Child database system postponed

Ministers are postponing a new database on every child in England, pending a security review and changes to the system including its access controls.

Children’s minister Kevin Brennan told MPs there would be a five-month delay to the £224m system, ContactPoint.

The security review was ordered after the loss of child benefit discs.

ContactPoint holds name, address, date of birth, gender, parental contact information, details of school and any professionals working with the child.

It does not include actual case records.

The database came out of the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie and is designed to make it easier to co-ordinate the work of different child protection agencies.

‘Questions raised’

Mr Brennan said in a statement: “Over the last few months we have been considering the substantial stakeholder feedback we have received and looked at the implications that the resulting proposed changes could have on the system.

“It is clear from the considerable work we have done so far that we will need more time than we originally planned to address the changes to ContactPoint which potential system users suggested.”

The change to the timetable will mean deployment to the “early adopters” local authorities and national agencies in September or October 2008, and to all others by May 2009.

Mr Brennan said the loss of the Revenue and Customs child benefit data “has raised questions about the safety of large scale personal data in other government systems, including ContactPoint”.

An independent assessment of security procedures would be undertaken by Deloitte.

“Delaying the implementation of ContactPoint will enable the independent assessment of security procedures to take place as well as address the changes to ContactPoint that potential system users have told us they need,” Mr Brennan said.

He added: “The fundamental design of ContactPoint will not change; the alterations will make sure the system works even more effectively for users and improves the ability of local authority ContactPoint teams to manage user access.”

Shadow Children’s Minister Maria Miller said: “The government should also use this opportunity to see whether it really is necessary to have a database for every single child in the country, accessible to 330,000 people, given the significant amount of concern that this could overload the system and lead to a dumbing down of information.

“We have always supported, as an alternative, a slimmed-down tightly controlled database which focuses on those genuinely vulnerable children.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7115546.stm

My emphasis.

This is one of the most absurd statements ever. Just when you thought that they couldn’t get more stupid, we have the imbecile ‘Kevin Brennan’ saying they need more time to CHANGE THE VERY NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE and RE-DEFINE THE RULES OF MATHEMATICS before they roll out ContactPoint.

The fact is, you computer illiterate JACKASS, no matter how long you delay it, not matter what you do to re-design it, data will always be copyable, and if you put together ContactPoint in the way it has been planned, it will still be copyable. Read how this is going to be done, in evidence already submitted to you. Even if you make it difficult for insiders with root level DB access, wholesale copying WILL take place on a page by page basis. Remember, there are going to be 300,000 people with authorized access; it will be impossible to monitor them all, like that PHD’s submission says.

No amount of security reviews will be able to stop people from printing off ContactPoint pages. Deloitte knows this. The alterations you are talking about will do nothing to reduce the risk you are putting all the children of the UK in.

These are the FACTS.

ContactPoint MUST BE ABANDONED COMPLETELY, and it is absolutely sickening that you and your inhuman child harming monster colleagues are pushing on with this abomination.

This story shows the extent to which these people are a bunch of mentally retarded incompetent liars. According to BBQ:

Private data ‘also given to firm’

Unencrypted discs with 25 million Child Benefit records on them were handed to an accountancy firm by government auditors, it has emerged.

Obviously the drone that wrote this report has taken the phrase ‘unencrypted discs’ and inserted them here because she thinks that any disc that leaves the government must be encrypted to protect it. The fact is in this case, the disc was handed over personally, and so wether or not it was encrypted is not an issue. What IS an issue is that the data was not anonymised, and that someone had root aceess to the database to be able to export all the tables.

The National Audit Office (NAO) gave the CDs – similar to the ones lost by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) officials – to accountants KPMG for auditing.

It said the discs – with bank account details on them – were delivered “by hand” to KPMG and returned safely.

The Information Commissioner is probing whether data laws were broken.

A spokesman said the commissioner would be looking at “all aspects” of data protection surrounding the missing Child Benefit records as part of its investigation.

‘All aspects’ will not include wether or not ContactPoint is to be abandoned no doubt.

Meanwhile, police looking for the missing discs say they expect to finish their search at the HM Revenue and Customs office in Tyne and Wear on Friday night. The focus will then turn to premises run by the couriers, TNT.

Something of this value that has been missing for this long will have been copied, so even if they find the discs, the data is out there now. Period. The fact that everyone is scrambling around to find these discs (especially in the light of this story) and not shouting for the closure of ‘the database state’ shows just how STUPID they all are.

‘Treated securely’

An NAO spokesman said it had not asked for sensitive information to be included in the material sent to it by HMRC – but it was confident it had taken steps to ensure its security.

This is absurd. Once the data is out there, all the measures in the world will not put it back. The motherlode has already been shot. There is now no real incentive for criminals to get a hold of any other database because this one will satisfy any criminal for years to come.

This is what we have been saying for years. Once the data is out there, it can never be put back. This cannot be undone. No penalty, no sanction, no censure, no sentence can un-violate the violated.

“We feel we treated this data securely but at the same time we will look at any lessons that may have to be learned,” he added.

If you feel that then you are an unmitigated imbecile.

The data given to KPMG was for the 2006/07 audit and was sent to the NAO offices in March this year. The missing data was produced for the 2007/08 audit.

The details were revealed in a letter sent by the NAO, which was released on Thursday.

The letter from an NAO director, whose name is blanked out, says: “I also confirm that I have asked KPMG to provide me with assurances that they have deleted or erased the data that they analysed as part of our 2006-07 Resource Accounts audit.”

All it takes is one employee to make a pair of copy discs, or ISO images, store them on his iPhone or iPod or laptop, and then BOOM the data is out there forever. There is no way of knowing that it was done or who might have copied the discs. Any assurances, even if given honestly, are worthless. And I GUARANTEE you that this data is lurking in one of KPMG’s backup devices!

Returned safely

The letter was dated 9 November – the day after senior management at HMRC was told about the missing discs.

The NAO told the BBC the data was delivered to KPMG’s offices by hand and had now been returned safely.

This is so TARDED it is beyond belief. These people clearly think that discs are analogous to paper. Even PAPER can be copied after it is handed over, so these assurances are not only wrong, but they are extremely insulting to anyone with half a working brain cell.

A KPMG spokesman agreed with this statement and said any trace of the data contained on the discs had been erased from the company’s computer system.

The Child Benefit details had originally been put on to disc and forwarded to the NAO by HMRC officials at its Tyne and Wear offices in March.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7108532.stm

Even if this is true, they cannot GUARANTEE that no one copied the data while the discs were in their offices. If they did give such a guarantee, they would be certifiably insane, because there is no way to distinguish a released copy of the discs that escaped from another source and the data set that they were handed. It would be easy to say that ‘it was not us’ and there would be no way to prove or disprove it.

Needless to say, this BBQ report does not counter each of the bogus and TARDED points that have been put out there to re-assure the sheeple public. This is another …YET ANOTHER… example of poor journalism from BBQ. But I digress.

It is abundantly clear that no one can trust these people to handle any sort of data, and it is abundantly clear taht they are the most incompetent people in this country.

It is ASTONISIHING that audits are not ‘done in house’ and that private firms are hired to do the work. Is there NOTHING that the government does for itself? is there nothing that is not outsourced?

And now we hear that they did it DELIBERATELY with forethought:

A secret meeting of senior Whitehall officials made the decision to release personal information on millions of people, it emerged last night, as the “cover-up” row in the lost data scandal deepened.

The Daily Telegraph has established that officials from at least three units within HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) authorised the decision not to strip out sensitive, confidential data before sending the child benefit records of 25 million people through the post.

Nigel Jordan, an assistant director at HMRC, who received copies of key correspondence on the release of the information, is to be hauled before the Commons public accounts committee to explain how the records were lost.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/24/ncustoms124.xml

Once again, they can haul whomever they like before a committee; that will not put the genie back in the bottle!

These mentally retarded subhuman monsters JUST DONT GET IT; they have let escape, on more than one occasion, a perfect, formatted, searchable, exportable, plaintext list of ALL THE CHILDREN IN THE UK along with their parents names, addresses and bank account details of same.

They should all be hung drawn and quartered.

OR

They should take immediate steps to make sure that such a thing can never happen again. That means abandoning all databases involving children and citizens of the UK, and doing everything in the list on this post.

It will be literally a generation before the effects of this disaster start to wind down and the data becomes so out of date that it is rendered useless and worthless. If the government stops collecting and centralizing data on British Citizens now, and return to tightly compartmentalized systems that cannot easily compromise privacy, by the time we reach 2075 they will have a system in place that actually works for the population without violating them, and a population that is no longer in danger from these two DVDs.

My name is Wilfried De Brouwer.

I am a retired Major General of the Belgian Air Force and I was Chief (of) Operations in the Air Staff when an exceptional UFO wave took place over Belgium.

