information in real time. It has nothing to do with any of the Cause célèbre that HMG is trotting out.

Yet the law, in a strange way, almost gives criminals an “out,” in that those caught potentially committing serious crimes may opt to refuse to decrypt incriminating data. A pedophile with a 2GB collection of encrypted kiddie porn may find it easier to do two years in the slammer than expose what he’s been up to.

[…]

http://arstechnica.com/

Which is what I said.

This law is not about porn. It is not about ‘terrorism’. Those are pretexts. RIPA is bad law that is being shoehorned onto the books, whose real purpose is financial surveillance.

Money sees laws like RIPA as damage and it routes around it…or more accurately, it runs away from it. People will move their money into jurisdictions that are business and privacy friendly. Britain will suffer until it comes to its senses, and it will come to its senses, just as France did with its absurd ban on 128 bit SSL encryption.

Before the measles vaccination, measles used to be considered like chicken pox is today, a nuisance, and nothing more. Why, just because we have a vaccination for it has it suddenly become worthy of HUGE FRONT PAGE HEADLINES? Will chicken pox get the same treatment when the drug peddlers come up with a vaccination against it? Smacks of hysteria and sheep shearing to me.

Irdial; Blogdialian Blarchive, July2nd 2002. http://www.irdial.com/blogger/archive/2004_09_05_blarchive.html#109455661950837288

You can find more preminiscences on Chickenpox vaccines, and our early discussions on their proposed by using the Blarchive search.

Their relevance is cranked up a notch today by this story, the thrust of which we will now deconstruct:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6990643.stm

Children may get chickenpox jab
The Department of Health is to consider a mass vaccination of children in England against chickenpox.
There are now 2 chickenpox vaccines, licenesed for use in the UK since 2002. But the market is tiny, as it costs 60-90 pounds sterling from a private clinic. Which means GSK and Sanofi are missing out on a few quid.
Experts have been drafted in to weigh up the benefits following a recommendation from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
http://www.advisorybodies.doh.gov.uk/jcvi/members.htm

This bit of the article makes it sound like the JCVI is acutely concerned about varicella infection rates and mortality. However, there is nothing on their site about a varicella vaccine report. The minutes of 18th October 2006 say “The JCVI had proposed that subgroups be set up to look at rotavirus vaccines and varicella zoster vaccines. This had not yet been possible they but would be set up shortly.”

From 2001: “Varicella Vaccine

The Committee discussed varicella (chickenpox) vaccine and its potential use in the UK. The Committee agreed that, as far as the vaccine’s use in the wider population was concerned, there was insufficient information on which to make any recommendations. However, the vaccine’s use in health care workers could be considered more immediately as data on its use in this group was available. The vaccine was not yet licensed for use in the UK. A sub-group would look at this further.”

And from 2002, when the vaccine was licensed:

“Effectiveness and cost effectiveness of varicella vaccination This paper suggested that the key factor in the effectiveness of any varicella immunisation programme is the impact on zoster. Based on the assumptions in the paper and the available evidence, the case for routine infant or pre-adolescent immunisation had not been made.

The Committee welcomed the paper. It was suggested that the data offered very much a minimum estimate of the burden of disease. However, based on the current data available the paper’s conclusions were reasonable.”

So what has changed their collective mind? According to the most recent study in the British Medical Journal, deaths from chickenpox are decreasing.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7337/609/a

In context, so as not to scare you with the word ‘deaths’ or an image like this:

Chickenpox can be fatal

it should be noted that deaths predominate among the very immunocompromised, and are often ‘varicella-associated’, which means you die from a secondary infection such as pneumonia while trying to fight off chickenpox or shingles.

Peanuts can be fatal.
Ballpoint pens can be fatal.
It’s all about context.

So then, in 2006;

“13. VARICELLA
The Committee recognised that varicella was an area of increasing importance with recent evidence that vaccine prevented shingles in the elderly. However this is a complex area because of the potential impact of chidhood infection on transmission dynamics at older ages. It was agreed that a sub-group should be setup in the near future to consider the issues.”

