This blog, which is on our blogroll, is a sober voice to pay attention to:

Identity cards might not become compulsory for all Britons, Gordon Brown has appeared to suggest [at his monthly press conference].

Anyone getting a passport from 2010 will have to get a card, and ministers had said they would be compulsory for all if Labour won the next election.

But, in an apparent softening of that line, Mr Brown described compulsion only as an “option” which is “open”.

The press conference:

Question:
Do you think that in the medium to long term, to be effective, ID cards will need to be compulsory for British citizens?
Prime Minister:
That is the option that we have left ourselves open to but we haven’t legislated for it. [yet!]

I think over the course of the next few months people will see that there is some wisdom in the argument that we have put forward for identity cards themselves. If you look at the information that we are asking people to give for their identity card it is not much more than is actually required for a passport, but the advantage people have from an identity card is that that information cannot be used without biometric identification. So that is why we are starting with the foreign nationals and that is why we will move further, linking if you like passport information to biometrics over the course of the next few years, but we leave open a parliamentary vote on the decision about compulsion.

Well, there are all sorts of lies/mistakes in that response, such as the information to be stored* (or see BBC), and not answering the question, but let’s consider the issue of compulsion because this seems to be the hot potato at the moment.

Take care not to get drawn into whether or not ID cards will themselves become compulsory, because I think that as well as a ’softening of the tone’ as Phil Booth of NO2ID put it (indeed, perhaps Gordon is softening us up), we are being enticed on a wild goose chase – they don’t want us to consider or argue about what we should be concerned about.

And this is the National Register, the privacy demolishing database behind the cards (based on something that doesn’t function 100% at present).

(Not only because of the argument below, and that it is overkill, infringes on civil liberties, and probably won’t work, but also because here opponents to ID cards can find some common ground with supporters of the principle of ID cards but not this particular proposal.)

Once you are enrolled on the National Register, you are the card, in a sense – in other words, on accessing a service, you could just use a fingerprint or PIN. The card is surplus to requirements, really, unless it’s useful in circumstances to be able to simply show one (the lowest level of security envisaged by the Government’s proposals).

That said, it seems to me at least that Labour’s plan has always been to make ID cards compulsory: the IPS website is unequivocal (”Yes, it will eventually be compulsory”); Home Secretaries are unequivocal (”When we announced the decision, in principle, in November 2003 to introduce ID cards, it was made clear then that there would be a two-stage scheme. It was stated that the second stage would be compulsory—that it would apply to every UK resident”); Home Office Ministers too (”It is the Government’s policy that ID cards should eventually be compulsory”).

In short, it has been a fairly consistent public position of Labour’s.
I say fairly consistent… well, try Googling for “id cards compulsory”, taken together the first two results are amusing: the first article says, “Compulsory ID cards ruled out”; the second, “Move towards compulsory ID cards”; the two stories being just four months apart.
But if you read a lot of articles about ID cards, you’ll see these changes over time, and I think you’ll come to the same conclusion as me: that the intention is to make sure we are all enrolled on the National Register.

And we will be enrolled when we renew or apply for ‘designated documents‘. A designated document might be a passport – it could also be a driving licence, any ‘document’ the Home Secretary designates (after being approved by Parliament).
The Explanatory Notes to the Act say,

If a document is designated, anyone applying for one will simultaneously need to apply to be entered in the Register, unless he is already so registered (see section 5(2)). He would also need to apply for an ID Card unless he already has one. There is, however, an exception to the requirement to apply for an ID Card where the designated document being applied for is a British passport and the application is made before 1^st January 2010 (see subsection 6(7)). …
Under subsection (7) an application for a designated document must include an application for an ID card in the manner prescribed unless the application is being made before 1^st January 2010, is for a British passport and the application contains a declaration that the individual does not wish to be issued with an ID Card. Individuals applying for British passport can therefore choose to ‘opt out’ of being issued with an ID Card but only up until 1^st January 2010. The ‘opt out’ does not apply to the Register. All individuals who apply for a passport will be required to be entered onto the Register once the passport becomes a designated document.

In short, once passports become ‘designated documents’, you can opt out of being issued with an ID card until 2010, but you will nevertheless be compelled to enrol on the National Register.

Update
Question Time (BBC):

Mr Cameron asked if it was still government policy that ID cards would be compulsory for all. He read out a quote from Chancellor Alistair Darling, who said: “I do not want my whole life to be reduced to a magnetic strip on a plastic card.”The Tory leader added: “Compared with being Chancellor in his government being a magnetic strip on a plastic card is probably a welcome relief.”

If it was the policy of the government to press for compulsion, why did the PM say in an interview with The Observer that they would not be compulsory for existing British citizens, Mr Cameron asked the prime minister.

Mr Brown said he had made those comments because there had to be a vote in Parliament before they became compulsory. He asked if Mr Cameron supported identity cards for foreign nationals, which are being introduced this year.

Mr Cameron said he was against compulsory ID cards and asked why Mr Brown could not give a straight answer to the question.

“It is the government’s policy to move ahead with this,” said Mr Brown, depending on a vote in Parliament and how the voluntary scheme works.

Gordon does want compulsory ID cards and National Register enrolment for British citizens. It is that simple.
He told the Observer that, “under our proposals there is no compulsion for existing British citizens”. As you can see, that is not the truth. (see also Guardian and Telegraph)

* note however that this has gone from being “no more” or “the same as” with passports, or simply and merely “core identity information”, to “not much more” than “actually” required for a passport, honest guv.

[…]

http://ukliberty.wordpress.com/

I would like a Word Press plugin that scanned our blogroll and perhaps a list of RSS feeds, put summaries into WPadmin so that BLOGDIAL authors can cherry pick from them to save us copying pasting clicking and indenting manually.

In fact, the ultimate tool to do this would be a bundle for Textmate, that imports a list of posts and summaries as a new document with a ‘fetch’ keyboard shortcut, thereafter allowing another keyboard shortcut to present you with a ‘context selector’ of all the recent posts (like when you hit command shift b to turn a document into a blog post) so that you can import the post and then work with it. No doubt there will be more clever ways to present these lists, but the fact remains that we spend alot of time manually cross posting for comment and analysis and its a PITA that could be eliminated.

Look at all the great comments over at this Guardian Blogs post:

Ron Paul places second in Nevada. Now that’s news. Bad news for Rudy Giuliani, whose Florida-or-bust strategy likely didn’t account for America’s mayor losing to the likes of Paul in Iowa and Michigan as well. Good news for Mitt Romney, who’s watching John McCain’s image recede in the rear-view mirror. For a few hours anyway. Interesting news for the rest of us. Does America really want a return to the gold standard? Concealed weapons to become commonplace? We know you Ron Paul supporters are online. Tell us what you think of the man’s coup earlier today

Hmph! Lets take a look:

Dr. Paul is the only uncorrupted and uncorruptible candidate running in the primaries for both parties.He is the only candidate that speaks humbly in terms of spending the people’s money and blood. Every other candidate speaks arrogantly of the “government’s” money, blood and resources.You trivialize the significance of his experience, his sincere empathy for this country’s history and that which is uniquely “American”, as well as the logic and breadth of his proposals by seizing upon a couple aspects of a very broad ideological discussion that has been going on for — well at least a hundred years.

Let me get this right. You would expect American voters to view as freakish a candidate who proposed the cessation of spending a trillion dollars a year of money borrowed from ideological adversaries simply in order to sponsor a military presence in 170 countries via 300 bases? To reject the only candidate that has proposed logical and sanely compassionate solutions for funding transitional economic and political solutions for a country on the verge of bankruptcy? You would expect American voters to reject a candidate that views the sacred function of government is to honor its founding covenants? You would expect American voters to view with contempt the only candidate that treats them as thinking citizens, capable of digesting the good, bad and ugly—and not subscribing to pandering, platitude and pervasive mendacity?And here is the real perversion of modern media. Here is the clarion call to citizens around the world that the almighty intellectually elite members of the vaunted fourth or fifth estate of “democracy” have subscribed to their own form of corruption.

This is a statesman whose campaign exists solely and thoroughly only through the contributions of individual donors. Did you hear that? Individual donors. Not Hillary’s and Obama’s $125 million of corporate donors, not the personal fortunes of one like Romney, not the insider connections of the apologist McCain—but regular folks.And we’re nationwide. And maybe some day in the future, we’ll go worldwide. And then maybe again the good and decent people in Europe, Russia, China, Asia, the Middle East will be able to understand what it means to be free. To be truly free.

Because what we are inheriting now is, in the end, slavery.

…

I wonder how the writers of our constitution would vote nowdays between the guy who:

1. wants money backed by something, or money backed by borrowing from the chinese?
2. Spreading our resourses so thin that we are effectively bankrupt and selling our industries to foreigners, or someone who wants to cut spending down to sustainable operations?
3. The guy that supports eroding personal liberties that they struggled so hard to achieve, or the guy that wants to keep big brother out of your business?

It is no contest….

Ron Paul would win if the founding fathers were voting. Our country has drifted so far off course that most have lost sight of what is important. Studying history might give us an insight as to how the great nations of the past slipped into nothingness, but I suspect that it is really to late to stop our slide. We probably have to crash and burn before hopefully something better will crawl out of the ashes. Even then there will probably be some kind of NY Banker to extend him credit.

…

“Does America really want a return to the gold standard? Concealed weapons to become commonplace?” Second question first. The vast majority of US states already have liberal handgun carry permit laws that allow law-abiding citizens to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon. (Actually, in one or two states you don’t even need a permit.) As each of these laws was proposed, anti-gun propagandists predicted that an orgy of “wild-west” shootouts would result. They have been proven wrong. If anything, the implementation of liberal handgun carry legislation has been associated with slightly reduced levels of violent crime. The real question is whether people should be rendered defenseless against violent criminals who (we may be sure) will get guns, legally or not. Apparently that’s what you folks in Britain want. Maybe that’s why your levels of violent crime have gone up so much in recent years. First question. The idea of a gold- or commodity-backed standard is to control government spending. Can’t just print more gold. Also, the value of the money would be relatively stable, which helps people plan for the future. Sounds like a good idea to me.

I think its pretty clear, from these and the rest of the comments that people in the usa with at least one firing brain cell, understand that guns are not the issue, and that they actually supress crime levels.

Of all the issues Ron Paul stands for, this article, naturally, picks the most controversial. He may be right on the Gold standard and weapons, or not, but these are side issues. It would be silly to concentrate on those in a time when democracy is being replaced by a belligerent, mad plutocracy that plunges Western societies and the world into chaos and war.

that last one was a very insightful comment, and I agree with it; typical of the prissy, limp wristed fear-mongering, scared of loud noises, Health & Safety Fascist, nanny-statist, control freak, scumbag, lying mouth, traitor loo paper Guardian to focus on things that are just not central to the Ron Paul platform, but which immediately pander to the worst ‘instincts’ of the modern British; FEAR.

But I digress. I posted this because reading those comments helped to wipe away my despair at meeting two very stupid americans, who can be further explained by this, which comes from another comment on that page:

One of the best quotes I found out there which sums it up a bit is from gambling911.com: “Sadly, it has become clear that without a fair shake in the media, it is really difficult to make a realistic run for the White House. On a very unscientific survey of anecdotal evidence (something that seems to be just a reliable as the polling methods these day that all but inagurated Obama in New Hampshire) I have found that roughly 90% of the population has never heard Ron Paul’s message. However, of those that hear the whole message, and not the twisted distorted filtered garbage the main stream media puts out, 80% become supporters….Over and over I hear that people like Ron Paul, would love to have him as President, they believe in his views, but alas, they don’t think he can win so they are willing to vote for someone they don’t like who will give them things they don’t want and take away their rights and liberties. It boggles the mind.” Check out Ron for yourself. Tell your friends. The best place to point them if they show ANY interest at all is here: http://thecaseforronpaul.com

Boggles indeed.