Indeed, during the evening of 29 November 1989, in a small area in Eastern Belgium, approximately 140 UFO sightings were reported. Hundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately 120 feet, powerful beaming spot lights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds.

The following days and months, many more sightings would follow. The UFO wave would last more than one year during which a Belgian UFO organization conducted more than 650 investigations and recorded more than 400 hours of audio witness reports. On one occasion, a photograph revealed the triangular shape and four light beams of the object.

Belgium had no official focal point for reporting UFO observations. Nevertheless, in my function of Chief Operations, I was confronted with numerous questions about the origin and nature of these craft.

In the first instance, and in consultation with other NATO partners, I could confirm that no flights of stealth aircraft or any other experimental aircraft look place in the airspace of Belgium. In addition, the Civil Aviation Authorities confirmed that no flight plans had been introduced. This implied that the reported object(s) committed an infraction against the existing aviation rules.

The F-16 – UFO chase map for March 30-31, 1990

The Belgian Air Force tried to identify the alleged intruder(s) and, on three occasions, launched F-16 aircraft. On one occasion, two F-16 registered rapid changes in speed and altitude which were well outside of the performance envelope of existing aircraft.

Nevertheless, the pilots could not establish visual contact and the investigation revealed that specific weather conditions may have caused electromagnetic interferences and false returns on the radar screens. The technical evidence was insufficient to conclude that abnormal air activities took place during that evening.

In short, the Belgian UFO wave was exceptional and the Air Force could not identify the nature, origin and intentions of the reported phenomena.

Wilfried De Brouwer
November 12, 2007

http://www.irdial.com/triangle_1.htm
http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1125.htm

Everyone now seems to be waking up to what we and other people have been saying for four years.

What they are NOT doing, is going far enough.

Once again the following must be totally SCRAPPED in order to protect the privacy of the British Public:

• The NIR – the National Identity Register that backs the ID Card.




• Mass Fingerprinting – Compulsory fingerprinting for access to anything must be outlawed.




• The NHS ‘Spine’ – The NHS SPine must be scrapped, as it suffers from the same vulnerabilities as all centralized databases do.




• ContactPoint – The database of all children in the UK must be scrapped, as it is no different to any of the other databases listed above.




• Project Semaphore – The plan to collect 53 pieces of data on all travellers flying to the UK (a mirror project of USVISIT) must be stopped. USVISIT has cost the american people BILLIONS of dollars and only 1500 people have been caught, millions have been subjected to humiliation and violation and none of the people caught have been identified as ‘terrorists’. No one in the UK has done a cost benefit analasis of Project Semaphore and USVISIT; had they done so, they would have found that it is a total waste of money.

All of these projects MUST BE ABANDONED and the contracts terminated, even if there are penalties to be paid.

It’s good news to hear that people are FINALLY waking up, and I know that we have done our own small part in getting the word out about what a disaster this is in the making. Now lets FINISH THE JOB. No signing up for ID cards, demand that your doctor remove your records from his system, and NEVER give your fingerprint to anyone for ANY reason.

This rabid mania for ‘registers’ should now be put out of the minds of the brain dead subhumans who run the government, PERMANENTLY.

Who would have thought that four .25p DVDRs could bring down billion pound contracts and a fascist police state control system?!

The fact of the matter is that these corrupt regimes and their infernal tools are as weak as spiders webs. All it takes is one touch and the whole thing can be brought down. In this case, the biometric net is the weak premise being destroyed.

On the cover of every newspaper in the UK is this news, which should come as no surprise to anyone:

Revenue & Customs loses personal details of 25m people
Deborah Summers and agencies
Tuesday November 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The chancellor, Alistair Darling, today admitted the personal details of 25 million individuals had been lost by HM Revenue and Customs.

The information includes the names, dates-of-birth, national insurance numbers and in some cases the bank details of those claiming child benefits.

Paul Gray, the chairman of HM Revenue and Customs, today resigned over the “extremely serious failure” of security.

In a Commons statement greeted by gasps of astonishment from MPs, Darling told the Commons that two discs containing details of the 7.25 million families claiming child benefit, sent to the National Audit Office, failed to reach the addressee.

[…]

The Guardian

I hate to say it, but I TOLD YOU SO.

The personal details of TWENTY FIVE MILLION PEOPLE contained on TWO DVDRs is now missing.

Here are some obvious questions you would ask of a person who is not incompetent:

What the hell are you doing sending data by post? THAT IS WHAT TEH INTERNETS ARE FOR.
What the hell are you doing burning data onto DVDs?

Data sets the size of DVDs are downloaded MILLIONS OF TIMES A DAY. Are these people really THAT INSANE?

Now.

Is there anyone left ON THIS PLANET that thinks the government should take your fingerprints and photos and use them to administer a national ID card? Is there anyone left IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE that thinks ContactPoint is a good thing?

I should think not.

Even if they get those discs back, this is a vivid demonstration of how two very small objects can hold the details of the lives of MILLIONS of people. If this information was not held on computers, it would not be possible for the government to create and then misplace such discs, and that is the way it should be, since they are amongst the most incompetent organizations in this or any other universe.

A database of convicted criminals is another story, but these databases of ordinary people must be COMPLETELY OUTLAWED so that it is impossible for data breaches of this kind to take place. Just read the absolute STUPIDITY of these people:

The chancellor told MPs the information went missing after a junior official in the department failed to follow standard procedures and sent a “full copy of the data” to the NAO by courier – not by recorded or registered mail.

When it became clear the discs had not arrived, the same official sent the information again – this time by registered post.

What this article does not mention is wether or not the data on these two, sorry, FOUR DVDRs was encrypted or not.

Had the data been encrypted with GPG, it would not matter if the discs went missing, because it would be impossible to get anything off of them.

But then, using GPG is something COMPETENT people do, not the likes of Citizen Brown and his bumbling buffoons.

Amazingly, this incompetent government has just invoked RIPA against an animal rights activist, threatening her with gaol if she refuses to provide the password to the encrypted data on her hard drive.

You cant make shit like this up.

These people REALLY ARE BUFFOONS.

Think about it. Those discs are worth literally MILLIONS of pounds to a large number of people, criminals being far down on the list.

Finally, this is the insult above all insults:

Campaign group Action on Rights for Children (Arch) warned that children could have been put in danger. “It’s a simple and vital precaution which any self-respecting government agency should be practicing,” its director, Terri Dowty, said.

“This appalling security lapse has placed children in the UK in immediate danger especially those who are already vulnerable.

“Child benefit records contain every child’s address and date of birth. We are not surprised that the chair of HMRC’s board has resigned immediately.”

Arch accused the government of ignoring warnings over the dangers of creating “large centralised databases” of sensitive information about children.

ARCH are a group that is rightly skeptical about ContactPoint.

Now that everyone can see what a TOTAL NIGHTMARE these systems are hopefully this will add tremendous momentum to their absolute abolition.

If you go along willingly with any of this, ID Cards, NIR, ContactPoint, then you can count yourself amongst the stupidest people in the history of mankind.

Once again, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

UPDATE:

The Telegraph echoes BLOGDIAL:

The disks are now either languishing in the bottom of a postbag in the bowels of a London sorting office or are in the hands of organised criminals somewhere in Africa or Asia.

It is an astonishing, almost grotesque, failure that will come to symbolise the gradual collapse of Whitehall’s Rolls Royce reputation into the equivalent of an old heap ready for the scrap-yard.

The only benefit that might possibly come out of it is that surely, now, the Government cannot proceed with the ID card project.

Can it?

[…]

Telegraph

Momentum indeed!

Listen to this recording of a phone call between Alex Jones and an Iranian, from Friday the 9th of November.

In the 15 minutes and 24 seconds that it lasts, you get more information about what is happening and what has happened than, frankly, most people can handle.

A lurker sent me this:

Its almost like she’s quoting from Blogdial.

Heh…

Peer ‘ready to defy ID card law’
The Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Williams has said she would rather go to prison than carry an identity card.

Baroness Williams said the cards would seriously undermine individual liberty so people were entitled to refuse their co-operation, using non-violent means.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, she described the plans as “a Big Brother scheme of the most terrifying kind”.

From 2010, all UK passport applicants will be issued with biometric ID cards.

The £5.6bn scheme will also mean all foreign nationals will have to carry them from next year.

The government says cards will help protect people from identity fraud, will tackle illegal working and illegal immigration, and disrupt criminals and terrorists’ use of false identities and ensure free public services are only used by those entitled to them.

But Baroness Williams said: “Because it is so expensive the government has proposed that it will sell our data to commercial interests who will then be able to track down every damn thing you do from dawn until dusk.

“And you won’t be able to escape from it because the ID card which will be checked against your credit card will be a record of exactly where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who you’ve talked to.

