This astonishing document is snarfed from the TPUC site:

+++++++

This is taken from nocounciltax.com

OK – so now the cracks are really beginning to appear.

I am indebted to my good friend and fellow Freeman on the land, for allowing me to use his documentation for this:-
Let me fill you in on the background so you have the case history:-

“Jim” (As we will call him”) is a Freeman on the Land along with us (More on that here www.TPUC.org & www.thinkfree.ca) – and a few months back he decided (Like many of us) that he wasn’t going to pay the UNLAWFUL Council tax that they were trying to enforce upon him via thier unlawful statute legislation. So he stopped paying:-

In due course he started receiving the threatening letters until one day the “summons” appeared on his doormat. (Note: A summons is merely an invitation to attend their place of business to discuss a punishment – its an offer – Read more – just as the Council Tax Bill is an offer to contract with them – read more on this)

The “invitation” was to appear before Wirral Magistrates Court for a hearing concerning the issuing of a liability hearing. Now as we all now ALL magistrates courts are merely a trading styles of the “run for profit” company called “Ministry of Justice” – see below and you can get a copy of the document I have acquired clearly showing:-

1. The corporate status of the Ministry of Justice
2. The Directors (Lord Falconer of Thoroton & Others)
3. The fact that Ministry of Justice has County Court Jugements against it
4. The trading styles of MOJ (Top right – which includes “Magistrates Courts”

MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IS A BUSINESS

Now call me blonde but I would say this is pretty damned conclusive that we are dealing with a corporate court convened by a corporation to simply lift money from you and I.

So … “Jim” jotted the council a little letter which is shown below:-

FIRST LETTER TO WIRRAL COUNCIL

Jim sent this letter about THREE WEEKS before the date that the hearing was due to be heard on.
So … the DAY BEFORE the hearing, Jim received a phone call from the Wirral Council LEGAL DEPARTMENT and what they said was staggering …

THEY WERE GOING TO WITHDRAW THE APPLICATION FOR A LIABILITY ORDER!

1. Now this is incredible that on the back of one letter they decide to withdraw and more importantly confirms the following:-
2. Council tax is UNLAWFUL, as you and I well know that if these leeches had once ounce of a lawful case for taking this money then they would fight it to the death

They KNOW Council Tax is unlawful and are simply robbing those who haven’t woken up to the facts yet to the tune of £140,000,000,000 per annum (thats 140 BILLION of our money!)
So, Jim being the experienced fellow he is – asked them to email him with confirmation that they were going to withdraw and printed below is their email.

WIRRAL COUNCIL CONFIRMATION OF WITHDRAWAL BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO LAWFUL CASE

Jim then asked for further clarification in a formal letter and here is the letter that they sent!

LETTER FROM WIRRAL COUNCIL CONFIRMING THEIR WITHDRAWAL FORM COUNCIL TAX LIABILITY HEARING

Then Jim asked them to confirm in writing that because there was now NO LIABILY that the council tax was no longer due
This is the letter they and this is probably (in my opinion) one of THE single most important documents in the fight against Council Tax as it PROVES beyond ANY DOUBT that we DO NOT HAVE TO PAY this UNLAWFUL COUNCIL TAX.
Look at the bit in red!

LETTER FROM WIRRAL COUNCIL CONFIRMING THAT COUNCIL TAX DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PAID

So not believing a word of the Council or the courts Jim rocked up to the court on the morning of the Liability hearing and standing as a Freeman on the Land asked the Judge to confirm the withdrawal of the other side which the Judge duly confirmed. The judge then told Jim that he needn’t have turned up and then Jim hit with it.
“I know that sir, but there is the small matter of mys costs”

BAM! – They were not expecting that one!

So, Jim has now duly entered a claim for costs of £1,400 against Wirral Council which is still ongoing at this time as the courts are trying to play silly buggers with Jim – he has even had one judge step down and refuse to adjudicate in favour of his costs – as you can see – its a stitch up!

Anyway – Jim has some other things planned and I will keep you abreast of developments but there you have it.
A UK Council running away from a court hearing because they KNOW they dont have a LAWFUL leg to stand on and the whole Council Tax is a scam to relieve you and I of money.