Sadly, I will not be able to report to you wether or not those nincompoops did what they said they would do, and wether or not they changed their minds. That they are able to and do is all that counts in the end.

Well, the hammer has finally struck.

Several months ago, I wrote a column in which I described the strategy the establishment would use to attack Ron Paul’s candidacy:

The first step is already in play. The establishment will start by simply ignoring him, by using its power in the mainstream media and their influence over campaign donors. If possible, they will find ways of excluding him from the debates.

This strategy is already failing. The internet and talk radio are outside the elite’s direct control and are being used effectively by Rep. Paul to “get the message out.” (And mark my words, sooner or later the oligarchy will come for the internet. This medium has been a royal pain in their derriere from day one.)

If this strategy fizzles, the establishment will move on to ridicule and fear mongering. Ron’s ideas will be grotesquely distorted in establishment media “hit pieces.” They’ll say he wants to permit heroin use in public schools, or that he wants old people to die in the streets without their social security checks, or that he wants to allow greedy industrialists to dump toxic waste into our drinking water.

The next arrow in the oligarchy’s quiver will be scandal – real or fabricated. Usually, this takes the form of pictures, billing records, etc. involving financial or sexual hi-jinks. For folks with the right motivation and abilities, it would be child’s play to implicate him in some sort of phony ethical, moral, or financial skullduggery (e.g., doctored pictures, sordid media accounts from “eyewitnesses,” etc.)

Since the first two tactics met with limited success, they predictably moved on to the third (scandal) in the form of a scurrilous article in The New Republic. In that screed, James Kirchick accused Rep. Paul of authoring a series of articles that insulted blacks, gays, and a myriad of other “groups.”

Ron responded quickly. In a Reason interview, he noted that he did not write the articles in question and did not edit them. To his credit, he did take moral responsibility for inadequately policing the content of a newsletter associated with his name.

What is particularly nauseating about this hit-piece is the host of glaring double standards it represents.

James Kirchick is a prototypical neocon and a supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy for president. Rudy has been, from the start, a staunch supporter of Bush’s “War on Terror,” including the invasion of Iraq.

That invasion was conceived long before 9/11 and has taken the lives of somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Iraqi civilians. Nearly four thousand American soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more are physically and/or emotionally crippled. Our nation’s reputation has been soiled, perhaps irrevocably.

As has been exhaustively documented, that war was launched in a fog of lies, propaganda, and fabricated intelligence.

So now, five years into the war, we are forced to endure an attack by these same neocons, who are accusing the one viable antiwar candidate of…what?

Even if Ron Paul wrote every word in every one of those articles, how does that compare to the death and destruction the neocons have rained down on Iraq? It takes unimaginable chutzpah, nearly pathological gall, to stand amid mounds of smoking corpses and accuse Rep. Paul of cultural insensitivity.

Has America become so politically egocentric, so utterly consumed with its own cultural fetishes, that we could tolerate watching those who perpetrated the Iraq atrocity (or who supported it) smear a decent man for inadequately supervising a newsletter?

If Ron Paul’s candidacy is now tainted for (allegedly) slandering people of color, what should be the political punishment for Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and others who supported mass death and dismemberment of a third world country?

Even though I anticipated this sort of thing, it is infuriating to watch it unfold before my eyes.

Are we to be spared nothing?

In a very fundamental way, there are really only two candidates running for president this year: Ron Paul, and all the others.

This is because there are really only two issues at stake.

The first issue is our out-of-control foreign policy. America is embroiled in shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We spend more on our military than nearly the rest of the world combined. We have troops stationed in over a hundred foreign countries. Manic interventionism has stretched our military to the breaking point, and has ruined our nation’s reputation.

The second issue is our impending economic implosion. Our government, which has shed the last vestiges of constitutional restraint, has made a myriad of promises that it cannot keep. Our outstanding obligations to fund social security, government health care programs, and everything else under the sun are rapidly bankrupting our nation. To maintain these Ponzi schemes, the Fed is debasing our currency and igniting an ugly bout of hyperinflation.

Our predicament is severe and profound. We must immediately begin to shed our overseas obligations and put our domestic house in order. Otherwise, we will find ourselves reenacting the collapse of the Soviet Union right here at home.

Ron Paul is the only candidate who is willing to address these issues. He is the only one who is willing to speak frankly with the American people about our predicament and the painful actions which must be taken to prevent a real catastrophe.

And rather than offering solutions, Obama, McCain, Clinton and Romney, (and the other political hacks running for president) are not even willing to talk honestly about the problems.

As I noted in the previous article, the reason for this is simple: The establishment benefits from the status quo and would be disempowered by Ron Paul’s proposed solutions.

Specifically, as I noted in that previous article, Ron Paul is running on three ideas:

1. The federal government must function within the strict guidelines of the Constitution.

2. America should deconstruct its empire, withdraw our troops from around the world and reestablish a foreign policy based on noninterventionism.

3. America should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, eliminate fiat currency and return to hard money.

This is not a political agenda. This is not a party platform. It is a revolution. The entire ruling oligarchy would be swept away if these ideas were ever implemented. Every sentence, every word, every jot and tittle of this agenda is unacceptable, repellent and hateful to America’s ruling elite.

So let us all be forewarned. If Ron Paul’s candidacy should rise to serious contention, that New Republic hit piece will be mild compared to whatever comes next.

The rulers of the universe will not go quietly.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe82.html

They might not go quietly, but they will go in the end, like the Roman Empire did, and hopefully in the manner that the Soviet Union ended…only much faster. After all, who has seventy years to wait before a totalitarian system collapses? The same will go for the European Union as the Soviet Union; people will spontaneously, Baudrillard Mass style, down tools and bring about the end through inertia; the inertia of The Mass.

Americans: They’re fucked up, they talk like fags and their shit’s retarded, to quote a prescient film.

On the other hand…

They are the only country that could produce a Ron Paul, and they are the only country where such a man had a actual chance to get elected to the highest office and turn the country around on a dime. That is what is literally needed in this case.

This is why everyone still has hope for America, that everyone still has hope that the greatest country of all cam somehow re-emerge from the utter darkness that has enveloped it.

Despair is useless, and in a situation where a candidate like Ron Paul exists and can win, it is insanely dangerous.

This year computer users will be more exposed to cybercriminals than ever before. It’s not just because online crime is so attractive to identity theft gangs but, ironically, because the computer security industry that is supposed to protect users has deteriorated – from one which shared everything about newly discovered weaknesses to what some within it now call a “protection racket”.

It may sound alarmist,

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/computersecurity

SNIP!

Yes, it IS alarmist, and yet another example of computer illiteracy at The Guardian.

The fact of the matter is that you can…anyone can… download and install Ubuntu and be free of this ‘problem’.

The fact of the matter is that writers like Sean Hargrave are a part of this ‘protection racket’ because they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge and spread the information that there are perfect alternatives to Winblows; i.e. Ubuntu, which Dell are now delivering on their machines pre-installed. By stopping people from dumping Windows, Hargrave is protecting the Windows monopoly and monoculture which is the source of all these problems, and many others.

There is no longer any excuse not to run Linux instead of Windows. It outperforms Windows in every way, and has everything you need that you find on Windows (office suite) but for FREE. Its user interface is now more sophisticated than Aero on Vista, and since you can buy it pre-installed, that problem is gone also.

The reason why The Guardian doesn’t like linux is because they are an old economy newspaper. They are against the free music, free publishing, and free software movements, and every time they have an article about anything to do with any of the aforementioned subjects, they always take the stand of ‘the man’.

The answer to this is not fear-mongering articles with pictures of devils menacing the lone Guardian believer in his C0₂ neutral hovel. The answer is ‘go open source’; then the secrecy that unscrupulous companies use to gain commercial advantage is erased and everyone benefits…unless you are in the pockets of the people who sell the crappy products that you are complaining about.

And then there is the ‘problem’ of having nothing to fearmonger about once Windows is dead. But then people like this always find something to try and scare everyone about.

I think we need a new category: ‘fear-mongering’.

By Bob Unruh

Homeschoolers need to be making plans to flee Germany en masse after a government document implied the advent of a coming crackdown that would target them, an advocate says.

The government letter is addressed to “School Administrations of State and Private Schools” and its subject line specifies “Custody withdrawal for violation of mandatory school attendance.”

“The [German] court determined that the parents’ refusal to send their children to either a state or a state approved private school is a misuse of parental custody rights, which violates the well-being of the child,” the letter, dated just a few weeks ago, said, “and which requires actions by the family court. …”

“We ask for acknowledgment and compliance,” the letter, signed by N. Hauf., director of school affairs, said.

WND has carried numerous reports of homeschooling families in Germany running afoul of that nation’s Nazi-era law banning homeschooling, and being fined or otherwise penalized. In recent days, however, the threats against homeschooling parents frequently have included loss of custody of their children, and several families already have fled.

The government letter was forwarded to the United States by a homeschooling advocate in Germany, who expressed his own personal fears for the safety of his family and contemplated leaving his home country himself.

“It is very likely that our family [will have] to leave the country this year. Maybe I have to bring my children and my wife to a place of safety within the next weeks or even days,” the advocate said in a personal message to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the world’s largest homeschool advocacy organization, which has been involved in a number of recent cases in Germany.

“The behavior of German authorities against families who homeschool goes against the very fiber of what free and democratic societies stand for – that governments exist to protect the rights of people not to take them away,” Mike Donnelly, a staff attorney for the HSLDA, said. “In Germany it appears that the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government do not care to protect the human right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children which includes the right to homeschool – a view shared by nearly all other western civilized countries.”

The government letter was from the State of Bavaria’s Ministry of Education and appeared to be directed to local school officials, essentially declaring an open season on homeschoolers in Germany.

It followed a recent Federal High Court decision, which now remains under appeal, that “schulverweigerung” – or those who “refuse” to give their children to public school authorities – actually are misusing their parental rights.

It calls for action against those people, and finishes with the phrase, translated into English, meaning, “To your attention.”

That, the German homeschool advocate said, is an encouragement for civil and criminal case authorities to act against such families.

“There was not yet an official reaction from our authorities, but the case of the Landahl family shows that they can act very quickly,” the advocate said. “So it seems to me the best to think about leaving Germany. The situation is horrible. Homeschoolers who are still here are fearful what happens next. Germany changes quickly into a brutal tyranny and dictatorship.”

Without help, he said, “All homeschool families must leave our country or even give up.”

The Landahl family recently reached England in its flight from Germany in the face of a court case assembled by the mayor of Altenschieg.

The government letter noted the federal court concluded “that the partial withdrawal of custody and the withdrawal of the parental right to determine the place where their children stay to be legitimate when the mandatory school attendance law is violated continuously.”

The letter advised local authorities, “to initiate appropriate action is generally the responsibility of Youth Administration (Child Protective Services). Long term violations of the mandatory school attendance law are to be reported by the schools to the Youth Administration …,” it said.

“The County Court Houses and the County-free cities have been informed by the government accordingly,” it said.

Government crackdowns, or pogroms, are not new in Germany. The most famous probably was Kristallnacht, perpetrated in Hitler’s buildup to World War II, when The Times of London concluded, “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings … which disgraced that country yesterday.”

In one night, thousands of businesses owned by Jews and synagogues were destroyed, and tens of thousands of people jailed.

Homeschoolers fear the letter is part of a mechanism that would trigger a nationwide roundup of such “lawbreakers.”

“We are seeing what may be a severe crackdown against homeschoolers in Germany,” Donnelly said. This document “appears to send the message to local school officials that it is ‘open season’ on homeschoolers in Germany.”