“My view quite simply is that the ID card will undermine individual liberty so seriously that one’s entitled to say one won’t co-operate with it.

“I have not suggested I would use violence. I am suggesting I wouldn’t co-operate with it, nor will I.”

Asked whether that meant she would go to prison for breaking the law, she replied: “So be it – and I’m not suggesting any act of violence but we’ve got to not co-operate with something as bad as this.”

Nick Clegg, one of the party’s leadership candidates, has also stated he would take part in a civil disobedience campaign against ID cards.

Last month, he said if legislation were passed, he would lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the programme and thousands of people would simply refuse to register.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7088315.stm

She is right of course.

But what she has failed to understand (or at least failed to say) is that exactly the same dangers exist if you simply apply for a passport and hand over your fingerprints.

Once they have your fingerprints, they can use both stationary and mobile fingerprint readers to interface with the NIR in lieu of a physical card.

It is the NIR which is the danger, not the physical card alone.

If Dame Shirley is really serious, she should encourage everyone to refuse to be fingerprinted by the authorities for any reason. That means not applying for a new passport until the requirement of fingerprinting is eliminated.

Violence is absolutely not required. All you need to do is get everyone to agree to refuse to co-operate. That is the only thing that is required.

As for her reading BLOGDIAL, that may or may not be the case. What we do know with absolute certainty is that she has read the ‘Frances Stonor Saunders‘, which spells out beautifully and perfectly what ID cards are all about. We know this because everyone in the Lords read it.

This scheme is going to fail. The next part they are trying to bring in is the fingerprinting and registration of all foreigners. This is not only discriminatory, but it is insanely stupid, as we have said over and over again.

Firstly:

[…]

It’s certainly possible that people might find ways to mount legal challenges to compulsory ID cards, but the most obvious potential challenge would be over the introduction of an ID card for EU citizens resident in the UK. This is specified in the ID Cards Act, and can only go ahead without being challenged by Brussels if compulsory ID cards for all UK citizens also go ahead. The moment Gordon Brown’s Government admits that compulsory ID cards aren’t going to happen for UK citizens is the moment that he also has to abandon them for non-UK EU citizens, because he’s not permitted to discriminate against them.

[…]

The Register

And secondly, you cannot discriminate against foreigners who are not EU citizens because that is….DISCRIMINATION.

Thirdly, this doesn’t make any sense on a practical level. If you stop someone (you being a police man) and then use your mobile NIR fingerprint reader to scan the person, and they are NOT in the NIR, what does this mean? IT can mean one of several things:

This person is not in the database because he is an:

1. Illegal immigrant
2. ID card Refusnik
3. British Citizen without a passport

So, what do you do?

You have to haul in the person wether they are entitled not to be in the NIR or not, just like they do in Belgium if you are caught in the street without your ID. You are taken to the police station until they can find out exactly who you are. Them not knowing who you are at all times is a crime in Belgium, and it is the logical conclusion of having a compulsory ID card. But I digress.

The only way to be sure that only criminals are not in the database is to put all the law abiding citizens in the database. Fingerprinting only foreigners is insanely stupid because it is impossible to distinguish between a foreigner and a True Brit^®. An identity database that only targets foreigners or that is voluntary is useless for the purposes of identifying people on a routine basis. The above leaves out all the moral objections any of which is enough to destroy a scheme like this.

Fingerprinting is for criminals and the detection of crime. It should be done only when a person is convicted of a crime, and if someone is convicted and later acquitted, those records should be erased. That is the only fit purpose for this technology, and it should be used to speed up the identification of known criminals and nothing more.

Fingerprinting everyone in a country is very much the ‘Nuclear Option’ in the identity arena, and this option should be and will be shunned by all decent and properly informed people.

Just you watch.

Media Matters has a piece on a Fox News item where one of their journalists is put through waterboarding ‘to see what it is like’.

Of course, it is a total sham and pure propaganda.

This journalist is in TOTAL CONTROL of the process; when he says ‘stop’ they stop immediately. This is nothing like real torture, where you have NO CONTROL AT ALL and you are AT THE MERCY of the interrogator.

An eternity ago we wrote about a Channel 4 documentary where people were put through ‘The Gitmo experience™’ as an experiment:

Monday, February 28, 2005

On Channel 4’s programme about Guantanamo, an Oxford student who volunteered to be tortured was shaved bald, stripped naked, and forced to listen to…

THROBBING GRISTLE: ‘SUBHUMAN’

and…that was the point at which he broke.

This total moron (and another one who bottle out) thought that Guantanamo was needed ‘to catch the bad guys’. After 40 hours and TG, he totally changed his mind. What a stupid idiot.

Will somebody please PLEASE wake me up!

THAT is the story that everyone needs to see, not some pathetic fake, Torture Feelgood™ ‘demonstration’ designed to pull the wool over your eyes.

You can watch the whole series for yourself to see what we are talking about, and what a sham that Fox News item is.

Fox News transmitting a deception…quelle suprise!

Now we have this:

Schoolgirls to get ‘cancer jab’

HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer

Schoolgirls in Britain will be vaccinated against the virus that causes cervical cancer from September 2008, ministers have announced. This goes further than recommended by experts, with all aged 12-13 eligible, and a catch-up campaign up to 18.

It is thought that vaccinating against human papilloma virus (HPV) could save hundreds of lives in the UK each year.

The vaccine is given in three injections over six months at a cost of around £300 a course.

Note the syntax, that schoolgirls WILL BE VACCINATED. Not, ‘parents will be offered vaccination for their children’. And all that this difference implies.

Note also that ‘Boys will not be vaccinated under today’s announcement, after the JCVI said it was not cost-effective.’ Not cost-effective. There you go, the ultimate deciding factor is cost. Not health. Which is bizarre, as this will cost 100-200 million of your GB pounds per annum to save around 300-700 lives, depending on who is giving the figures. Cost-effective?

Note finally that the vaccine to be used has not been chosen. Imagine the lobbying going on! This is multi-multi-millions over many years… Do you trust our politicians not to be ‘influenced’ in any way, and to come to the best decision for spending your taxes? Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?

We would say this is a piece of Public Heath Theatre. Are you clapping along in the audience?

——

Below are excerpts from emails relating to the previous En Gardasil post. They are a lesson in trust. Trusting your source, or not, and remembering that ‘good’ lies are no better than ‘evil’ ones. An open, curious mind is a very sharp weapon.

……..

May I burn down that straw man?

Aspirin is safe; that is the difference between it and Guadakill. Aspirin was initially prepared from the bark of trees. It is a naturally occurring medicine, unlike Guardakill which is a man made poison.

There is *no straw man here*. Aspirin and STW are used, in my context, to denounce your point on alum, i.e. that just because you don’t understand how something works doesn’t mean it must be distrusted. One could apply this to all homeopathy, I just picked SJW at random. According to ‘the science’ SJW is no more effective than a placebo.
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/stjohnswort/#science
And that from the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

St Johns Wort is also a naturally occurring plant, and is therefore much safer and preferable as a medicine. It also has a long history of safe use.

Now, HERE is a straw man. I would guess there are many more deaths from digitalis than Gardasil will ever manage, despite also being a plant with a long history of safe use. Aspirin kills 500 people in the US per year, apparently. Just a stat, and probably through misuse, but its still a killer. One can twist anything… omigoditsachemical! …. its all about context.

Alum has been used for /just/ 60 years and has recently been ‘proven’ safe on paper, when anyone who has used it has known it is safe in vivo. And yes, I’ve used it and taken it.
http://www.drugresearcher.com/news/ng.asp?id=49797-alum-given-clean

Together we could say “Who do you trust?”. Or, “Why trust one drug and not the other?”, as someone clever once said. Now we both know the answers to /those/ questions.

Mankind is much better off living inside and with his environment. Guardakill is an unnatural medicine; the need for it is artificial, the lust behind its making is the lust for money, and while the medicine itself is not evil, the people who make it most certainly are.

I would agree with this. What I wouldn’t agree with is throwing petrol and matches on non-existant straw men. There should be enough real, substantive data and well-argued opinion (and there is) to let people come to their own conclusion… that only a fool would inject their child with ‘GovDrugX’.

Guardasil has killed people. That is a fact.

No it’s not! You can show people the reality, but you can’t make up ‘the truth’. Those FDA reports should put enough doubt in anyones mind about Gardasil, but there is no “Gardasil Kills – Fact”. If one starts sounding like the Daily Mail, credibility flies out of the window.

The rules of peer review do not extend into the coroners office, and those recorded deaths and the numbers of people damaged are *not* opinion. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is not going to falsely attribute death to a vaccine (I would imagine) which is where those numbers come from.

Wrong again! I read all the FDA/VAERS reports last night and not a
single one attributes death to Gardasil.

Not.
A.
Single.
One.