This advisory committee are not convinced, are they? But just a few months later and here we are, front page of BBQ News, and about to jab every kid in the land.

From The Telegraph we discover that the news is actually that,

“The Govenment’s advisors, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation have set up a sub-committee into chicken pox and will meet later this year or early next year for the first time.

It will investigate the impact of a vaccination programme for all or selected groups and the cost effectiveness of such a plan.
Advisers have previously rejected calls for chicken pox vaccination in the UK.”

Which is what was in the JCVI minutes from almost a year ago. So what does this lead us to conclude? That someone has fed this story to the press, to increase it’s profile. The Daily Mail will, no doubt, have horror stories about chickenpox spreading like a rash across it’s pages as you read this.

We have, of course, told you before of the major reason behind MMR and now varicella vaccination, and it is money. It is cheaper for the NHS to give you a jab than it is to send a doctor to see your sick child. This is the monetary justification of HMG.

It is essential that the shareholders of GlaxoSmithkline, Merck et al., who make these vaccines, recoup their R&D costs and make substantial profit. Their ideal target market is EVERY PERSON ALIVE. Trebles all round for them, and for the PR companies working on their behalf, if (no, WHEN) HMG adopts a policy of vaccination against chickenpox. The greed of these companies and their financial clout, allied with the corrupt thinking of HMG mean it is all but inevitable that you will be “offered” chickenpox vaccination very soon.

But is there a health-based reason for choosing to vaccinate? In short, no.

The chance of complications from chickenpox are insignificantly higher than the chances of complications from the vaccine.
The protection from natural infection is lifelong. Vaccine-mediated protection is estimated at 9 years. Or if you believe the optimists, 10-20 years.

Since a major reason behind the vaccine is to cut adult deaths (at 40-years plus, in the main) the vaccine is, useless.

So there we go.

Once again the public are being lined up to take a shot in the arm simply to fill the boots of a drug company, at the behest of the government. And they will do it in their droves!

But they can’t say they haven’t been warned.

[…]

From the lab of the scientist and Immunologist Dr. Alun Kirby, “the man who keeps BLOGDIAL honest”.

Interested in the facts behind the new twenty pound note? You need to listen to these two clips:

[…]

http://mises.org/money/2s5.asp

If someone asked you, “Do you know the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents?” would you respond with a “yes” or a “no”? For me, it’s an immediate “yes”, as I imagine it is for most people (or so I hope). However, George Vaccaro has found out the hard way that some people simply do not know the difference.

The story, if you haven’t heard it by now, is that George, who is from the U.S., was in Canada and he had called Verizon inquiring what the fee would be per kilobyte (KB) while he was abroad. Verizon quoted him “0.002 cents per KB.” So George uses 35,893 KB in Canada and goes about his life. Upon returning home, he finds that Verizon has charged him $71 for his KB usage in Canada-a fee that equals 0.002 dollars.

To keep things short, George calls Verizon and informs them of this mistake. While on the phone, they confirm several times that the charge is “.002 cents per KB.” However, no one at Verizon seems to be able to tell the difference between 0.002 cents and 0.002 dollars. In fact, George recorded and posted the conversation he had with Verizon. It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Why is it so frustrating? Because it should be very simple math. 0.002 dollars is equal to 0.2 cents, not 0.002 cents. Observe:

100 \times 0.002 = 0.2

See what I did there? I took 100 pennies (which is equal to 1 dollar) and multiplied it by 0.002. The result is moving the decimal place to the right two places, which gives me 0.2 cents. We can see right away that 0.2 cents-or 0.002 dollars-does not equal 0.002 cents.