He said there has been an increase in the number of families fleeing persecution in Germany, and “even American citizens in Germany are also being told that they must enroll their children in the public schools or an approved private school or else face the same measures that German families face.”

He said what’s startling is the absolute unanimity of judges’ opinions in recent cases. “Such unanimity amongst judges in Germany is itself hard to understand. I can’t imagine such unanimity amongst judges in our own country or any other free democratic society –which I suppose points out some of the important differences and why we are having these problems in Germany and nowhere else,” Donnelly said.

Even before the 2007 court ruling and the recent letter, Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit, or Network for Freedom in Education, reported that German authorities were rigid in their interpretation of homeschooling bans, up to the point that they expressed plans to change the religious opinions of a family.

The group described a situation in which local police had picked up three children from one family and taken them physically to a public school.

WND reported when a German family wrote to object to such actions. “The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling,” said a government letter in response. “… You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. …In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.”

The European Human Rights Court earlier affirmed Germany’s homeschool ban.

That specific case addressed in the opinion involved Fritz and Marianna Konrad, who filed the complaint in 2003 and argued that Germany’s compulsory school attendance endangered their children’s religious upbringing and promotes teaching inconsistent with the family’s Christian faith.

The court said the Konrads belong to a “Christian community which is strongly attached to the Bible” and rejected public schooling because of the explicit sexual indoctrination programs that the courses there include.

The German court already had ruled that the parental “wish” to have their children grow up in a home without such influences “could not take priority over compulsory school attendance.” The decision also said the parents do not have an “exclusive” right to lead their children’s.

The family had appealed under the European Convention on Human Rights statement that: “No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”

But the court’s ruling said, instead, that schools represent society, and “it was in the children’s interest to become part of that society … The parents’ right to education did not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience.”

Government officials repeatedly have expressed a determination to stamp out “parallel societies” and that includes homeschooling. An American family of Baptist missionaries reports being threatened with deportation for homeschool, and a teenager, Melissa Busekros, eventually was returned to her family months after German authorities took her from her home and forcibly detained her in a psychiatric facility for being homeschooled.

“Even the United Nations has called on Germany to reform the way it treats homeschoolers.We appeal to the German people and German leadership to do what is right and to protect rather than attack families who choose to homeschool their children,” the HSDLA has noted.

In the case involving Melissa Busekros, a German appeals court ultimately ordered legal custody of the teenager who was taken from her home by a police squad and detained in a psychiatric hospital in 2007 for being homeschooled be returned to her family because she no longer is in danger.

The lower court’s ruling had ordered police officers to take Melissa – then 15 – from her home, if necessary by force, and place her in a mental institution for a variety of evaluations. She was kept in custody from early February until April, when she turned 16 and under German law was subject to different laws.

At that point she simply walked away from the foster home where she had been required to stay and returned home.

Wolfgang Drautz, consul general for the Federal Republic of Germany, has commented on the issue on a blog, noting the government “has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole.”

Drautz said homeschool students’ test results may be as good as for those in school, but “school teaches not only knowledge but also social conduct, encourages dialogue among people of different beliefs and cultures, and helps students to become responsible citizens.”

[…]

World Net Daily

I feel very sorry for the Home Schooling Germans.

They need to understand that there is a huge population of Home Schoolers in the UK, and that they have the right to move here and live here whenever they choose. They can and should sell their houses and turn their backs on Germany.

That is exactly what they should do. The Germans are experts in rounding up people – everyone in the world know it. Germany has not been a free country before during or after the Nazis, and as this article vividly explains, it is just as Nazi now as it was in the 1930’s and Herr ‘N. Hauf’ is a Nazi, pure and simple.

It is also another clear example of how the German Constitution is completely worthless. Germans can let roll off of their tongues, phrases like, “misuse of parental custody rights”. Sound familiar? This is the same language that destroys every delineated right in their constitution.

All Germans today are clearly brainwashed against Home Schooling, otherwise there would be widespread outrage that their government was proposing to crack down on these people who are harming no one and simply minding their own business. Any nation of free people where the majority of people understand the principles of freedom would not sit down silently while a group of people were persecuted in this way…but then, we are talking about Germany, and they have a history of sitting down quietly while minorities are eliminated.

These are the facts.

Trying to make Germans and Germany into decent people is like trying to make dry water. Free people are anathema to the Germans and the national character of that country makes it easy for them to suppress or murder anyone that does not conform.

These Home Schoolers are very lucky; they can simply get on a train and arrive in St. Pancras a few hours later as free people. They can move their assets also. It would be difficult and painful to do, but it can be done, and once finished, they will be able to do exactly as they please. They can even go back to Germany whenever they like, to visit their relatives.

Other people who were put on trains by the German government were not so lucky.

No doubt the German government will try and stop the free movement of Germans and their assets to lock in Home Schoolers.

I know some German Home Schoolers, and they are perfectly pleasant people; not brainwashed, decent, friendly, considerate, good parents and exactly the sort of person you would like to have as a neighbor.

German culture is in fact the pure evil here; you can find decent people anywhere from any country – you know this – it is a case of a human brain running an operating system.

People running German culture OS, are running a closed source, non free OS like a certain Borg-like disease that we all love to hate.

People running any Free thinking OS are like Linux; open source, free, extensible, infinitely customizable, portable, unlocked, beautiful, useful and more human like.

Großbritannien wartet Sie deutsche Hauptschulefamilien!

Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order.

This is a bad start to a bad article. It seems that many american writers are not capable of serious logical thought; there is nothing wrong with sweeping generalizations (as long as they make you laugh) but these sorts of line are nothing more than propagandistic slander words.

And I beg to differ that they are ‘no threat to the established order’. Libertarians and Libertarian ideas are the biggest threat the established order have faced in one hundred years.

But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let’s pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person’s money to someone else?

The libertarian perspective is useful, and undervalued. Why does the government pay farmers not to grow food? Why are medications for fatal diseases sometimes held off the market in case they aren’t safe? (Compared to death?) Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether some government activity or other expands freedom or contracts it.

Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny of the majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring that people with odd Social Security numbers have to give $1,000 to people with even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what the government does is essentially like that.

So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want. We have to decide that together. Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want.

I would say that pollution is a modern example, and it is there because the market for energy is distorted. The free market might have been able to produce a pollution free economy by now if it had been left to do so, just as we would be on Mars had Nuclear engines been allowed to fully develop and fly.

There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference –often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it chooses to intervene is purely pragmatic.

No. The point of principle is the the source of how we consent to ourselves to be governed; we should never allow government to choose to intervene on the basis of what is pragmatic. Governments that do that wind up expelling all ‘foreigners’, treating foreigners like animals, building concentration camps and waging pre-emptive wars.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenues to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to user it — and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency.

That is a straw man argument.

Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection). Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: you are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation — to make inconsistent decisions in different cases. And usually there is no one “right” answer: There is a spectrum of acceptable answers, involving tradeoffs (dirty air versus fewer jobs, etc.) that ought to be made democratically — that is, through government.

This is so wrong I do not know where to start. Sorry, yes, I do!
America is alredy ligigation mad. There is no way that more litigation is possible in that country; there are not enough judges or courts. But that is to use one of Kinsleys poorly formed style of argument. Judges and lawyers and juries are inexpert in everything else that is going on today; just look at the absurd decisions to do with RAM; it is clear that anything technical is out of the depth of most judges; does that mean that we cannot use the courts to settle disputes and that we must turn to Big Brother to solve all our problems? Of course not, one of the chief reasons being that government is as incompetent and science illiterate as any judge and jury. There is no reason why when you have a jury of your peers, the correct decision cannot be arrived at. If we are talking about pollution, then the judge should be a scientist with the correct background. If we are talking about wether a company should store the temporary and fleeting files that are held in the RAM of a server running LigHTTPd then the judge should be someone who knows the difference between ‘Apache’ and ‘an Apache’. As you can see from those links, the Google knows the difference!

To say that, “the solution ought to be made democratically — that is, through government”, is to engage in a dastardly misuse of the English language. It is a form of abuse that has been going on for a long time in both the UK and the USA; the substitution of the meaning of the word ‘fair’ with the word ‘democracy’. What Kinsley is doing is substituting the meaning of one word for another in a modern (and rather nasty) shorthand that connects a system of government to a word meaning goodness.

If we take that sentence literally, it makes no sense. To say pollution problems should be solved democratically means that a vote should be taken on each separate issue; not that the issue should be turned over to government to arbitrate. These subtle linguistic tricks, if they are done deliberately are evil in writing. If they are not done deliberately, then Kinsley is a poor thinker and writer. Either way it is wrong.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competition with other routes keeps it all efficient. And what about, um, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own both roads at major intersections, and when that happened the company would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own, and maintain all the roads, and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government.

This is another straw man. You can come up with an infinite number of different offensive and unworkable proposals, call them ‘Libertarian’ and then say, “see! they are all wacky!”. None of these arguments change the true nature of Libertarianism, and none of them will dent its popularity. This is the dull thinking of the inured, powered by stupid skeptic tricks.

Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the maze at the FDA. The Terry Shiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.

I thought Libertarianism’s greatest moment was the penning of The Constitution…I could be wrong of course…

The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to a right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt?

Or ride a bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet.

The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on others. I would pay good money not to have to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam, or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right like the right to die may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or irresponsible is not.

To say that government should force people to wear seatbelts so that you are not inconvenienced by a traffic jam is patently absurd. It is also absurd to say that government compulsion is justified to spare you the sight of a bloody carcass. These are the words of a selfish and stupid man; a man who clearly doesn’t understand the value of liberty, a squeamish and milk blooded weakling who is terrified of life, who happily runs into the arms of government for everything and anything. This is not the sort of person who would have packed up a trunk and taken the perilous voyage to the new world. This is not the sort of man who built america – or anything else for that matter. People as soft as that last paragraph implies are the Eloi; the human cattle of this age.

They are ‘the problem’.

Perhaps if more americans were exposed to carnage, in other words, real life, they would have a better appreciation of what it means to send their military to other countries to inflict ‘regime change’ on innocent people. More on that below.

Llibertarians are quick to see hidden costs of ignoring libertarian principles and slow to see such costs in adhering to them. For example, Tucker Carlson reports in the Dec. 31 New Republic that Ron Paul wants to end the federal ban on unpasteurized milk. No one should want to drink unpasteurized milk, and almost no one does. Paul himself doesn’t. But it bothers him that the government tells people they cannot do something they shouldn’t do. Libertarians would say that if most people want pasteurized milk, the market will supply it. Firms will emerge to certify that milk has been pasteurized. These firms will compete, keeping them honest.

And that is the difference between people who live by principle and people who do not. A I said above we should only consent to be governed by a government that operates on principle, not by what is pragmatic. This concept is alien to the sheeple like Kinsley. The very idea frightens them; and that is behind this image of people drinking untreated milk.

Fear of untreated milk is symbolic of the programmed fear that the sheeple live in. They are like the hive people in THX-1138, where there is nothing natural; where the only food is processed food. The immediate revulsion felt by most people when they think about drinking milk straight from the cow without being blessed and sanctified by ‘science’ is the same reaction that drives them to run to the government to solve every problem. It is the same perverted instinct that causes them to distrust the flow of life and the market. It is the same force that has created the “Health and Safety” mass hysteria that has overtaken the once sane and rational British.

So yes, a Rube Goldberg contraption of capitalism could replace a straightforward government regulation. But what if you aren’t interested in turning your grocery shopping into an ideological adventure? All that is lost by letting the government take care of it is the right of a few idiots to be idiots. That right deserves respect. But not much.