They merely report adverse effects in anything from minutes to weeks following Gardasil vaccination. Many of the patients had other injections at the same time. Many had so long between jab and death that mentioning Gardasil seems nothing more than thoroughness.

Now, you KNOW what I think of these ‘medicines’, and you know what I will do for my daughter. If drugs like Gardasil and chickenpox vaccineare to exposed for the fraudulent, greed-soaked tripe that they are then it must be done through strong, coherent argument and not by setting flame to reality.

—————————————–

just because you don’t understand how something works doesn’t mean it must be distrusted.

It shouldn’t be distrusted by itself, but when people are compelling you to take it, common sense says (at least to me) it has to be 100% understood before compulsion. There shouldn’t be any doubt over the mechanism or the elements, otherwise, it should be 100% voluntary.

Gardasil is so new and novel WITHOUT teh accelerant it should absolutely not be mandatory, or anywhere near mandatory. Also no one has pointed out that HPV is not like chickenpox or the flu – it spreads only in a very particular way, by sex. Vaccinations should be used where disease is spread non consensually, i.e. through sneezing – where the public health is at risk, and even that is a near bogus rationale.

But I digress.

One could apply this to all homeopathy, I just picked SJW at random.

Homeopathy is voluntary, as all medicines should be. If it works, then you keep using it. Gardasil doesn’t work to provide life long immunity, and so it is broken out of the vial. By the time a 12 year old reaches drinking age its efficacy will be gone. It is a total sheep dip vaccine.

According to ‘the science’ SJW is no more effective than a placebo.

I don’t believe these studies, in the same way that the anti-homeopathy brigade to not believe the century plus of of trials that homeopathic medicines have been through. These people have an agenda that has nothing to do with health, and everything to do with control of science.
But I digress again.

And that from the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

which is run by the US government, the same organization that mandates vaccines like Guardakil. YEAH, I’m really going to trust *them*.

Aspirin kills 500 people in the US per year, apparently.

and so, should we now ban aspirin or provide defenses against it that are mandated by law? The numbers are almost the same as those who die from Cervical Cancer…

Just a stat, and probably through misuse, but its still a killer. One can twist anything… omigoditsachemical! …. its all about context.

exactly, and Gardasil is the same as anything else; /until it is mandated/ this is the biggest problem with it. Anyone can produce any medicine they like. You are free to take it or not, after you have made a jugement in concert with your doctor. That is your and my right.
Gardasil and the politcs surrounding it break, sour and queer the relationship between patient and doctor. That is probably its most evil effect.

Together we could say “Who do you trust?”. Or, “Why trust one drug and not the other?”, as someone clever once said. Now we both know the answers to /those/ questions.

I trust the one that is old and not mandated. I do not trust the one that is new and mandated. That is my rule, and I apply it to all my medicines. I will not be a party to experimentation or the recouping of someone’s R&D.

If someone I trust explains that Alum is safe in a very particular context, then I will trust it, otherwise, I do not trust any medicine without looking into it myself and getting other opinions.

There should be enough real, substantive data and well-argued opinion (and there is) to let people come to their own conclusion… that only a fool would inject their child with ‘GovDrugX’.

This is about trust. We cannot trust the people who make Gardasil and anyone who promotes it because the whole programme is tainted from the off. People cannot come to that conclusion on their own because it is hard to be a dissenting voice in this matter if you do not have the credentials.

there is no “Gardasil Kills – Fact”.

So you are telling me that the report that attributes the deaths of
those girls to Gardasil is false, yes?

Wrong again! I read all the FDA/VAERS reports last night and not a single one attributes death to Gardasil.

then what you are saying is that Judicial Watch are libeling Merc. Both things cannot be true at the same time.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/6428.shtml says unambiguously that the deaths are related to Gardasil. Are you saying that they are lying?

http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2007/GardasilVAERSUpdatedDeaths0907.pdf

??? so the above is a forgery? Help me out here!

That is a VAERS report listing Gardasil as the cause of death!

they would NEVER list Gardasil as the cause of death if they were
not absolutely sure would they not?

What have I missed here?

I’m not sure what the reality is; VARERS says ‘death by Gardasil’ you
say no such reports even exist.

The ambiguity, the complexity, everything about it screams out to me that it must be totally shunned. An impenetrable reality is as bad as a lie, and in the face of that, taking the risk is just not an option.

Then add into the mix that Justice Watch had to sue for the information, the case is closed; these guys are evil and their medicine is no good!

————————————————————–

So you are telling me that the report that attributes the deaths of those girls to Gardasil is false, yes?

JudicialWatch’s conclusion that G-causes-D is OPINION based on a misinterpretation of official documents. The reports never link G and D. They are simple, clear reports which state known facts about each case.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/6428.shtml says unambiguously that the deaths are related to Gardasil. Are you saying that they are lying?

Not lying per se, but distorting beyond reasonable limits. As I said
previously, this does no good and leaves them looking like rabid haters without the ability to construct a strong enough argument from the available information, without resorting to screeching FEAR! EVIL! DEATH!

That is a VAERS report listing Gardasil as the cause of death!

NO!!! Read that pdf!
Lets see…
1st page: ‘Gardasil did not cause the patients death’

P.2 ‘Cause of death was sudden death’. Other factors involved. Does notblame Gardasil.

P.3 All just hearsay! A nurse who heard from a nurse… and anaphylaxis DOES NOT occur 3 days after exposure. It’s a bit quicker than that. Ask anyone with a peanut/bee sting allergy. Does not blame Gardasil.

P.4 Hearsay! Bloodclot 2 weeks after vacc. Could have been any cause! Does not blame Gardasil.

P.5 Death 2 weeks after vacc. No direct link at all. Does not blame Gardasil.

P.6 Another 2 week gap Does not blame Gardasil.

P.7 States ‘manner of death natural’!!!! Does not blame Gardasil.

P.8 History of heart problems, died of heart problem. Does not blame Gardasil.

P.9 Viral sepsis and secondary infection. Symptoms started BEFORE last vaccine. Does not blame Gardasil.

P.10 Hearsay, no cause of death reported. Does not blame Gardasil.

Are you now seeing the difference between the official VAERS reports and the conlusions/opinions in the JudWac piece?

then they would NEVER list Gardasil as the cause of death if they were not absolutely sure would they not?

See above; Gardasil is NEVER listed as cause of death by VAERS.

Why trust one source and not another?
Just because JudWac appear to agree with our stance on BigPharma does not mean they are virtuous truth-givers. They have their agenda, just as Merck does.
We at Blogdial should know better though, and decide for ourselves.

Now, who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? ((C) Groucho)

What have I missed here?

The blindingly obvious! That Mercks clinical trial, and JudWac’s take on the VAERS reports are all spin to support a position, and somewhere under it all, crushed and splintered, lies the reality.

I’m not sure what the reality is; VARERS says ‘death by Gardasil’ you say no such reports even exist.

VAERS NEVER EVER says death by Gardasil.

The ambiguity, the complexity, everything about it screams out to me that it must be totally shunned. An impenetrable reality is as bad as a lie, and in the face of that, taking the risk is just not an option.

But we can find the reality, when we remember to treat JudWac with the same basic scepticism that we treat Merck. I would like to believe JudWac, but they give me no reason to do so when I look at the reality behind what they are saying.

these guys are evil and their medicine is no good!

And JudWac are misguided, severely biased, narrow-minded, blinkered scaremongers whose stance does not stand up to the most preliminary of scrutinies. But we have found this out, and we can understand the reality. We can take each for what it is and still know that Merck is evil, and that JudWac is at least trying to stand on the right side.

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Friday, October 26, 2007

The barely reported highlight of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran for the Caspian Sea summit last week was a key face-to-face meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

A high-level diplomatic source in Tehran tells Asia Times Online that essentially Putin and the Supreme Leader have agreed on a plan to nullify the George W Bush administration’s relentless drive towards launching a preemptive attack, perhaps a tactical nuclear strike, against Iran. An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia.

But then, as if this were not enough of a political bombshell, came the abrupt resignation of Ali Larijani as top Iranian nuclear negotiator. Early this week in Rome, Larijani told the IRNA news agency that “Iran’s nuclear policies are stable and will not change with the replacement of the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council [SNSC].” Larijani will keep attending SNSC meetings, now as a representative of the Supreme Leader. He even took time to remind the West that in the Islamic Republic all key decisions regarding the civilian nuclear program are made by the Supreme Leader. Larijani actually went to Rome to meet with the European Union’s Javier Solana alongside Iran’s new negotiator, Saeed Jalili, a former member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), just like President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

In itself, the Putin-Khamenei meeting was extraordinary, because the Supreme Leader rarely receives foreign statesmen for closed talks, even one as crucial as Putin. The Russian president, according to the diplomatic source, told the Supreme Leader he may hold the ultimate solution regarding the endlessly controversial Iranian nuclear dossier. According to IRNA, the Supreme Leader, after stressing that the Iranian civilian nuclear program will continue unabated, said. “We will ponder your words and proposal.”