+++++++

Now. After having read that, and caught your breath after having counted from one to ten slowly, you need to ask yourself two questions.

These are questions you have to answer for yourself before you consider ‘registering’ with them, accepting delivery of an SEO, or engaging with these creatures in any way whatsoever.

If I were you, I would have a close read of the articles at TPUC, and then try and explain to yourself how it is possible that these people can do what they are doing.

January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders. The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make, and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum. Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government, after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote on December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy and dishonesty on the part of the government. Every day throughout the debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local media or wikileaks. Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country, spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer, a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers. The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland’s citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best economic interests of their nation.

Let’s also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000 under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the banks.
Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news, saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring us further down!

The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.
Love and rage from Iceland.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament
Documentation: I append links to the files about Icesave that were leaked to wikileaks, and which show how the EU member states blackmailed Iceland into the same corner the government helped push into by accepting the Icesave bill. This file also contains letters between the main financial adviser to the Iceland Finance Minister and Mark Flanagan of the IMF:

http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf
and
http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf

http://www.infowars.com/a-call-to-the-people-of-the-world-to-support-iceland-against-financial-blackmail/

The people of Iceland need to face up to the facts of this matter.

As individuals, they are no more personally responsible for the failure of a bank in their country than the people of Tazmania are. No person can be made liable for a debt incurred by a third party without the written consent of that person, so unless every person has signed a contract that makes them legally bound to repay the debts of Landisbanki, Icesave or ANY bank they are not liable for that debt, PERIOD, no matter what anyone says. It is entirely immoral for the government of Iceland to socialise the debt of these banks and tax the Icelandic people to raise the money. This is unambiguous and criminal theft.

Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP_2jXlo3JI&feature=sub

at 14:35. For a very clear explanation of the background.

The answer for Iceland is Libertarianism and Austrian Economics.

First of all, they need to close down their central government PERMANENTLY and not replace it with anything. Then they need to start trading with each other for and with real money, which means gold, or fish or whatever it is they have to hand or that they determine money should be.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir said:

The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it.

The welfare system of Iceland needs to switch to an entirely voluntary basis; Icelanders cannot afford (either financially or morally) a socialist style system of welfare based on theft. It is precisely this sort system that got them into this trouble in the first place.

Murray Rothbard says:

English laissez-faire liberalism, even though it generally accepted [p. 148] "Poor Law" governmental welfare, insisted that there be a strong disincentive effect: not only strict eligibility rules for assistance, but also making the workhouse conditions unpleasant enough to insure that workhouse relief would be a strong deterrent rather than an attractive opportunity. For the "undeserving poor," those responsible for their own fate, abuse of the relief system could only be curbed by "making it as distasteful as possible to the applicants; that is, by insisting (as a general rule) on a labour test or residence in a workhouse."6

While a strict deterrent is far better than an open welcome and a preachment about the recipients' "rights," the libertarian position calls for the complete abolition of governmental welfare and reliance on private charitable aid, based as it necessarily will be on helping the "deserving poor" on the road to independence as rapidly as possible. There was, after all, little or no governmental welfare in the United States until the Depression of the 1930s, and yet — in an era of a far lower general standard of living — there was no mass starvation in the streets. A highly successful private welfare program in the present-day is the one conducted by the three-millon-member Mormon Church. This remarkable people, hounded by poverty and persecution, emigrated to Utah and nearby states in the nineteenth century, and by thrift and hard work raised themselves to a general level of prosperity and affluence. Very few Mormons are on welfare; Mormons are taught to be independent, self-reliant, and to shun the public dole. Mormons are devout believers and have therefore successfully internalized these admirable values. Furthermore, the Mormon Church operates an extensive private welfare plan for its members — based, again, on the principle of helping their members toward independence as rapidly as possible.