To say that Libertarianism is comparable to a Rube Goldberg contraption is a complete polar opposite mischaracterization, and Kinsley knows it. This is the sort of line that we are now used to hearing from certain quarters in america: “downsizing” for “firing of many employees”, “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “extraordinary rendition” for the process of kidnapping people from countries where torture is illegal to countries where it isn’t, “wet work” for “assassination”, “collateral damage” for “civilians killed”, “take out” for “destroy”, “red tape” for “bureaucracy”, “area denial munitions” meaning “landmines”, “physical persuasion”, “rough interrogation” and “tough questioning” for “torture”, “illiquid assets” worthless real estate and “detainment of enemy combatants” meaning “prisoners of war”, “regime change” meaning “CIA organized assassination / military coup” and of course, “Democracy” meaning “colonization by the United States”.

Libertarianism is about simplicity, not complexity. Libertarians, and Ron Paul explicitly, unambiguously and repeatedly have said this, and they say it in plain language of the sort that is alien to Kinsley and his ilk.

A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even more moderate libertarians disapprove of government social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers. But freedom is only one of the two core values our nation was built on. The other is equality. Defining equality, libertarians tend to take a narrow view, believing that it means only political equality with no financial aspects. Defining freedom, by contrast, they take a broad view, and see a violation in every nickel a citizen must spend.

Libertarians ask: By what justification does the government concern itself with inequality — financial or otherwise — in the first place? They are nearly alone in asking this question. Even conservatives claim a great concern for equality of opportunity, while opposing opportunity of result. And the reasons seem obvious: some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life; etc.

There is no such thing as an ‘extreme libertarian’. The prefix ‘extreme’ is used as code in this example to tarnish Libertarians as ‘extremists’; and of course, that bundles them in with ‘extremist islam’ and by extension ‘islamic extremists’. Glen Beck said it plainly for joe sixpack.

Theft is immoral, just as murder is immoral. That it is done by the government doesn’t make it not so. Bush Blair and Brown are mass murderers in the same way that Charles Manson is a convicted murderer; none of those three men were physically doing the murdering, and neither did Charles Manson, yet all four are guilty. But I digress. You cannot use force to take something from someone; that is theft. The fact that it is voted upon is irrelevant. This video makes it vividly clear why this is so.

But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians. They force us to think it all through from scratch. Good for them.

[…]

Washington Post

Actually, Libertarianism is good for YOU, and is superior to your philosophy. Your philosophy works on the presumption that you are correct in everything, and that therefore, everyone should obey you, hand over their cash to you, and live by your standards. Libertarians begin by saying that they only know what is good for them, not for others, and so we can co-exist with you, whereas you cannot co-exist with us. Your philosophy makes violent conflict inevitable as it depends on you stealing from people. Our philosophy is one of peace, since we believe it is immoral to steal.

Once again, that instructional video is one of the best presentations I have seen explaining what Libertarianism actually means, and how it works practically. The ideas behind this are spreading like wildfire because they make sense to everyone with a brain-cell and who doesn’t have something to lose by them being widely adopted and practiced.

Finally!

The impact of Hilary Clinton’s suggestion in the run-up to the New Hampshire caucus that the US and the UK jointly secure our nuclear facilities suggests that a strong Pakistan policy is a key in this US election. Clinton is far too savvy a foreign policy analyst to champion an idea that undermines Pakistani sovereignty and delivers what many consider our most precious commodity into western hands. But talking big about Pakistan these days is sure to ignite some election heat. Say something provocative about “the world’s most dangerous place”, and you’re sure to make headlines. And while I can’t prove the exact correlation between Clinton’s comments and her subsequent victory in the presidential primary, the media coverage she received is bound to have made a difference.

[…]

At this early stage, non of the presidential hopefuls have tossed up an acceptable vision for a US-Pakistan collaboration in the war on terror. But nuggets of wisdom do exist amongst the tangle of voices. Parsing through the different stances yields a vast middle ground in which US aid and intervention could help bolster democratic reform and undermine the threat posed by terrorism while respecting national sovereignty.

The four Democratic candidates–Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards–are prepared to launch unilateral military strikes if there is “actionable intelligence” of a security threat, or if Osama bin Laden’s location can be verified. Not surprisingly, this stance rankles with many Pakistanis who are horrified at the thought of a US military intervention–or should I say invasion?–against Islamabad’s wishes.

[…]

But just as there’s more to Pakistan’s anti-Americanism, there’s more to the trigger-happy suggestions of presidential hopefuls. Obama is willing to continue hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to Pakistan, but only on the condition that substantial progress is made towards closing down training camps and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan. Obama’s belief that Pakistan ‘needs more than F-16s to combat extremism’ is one that should be adopted by our government as well. For his part, Edwards is willing to maintain ties with Musharraf and continue economic and military aid to Pakistan if our government extends the reach of the legitimate government to the tribal areas. While his suggestion goes against historical trends, Edwards is correct to point out that the Pakistani government needs to exert some authority and regain respect amongst FATA residents to earn their collaboration in the fight against militancy.

[…]

Republican candidates also have a few choice suggestions. Ron Paul, who opposes aid to Pakistan, rightfully emphasizes that extremist militancy exists because US forces have ‘invaded’ and ‘occupied’ Muslim countries and maintained bases across the Muslim world for a long time prior to 9/11. His insightful comments can certainly help inform US foreign policy in the coming years. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has explicitly stated that bombing a potential ally is a bad idea. Finally, John McCain has advocated making “a long-term commitment” to Pakistan, acknowledging that the war on terror cannot be won overnight. Although he has discussed the possibility enhancing Pakistan’s security capabilities, he is more excited about getting children out of seminaries and into schools. In the midst of these myriad suggestions lies a sensible Pakistan policy. It’s our own responsibility to guide the next American president and ensure that unilateral US action does not further destabilize our country.

[…]

http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=90649

And there you have it.

It is completely clear that the Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards are ‘business as usual’ warmongering monsters who want to drag america deeper into the quicksand, everyone understands this except the american electorate.

What is interesting about this piece is that it seems to be written as if under duress; Ron Paul is right, but, “In the midst of these myriad suggestions lies a sensible Pakistan policy”. This cannot be the case either america should be engaged with Pakistan fully or it should withdraw completely. Those are in fact, the only two different choices on the table. I suppose the writer doesn’t want to get in trouble.

For the record, again, the so called ‘extremist’ militancy is not ‘extremist’ at all, these people are really quite ordinary men who simply want to control their own destiny in their own country. If america disentangles itself from them and stops being the puppet master, they will immediately stand down. They are no more insane or extremist than the original american revolutionaries that kicked out the British, or any other freedom fighters that stood and stand firm against invasion and colonization. Ron Paul understands this, and so do a growing number of people in the west who have finally started to wake up to this and see things from their perspective.

Any election that can not be audited, i.e., that does not happen on paper, with multiple receipts, is not trustworthy.

That these imbeciles are STILL using Diebold machines to ‘manage’ an election is almost beyond belief. Almost.

Listen to how people in New Hampshire have been disenfranchised.

And look at a programmer giving evidence on how vote rigging with computers is done.

Both Ron Paul AND Obama have had the Diebold network used against them. Even if it is a single vote that has not been counted, if it is your vote, it matters does it not?

The recent discussions in the media about Ron Paul’s comments regarding Lincoln and his political legacy got me to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst, would weigh in on the subject. I had this thought because Judge Napolitano included a chapter entitled “Dishonest Abe” in his brilliant book, The Constitution in Exile. Judge Napolitano is a very busy man, hosting a radio show as well as appearing on television, making speeches all around the country, writing books, and practicing law – in addition to (hopefully) having a private family life. Since I am a big fan of his writing I thought I would try to pique our readers’ interest in what the judge has to say on this subject.

The first two sentences of the “Dishonest Abe” chapter of The Constitution in Exile are hard hitting: “The Abraham Lincoln of legend is an honest man who freed the slaves and saved the Union. Few things could be more misleading.” He then goes on to say exactly what Ron Paul told the Washington Post, and which seemed to mystify and confuse Tim Russert in his “Meet the Press” interview with Congressman Paul: “In order to increase his federalist vision of centralized power, ‘Honest’ Abe misled the nation into an unnecessary war. He claimed that the war was about emancipating slaves, but he could have simply paid slave owners to free their slaves . . . . The bloodiest war in American history could have been avoided.” And, as Ron Paul would likely add, all the other countries of the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century, including Britain, Spain, France, Denmark, the Dutch, did so without a war. This, by the way, included the Northern states in the U.S. There were no “civil wars” to free the slaves in Massachusetts, New York (where slavery existed for over 200 years), or Illinois.

Lincoln’s “actions were unconstitutional and he knew it,” writes Napolitano, for “the rights of the states to secede from the Union . . . [are] clearly implicit in the Constitution, since it was the states that ratified the Constitution . . .” Lincoln’s view “was a far departure from the approach of Thomas Jefferson, who recognized states’ rights above those of the Union.” Judge Napolitano also reminds his readers that the issue of using force to keep a state in the union was in fact debated – and rejected – at the Constitutional Convention as part of the “Virginia Plan.”

He also discusses Lincoln’s Confiscation Act of 1862, under which “any slaves behind the Union lines were captives of war who were to be freed and transported to countries in the tropics. This was in keeping with Dishonest Abe’s lifelong position (his “White Dream,” according to Ebony magazine managing editor Lerone Bennett, Jr, author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream) of deporting all blacks from the U.S. “Colonization” was the euphemism that was used for this.

“The Confiscation Acts,” writes Judge Napolitano, “show that Lincoln did not have much concern for the slaves. He did not suggest to Congress that freed slaves should be granted civil rights or citizenship in Northern states. Once the freed slaves were transported out of the United States, they would no longer be Lincoln’s problem.” This is also why Lincoln tinkered with proposals for compensated emancipation in the border states while they were under U.S. military occupation during the war. These proposals included immediate deportation of any freed slaves. He saw the occupation of the border states during the war as an opportunity to begin ridding the country of “The Africans,” as he referred to black people, as though they were from another planet. Judge Napolitano quotes Lincoln in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas as saying what he repeatedly said throughout his adult life: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes.” “Lincoln was more concerned about the failure of [the seceding] states to collect tariffs than he was about slavery, ” says Napolitano.

Unlike all those hopelessly miseducated neocon pundits who sneered at Ron Paul’s statements regarding how Lincoln did tremendous damage to the principles of the American founders, Judge Napolitano is well schooled in constitutional history. He writes of Lincoln’s complete trashing of the Constitution by “murdering civilians, declaring martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing . . . private property without compensation (including railroads and telegraphs), conducting a war without the consent of Congress, imprisoning nearly thirty thousand Northern citizens without trial, shutting down . . . newspapers, and even deporting a congressman (Clement L. Vallandigham from Ohio) because he objected to the imposition of an income tax.”

“Saying that Lincoln abolished slavery and calling him the ‘Great Emancipator’ are grossly inadequate mischaracterizations,” writes the judge. “Lincoln was interested in promoting his political agenda of centralizing government power, and freeing the slaves was only a means of advancement of that end.”

Lincoln destroyed the union of the founding fathers. He “replaced a voluntary association of states with a strong centralized government. The president and his party eagerly lifted the floodgates to the modern thuggish style of ruling that the U.S. government now employs” (emphasis added). This “opened the door to more unconstitutional acts by the government in the 1900s through to today.”

The next time you see Lincoln’s portrait on a five-dollar bill, the judge concludes, “remember how many civil liberties he took away from you.”

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo138.html

!!!!!

Our new Holford Myths site is launched today – this has been developed to counteract false information about Patrick Holford.

Anyone who challenges today’s drug-based medical paradigm effectively is a likely target for attack. Notably, since the publication of Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne, certain drug industry funded organisations and drug-oriented individuals have campaigned to discredit Patrick Holford by spreading false allegations. The main opponents have been Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, pharmacology professor David Colquhoun, the anonymous Holford Watch and certain dieticians.