Larijani himself had told the Iranian media that Putin had a “special plan” and the Supreme Leader observed that the plan was “ponderable”. The problem is that Ahmadinejad publicly denied the Russians had volunteered a new plan.

Iranian hawks close to Ahmadinejad are spinning that Putin’s proposal involves Iran temporarily suspending uranium enrichment in exchange for no more United Nations sanctions. That’s essentially what International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammad ElBaradei has been working on all along. The key issue is what – in practical terms – will Iran get in return. Obviously it’s not the EU’s Solana who will have the answer. But as far as Russia is concerned, strategically nothing will appease it except a political/diplomatic solution for the Iranian nuclear dossier.

US Vice President Dick Cheney – who even Senator Hillary Clinton now refers to as Darth Vader – must be foaming at the mouth; but the fact is that after the Caspian summit, Iran and Russia are officially entangled in a strategic partnership. World War III, for them, is definitely not on the cards.

Let’s read from the same script
The apparent internal controversy on how exactly Putin and the Supreme Leader are on the same wavelength belies a serious rift in the higher spheres of the Islamic Republic. The replacement of Larijani, a realist hawk, by Jalili, an unknown quantity with an even more hawkish background, might spell an Ahmadinejad victory. It’s not that simple.

The powerful Ali Akbar Velayati, the diplomatic adviser to the Supreme Leader, said he didn’t like the replacement one bit. Even worse: regarding the appalling record of the Ahmadinejad presidency when it comes to the economy, all-out criticism is now the norm. Another former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, told the Etemad-e Melli newspaper, “The effects of the [UN] sanctions are visible. Our situation gets worse day by day.”

Ahmadinejad for the past two months has been placing his former IRGC brothers-in-arms in key posts, like the presidency of the central bank and the Oil, Industry and Interior ministries. Internal repression is rife. On Sunday, hundreds of students protested at the Amir-Kabir University in Tehran, calling for “Death to the dictator”.

The wily, ultimate pragmatist Hashemi Rafsanjani, now leader of the Council of Experts and in practice a much more powerful figure than Ahmadinejad, took no time to publicly reflect that “we can’t bend people’s thoughts with dictatorial regimes”.

This week, the Supreme Leader himself intervened, saying, “I approve of this government, but this does not mean that I approve of everything they do.” Under the currently explosive circumstances, this also amounts to a political bombshell.

As if anyone needed to be reminded, the buck – or rial – stops with the Supreme Leader, whose last wish on earth is to furnish a pretext for the Bush administration to launch World War III. If Ahmadinejad now deviates from a carefully crafted strategic script, the Supreme Leader may simply get rid of him.

[…]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2007/261007_b_attack.htm

I don’t care what anyone says about Vladimir Putin. The President of Russia has some GRAPEFRUITS.

A demonstration of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend‘.

All the people who say that an attack on Iran is ‘nuts’ and the infinite losers who will do nothing but light a candle in response to another mass murder episode, and every other gutless piece of trash are all made to look like what they are in the face of this statement.

Even if it never happens, i.e. the defense pact doesn’t come to full fruition, to say these words, and to enter into even an informal defense pact with Iran shows some real guts, some BALLS.

This story should have been all over the news – its a little odd that it was not. Does this mean that it is really true? Stories like this are not left out of the news by accident. Lets see what Google News says:

Only TWO RESULTS at the time this was posted, one of them TWENTY HOURS OLD.

From a comment on Raw Story, the second place in the results:

October 26th, 2007 at 01:31:15 From: Eyeball Kid
Putin..
has a growing sphere of influence at this time, and he’s not willing to allow Bush to start bombing next door. While Putin’s commitment hasn’t made any news in fascist America, you can bet that the White House is listening with all ears. Putin is upping the ante. And well he should. He knows that US influence is on the sharp decline. He know that foreign policy dunderhead Bush is leaving a vacuum of leadership that Putin is all too willing to fill. And the writer is probably correct that Cheney is fuming at Putin’s master diplomatic stroke. Cheney/Bush want to mortally weaken Iran. Now the risks have increased to levels perhaps too high to execute an attack. What Putin did is what the US Dems could not do: largely neuter the Bush/Cheney juggernaut. Spreading war is one of the few ways that the Cabal could run away from the US’ collapsing economy. War would allow them to continue borrowing more money, on an “emergency basis”, for the indefinite future. If Putin puts a stop to the madness, the Cabal will have to pause and look within at the cancer that’s spreading throughout its own body. There will no longer be a distraction. In the waning months of this most disastrous presidency, the Bush/Cheney death knell can now be heard all the way to Moscow. For the Cabal, there is no way to go but down.

I like it.^®

The clocks change shortly, which brings us to this fascinating piece of information. Islam forbids ‘intercalation’, which Wikipedia says is:

Intercalation is the insertion of a leap day, week or month into some calendar years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. Lunisolar calendars may require a combination of both adjustments.

The solar year does not have whole number of days, but a calendar year must have a whole number of days. The only way to reconcile the two is to vary the number of days in the calendar year.

In solar calendars, this is often done by adding to a common year of 365 days, an extra day (leap day or intercalary day): this makes a leap year of 366 days.

The Decree of Canopus, which was issued by the pharaoh Ptolemy III, Euergetes of Egypt in 239 BC, decreed a solar leap day system.

In the Julian Calendar as well as in the Gregorian Calendar that improved it, intercalation is done by adding an extra day to February in each leap year. In the Julian Calendar this was done every 4 years. In the Gregorian calendar years whose number is evenly divisible by 100 but not 400, were exempted in order to improve accuracy.

The solar year does not have a whole number of lunar months either, so a lunisolar calendar must have a variable number of months in a year. This is usually 12 months, but sometimes a 13th month (an intercalary or embolismic month) is added to the year.

ISO 8601 includes a specification for a 52-week year. Any year that has 53 Thursdays has 53 weeks; this extra week may be regarded as intercalary.

The determination of whether a year has intercalation may be calculated (Julian, Gregorian and Hebrew calendars), or determined by observation (Iranian calendar).

Absolutely fascinating.

Here is a page that explains it further in the context of Islam:

Annulling intercalation

In the ninth year after the Hijra, as documented in the Qur’an (9:36-37), Allah revealed the prohibition of the intercalary month.

The number of months with Allah has been twelve months by Allah’s ordinance since the day He created the heavens and the earth. Of these four are known as forbidden [to fight in]; That is the straight usage, so do not wrong yourselves therein, and fight those who go astray. But know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.

Verily the transposing (of a prohibited month) is an addition to Unbelief: The Unbelievers are led to wrong thereby: for they make it lawful one year, and forbidden another year, of months forbidden by Allah and make such forbidden ones lawful. The evil of their course seems pleasing to them. But Allah guideth not those who reject Faith.

This prohibition was repeated by Muhammad during the last sermon on Mount Arafat which was delivered during the Farewell Pilgrimage to Mecca on 9 Dhu al-Hijja 10 AH:

O People, intercalation is an addition to unbelief, through it [God, Allah] leads the unbelievers astray: they make it permissible one year and forbid it [at their mere convenience] the next one to elude the timing of what God forbade, so that they make permissible that which Allah forbade [fighting in the forbidden months], and forbid that which Allah has made permissible [fighting in other months]. And [now, this year] time has turned the way it was the day God created Heavens and Earth [The intercalary months since the creation of Heavens and Earth have all canceled out (summed up to whole years)]. The year is twelve months, four of them are forbidden, three successive: Dhu al-Qi’dah and Dhu al-Hijjah and Muharram; and the Rajab of Mudar which is between Jumada and Shaban.^[4]

The three successive forbidden months mentioned by Muhammad (months in which battling is forbidden) are Dhu al-Qi’dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram, thus excluding an intercalary month before Muharram. The single forbidden month is Rajab. These months were considered forbidden both within the new Islamic calendar and within the old pagan Meccan calendar, although whether they maintained their “forbidden” status after the conquest of Mecca has been disputed among Islamic scholars.

File under, “you learn something every day!”.

I ride a bicycle around London, and never wear a helmet. I have never worn a helmet in my life to ride either a motorcycle or a bicycle.

Free people do not wear bicycle helmets.

There is a completely ’21st Century British Insanity™’ piece in today’s Times ‘Alpha Mummy’ where a shrieking, hysterical, illogical, fear soaked nincompoop equates cycling with children to, wait for it…. CHILD ABUSE.

I’m not making this up.

After getting up off of the floor, being thrown down by fits of laughter as a man Tased, I read some of the comments and found this site, cyclehelmets.org which is absolutely wonderful.

First of all, no free country has helmet laws. Period.