The Verizon folks were simply taking 0.002 and multiplying it by 35,893, which returns 71.786-which they read to be 71 dollars and 79 cents. What they should have done is convert 0.002 cents to dollars, which would be 0.00002 dollars. If you take that number it multiply it by the KB usage you get what George should have been charged:

0.00002 \times 35893 = 0.71786

71 cents, not dollars (and Google agrees)!

This isn’t integral calculus or differential equations; it’s very basic middle (elementary?) school math. If a kid ever asks you “What will I ever use math for, anyway?” this story should give you an obvious response.

http://agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=5458

[…]

Now do you understand?

The information commissioner signalled a crackdown last night on companies that steal and sell sensitive details of people’s private lives after a prosecution exposed the growth in data theft.

This is certain to increase exponentially once State imposed registers are integrated with the proposed National Identity Register.

Richard Thomas, the official privacy watchdog, said he was investigating a number of organisations that have bought personal data such as details of bank accounts, tax returns and mortgage payments.

All this will become trivial when the NIR is implemented and people are coerced into using it to authorise financial transactions, (inter)national travel, access NHS records and the like.

He warned of raids and prosecutions after the conviction yesterday of a husband and wife who made £140,000 a year selling private financial information obtained by deception.

This is value is just for selling data nevermind its further misuse for fraud. Once the NIR is implemented this value will soar as inherently non-revokable biometric information on those who register will become available to those with the contacts/skills.

The Guardian has learned that two of the country’s leading law firms – Mishcon de Reya and Arnold & Porter – were linked to the couple’s scam. The firms deny any knowledge of illegal activity, but confirm they hired private detective agencies to find out information for their clients.

Showing that it will be easy to dupe those companies who legally pay for access to NIR information (in order that the project remains self financing). Once the foot is in the door this information can be used to leverage more and more information which will allow access to the correlated NHS, etc. databases.

The privacy watchdog suspects some big companies are exploiting the trade in personal data, which has been driven by the growth in computer databases and call centres operated by banks, utility companies and government departments.

Mr Thomas wants to widen his investigations to pursue those who buy personal data, as well as those who make a living selling it.

As you can see the activity of personal data theft/trading is directly linked to it being on the databases that are used by organisations ipso facto if you are not on a database your data cannot be stolen. If you do not register on the NIR and refuse to acknowledge it in your private transactions its cancer will not spread to private the databases you may consent to be on. (Incidentally the centralised biometric database should cause serious worries for certain institutions that already rely on privately held biometric authentication devices).

He will also campaign to persuade Lord Falconer, the constitutional affairs minister, to increase penalties. He wants jail terms for data thieves but is opposed by some newspapers, who say it would be a threat to free speech.

“These are serious offences, which are highly damaging to the individuals concerned. People’s personal details ought not to fall into the wrong hands,” Mr Thomas’s office said yesterday.

The wrong hands are anyone’s who would punish you into complying with an inherently damaging system.

A court heard how Sharon and Stephen Anderson had made a career out of bogus phone calls to penetrate the details of people’s bank accounts and tax returns all over the country.

This will be more serious with NIR and linked databases.

In what Mr Thomas has described as a thriving black market in personal information, the pair were hired as sub-contractors by three detective agencies, Carratu International, Fleet Investigations and Keypoint Services, all of which denied knowledge of the couple’s crimes committed on their behalf.

Guardian inquiries reveal that the ultimate clients in yesterday’s case included a Japanese air-conditioning firm, Daikin, and a US insurance company, CNA. Those firms too, say they were unaware illegal methods were being used.

Data theft is an international problem and whilst our government wuld wish otherwise it does not have the international jurisdiction to enforce the safety of its proposed NIR database

The victims of “blagging”, as such bogus calls are known, included David Hughes, former chairman of the collapsed football shirts empire Allsports, and Jon Sanders, a Manchester insurance broker. They were both said to be indignant that their privacy had been invaded.

In the fully-documented society no one will be safe, people such as those above will carry out business from abroad and most likely emigrate once the stupidity of NIR and it’s invasiveness into daily affairs is fully comprehended.