The associations with the pharmaceutical industry and/or organisations funded by the pharmaceutical industry are explored in the free e-book Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacre, Quackbusters and Corporate Science by Martin Walker for those who want to understand the modus operandi of the organised lobby against alternative and nutritional approaches within medicine.

Responses to false allegations about Patrick Holford plus direct links to extracts about Ben Goldacre, David Colquhoun, Holford Watch and certain dieticians from the above e-book can be found on www.holfordmyths.com

[…]

Patrick Holford is a man who owns a company that makes and sells vitamins and dietary supplements. He writes books, and sells them.

This is an affront to people like Ben Goldacre and his ilk. The only food you should be eating is the food that SCIENCE says you should be eating. The only thoughts you should be thinking are the ones that SCIENCE says you should be thinking. Anyone who eats anything else, who thinks anything else, who says anything other than what they believe, who does not swallow the dogma is ANTI-SCIENCE and is to be…

BURNED AT THE STAKE

Rational people are not frightened of Vitamin Sellers or book writers. They make their case cleanly and then STFU. If the thinking behind Bad Science is so great, then let them write a diet book, sell it, and then make people thinner…[booming voice] WITH SCIENCE [/booming voice]; what need have you to personally attack, ridicule and seek to destroy other people? What do you gain out of it? Who appointed these sub human monsters the protectors of the general public? Once again, if they have something better to offer, OFFER IT, do not pump the world full of negative vibes (man [or is that hairless monkey?]).

The fact of the matter is, none of these people have anything to offer, other than rancid bile, calls to disbelief and personal attacks. It goes like this; you have posts on your blog about UFOs, therefore, ALL your stuff is garbage. That is a stupid skeptic trick. That is junk science. I say “God does not exist” and so you are a fool to believe anything else. That is how they work; they do not have a better diet for you, or a better set of supplements, a different, greater belief to follow (except their utterly fallable, incomplete, and downright deadly dogma) the only thing they have to offer is ‘DO NOT DO THAT’ ‘DO NOT BELIEVE THAT’ ‘DO NOT EAT THAT’, and of course, there is nothing that you can DO with that negativity, and the newspaper it is printed on is fit only to light up your fire.

I can tell you something straight – anyone who writes a column like ‘Bad Science’ is on my shitlist from the first speck of ink on the paper. Anyone who runs other people down, who uses Stupid Skeptic Tricks is a TOTAL SCUMBAG.

Lets be clear:

Should they be burned at the stake? No.
Should they be stopped from writing in that RAG the Guardian or any other rag? No.
Are they the worst examples of human trash ever? Yes!

The point is, these attacks on Vitamin Sellers are direct attacks on MY LIBERTY. They are an affront to decent people everywhere, who just want to mind their own business and who do not want to be told what to do, what to think and what to eat and who to trade with.

People who are against Patrick Holford are Fascists. They want to forbid you from taking vitamins, they want the law to ban the sale of dietary supplements. They want you to not read his books; in effect, they want to censor him, and prevent the free flow of information across the world. They are as bad as the Chinese Government, or those guys who burned books in the 1930s.

All free people have the absolute right to publish what they want, and free people have the right to read what they like. Free people have the right to control what goes into their bodies; that means that they can eat whatever they like, inject whatever they like, smoke whatever they like, and it is no one’s business. It is not the business of Ben Goldacre and the corprophiliacs at The Guardian. It is not the business of Bayer, GSL, Novartis, Monsanto, Uncle Sam, HMG or anyone else.

Anyone who tries to shut down writers like Patrick Holford are on the side of Fascists and Fascism. They are against Liberty and against the freedom to read and to learn (and no, learning does not mean only learning what is ‘right’).

I am fed up to the teeth of the attacks on vitamins and food supplements. I am tired of reading about the weasel words of the corporate shills defending the indefensible, trying to take away my right to interact with whomever I want in whatever way I want.

In the end, these people must be put down like diseased dogs. Fox news is learning what it means to defy the force of Liberty unleashed. Their stock has taken a dip thanks to the boycott that is now running against all the sponsors of that evil station. This can be done to any company, and certainly, if the vitamin eaters and supplement takers decide to boycott a newspaper that is attacking them, the effects will be felt. Newspapers can publish whatever they like, and everyone has the right to buy and sell whatever they like…including stocks.

Some may say that I go in too hard on these subjects; part of the style of this blog during its nearly seven years of operation is to go in with all guns blazing if thats what you like. Nevertheless, in the past, when people tried to take away the liberty of free men the result was war and killing and that is what The Guardian, Skeptics and corporate shills are doing; literally attacking millions of free people; trying to erase their liberty, poison them and destroy their lives. That they are subjected only to some bad language and shouting is very lucky for them; in another age they would lose their lives…in any case, they have lost. More people than ever are turning away from Industrial Pharmaceutical Medicine and The Medical Industrial Complex. This is why they bring out the big guns to try and shoot down people like Patrick Holford – though in the case of Goldacre we are talking about a .22 not The Guns of Navarone… but I digress; the publishers of that garbage had better think twice about running hit pieces against people who are doing nothing but mind their own business – there could be big economic consequences for them, just like Fox is feeling right now.

For those morons out there who say that vitamin sellers are defrauding the public, that is not your business. There is plenty of legislation dealing with poisoning and poisoners to take care of people who sell things that actually harm buyers under the guise that it is medicine. We have enough law on the books to take care of almost every possible situation. It is you baying and whining morons who create the monster governments that stop at nothing to control everything that you do down to how and when you piss.

Make up your own minds, eat what you want, publish what you want, read what you want, think what you want and DOWN with the anti vitamin fascists!

UPDATE!

a lurker sends this

> this snippet should have been in your post:
>
> At this point it is perhaps worth pointing out
> that Goldacre won a British Science Writers (BSW)
> award, in 2003. At this time, the BSW was funded
> by Glaxo Wellcome and called the Glaxo Wellcome
> BSW Award, the very year that he began working
> for the Guardian. The drug AZT was made by
> Burroughs-Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline.
>
> and check out this book:
>
> http://www.slingshotpublications.com/dwarfs.html

What a nasty, foul and loathsome piece of work!

By STAN GOFF

For starters, I have become a single-issue voter. The two-front war in Iraq-Afghanistan continues to drag on; and I am thoroughly convinced that no viable Democratic nominee will stop these occupations.

The recent analysis by Allan Nairn shows that even the putative anti-war Edwards (who the press is smothering because of his anti-corporate declarations) has a backroom full of defense contractors. Clinton is a ruthless war-monger, period. Obama is employing on the sorriest, pro-Zioinist, neoliberal trash on the market, i.e., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross, on his core advisory staff.

No one listens to me much, but in some fantasy world where they might, I would suggest that others follow suit with me here. In open primary states, cross over to vote in the Republican primaries for Ron Paul. In closed primary states, switch fast to Republican (like in the next few days).

Vote in the Republican primary; and vote for Ron Paul. Turnout will be dismally low for Republicans this year, because they have been demoralized by the Bush loons’ performances. Independents will vote Paul. The other Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal melee.

I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, “I won’t endorse this-n-that position” liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was anti-war before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.

Cynthia McKinney is running Green, though she hasn’t got the nomination yet. Remember Cynthia McKinney? When she broke with the DLC diktat, her own party fronted another Black woman (Denise Majette) to run against her in an open primary, and Republicans crossed over massively to vote in the Democratic primary to unseat her in a foregone Democratic Congressional district.

Two can play that game. If Cynthia McKinney runs in 2008 for President, I’ll write her in if I have to just to burn a vote for Clinton or Obama. But meanwhile, Ron Paul is on our primary ballot (North Carolina), because he is running as a Republican (we have draconian ballot access conditions here for thrid-parties, thanks to — of course — Democrats).

Ron Paul is running for President. Just what are the capabilities of a President, and what are his likely courses of action… in the unlikely event he wins?

Well, he is the Commander-in-Chief, so he can bring the troops home immediately, as well as order the military-industrial complex to radically scale back. In case anyone on the left has missed the implications of this, this would be a profoundly anti-imperial development that would take the US boot off the necks of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He is a libertarian who dislikes corporate subsidies, so he would veto the mega-billion dollar subisidies for Big Agra, Big Pharma, nuclear power company insurance policies, Weapons-R-Us, the ADM/Cargill Great Ethanol Scam,et al. He could veto the federal highway spending that is promoting sprawl. He has also stated that he opposed so-called free trade agreements.

Hello?

Don’t argue with libertarians when they are right. Many of them say that the leviathan-capitalists that dominate the world’s economy could not get as big as they are in an unfettered and unsubsidized market. Newsflash: that is actually true.

Ron Paul is a Gold Bug. For the uninitiated, that means he believes dollar-value should be pegged to a gold-standard. The implications of a return to the gold standard by the Fed are grim… for Wall Street and the military, both of which depend on massive foreign loans convered by runaway printing presses. Putting a stop to this is a Good Thing. What is the net effect?

Ron Paul may have the most outrageous personal account of race you might imagine; but what is the most horrific social catastrophe in the United States for Black and Brown folk? You guessed it: the criminal (in)justice system. The malignant growth of the American Gulag has been fueled — more than by any other cause — by the ever-more-punative criminalization of drug use and drug addiction, and the ability fo the criminal justice system to apply this criminalization with special force against African America and Hispano-Latinas. Here’s the thing. Paul opposes the criminalization of drugs. What is the net effect?

When we are at the point in history where we cannot change the electoral system, then we need to think tactically about what we can do right now. What will a Paul victory in the primaries do? Not whether a vote for Paul in the Republican primaries endorses his decentralizing philosophy on reproductive choice. President Paul will not be writing legislation. The Executive Branch decides how strongly to enforce legislation… like domestic spying fer-instance.

President Paul would close Guantanamo, halt CIA kidnappings, and gut the enforcement capacity for the PATRIOT Act.

Nominee Paul would give 2008 voters a choice between a real anti-war candidate and a phony Democratic equivocator. The intensity of anti-war sentiment in the country already forced ex-war-hawk Edwards to adopt an out-in-nine-months position to left flank his Democratic opponents.

Don’t ask yourself “what are the ideas?” If your toilet backs up, you can come up with a thousand ideas while shit-water cascades onto the floor. The question is not about ideas; it is, “What will be the net effect?”

Wanna throw a monkey wrench into a fixed electoral system? Here’s a chance.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and “Sex & War” which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com

[…]

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff01042008.html

And there you have it. Snarfed from Lew Rockwell who describes the above as:

Another Left-Liberal Supports Ron Paul
And smacks down some of the left’s dumb arguments against him.

Points of order; Ron Paul’s ideas on ‘race’ are not outrageous in any way – and the fact that Stan Goff calls people ‘black’ demonstrates that he knows less about people than Ron Paul does. But I digress. The rest of this is almost BLOGDIAL in its absolutely pure common sense.

I especially like the bit about your loo overflowing with shit; of course, on BLOGDIAL we say, “if your loo is overflowing and the poop, pee water and used partially disintegrated loo roll is about to spill over the edge, you do not sit there and call for a white paper, go on a demonstration or write to your MP…you get the plunger and start MAKING IT GO DOWN!” … and you do this BEFORE the ‘shit-water’ even gets to the edge; as soon as you see it rising, you ACT QUICKLY.

Sadly, for america and the rest of the world, the loo has already overflowed and we are all walking in an inch of filthy water. Its not too late to call in the plumber though, and his name is RON PAUL.

An educated lurker writes:

>>From BBC reportage:
>
> For Mr Huckabee, the key word was “values”,
> with many Republican caucus-goers saying
> the former Baptist minister was someone
> “who shares my values”.
>
> His win was built on the support he got
> from evangelical voters. More
> than half of Republicans interviewed as
> they attended the caucuses said
> they were either born-again or evangelical
> Christians, the Associated
> Press news agency reported.