Helmet laws spring from that same foul well of immoral laws that says you cannot ingest whatever you like, or have consensual sex in whatever way you like in the privacy of your own home – that you have no privacy, that the fruit of your labour does not belong to you, that your children do not belong to you, but to the state. These diseased ideas, that are absolutely un-British are the sort of thing ‘Eleanor Mills’ espouses by extension when she says what she said in that piece.

I will give the devil her due and say that she posed this as a question, but the fact remains that this vile thought, this absurd question actually passed her mind, and she then actually posted it on the internets. Nothing wrong with the latter of course, but honestly…I digress.

This site has the proof that cycle helmets are ineffective as safety devices, and, like the fear pumped safety mania that has spread all over the west, are just another piece of nanny statism that can be proved to be pointless. Not only that, but these useless laws the site argues further diminish the rule of law in general, since the law is plainly seen to be not only an ass, but unreasonably interfering in private matters.

Look at this graph:

The countries with more and safer cycling are where fewest cyclists wear helmets. This is a fact.

In the past, you would have read this piece by Eleanor Mills and then perhaps entered into a debate with someone about cycle helmets and how they, “make people safer”. You would have had to rely on anecdotes and gut feeling to make your point, and you might have been able to win if you were eloquent.

Now with the internets, people like Eleanor Mills can write a piece of garbage and have it shot down within ten minutes of it being published, and furthermore, everyone who knows how to click on a link will be able to trash her aberrant thought.

In conditions like this, liberty is the default result, and now we can see how it is going to happen. Logic, common sense and the facts are now no longer stuck in treacle, and time to delivery of these facts is near instant.

The Ron Paul campaign in a few short months has put complex questions into the public arena, all thanks to the internets:

Message from Ron Paul

The other day, my old sparring partner in so many Congressional committee hearings, Alan Greenspan, was on the Fox Business Channel. After Alan promoted his new book, the reporter asked if we really needed a central bank. Greenspan looked stunned, and then said that was a good question; he actually talked about fiat money vs. a gold standard. Now, the ex-Fed chairman is not about to endorse our sound monetary policy, but you know our Revolution is working when such a question is asked in the mainstream media, and this powerful man gives such an answer.

You and I are reopening a whole host of questions that the establishment thought it had closed off forever: on war, on taxes and spending, on inflation and gold, and on the rule of law and our Constitution.

As China and Japan start ‘an unprecedented flight from the dollar‘ only Ron Paul is talking about the causes and what must be done to stop it. Only Ron Paul comes up the with the numbers showing how much america is spending on running its foul empire – ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

Helmet laws and empires are inextricably linked. The same urges that drive evil and venal mass murderers to spread plagues of death all over the world are the same ones that make parliaments and legislatures pass helmet laws and all the other illiberal and useless control laws that should all be removed from the statute books.

This is in no way ‘a stretch’; in fact, you can file it under ‘act locally, think globally’.

Your freedom on the local, personal level is essential to maintaining peace and non interference on the global level. When you lose your liberty and mass murderers, international gangsters, counterfeiters and vicious organized crime syndicates engineer it, the bad consequences are not only going to affect you, but your neighbours, your cities your country and the entire world.

FINALLY it is being understood, albeit at the eleventh hour.

‘Second Earth’ found, 20 light years away
Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian
Wednesday April 25 2007Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky “second Earth” circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

WRONG.
The prospects (probability) that we are not alone do not change from day to day, they are the same and have been the same since man first looked up into the night sky.

Reality is not dependent on what we have or have not observed…or what we will admit to having observed. Is this journalist suggesting that this planet did not exist before it was observed? By extension, is he suggesting that intelligent life on other planets does not exist unless we detect it? I am sure that the people on other planets would have something to say about that.

This is illogic pure and simple. It is not science, or scientific thinking. In fact, it is more like false religion than science.

The planet is the most Earth-like ever spotted and is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life.

WRONG.
Water is not an essential ingredient for life. This is dogma. People used to say that the sun is essential for life; we now know that this is not the case. To say that water is essential for life is to fall into the same trap that previous scientists have, and really, there is no excuse for it.

Researchers detected the planet orbiting one of Earth’s nearest stars, a cool red dwarf called Gliese 581, 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra.

Measurements of the planet’s celestial path suggest it is 1½ times the size of our home planet, and orbits close to its sun, with a year of just 13 days. The planet’s orbit brings it 14 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But Gliese 581 burns at only 3,000C, half the temperature of our own sun, making conditions on the planet comfortable for life, with average ground temperatures estimated at 0 to 40C.

FALSE.
Even if Gliese 581 was cold, there is no reason why any planet that orbits it should not be teeming with life. We know that there are forms of life, named ‘Extremophiles‘ that can live in conditions that are incomprehensibly harsh. There is no reason to suppose that life forms like this, or even more hardy than this, are not living throughout the universe. More false reasoning, and very tiresome it is.

Researchers claim the planet is likely to have an atmosphere. The discovery follows a three-year search for habitable planets by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in Chile.

Atmospheres are not required for life, clearly.

“We wouldn’t be surprised if there is life on this planet,” said Stephane Udry, an astronomer on the project at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.

Good!
Will you now concede that you would not be surprised if Alien scientists and explorers are visiting the earth right now?

I wonder!

Two years ago, the same team discovered a giant Neptune-sized planet orbiting Gliese 581. A closer look revealed the latest planetary discovery, along with a third, larger planet that orbits the star every 84 days. The planets have been named after their star, with the most earthlike called Gliese 581c. The team spotted the planet by searching the “habitable zone”.

There is no such thing as ‘the habitable zone’ this is another anthropocentric fantasy.

More trash from The Guardian.

Very easy to trash…typing exercise.

Legalise all drugs: chief constable demands end to ‘immoral laws’
By Jonathan Brown and David Langton
Published: 15 October 2007

One of Britain’s most senior police officers is to call for all drugs – including heroin and cocaine – to be legalised and urges the Government to declare an end to the “failed” war on illegal narcotics.

Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, advocates an end to UK drug policy based on “prohibition”. His comments come as the Home Office this week ends the process of gathering expert advice looking at the next 10 years of strategy.

In his radical analysis, which he will present to the North Wales Police Authority today, Mr Brunstrom points out that illegal drugs are now cheaper and more plentiful than ever before.

The number of users has soared while drug-related crime is rising with narcotics now supporting a worldwide business empire second only in value to oil. “If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimisation of harms to society,” he will say.

The demand will not find favour in Downing Street. In his conference speech this year, Gordon Brown signalled an intensification of the existing battle. “We will send out a clear message that drugs are never going to be decriminalised,” the Prime Minister told the party.

The Tories also rejected the proposals. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said a more effective move would be the creation of a UK border police force to stop drugs getting into the country as well as expanding rehabilitation centres. He added: “We would put police on the streets to catch and deter drug dealers and we would ensure sufficient prison capacity so they could actually be punished.”

Mr Brunstrom, whose championing of speed cameras has made him a hate figure among some motoring groups, also found his suggestion that the war on drugs was unwinnable dismissed as a “counsel of despair” by the Association of Chief Police Officers. “Moving to total legalisation would, in our view, greatly exacerbate the harm to people in this country, not reduce it,” an Acpo spokeswoman said.

But the 30-page report, entitled Drugs Policy – a radical look ahead, includes a number of persuasive voices. Today Mr Brunstrom will urge his colleagues to submit the paper to Westminster and the Welsh Assembly. In it, he quotes the findings in March this year of a Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts commission, which stated that “the law as it stands is not fit for purpose” and argues for the replacement of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act with a new Misuse of Substances Act.

That would mean scrapping the ABC system introduced by the home secretary James Callaghan with a new scale that assesses substances, including alcohol and tobacco, in relation to the harm they cause – although he admits banning booze and cigarettes is not likely.

But he notes that figures from the Chief Medical Officer have found that, in Scotland, 13,000 people died from tobacco-related use in 2004 while 2,052 died as a result of alcohol. Illegal drugs, meanwhile, accounted for 356 deaths. The maximum penalty for possessing a class A drug is 14 years in prison while supplying it carries a life term.

Mr Brunstrom indicates that there is a growing mood for change. He cites the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, which criticised the Government for failing to switch to an evidence-based policy approach. The report also includes quotes from former home secretary John Reid, admitting “prohibition” doesn’t work, and the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, conceding “it drives the activity underground” . There is also supportive evidence from former Chief Inspector of Prisons Lord Ramsbotham, a retired High Court judge, and Scotland’s Drug Tsar, Tom Wood.

As well as hitting the country hard in economic terms – class A drug use in England and Wales costs the country up to £17bn a year, 90 per cent of which is due to crime – there are also a series of socially damaging knock-on effects, he says.