At Huntingdon magistrates court yesterday, where the Andersons pleaded guilty to breaching the Data Protection Acts and were ordered to pay £14,800 in fines and costs, their lawyer said their firm, based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, was purely devoted to commercial disputes. They denied ever acting for warring spouses or newspapers on what they said were “ethical” grounds.

But Phil Taylor, prosecuting for the information commissioner, said: “People have the right to feel their information is safe and secure”. He told the magistrates: “There is a real risk information can be used for sinister purposes.” Bogus callers could be used to extract personal information from databases on behalf of criminals, or to intimidate witnesses.

Quite, and with interlinked databases and non-essential demands for NIR authentication or other ways of gleaning biometric information (set up a night club and get fingerprinting?) it is likely most person’s could be gleaned remotely.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

America Freedom To Fascism

There are many great documentaries out there today. We are finally seeing the critical mass of both near zero cost distribution and  super cheap filming and editing equipment coming together in a runaway chain reactoin of information that is literally changing the world before our eyes.

Now all we need is the next element to go critical; the mass refusal of the population to engage with the global insanity that has gripped this world. A world-wide chain reaction of non cooperation with the nonsense, warmongering, waste and unrefined sleaze that makes all of our lives less pleasant than they should be.

Dear Dr. Waldron, All my life I was affected by the tragic end of Mr. Lumumba. My father could not explain why this very intelligent and lovely man who was the incarnation of our socio-political dreams and hopes was killed with the blessing of the USA president of the time, UN general secretary and the local leaders of the time, My question is why Lumumba was so hated? Why nobody could hear him and understand him objectively? Why king Baudouin who was so intelligent and religious could not take time to discuss with Lumumba to know him better and understand his vision for his home country? From South Africa to Algeria, Egypt to Ivory Coast, I heard similar stories of the best men who were killed to satisfy the international community.

Dear Rev. Doctor, I don’t think anyone in America had anything personal against Lumumba. They did listen to him and they understood very well what he had to say, and that is why Western economic interests killed him. Lumumba was killed by the European and American mining and banking interests because Lumumba was the only person who could hold the Congo together after Independence, and those economic interests wanted to break the Congo apart for their own profit. In order to justify killing Lumumba, they had to create the propaganda lie that he was a Communist. The assassination of Lumumba also suited the Russians who could not control Lumumba alive, but after his death could wrap their man Gizenga in his mantle. Lumumba was doomed. If the West hadn’t killed him, Russia would have, and Lumumba’s Congolese political rivals were equally determined to get rid of him so they could carve out their own little kingdoms within the Congo. This was not just Tshombe in Katanga, but do not forget that Kasa-Vuba originally called himself King Kasa in his election campaign, in which he promised to make his own ethnic group an independent entity. In the months before Independence, most of the Belgians in the Congo knew perfectly well that the Belgian Government, for the sake of the profits of Union Miniere de Haut Katanga and its other economic interests, was already engineering the conditions in which the Congo could not survive as a unified country. The Royal Family of Belgium were major stockholders in Union Miniere de Haut Katanga, and King Baudouin of the Belgians was just as profit motivated as the notorious King Leopold II was when he set up that company to exploit the mineral riches of the Congo. Ordinary born-Congolese Whites and those among the provincial administrators who were caring and honest, were outraged by what the government in Belgium was doing, not just to the African Congolese, but to the White Congolese. You can read more about this in the Luluabourg excerpt from my book THE SECRET IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS; The Sabotaged Independence of the Belgian Congo, which is on this Web site There is a saying in English, that to understand something you “Follow the Money”. Therefore, don’t look for answers to what happened to the Congo in political ethics, or animosities, or misunderstandings of what Lumumba was saying and wanted to do. Look for the answers in who was planning to profit. The people who were behind the chaos and the murder of Lumumba then looted the Congo of all its resources both through taking them directly and through loans to Mabutu at crippling interest rates to have European companies the lenders designated build (or in many cases not actually build) unneeded huge projects while letting the basic infrastructure crumble, impoverishing the country and depriving the people of the necessities of life to service the debts. The people of the Congo need peace, good government, and a viable infrastructure, and I do not know how any of these can be attained in the present conditions of corruption, chaos, war and poverty. A BOOK I RECOMMEND TO SERIOUS SCHOLARS: THE CONGO CABLES THE COLD WAR IN AFRICA–FROM EISENHOWER TO KENNEDY Author: KALB, MADELEINE G MACMILLAN, 1982, These are the actual cables back and forth between Washington, the Congo and the UN.