This report, and most brits have missed and are missing the big news of the campaign; Ron Paul.

Not everyone in the states is an ‘Evangelical’ and if it is the case that ‘more than half’ of the idiots who voted for Huckleberry are those types, then that caucus is skewed.

read this:

http://www.ronpaulnews.net

every day, and watch ALL of the videos on that site going back through the weeks. ITs worth the effort, because this man is causing a revolution in the usa, and its effects are spreading outside the usa also.

> This won’t be good for reasserting the
> separation of church and state,
> obviously.

Ron Paul advocates TOTAL separation of church and state.

> No more freedom of choice on abortion,

Ron Paul is for removing the federal jurisdiction on the abortion matter.

> but more people on
> death row.

Ron Paul is for abolishing capital punishment

> Less big government, but more diktats.

Ron Paul is for a constitutional sized federal government; ie, no diktats.

> And more ‘keeping up with the Muhammeds’

Ron Paul is for removing ALL of america’s 570,000 troops from ALL bases all over the world.

> when it comes to creating an indoctrinated
> population capable of supporting
> faith-based conflict (sick)

Ron Paul is for home schooling and the abolition of the Department of Education.

> in all
> aspects of trade, migration and power-grabbing.
> (Remember the nice lady pastor talking about
> creating an army to combat ‘The Muslims’ at the
> beginning of jesus camp? Heart-warming stuff)

Ron Paul is for open trade and cultural exchange on the personal level with all countries and all peoples without exception and without restriction.

> And the alternative?

Ron Paul!

> Blandness Inc., an everyman for the
> head-in-the-sand generation. A man as strong,
> stand-uppish and resilient
> as the celery sticks in my fridge no longer
> fit even for stock.

You mean Obama of course :)

> Gah!

Ditto.

America is undergoing a volcanic change, and now, even the Main Stream Media is beginning to get on board with the revolution, whereas before, they were entirely dismissive and even openly hostile to Ron Paul.

Why?

Because everyone of them knows that business as usual is off the table, and if America (with a capital ‘A’) is to re-emerge, then Ron Paul is the only candidate that they have who will do the job.

The media in Britain is completely clueless about what is happening over there. Just look at how The Times has been reporting it. Even British journalists in the USA are completely blind to it; read the amazingly blinkered writings of Justin Webb for a tea soaked taste.

Something BIG is happening in america; America is making a comeback, as I said it could, and its about time.

Mike Huckabee is a fraud. He is a two faced, opportunist, hypocritical, tax loving, preacher of false religion.

Of course, he is free to believe whatever he wants and he is free to preach it, but anyone who wants high office and who also wears his religion on his sleeve like a brat with a cold who keeps wiping his nose and showing it to you is simply unfit. The only thing the candidates should be talking about is The Constitution, nothing else; not morality, ‘values’ or any other bogus nonsense. Lets look at what this man is ‘for’:

Faith and Politics
My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them. For example, when it comes to the environment, I believe in being a good steward of the earth. I don’t separate my faith from my personal and professional lives.

That should make loud sirens sound in every americans head; the only thing that should GUIDE the presidents decisions is THE CONSTITUTION not your own religious beliefs. THat he explicitly does not separate his faith from his professional life(, in this case, his profession is politician and potential president of the united states, ) should signal his immediate disqualification as a candidate – this man is a religious leader who doesn’t understand the separation of church and state. People like Mike Huckabee are extremely dangerous, not because they are religious, but because they do not know what their job is meant to be and what its necessary constraints and limits are.

Marriage
I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. As President, I will fight for passage of this amendment. My personal belief is that marriage is between one man and one woman, for life.

Marriage is not the business of the state. Period. This is a perfect example of religious fanaticism creeping into policy. It is also a perfect example of why this man cannot be president; his own views and not the constitution are the basis of his policy decisions. Furthermore, he has the effrontery to want to change the Constitution to reflect his own religious beliefs. The president’s job is to protect our liberty, which includes our right to express our religious beliefs, even if you believe marriage means polygamy. This man is dangerous because he believes he knows what the absolute truth is, and hence, what is good for everybody; rather like a Communist or a Fascist Dictator.

Energy Independence
The first thing I will do as President is send Congress my comprehensive plan for energy independence. We will achieve energy independence by the end of my second term.

Mike Hukcabee is a religious preacher, not a scientist. He doesn’t understand anything about the dynamics of energy supply (or judging by this statement, economics) and has no business trying to organize it for the entire usa. Only the market can correctly supply energy at the greatest efficiency and lowest cost. That is true for everything, and whenever the government gets involved in a market it creates a distortion and ruins everything. Mike Huckabee is dishonest because he is saying that he can solve something that he cannot. Government needs to get out of business and let people take care of themselves. It is presumptuous that he thinks he can solve this problem, and doubly presumptuous that he thinks he is going to get a second term as president.

National Security/Foreign Policy: Iraq
Iraq is a battle in our generational, ideological war on terror. General Petraeus and our troops are giving their all to provide a window of opportunity for the Iraq government to succeed, while the Democrats are running for the exit doors.

There is no ‘war on terror’. Huckabee saying this means that he is committed to war without end, thats what ‘generational’ means in this context. Mike Huckabee is a suicidal maniac who wants to keep america at war, in other peoples business, and he wants americans to continue to pay for it in blood and cash…only there is no more cash to do it; america has to BORROW money or fraudulently PRINT IT to run its insane wars and 300+ bases around the world. There is also no more blood available, meaning that there is going to have to be a draft to replenish the soldiers for his insane quasi religious war.

National Security/Foreign Policy: War On Terror
I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war. Radical Islamic fascists have declared war on our country and our way of life. They have sworn to annihilate each of us who believe in a free society, all in the name of a perversion of religion and an impersonal god. We go to great extremes to save lives, they go to great extremes to take them. This war is not a conventional war, and these terrorists are not a conventional enemy. I will fight the war on terror with the intensity and single-mindedness that it deserves.

We are NOT engaged in a world war. That is a lie. If Huckabee believes that, he is delusional and unfit for command. There is no such thing as a ‘Radical Islamic fascist’ and no one has ‘declared war on the american way of life’. No one has sworn to annihilate those who believe in a free society. These are the words of the fantasy prone, warmongers, the ignorant and imbeciles. This sort of talk is the talk of Neoconservatism and insanity, and Mike Huckabee is clearly insane for believing it. A promise to fight the war on terror is a promise to destroy america utterly, by eliminating the last vestiges of its Constitution, cementing soft fascism, and murdering millions more innocent people round the world as Bush, Cheyney, Blair and Brown just have.

Cuba Policy
As President, I will enforce and implement all provisions of U.S. law governing policy toward Cuba including the Libertad Act. I will continue President Bush’s policy of pursuing indictments against any Cuban officials, including Raul Castro, responsible for crimes against U.S. citizens.

He really IS insane!!!!

Crisis Management
You need to know that your President will calmly and confidently lift you up in a crisis. During the massive emergency of Hurricane Katrina, when local, state, and federal governments were in melt-down, I stepped forward and directed the rescue and relief of 75,000 victims. Our island of success in a sea of failure was one of the reasons Time magazine named me one of America’s five best governors.

No, we need to know that our president is there defending our LIBERTY and nothing more you idiot!

Vertical Politics
Vertical Day is here and I want you to be a part of it.

Straight up to heaven?

All of this from Huckabee’s website.

If you didn’t think so before, now it must be absolutely clear; Huckabee is a totally INSANE and unfit candidate!!!!!

Barak Obama is no better; all we need to know about him is that he would invade Pakistan to find OBL. Another business as usual big government warmongering nutcase. His website’s issue page is full of meaningless twaddle, and on his foreign policy page, the word ‘constiution’ only appears once, in reference to Iraq’s Constitution.

I think that says all we need to know about that very young man.

America continues to be in VERY BIG TROUBLE. They and thanks to them, the entire world has been in a nightmare for decades. Now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Mike Huckabee and Barak Obama want not only to blow up the tunnel, but they want to douse the light as well.

What a life!

Whilst both Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough, both more or less polite and as close to fair minded MSM types as you are going to find in that electronic sewer were off duty, the anti-Paul machine rolled out their animatronic attack swine ‘David Shuster’ to fill in BOTH slots to attack Ron Paul in rapid succession in a most ignorant, petty, absurd, ill mannered and stupid way.

Here are the two clips in question.

Lets find out about this utter moron shall we?

David Shuster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Shuster (born 1967) is an American journalist for NBC News and MSNBC.
He is a correspondent for Hardball with Chris Matthews and other MSNBC programs. He is based in Washington, D.C.

Early career
A native of Bloomington, Indiana, Shuster graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, and started his journalism career at CNN’s Washington, D.C. bureau. He was an assignment editor and field producer from 1990 to 1994, covering both the Persian Gulf War and the 1992 presidential election campaign. Shuster left CNN in 1994 to become a political reporter for the ABC affiliate KATV in Little Rock, Arkansas, covering the Whitewater controversy. At KATV, he won a regional Emmy Award for investigative journalism for his reporting on a manufactured housing scandal.

Tenure at Fox News
In 1996, Shuster joined the Fox News Channel in Washington, D.C., covering Bill Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater scandal, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Starr Report, and the Clinton impeachment. He was at The Pentagon during the September 11, 2001 attacks, when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into it. After September 11, he headed Fox News’ coverage of the War in Afghanistan.[…]

Wikipedia

Hmmm, so, he worked for the scumbag FOX news channel, and according to internets, they sacked him. Too coarse for FOX? Now that is saying something.

This bastard is just the sort of religious fanatic that has brought america to its knees. Ron Paul dared to challenge the deity of one of america’s Gods, Abraham Lincoln, who all american schoolchildren are brainwashed to recite, ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves’. To suggest otherwise, to say that the motivations behind the Civil war were grey and not Black and White (…I typed that!) is simply blasphemy to ‘americans’ like Shuster, and that is why that imbecile presenter addressed Dr. Paul as ‘Mr. Paul’, in a most disrespectful and childish manner, and another referred to him as a ‘crackpot’ on air, during the ‘interview’.

Most of the time the antics of FOX level journalists should be passed around as jokes, like the dribble of David Shuster, but this outburst of guided infantilism needs to be called out as such it is so flagrant and revolting in its nature.

This moron was put in place on the two shows where Ron Paul has a sympathetic response, deliberately, using all the lamest of the lame 20th century shout over the interviewee, stay away from what really matters tactics that have made the MSM the discredited thing that it is. What is so sad is that on Joe’s programme no one stood up and countered Shuster’s blatant MSM attack by simply saying, “Hold on a minute David, we are all tired of this sort of thing, lets ask some real questions instead of playing these silly games”. This is after all, the same show where the presenter refused to do a story about Paris Hilton because it was ‘not news’.

Credit where credit is due she put in a snide dig at Shuster saying there was a Paris Hilton story coming up that he could do coming up, implying that that is the level he operates at.

Ron Paul pointed out from the outset that it is totally absurd that he is now answering esoteric questions about the history of the Civil War when americans are dying in Iraq, Iran is about to be illegally attacked, troops are in Afghanistan unconstitutionally…you can’t make nonsense like this up, and yet, cretins like David Shuster try and burn Dr. Paul at the stake because of his reading of history, which is different to the pseudo religious indoctrinated drivel that him and his schoolmates have swallowed hook line and sinker.

Anyone who is reasonable, anyone who is intelligent, is able to sit quietly and consider another viewpoint. It is totally absurd to ask someone to ‘retract a statement’ just because it is slightly different to the opinion of others. This is precisely what religious inquisitors used to do when they were torturing heretics; they would ask them over and over to recant, and return to the faith. This is what Shuster did, with a most objectionable tone of voice and manner ill suited to serious discussion at a time when america needs to look very carefully and logically at itself in this pivotal moment in its history.