He argues that prohibition has created a crisis in the criminal justice system, destabilised producer countries and undermined human rights worldwide. By pursuing a policy of legalisation and regulation, he concludes, the Government will “dramatically reduce drug-related criminality and will enable significant funds to be transferred from law enforcement to harm reduction and treatment procedures that are known to work.”

There was a mixed response from groups that work with users. Danny Kushlick, a director of the charity Transform Drug Policy Foundation, praised Mr Brunstrom for his “great leadership and imagination”. But Clare McNeil, a policy officer for Addaction, said talk of legalisation distracted attention from the more important issue of rehabilitation. “We have some sympathy with his views and the reasons and why he believes this but we are not in favour of legalisation,” she said.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said it was ” significant” that a senior police officer had spoken out although he too thought the police chief’s views went too far. “Where he is absolutely right is that the Government’s drugs policy is failing and failing spectacularly. The refusal of the Government to think radically means we are letting thousands of young boys and girls down.

“I am not persuaded that full legalisation is the way forward but what is necessary is that a more logical and evidence-based approach is needed which is less susceptible to whims of individual home secretaries … The system does not work as it is.”

The Chief Constable’s verdict

• British drugs policy has been based upon prohibition for the last several decades – but this system has not worked well. Illegal drugs are in plentiful supply and have become consistently cheaper in real terms over the years.
• The number of drug users has increased dramatically. Drug-related crime has soared equally sharply as a direct consequence of the illegality of some drugs. The vast profits from illegal trading have supported a massive rise in organised crime.
• The ABC classification of drugs is said by the RSA Commission to be indefensible and is described as “crude, ineffective, riddled with anomalies and open to political manipulation”. Most importantly, the current ABC system illogically excludes both alcohol and tobacco.
• Mr Brunstrom says: “If policy on drugs is in the future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral. Such a strategy leads inevitably to the legalisation and regulation of all drugs.”
• The chief constable asserts that current British drugs policy is based upon an unwinnable “war on drugs” enshrined in a flawed understanding of the underlying United Nations conventions, and arising from a wholly outdated and thoroughly repugnant moralistic stance.
• He concludes: “The law is the law. In the meantime, I will continue to enforce it to the best of my ability despite my misgivings about its moral and practical worth.”

Independent

What struck me about this story is that the police man behind it says that prohibition is immoral.

Anyone with one working brain cell knows that prohibition is not only immoral, but that it is the very mother and engine of ‘organized crime’.

The Mafia in the USA was born out of the prohibition era when the manufacture, buying and selling of alcohol was outlawed.

That includes beer and wine.

The ‘war on drugs’ has been nothing more than a flimsy pretext to bring in police state measures and absurd ‘money laundering’ laws and surveillance that impact the ordinary person more than any ‘criminal’.

I single quoth criminal because no one today would say that Seagrams and any brewwer of beer is a criminal, yet, if you grow a single plant in your own garden, you can be sent to gaol for a long time. It is completely absurd, and what’s more, everyone knows it, including the poor beleaguered police who have to waste their time enforcing these insane laws.

This article says that there is a ‘growing mood for change’. This is true not only about the bogus, immoral, stupid and pointless war on ‘drugs’ but about everything. It is the same mood that is behind the mass exodus from this country. It is the same mood that is behind the meteoric rise of Ron Paul.

Everyone, everywhere has HAD ENOUGH, and they are slowly waking up, asking the right questions, and, more importantly, taking steps to do something about it.

With the elections over and the 110th Congress settling in, the media have been reporting ad nauseam about who has assumed new political power in Washington. We’re subjected to breathless reports about emerging power brokers in Congress; how so-and-so is now the powerful chair of an important committee; how certain candidates are amassing power for the 2008 elections, and so on. Nobody questions this use of the word “power,” or considers its connotations. It’s simply assumed, in Washington and the mainstream media, that political power is proper and inevitable.

The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power over us– we’re supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means the absence of government coercion. So when politicians and the media celebrate political power, they really are celebrating the power of certain individuals to use coercive state force.

Remember that one’s relationship with the state is never voluntary. Every government edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law ultimately is backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. That is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American people.

The desire for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate, but something to condemn! The 20th century’s worst tyrants were political figures, men who fanatically sought power over others through the apparatus of the state. They wielded that power absolutely, without regard for the rule of law.

Our constitutional system, by contrast, was designed to restrain political power and place limits on the size and scope of government. It is this system, the rule of law, which we should celebrate–not political victories.

Political power is not like the power possessed by those who otherwise obtain fame and fortune. After all, even the wealthiest individual cannot force anyone to buy a particular good or service; even the most famous celebrities cannot force anyone to pay attention to them. It is only when elites become politically connected that they begin to impose their views on all of us.

In a free society, government is restrained–and therefore political power is less important. I believe the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else. In other words, the state as referee rather than an active participant in our society.

Those who hold political power, however, would lose their status in a society with truly limited government. It simply would not matter much who occupied various political posts, since their ability to tax, spend, and regulate would be severely curtailed. This is why champions of political power promote an activist government that involves itself in every area of our lives from cradle to grave. They gain popular support by promising voters that government will take care of everyone, while the media shower them with praise for their bold vision.

Political power is inherently dangerous in a free society: it threatens the rule of law, and thus threatens our fundamental freedoms. Those who understand this should object whenever political power is glorified.

What Does Freedom Really Mean?

“…man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

We’ve all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.

George Orwell wrote about “meaningless words” that are endlessly repeated in the political arena*. Words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” Orwell explained, have been abused so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell’s view, political words were “Often used in a consciously dishonest way.” Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

A truly democratic election in Iraq, without U.S. interference and U.S. puppet candidates, almost certainly would result in the creation of a Shiite theocracy. Shiite majority rule in Iraq might well mean the complete political, economic, and social subjugation of the minority Kurd and Sunni Arab populations. Such an outcome would be democratic, but would it be free? Would the Kurds and Sunnis consider themselves free? The administration talks about democracy in Iraq, but is it prepared to accept a democratically-elected Iraqi government no matter what its attitude toward the U.S. occupation? Hardly. For all our talk about freedom and democracy, the truth is we have no idea whether Iraqis will be free in the future. They’re certainly not free while a foreign army occupies their country. The real test is not whether Iraq adopts a democratic, pro-western government, but rather whether ordinary Iraqis can lead their personal, religious, social, and business lives without interference from government.

Simply put, freedom is the absence of government coercion. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and created the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else. States, not the federal government, were charged with protecting individuals against criminal force and fraud. For the first time, a government was created solely to protect the rights, liberties, and property of its citizens. Any government coercion beyond that necessary to secure those rights was forbidden, both through the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers. This reflected the founders’ belief that democratic government could be as tyrannical as any King.

Few Americans understand that all government action is inherently coercive. If nothing else, government action requires taxes. If taxes were freely paid, they wouldn’t be called taxes, they’d be called donations. If we intend to use the word freedom in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

The political left equates freedom with liberation from material wants, always via a large and benevolent government that exists to create equality on earth. To modern liberals, men are free only when the laws of economics and scarcity are suspended, the landlord is rebuffed, the doctor presents no bill, and groceries are given away. But philosopher Ayn Rand (and many others before her) demolished this argument by explaining how such “freedom” for some is possible only when government takes freedoms away from others. In other words, government claims on the lives and property of those who are expected to provide housing, medical care, food, etc. for others are coercive– and thus incompatible with freedom. “Liberalism,” which once stood for civil, political, and economic liberties, has become a synonym for omnipotent coercive government.

The political right equates freedom with national greatness brought about through military strength. Like the left, modern conservatives favor an all-powerful central state– but for militarism, corporatism, and faith-based welfarism. Unlike the Taft-Goldwater conservatives of yesteryear, today’s Republicans are eager to expand government spending, increase the federal police apparatus, and intervene militarily around the world. The last tenuous links between conservatives and support for smaller government have been severed. “Conservatism,” which once meant respect for tradition and distrust of active government, has transformed into big-government utopian grandiosity.

Orwell certainly was right about the use of meaningless words in politics. If we hope to remain free, we must cut through the fog and attach concrete meanings to the words politicians use to deceive us. We must reassert that America is a republic, not a democracy, and remind ourselves that the Constitution places limits on government that no majority can overrule. We must resist any use of the word “freedom” to describe state action. We must reject the current meaningless designations of “liberals” and “conservatives,” in favor of an accurate term for both: statists.

Every politician on earth claims to support freedom. The problem is so few of them understand the simple meaning of the word.

*Politics and the English Language, 1946.