Source: D’Lynn Waldron

In a sharp escalation of their crackdown on Internet gambling, United States prosecutors said yesterday that they were pressing charges against the chief executive of BetOnSports, a prominent Internet gambling company that is publicly traded in Britain, and against several other current and former company officers.

Federal authorities arrested the chief executive, David Carruthers, late Sunday as he was on layover at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on his way from Britain to Costa Rica. In a hearing yesterday in Federal District Court in Fort Worth, he was charged with racketeering conspiracy for participating in an illegal gambling enterprise.

Also at the hearing, the court granted the government’s request for a temporary restraining order preventing BetOnSports from accepting wagers from customers in the United States and requiring it to return money held in the accounts of American customers.

In addition to Mr. Carruthers, the government filed charges against 10 other people involved with BetOnSports and with three Florida marketing companies that prosecutors say were involved in promoting illegal gambling.

The charges, particularly those against Mr. Carruthers, who runs a company that has been a symbol of the investment potential of offshore casinos, raise complex legal and political questions. And they are the most direct attack in several years on offshore Internet casinos, setting up a showdown with an industry that has grown increasingly brazen in promoting online wagering in the United States.

The gambling sites allow people to place bets on sporting events and play casino games like blackjack from their computers. The companies keep their computer servers in places like the Isle of Man, Antigua and Costa Rica, where BetOnSports has its operating headquarters. […]

Prosecutors assert that under the Federal Wire Act of 1961, the providers and promoters of Internet sports books and casinos are participants in a criminal enterprise.

The fact that these operations are legal in their home jurisdictions “does not entitle them to do business in the United States,” said Catherine L. Hanaway, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, which brought the indictment. The charges announced yesterday indicate that “their efforts to avoid U.S. law enforcement will be challenged and brought to justice whenever possible.”

In addition to Mr. Carruthers, prosecutors brought charges against Peter Wilson, BetOnSports’s media director; Gary Kaplan, the company’s founder; and several of Mr. Kaplan’s relatives, whom the indictment alleges were involved in the business. The indictment was returned June 1 but was sealed until yesterday. […]

The indictment seeks to have the accused forfeit $4.5 billion in holdings. […]

Ms. Hanaway, the United States attorney in Missouri, said the arrest happened during this visit because “it’s when we knew he was coming.” Asked whether it presented a challenge to prosecutors that Mr. Carruthers is not an American citizen, Ms. Hanaway said, “Thus far, no.” […]

Sue Schneider, publisher of Interactive Gaming News, an online magazine focusing on the Internet casino industry, said the charges would have at least one major chilling effect on the industry’s officers. “I imagine the number of executives coming through the U.S. on connecting flights will come to a screeching halt,” she said. […]

New York Times

My emphasis.

Firstly and OT, they probably knew he was passing through the US because the airlines are giving people’s itinearys to the feds on a regular basis.

Secondly, this is all wrong. BetOnSports is a 100% legal operation. It is not incorporated in the US, does not have any servers in the US and is in no way a US legal entity. Its owner is not a US person. It is however, on the internet, and las time I checked, the US does not own the internet, so why they think they can arrest the owner of this business is arrogance beyond comprehension.