Once again, types like Shuster (and they are a type to be sure) are what makes america a dangerous place. Thankfully, Dr. Paul is and was able to make his points beautifully and show Shuster for what he really is, a pathetic, uneducated dimwit, without imagination, manners and the ability to think himself out of a wet paper bag.

I hope that Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough apologize for the insults this bad man heaped on Dr. Paul when they return to work. Not that they need to, because types like Shuster are naked examples of operation mockingbird ‘journalists’ sent out to attack, disinform, lie through their teeth and disrupt.

Every word of Shuster’s shambling and amateurish attacks expose him as an errand boy…

But is any of this important any more?

Once again, people are talking about the antics of MSM and not the facts about the emergency facing us. Of course on BLOGDIAL, all we do is talk facts, logic and relevant ‘how tos’ so we have built up enough credit to allow us to digress and let loose on these animals once in a while.In any case, no one except the educationally sub normal, is buying into the lies of MSM. Everyone is turning to internets for their news and opinion and clear thinking; does it matter that human garbage like Shuster attack Ron Paul in this way?

It matters in that the Mockingbird system is being pushed into high gear, and that this is a sign that Ron Paul is seen as a real threat. If they are thinking in this way and pushing the pawns like Shuster along the board, you can be sure that they are acting in other ways to try and undermine and deflect away from the message of The Revolution. The Tim Russert ‘interview’ showed how deep they are wiling to dig to try and discredit Dr. Paul – they have gone through everything he has ever said, trying to pull out everything that looks odd, ‘controversial’ or that is not part of the american religious doctrine, like the worship of Lincoln. This is all they can do, because they cannot find any pictures of him sitting on a boat named monkey business with a blond on his lap.

At the end of the day, MSM still doesn’t matter, and neither do its human slugs on leashes like David Shuster. As long as people use the internets to talk to each other, to discredit MSM and to spread correct information, to keep everyone on topic, not only will the circuits of MSM be disrupted, but truth will propagate exponentially, and the louder the Shuster types shout, the more absurd and on the wrong side of history (my favorite phrase of the moment) they will rightly appear to be. We will win. We will continue to win.

What follows is the most important fact of all.

The fact that they are creating a purpose built single function Anti-Paul machine means that they actually fear the potential of a popular revolution in America, one that can completely reverse everything they have done so far to dismantle America. They understand, more than anyone, that the true power of that country rests in its population, and once that population reaches critical mass of opposition, there will be nothing they can do to stop it. This is what happened in the ‘Satellite States’ of the Soviet Union. This is what happened with People Power in the Philippines. America is no different from those countries, and if the informational tipping point is reached with the message that Ron Paul is carrying, then nothing will be able to stop him or someone identical to him from becoming president, and once that happens, the congress will be swept clean and the real America will start to re-emerge as the police state infrastructure is dismantled bit by bit.

I say it can and must happen.

Think about it:

• A bearded man who lives in a secret remote location. Everyone knows where he lives, but no one can get to him.
• NORAD can track him. But they cant track him down.
• He has a legion of helpers that help him deliver ‘presents’ to everyone everywhere by magic. He can deliver presents to all good citizens in one night. He can blow up a building that was not hit by a plane in one day, without the weeks needed to rig it for controlled implosion.
• He is believed in by people with child like minds as a result of lies told by people who know how the world really works.
• Despite living in a remote place, he knows everything about everyone.
• You can write letters to him, and somehow, they will be delivered. Somehow, letters from him are delivered to millions by the internets.
• People who grow up stop believing in him, and then buy their own presents for themselves and their loved ones.

Now, let us find out what it’s REALLY about:

Bin Laden: Should Governments Perpetuate the Bin Laden Myth?
Austin Cline,

Problems with the Bin Laden Myth:
Although Bin Laden was originally based upon the figure of Old Nick, a patron saint of big government, today Bin Laden is wholly secular. Some people object to him because he is secular rather than religious; some non-religious object to him because of his religious roots. He is a powerful cultural symbol which is impossible to ignore, but this doesn’t mean that he should simply be accepted without question. There are good reasons to dispense with the tradition.

Governments Have to Lie About Bin Laden:
Perhaps the most serious objection to perpetuating belief in Bin Laden among citizens is also the simplest: in order to do so, Governments have to lie to their citizens. You can’t encourage the belief without dishonesty, and it’s not a “little white lie” that is for their own good or that might protect them from harm. Governments should not persistently lie to citizens without overwhelmingly good reasons, so this puts supporters of the Bin Laden myth on the defensive.

Governments’ Lies About Bin Laden Have to Grow:
In order to get kids to believe in Bin Laden, it’s not enough to commit a couple of simple lies and move on. As with any lie, it’s necessary to construct more and more elaborate lies and defenses as time passes. Skeptical questions about Osama must be met with detailed lies about Osama’s powers. “Evidence” of Bin Laden must be created once mere stories of Osama prove insufficient. It’s unethical for Governments to perpetuate elaborate deceptions on citizens unless it’s for a greater good.

Bin Laden Lies Discourage Healthy Skepticism:
Most citizens eventually become skeptical about Bin Laden and ask questions about him, for example how he could possibly travel around the whole world in such a short period of time. Instead of encouraging this skepticism and helping citizens come to a reasonable conclusion about whether Bin Laden is even possible, much less real, most Governments discourage skepticism by telling tales about Osama’s supernatural powers.

The Reward & Punishment System of Bin Laden is Unjust:
There are a number of aspects to the whole Bin Laden “system” which citizens shouldn’t learn to internalize. It implies that the whole person can be judged as naughty or nice based upon a few acts. It requires belief that someone is constantly watching you, no matter what you are doing. It is based upon the premise that one should do good for the sake of reward and avoid doing wrong out of fear of punishment. It allows Governments to try to control citizens via a powerful stranger.

The Bin Laden Myth Promotes Anti-Libertarianism:
The entire Bin Laden myth is based on the idea of citizens giving up liberty for safety. There’s nothing wrong with staying safe, but Bin Laden makes it the focus on the entire life of the citizen. Citizens are encouraged to conform their behavior to Governmental expectations in order to receive ever more guarantees of safety rather than keeping their liberty. In order to make Terror watch lists, Government pays close attention to what informers tell them their neighbors are doing, effectively encouraging an unbridled STASI style informer based police state.

Bin Laden is Too Similar to Jesus and God:
The parallels between Bin Laden and Jesus or God are numerous. Bin Laden is a nearly all-powerful, supernatural person who dispenses rewards and punishment to people all over the world based upon whether they adhere to a pre-defined code of conduct. His existence is implausible or impossible, but faith is expected if one is to receive the rewards of safety. Believers should regard this as blasphemous; non-believers shouldn’t want their kids prepared in this way to adopt the police state and the loss of their civil liberties.

The Bin Laden “Tradition” is Relatively Recent:
Some might think that because Bin Laden is such an old tradition, this alone is sufficient reason to continue it. They were taught to believe in Osama as citizens, so why not pass this along to their own? The role of Bin Laden and false flag terrorism in modern life is actually quite recent — the mid to late 20th century. The importance of Bin Laden is a creation of cultural elites and perpetuated by business interests and simple cultural momentum. It has little to no inherent value.

Bin Laden is More About Governments than citizens:
Governmental investment in Bin Laden is far larger than anything citizens do, suggesting that Governments’ defense of the Bin Laden myth is more about what they want than about what people want. Their own memories about enjoying freedom may be heavily influenced by cultural assumptions about what they should have experienced. Is it not possible that kids would find at least as much pleasure in knowing that Governments are responsible for terrorism, not a supernatural stranger?

The Future of Bin Laden:
Bin Laden symbolizes terrorism and perhaps the entire ‘war on terror’ like nothing else. An argument can be made for the importance of the CCTV camera as a symbol for safety (notice that there are no reduction in crimes from them), but Bin Laden personifies terror in a way that groups cannot. Bin Laden is, furthermore, a very secular character by now which allows him to cross cultural and religious lines, placing him in an important position for the entire world rather than for Christians alone.

Because of this, it’s plausible that giving up on Bin Laden will mean abandoning much of the ‘war on terror’ altogether — and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. There’s a lot to be said for people dismissing the anti freedom, militarized police state of modern America and focusing instead on the freedoms of the Constitution. Ignoring Bin Laden would symbolize this choice. There’s a lot to be said for adherents of other religions refusing to allow Bin Laden to become part of their own traditions, representing an intrusion of Western culture into their own.

Finally, there’s also a lot to be said for nonbelievers of various sorts — humanists, atheists, skeptics, and freethinkers — refusing to be co-opted into a religious obedience. Whether Bin Laden in particular or the ‘war on terror’ in general is treated as defined by government or religious traditions, neither are religions which nonbelievers are part of. Government has strong secular elements, but those are primarily commercial — and who is going to invest themselves in a holiday all about commerce and who can spend the most money on credit?

The future of Bin Laden will depend on whether people will care enough to do anything — if not, things will continue on the same course they have been on. If people care not to be taken over, borg-like, by America’s ‘war on terror’, resistance may reduce Osama’s status as a cultural icon.

[…]

http://atheism.about.com/od/christmasholidayseason/p/SantaMyth.htm

Thank heavens.

Now maybe liars in search of a cause like ‘creator of teh internets‘ Al Gore, and the pig ignorant ‘no more thought’ Sheryl Crow and her ilk will pipe down the bullshit.

Or maybe not; it will only be when the press start to ask them proper questions that they cannot answer (or when their bs is trashed off camera by scientists embarrassing them into a little curled up mess) that they will realize that the jig is up and they had better put up or shut up but either way sod off with their hysterical anti-human, anti-science religious nonsense which is on the verge of becoming a major embuggerance thanks to the nincompoops at the UN and their legislative boosters.

If I may add to Georgia Clifton’s Open Letter to Home Schooling Parents on Behalf of Ron Paul:

When the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an organization of which I am a lifetime member, announced this past summer that they were endorsing Mike Huckabee’s candidacy for President, I had barely heard of Mike Huckabee and decided to do some research and learn about this candidate. As Christians, it is our duty to judge not according to appearance (or words), but to judge righteous judgment. When making weighty decisions such as who will become our next leader, we need to evaluate our choices carefully. My desire is to lay out the facts that I found concerning Mike Huckabee and ask that you receive them with an open spirit of discernment. I will conclude by presenting you with a powerful alternative that you should prayerfully consider.

Why did the HSLDA endorse Huckabee?
In endorsing Huckabee, the HSLDA said that he is:

1) “a principled conservative”
2) “a friend of homeschooling”
3) “a man of character”
4) “a man with a mature faith in Jesus Christ.”

These are the four reasons the HSLDA gave for supporting Mike Huckabee. Incidentally, this was the actual order in which they gave them. Let’s examine each one, in order of my own priorities:

A man with a mature faith in Jesus Christ?
It’s easy to make this claim, but it’s difficult to speak against it, so I won’t. The only way to know with certainty whether a brother has a “mature faith in Jesus Christ” is not to listen to their words, nor to even look at their actions, but to examine their fruit. Along this line, I would ask why Huckabee’s son David was accused of hanging a dog, slitting its throat and then stoning it to death?

[…]

Putting aside for a moment his irreverent attitude, consider this: he was presented with an opportunity to show us just how strong his faith is in the Scriptures and ultimately the Lord Jesus Christ, but he floundered. He then pointed out that he was the only one on that stage with a theological degree. I would remind all of us that Jesus warned us to “beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” This is the same man who took a pretend phone call from God. Blasphemous sacrilege!