Two essays by Congressman Ron Paul
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

Social Democratic Party drops its objections to fingerprints in ID cards

The experts on domestic and legal policy of the parliamentary group of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Bundestag, the lower chamber of Germany’s Federal Parliament, have withdrawn their initial objections to biometric enhancements of the new German ID card, the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel has written in a report published in the run-up to the final meeting of the representatives of the ruling coalition on the highly controversial topic scheduled for Tuesday. The Conservatives (CDU) and their partners in the ruling grand coalition, the SPD, have been working towards a solution akin to the one found for the e-passport, the paper declares. Thus apart from a digital photograph of the person in question, two of his or her fingerprints are to be integrated into the electronic ID card’s RFID chip. The approach does not provide for storage of the sensitive data outside the documents themselves. Members of the opposition have already warned that the system that was being put in place would lead to citizens being fingerprinted and photographed like criminals by the registration authorities.

>Dieter Wiefelspütz, an expert of the Social Democratic Party on domestic affairs, said he thought it was possible to countenance the inclusion of fingerprints in the ID cards that most citizens would eventually be carrying provided that “the storing of the data elsewhere has been ruled out completely.” The digital ID card was a “fascinating modernization project,” he added. Because of the potential advantages of the new document for citizens – it would make it a lot easier for them to register with authorities or have their age confirmed or checked via the Internet or when surfing the same, he pointed out – he for one would be supporting the project. For identification and authentication purposes a digital photo was good, “but a fingerprint is better still,” he declared. For Fritz Rudolf Körper, the deputy head of the parliamentary group of the Social Democrats, the party line is clear: “Fingerprints yes, but no database to go with them.” Even Klaus Uwe Benneter, the spokesman on legal policy issues of the SPD in the Bundestag, who within the ranks of the party has, to date, been a vocal critic of the project has signaled that he would be willing to drop his objections. The citizens of the Federal Republic would undoubtedly “benefit from” the biometric ID card, he said. (Stefan Krempl)

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/97169

Clearly there are people in the SDP who can feel the threat from routine fingerprinting, and the spectre of a database of everyone’s prints in a central location. What their ‘solution’ doesn’t address is the problem of taking people’s fingerprints, storing them on a card and then that card being readable and the prints, unique IDs and other information subsequently storable in a database. All it will take is one law to require this, and all the work of fingerprinting everyone will have been done on the basis that it was safe. It is called ‘betrayal’.

This problem cannot be circumvented. The SDP have to accept that in order to live in a free society, some things must be forbidden, and mandatory fingerprinting people is one of them. No concessions, no work-arounds, no compromise. The definition of freedom requires that you should not be compelled to be fingerprinted by the state for its purposes.

They at least accept that this is a very gravely serious issue, which is at least a start.

The title of this post is the sound of a safety valve allowing steam to escape from a pressure cooker:

BBQ:

Anti-Iraq war protest goes ahead

Hundreds of anti-war protesters took to the streets in 2005.

Anti-war protesters have marched down Whitehall to Parliament Square, despite being told the protest was illegal.

The Stop the War Coalition timed its protest to coincide with Gordon Brown’s Commons statement on Iraq.

Students, campaigners and trade unions joined the rally in Trafalgar Square, before marching down to Parliament.

The group was told it could not march down Whitehall because of a law passed in 1839 which protects the right of MPs and peers to get to Westminster.

But a last-minute decision to let the march go ahead was hailed by organisers, who said they had struck a “significant blow” for democracy.

Protesters’ determination

Lindsey German, convener of the Stop the War Coalition, said they had repeatedly been told they could not go ahead with the march – but said the authorities had underestimated their determination.

The protest coincided with Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s statement to MPs, in which he said the plan was to reduce troop numbers to 2,500 by next spring – depending on conditions on the ground.

Ms German said her message to the government was: “You will never draw a line under this war until you bring all our troops home.”

Labour left-wing MP John McDonnell said the attempt to “ban” the protest had been “an unacceptable assault on our civil liberties”.

Lawful protest

Respect MP George Galloway, currently suspended from the House of Commons after a row about his Mariam Appeal charity and his comments about standards watchdogs, said organisers had won a “significant victory”.

Speaking at the start of the protest in Trafalgar Square, he said that Mr Brown saw Iraq as a “photo opportunity” but that it had been a “graveyard for a million Iraqis”.

Other speakers included comedian Mark Thomas and Ben Griffin, a former SAS trooper.

Owen George, 21, who was at the protest in Parliament Square, said the demonstration was “amazing”.

He said: “They managed to get into the square, which is very good. It’s amazing how much freedom people do have in this country.”

CND chairwoman Kate Hudson accused Mr Brown of trying to ban the protest – despite promising to extend liberties around the world at the Labour Party conference.

However, a Home Office spokeswoman said the march had not been “banned” and talks had been held to find a way of re-routing protesters.

The Metropolitan Police said it had worked with the coalition to “facilitate” a lawful protest.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “Our aim is to balance the right of the Stop the War Coalition to freedom of protest whilst maintaining the right of MPs and peers to conduct the business of either House whilst they are sitting.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7033296.stm

And also:

Thousands in anti-war march

2 hours ago

Thousands of people took part in an anti-war march to Parliament on Monday after police made a last minute decision to lift a threatened ban on the protest.

The Stop The War Coalition said the demonstration struck a significant blow for “liberty and democracy” and claimed that the attempt to stop it going ahead had swelled the number of supporters.

Police said 2,000 people joined the march, but organisers said the figure was at least double that number, with students, trade unionists and peace activists taking part.

The march disrupted traffic outside Parliament just as the Prime Minister was due to arrive in the Commons to tell MPs about the latest phase of British troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Gordon Brown was seen being driven along adjoining roads to Whitehall to avoid being caught up in the demonstration.

Scores of police officers escorted the banner-waving, chanting protesters from Trafalgar Square to Parliament, past Downing Street.

Lindsey German, convener of the Stop The War Coalition, said the group had been told time and again by police in recent days that they could not go ahead with the march, and she claimed the authorities and MPs had underestimated the determination of the anti-war movement.

She said her message to the Government was: “You will never draw a line under this war until you bring all our troops home. “And we don’t want the troops brought home just so they can be sent to Afghanistan or the Iranian border. We want a permanent break with George Bush’s murderous, imperialistic policies.”

Ms German also claimed that Britain is now seeing restrictions on civil liberties as a direct result of the war in Iraq.

Andrew Murray, chairman of the coalition, announced to the crowd that the police relented just 30 minutes before the rally was due to start, adding: “This is a tribute to this movement and to everyone who has campaigned to assert our right to hold this Government to account for the criminal policies it is following around the world.”

[…]

http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jcaLumrZgrlNC3v_bIxYq2x9jvmQ

And so.

No one was martyred at this march. Shame.

All the people who went on this march are now in pubs or on trains home, and what precisely have they achieved? They are not even on the front page of BBQ/CNN or anything (not that that would change anything).

There are 143 stories about this at the time of this post; not very many is it? But I digress.

Once again, what precisely have they achieved?

The undemocratic anti protest laws are still on the books.
Britain is now explicitly supporting an attack on Iran.
Troops not coming home from Iraq.
Troop numbers planned to increase in Afghanistan.
War machine intact.
Dissent quelled.
No assurances.
no change of policy.
No promises.
No mention in parliament.
Scant mention on the news.
No increase in momentum.
No fabrication of a long term strategy.

They have achieved absolutely nothing. NOTHING. They have nothing to show for this display.

I have grave doubts about the level of intellect of the people behind Stop the War. Certainly their understanding of English leaves much to be desired:

The Stop The War Coalition said the demonstration struck a significant blow for “liberty and democracy” and claimed that the attempt to stop it going ahead had swelled the number of supporters.

This is clearly nonsense. They didn’t strike a blow for anything at all, they did NOTHING, there was no action, no purpose, no consequence, no reaction, NOTHING AT ALL. It is as if the march never even happened. The march that rallied two million people was a great achievement; let’s call a spade a spade, this march was pathetic, and impotent and useless and stupid.

“This is a tribute to this movement and to everyone who has campaigned to assert our right to hold this Government to account for the criminal policies it is following around the world.”

The police relented 30 minutes before the march was due to start. This is a tribute to the intelligence of the enemy. They did the math. They know that demonstrations are useless steam valves, and they understand the dynamics of martyrdom and how the press would jump on them if the Tasers and clubs came out. This is an Epic Win for the war machine Police State, and anyone that says otherwise is a FOOL. Or they do not understand the words they are using.

Marching in front of parliament is not ‘holding Government to account’, and criminals are not brought to justice by marching; they are brought to justice by force. Criminals are arrested and then imprisoned or hanged by force. Government is held to account by being turfed out either at an election or by revolution, and marching doesn’t do any of these things, especially a march of 2000 people.

Sorry people, these are THE FACTS.

You would all do well to study how previous wars were derailed, and the sorts of strategies that worked, as a pointer to what to avoid and adopt in the twentieth century. Go and watch Sir! No Sir! and see for yourself what a real, effective rebellion looks like; one so powerful that the government at the time had to adapt to its detrimental effects.