If someone in Spokane wants to connect to BetOnSports with their browser, that is THEIR business, and it is not correct that the US government should arrest people from other countries who are going about their lawful business. If they want to stop internet gambling, then they should do what China does and block sites. Then of course, they would face a Supreme Court challenge, and they dont want that, so they take the easy route of arresting an innocent person. Shameful behaviour.

If the tables were turned, all americans would be OUTRAGED if one of their citizens was arressted while ‘on layover’ through Germany because he published texts in the USA that are illegal in Germany.

This situation is no different. Jurisdiction is a real and necessary thing, so that people in different places with different moral standards can live in peace. america is violating this rule by arresting people who are not breaking the laws in their own countries. All business men, if they have any brains at all are avoiding the US like a plague.

We can add this example to the one of the NatWest Three who have just been extradited without any basis at all, for crimes committed in the UK that have nothing to do with the US.

UPDATE

Read the PDF of the actual indictment, which says that they took over ONE BILLION dollars in bets, and that they BetOnSports must forfeit 4.5 BILLION dollars!

Now, what on EARTH was Carruthers doing on a commercial airline flight if they have as much money as this indictment alleges? Anyone with that much turnover flies private aviation by default.

I smell some inflated figures!

Some of the UK’s most eminent doctors have mounted a direct challenge to the integration of complementary medicine into the NHS, on the day that Prince Charles urges the World Health Assembly in Geneva to back the cause of alternative and complementary medicines alongside scientifically-proven treatments.

Thirteen senior doctors have written to every hospital and primary care trust in the UK urging them not to suggest anything but evidence-based medicine to their patients.

There has been growing concern among some in medical and scientific circles about the increasing referral by GPs to complementary medicine practitioners. Some GPs use therapies such as acupuncture and homeopathy on their patients; others are increasingly willing to send them to complementary therapists in cases where they cannot themselves provide treatment.

Signatories to the letter include Sir James Black, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988, Sir Keith Peters, president of the Academy of Medical Science, and, according to the Times, six fellows of the Royal Society. Yesterday a spokesman for the Royal Society said that it had not organised the letter, but acknowledged that the society took a sceptical view. “As far as the society is concerned, it has always said that alternative medicine needs to be assessed on the same sort of criteria as conventional medicine – but we have not expressed a view about its role within the NHS,” said Bob Ward.

The letter was organised by Michael Baum, a cancer specialist who is emeritus professor of surgery at University College London. Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, is another signatory.

The doctors urge primary care trusts not to spend money on unproven therapies at a time when the NHS is short of cash. It criticises two recent initiatives of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Medicine – a patient guide to complementary medicine, for which it was given government funds – and last year’s Smallwood report, which purported to find that complementary medicine on the NHS was cost-effective. […]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1781148,00.html

Look carefully at the authors and signatories of this letter:  ’emeritus professor’, ‘Nobel Prize winner’, ‘president of the Academy of Medical Science’, ‘fellows of the Royal Society’…’the UK’s most eminent doctors’.

All of these men are interested in only one thing; thier own positions of power and social standing. They say that they want to save the NHS money. If that were the case, they would not care how the patient was treated, as long as she was treated and no longer a financial burden on the system.

The fact of the matter is that these ‘doctors’ are not in the slightest bit interested in the health of the patient; they are only interested in the primacy of thier philosophy. Nowhere is there any mention that harm can come to a patient from getting accupuncture treatment (for example) and of course, those true, patient centered scientists and medical practitioners know for a fact that accupuncture is so powerful that it can be used in the place of anesthesia for surgery.

Many of these people are not only morally bankrupt but they are completely corrupt, owning shares in pharmaceutical companies, whose products if abandoned in favour of ‘alternative’ medicine, would cause financial loss to these very same venal drug peddlers. They therefore have a double cause to be against the NHS adopting patient centered medicine; not only will people ignore their built up staus, but they will face financial ruin also.