[…]

A friend of homeschooling?
I count myself blessed to have known the beauty of loyalty in friendship. The word friend is a powerful word and brings to mind words like “loyalty,” “defense,” and “familiarity.” A friend stands by you through thick and thin and makes sacrifices for you when necessary. It may surprise you, then, that the New Hampshire NEA has also endorsed Huckabee. The NEA is the largest labor union in the United States and represents public school teachers. How can Mike Huckabee be loyal to both homeschoolers and the powerful public school lobby? The answer is: he can’t. Whoever will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God, and whoever is the friend of the public school union is the enemy of homeschoolers. This may explain why his “Issues: Education” webpage has only one brief and token sentence mentioning homeschooling. It may also explain why he defends the No Child Left Behind Act.

Where are Huckabee’s loyalties? Well, one morning in 1999, homeschoolers in Arkansas woke up to learn that they had been betrayed by their governor and friend, Mike Huckabee. The HSLDA had reported that under Gov. Huckabee, Arkansas became the first state in the nation to add restrictions to its existing home school law. From the report linked above, Huckabee signed the bill that the HSLDA specifically did not support. Can you call this man who signed legislation taking away our homeschooling freedoms a friend? Only if you are the NEA. Why did they pass this law? According to the HSLDA, the “public school lobby had been working overtime to convince the Arkansas legislature that the home school law was too permissive.” Rather than stand up against the powerful public school lobby, Huckabee caved in and took away freedoms that were previously given to homeschoolers. As the Psalmist wrote, “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.”

[…]

A man of character?
Where do I begin? I believe a man is only as good as his word, and when someone lies to me, I find it difficult to ever have that trust restored. I take lying very seriously. Mike Huckabee has been caught telling and repeating an outright falsehood. Read carefully this webpage that details how he got caught in this pretty blatant lie. How can you trust a man’s character when he is caught lying red-handed? Someone who tells lies is a liar, and that makes Mike Huckabee a liar. Why did the Arkansas Ethics Commission officially reprimand him for violations five times in 14 years?

What do his peers in Christianity say? The conservative “700 Club” has disowned him. What is his reputation like among those outside the church? He is known as someone who has “a mean streak, a thin skin and a penchant for revenge.” Huckabee is a member of a music band called “Capitol Offense.” Would Jesus form a band? If he did, would he name it something like that? According to the band’s website, they formed it because of their “love of … classic rock-n-roll.” Where is the gravity and sobriety that Titus chapter 2 calls for in an older man? It’s not a gospel music band, either. It is a cover band with a set list including songs such as “Born to be wild,” the highly sexually charged “Devil with a Blue Dress,” “Freebird, “Honky Tonk Woman, and other similarly ungodly songs. Go read the lyrics to Honky Tonk Woman (it’s offensive) and imagine the pastor of your church singing that song. If a leader in my church formed a band to play that kind of music, I would call that a very serious problem. And we call him a man of character? On the campaign trail and in debates, Huckabee frequently makes mention of his theological training and his status as an ordained minister. Jesus told us to beware of hypocrites who stand in street corners [feigning spirituality] wanting to be seen of men. We are told to go into our closet and close the door when we pray, so the Father can see us in secret. Why is Huckabee so vocal about his faith and his theological ordination? The only reason I can think of is that he’s doing it for political gains.

[…]

A principled conservative?
Huckabee’s history of pardoning violent felons with disastrous outcomes has been a major problem for his campaign. On immigration, he is a flip-flopper. As Arkansas’s governor, Huckabee supported in-state college tuition for young illegal immigrants, but recently, presumably for political expediency, has completely reversed his position. How about taxes? By the end of his ten-year tenure as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was responsible for a 37% higher sales tax, 16% higher motor fuel taxes, and 103% higher cigarette taxes, according to Americans for Tax Reform. Check out the infamous video of Governor Huckabee practically begging for any new tax.

What about pro-life issues? When asked about embryonic stem cell research, he said, “I don’t think it’s right to create a life to end a life.” So far, so good, but then he added, “That’s not a good health decision.” What on earth does that mean? He was later asked, “As president, you would seek to ban abortion?” and his response was that “I would seek always to promote the view that life is precious and should be protected. But I think it has to be won on a battlefield of one heart at a time rather than pieces of legislation at a time.” He clearly does not have a clear plan to stop or at least slow abortion.

I’m convinced, but what choice do we have? He’s the best candidate we have!
For this, I only need refer you to our brother, Dr. Ron Paul. For the sake of careful discernment, please look at Ron Paul with a fresh and unbiased eye. Ron Paul is a humble brother in Christ with a blameless record. His enemies have no ammunition against him, and his voting record as a 10-term congressman is consistent. He is a man who has proven himself to be trusted with the power he has been given. As an OB/GYN, he has delivered over 4,000 babies. He has been married for 50 years and has 5 children, 18 grandchildren and 1 great-grandchild. He is passionately pro-life and successfully defends that view against liberal pro-deathers. He has a plan to end abortion, starting with overturning Roe v. Wade and returning the decision to the local level where it will be handled by local leaders who must answer to their local voters.

His platform is strictly constitutionalist. His principle is that if the Constitution doesn’t specifically allow it, then the Federal government has no business doing it. He wants to abolish entirely the Department of Education, as well as many other massive unconstitutional government bureaucracies, and replace them with nothing. The beautiful thing is that we can trust him to actually do what he promises. He often repeats the mantra that he wants to “keep the government out of our lives.” As homeschoolers who want to raise our children ourselves, this should be music to our ears.

[…]

Is Ron Paul a friend of homeschoolers?
Ron Paul is the only candidate who has an entire microsite devoted specifically to the issue of homeschooling. According to Ron Paul, “The best way to improve education is to return control to the parents who know best what their children need. Congress should empower all parents, including home-schoolers, to control their children’s education…” Ron Paul also believes that “No nation can remain free when the state has greater influence over the knowledge and values transmitted to children than the family.” Amen! Back in the year 2001, Dr. Paul said, “Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states ‘accountable’ for their education performance. In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable by parents, not federal bureaucrats.” Virginia Baker, a national pioneer of present-day home schooling, and the first mother in Texas to do so, has formally endorsed Dr. Ron Paul. She said, “Dr. Paul is the homeschoolers best friend.”

A friend is someone who will loyally defend you, even to the point of sacrifice, and I personally trust ONLY Ron Paul in this area. There is no candidate that can be trusted to protect the rights of parents to direct their own children’s upbringing and education, except for Ron Paul. Jim Fedako, economist and homeschooling father of five wrote, “As a homeschooling father of five, I recognize that there are many individuals and groups who would like to force my children back into the public schools. In fact, the NEA has a statement on their legislative platform that advocates the end of the homeschooling movement. Ron Paul stands for Liberty. He stands for the right of my wife and I to educate our children at home, away from the influences of the NEA and other such organizations.” Ron Paul isn’t swayed by powerful lobbies. He never accepts bribes or gifts, and votes his conscience regardless of how unpopular it makes him. Ron Paul often finds himself casting the only “No” vote on bills before Congress that he sees as unconstitutional. In the face of what must be unimaginable intimidation, Dr. Paul stays true to what he believes. There are literally hundreds of other reasons to support Ron Paul’s candidacy, and I would encourage you to begin at Ron Paul’s website.

But the media keeps saying that he can’t win! I don’t want to waste my vote.
What right does the media have in telling us who can and can’t win an election? Can they see the future? Or do they have information that is not generally available to the public? What is their track record in correctly predicting the outcome of elections? The truth is, Ron Paul dominates in straw polls, and he has raised many millions of dollars from tens of thousands of personal donations. He has an excellent chance of winning, despite what you may have been told. I would say that to simply vote the way the media tells you to vote is the only way to waste your vote. Vote for who you believe is the best candidate, regardless of who you are told is winning. Please, for the sake of our future liberty as homeschooling families, give this serious thought, discernment, and prayer. Should you choose to support Ron Paul, please pray for him, his family, and his candidacy. Support him financially, and tell other homeschooling families about this champion of our liberty.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/whitinger1.html

???!!!

Shocking!

TOKYO (Reuters) – Yes, UFOs do exist, Japan’s top government spokesman said on Tuesday.

The comment by chief cabinet secretary Nobutaka Machimura drew laughter from reporters at his regular briefing on government policy.

Earlier the cabinet, responding to an opposition lawmaker’s question, issued a statement saying it could not confirm any cases of unidentified flying objects.

“This is an issue that the nation is interested in — it is a defence issue and a confirmation operation needs to take place,” Ryuji Yamane, a lawmaker from the main opposition Democratic Party who submitted the question to the cabinet, told Reuters.

“But the government does not even try to collect information necessary for the confirmation.”

Machimura, asked about the government’s view on UFOs at a regular press conference, told reporters that the government can only offer a stereotyped response.

“Personally, I definitely believe they exist,” he said, apparently tongue in cheek.

But the prime minister stuck to the official view.

“I have yet to confirm (that UFOs exist),” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters later in the day.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota and George Nishiyama, Editing by Michael Watson)

[…]

http://uk.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUKT37017220071218

In a country where ‘face’ is central to the identity of the individual, being publicly laughed at by brain dead robot journalists must have hurt.

Nobutaka Machimura however, will be vindicated. He will stand with the other great men of history and reason who made statements like, “The Earth is round”, and, “The Earth orbits around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth”.

As for the journalists who laughed out loud at this intelligent man, well, they are on the wrong side of history.

UFOs are a matter of National Defense interest. Ex members of the French government say so, and so does everyone else with even the slightest bit of knowledge about this subject, which sadly, (or maybe not sadly) most people haven’t got even the first clue.

Bring on the ridicule in the form of Santa Claus jokes. No matter what anyone says, UFO’s are REAL and there are no two ways about it.

UPDATE!

Note how BBQ propagandists spin this story:

[…]

Earlier, in response to a question from an opposition lawmaker, the Japanese government issued a statement saying it could not confirm any cases of UFOs.

But Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura later told reporters he believed they were “definitely” real.

It is the sort of question politicians dread but, under Japanese rules, are unable to ignore.

A member of the opposition asked the government what its policy was to deal with UFOs.

He said work should begin urgently to try to confirm whether or not they exist because of what he called “incessant” reports of sightings.

[…]

Seems ok doesn’t it? it is true that the reports of UFOs are constant; incessant is a good way to describe the frequency, and we are not talking about reports of sundogs, as this lame ass pathetic moron does by inference in this absurd article.

[…]
Most alerts turned out to be birds or other objects.
[…]

This is lie speak.

If there were one million bad reports and only one genuine report of a UFO that could be explained in no other terms other than an alien space craft, then the case is proven. It is completely irrelevant that there are many misidentifications; what IS relevant are the many extraordinarily high quality cases that are on the record. Any good journalist with a working brain would know this.

One of the best documented cases was a JAL (Japan Air Lines) pilots report which is a very high quality report. That line is just a propaganda style lie.

[…]
Perhaps with his tongue a little in his cheek he insisted that he believed UFOs did “definitely” exist.
[…]

Or perhaps not? We can never be sure with any report that comes from BBQ!

and here comes the prejudicial final punch:

[…]
Questioned about the existence of alien spaceships, Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda thought about it and then answered carefully.

He said he had “not yet confirmed” whether they existed.

The conspiracy theorists will note that the answer was not a “no”.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7150156.stm

Whenever BBQ or any mainstream media outlet wants to demonize and discredit a person, they pull out the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ and when they want to discredit or trash an idea, they use the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’.

Neither of these applies to the subject of UFOs. Only a fool believes in UFOs; rational people come to the understanding that some UFOs can only be explained as the space craft of alien beings visiting Earth.

These ideas however, are far too subtle for the likes of ‘Chris Hogg’ who it appears, cannot even use the Googles.

What amazes me is that someone somewhere in BBQ thinks it necessary to derail and control information and the thinking about UFOs. But then again, it isn’t too surprising is it?

Or is that a conspiracy theory?!