Thankfully those health workers on the front line, dealing with the scarcity of resources both physical and financial will use anything to get the job done, not only for those reasons, but because they are in constant contact with human sufffering, are actually interested in alleviating that suffering, rather than being concerned about the method of relief above all else.

HCM CITY — After one infant died and five others were admitted to hopsital in critical condition this week allegedly related to vaccinations, the Ministry of Health pulled GlaxoSmithKline’s MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) shots pending further investigation.

The Preventive Medicine Department announcement to health departments nationwide on Thursday said that to ensure public safety, Glaxo’s MMR vaccine is suspended from the national vaccination programme until the Ministry of Health announces otherwise.

On Wednesday morning, a 13 month-old baby boy in District 5 was admitted to Children’s Hospital No 1’s intensive care unit in critical condition after vaccination with the MMR, called Priorix.

The boy was admitted with a 40 degree Celsius fever, difficulty breathing, and a bruise in the shot area. Even though doctors administered emergency treatment, the baby boy died that same evening.

Five other babies aged from 13 to 17 months also from District 5 were admitted to the same hospital with similar symptoms along with convulsion, shock and respiratory problems.

All of these babies had received the MMR shots from stocks at local ward health care clinics administered by District 5’s Preventive Medicine Centre’s team.

Le Truong, director of District 5’s Preventive Medicine Centre said that of the 109 Priorix shots his centre bought, 76 have been administered at the clinics and schools in the district.

Truong also said that transportation and storage methods at his centre and the clinics were all carried out according to required protocols.

HCM City’s Department of Health Director Nguyen The Dung said that this was the first time such incidents had occurred during the vaccination programme.

Dung requested the assistance of the HCM City Pasteur Institute and the Departments of Preventive Medicine and HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control to help with the investigation.

On Thursday, GlaxoSmithKline Viet Nam representative, Nguyen Thi Tuong Vi, said that the MMR vaccines imported to Viet Nam were produced in Belgium.

The shots administered to the infants came from an 11,000-shot Priorix case lot imported to Viet Nam last November, with an expiration date of December 2008. Of these shots, 5,000 have been administered while the remaining 6,000 shots are still in Zuellig Pharma Viet Nam Company’s stock.

Vi also said that two vaccine specialists from GlaxoSmithKline in Belgium have arrived in HCM City to work with the Vietnamese authorities in the investigation.

To date, 145 million Priorix vaccine shots have been given to children in 90 countries for over 10 years, without such incidents being reported. — VNS […]

http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=01HEA130506 

ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTY FIVE MILLION

I was actually looking for today’s article about “Pentamortrix” – the 5-in-1 jab that is the latest evil foisted on stupid parents and their perfectly innocent children.

Okay as i mentioned earlier it is perfectly feasible to keep personal taxation at the local level, this would allow a more locally accountable spending of tax revenue etc, etc.
Now what if we increased that decentralisation further and said that individuals could offset direct contributions to local services against their tax. To keep things simple we don’t do this for basic rate tax payers. But for other tax bands you could allow a third-to-a-half of the tax burden to directly fund local services. To prevent fraudulent charities springing up this would be from a list audited (but not prescribed) by local government.

Why bother? Because such an approach could engender a philanthropic mindset amongst the majority of the population, people would be able to determine how their taxes are spent i.e. tax spending becomes more democratic. Service providers will become directly accountable to tax payers who will can legitimately demand to see how their tax money is used – if it is spent well the services are likely to get similar contributions the next year if not the money will likely go elsewhere.
Once you get people into a philanthropic mindset when they have small amounts of money to allocate to services and if this is seen as an opportunity not a burden then I believe they will be more likely to pursue such philanthropy (bolstering services that they may have previously allocated money to) if they become more affluent.

And why would common philanthropy be advantageous – because dispersed spending increases the likelihood of money being spent productively on services, rather than on schemes which bolster the State and its networks of favoured contractors and consultancies.