Note, for example, the following principles from the "Welfare Plan" of the Mormon Church. "Ever since its organization in 1830, the Church has encouraged its members to establish and maintain their economic independence; it has encouraged thrift and fostered the establishment of employment-creating industries; it has stood ready at all times to help needy faithful members." In 1936, the Mormon Church developed a "Church Welfare Plan, . . . a system under which the curse of idleness would be done away with, the evils of a dole abolished, and independence, industry, thrift and self-respect be once more established amongst our people. The aim of the Church is to help the people to help themselves. Work is to be enthroned as the ruling principle of the lives of [p. 149] our Church membership."7 Mormon social workers in the program are instructed to act accordingly: "Faithful to this principle, welfare workers will earnestly teach and urge Church members to be self-sustaining to the full extent of their powers. No true Latter-Day Saint will, while physically able, voluntarily shift from himself the burden of his own support.

[…]

For A New Liberty The Libertarian Manifesto

320,000 people live in Iceland. They have a 21st century infrastructure, a tourism trade, fishing and many other things, including the magical Björk who on some level understands that Icelanders need to "start their own currency".

They do not need a central government to enslave them, to feed them, to 'keep them safe' to organise them, to regulate them, to print and control their money, to regulate their banks or do anything else of any kind. These people are in a very good position to adopt the principles of a pure Libertarian society powered by Austrian Economics; that means no coercive central government and absolutely no central bank – voluntary interaction and exchange in all areas of life at all times. All they have to do is shutter their government, promise not to bother each other and launch their new money.

We know how a purely voluntary society operate, but what would the new Icelandic money really look like? Well, that is up to the market. Money is a commodity, just like wood, oranges, geothermal heat, tea or anything else that one person has that he wants less than something someone else has. People whose business it is to make money know how to craft it so that it is acceptable to the greatest number of people; it is something that they have in abundance that they have little real need for, which they can use to make more money. This is a great business opportunity for entrepreneurs to step in and create a good set of monetary units for Iceland.

A clever person with alot of money could mint (for example) small gold coins, say the size of a us Dime.

The weight of a US Dime is 2.268g
The price of gold at the date of this post is $36.38/g
That means that each of these new Icelandic gold coins would be worth 2.268*36.38 = $82.51 : enough for a weeks shopping at the grocery store.

Smaller amounts of money would be minted in silver coins:

2.268*18.23 = $41.35

for a dime sized coin made of pure silver. Price of twenty pints of bitter. Or a canister of natural gas.

These are two examples of the shape of money that could come out of a market driven currency. The money makers business is then to inject this new money into the economy, taking a small profit whenever the money is exchanged. Read about how it works:

This is the true and remarkable story of private coinage and banking in Britain in the early years of the Industrial Revolution (1775-1850). Making money was a business in demand. The needs of business for small denominations were changing. Merchants needed small denomination coins in copper and silver.

The Royal Mint couldn't be bothered. It made coins to serve the elites, not the new and burgeoning working class. Free enterprise stepped in with a new industry that truly saved the day—before the Crown cruelly stamped it out and ended one of the most beautiful experiences with private money in world history.

It is very likely you have never heard of this episode. You can read dozens of histories of the early years of capitalism and know nothing of this spectacular industry – to say nothing of its lessons for today.

What is going on here? George Selgin, professor at the University of Georgia, has discovered the monetary equivalent of the lost city of Atlantis. He has written a full-scale historical narrative—one that is deeply interesting and engaging—that has been largely unknown, even to scholars of the Industrial Revolution.

It is not only the first full-scale history of this episode ever written. It is likely to maintain a place as the definitive work for many decades. It is 400 pages, but always and everywhere very interesting. It includes 20 pages of color photos. The prose is elegant, and the method of analysis is thoroughly Rothbardian: this is flesh-and-blood history of real human beings.

http://mises.org/store/Good-Money-P519.aspx

These coins would be desirable not only in Iceland, but all over the world; they are gold, and gold is money.

Thanks to the small number of Icelanders, a single billionaire could jumpstart this new currency. Many millionaires could do it. It has been done before, for purely commercial reasons; this time it would not only be commercial pressures that propel the adoption of this currency but also the thirst for freedom, that would propel it.

However the Icelanders decide to solve their problem, one thing is for sure; they need to understand what their problem is before they can solve it.

Their problem is the parasitic, resource sucking corrupt and evil Government of Iceland, and all of its institutions, pure and simple. If they do not face this fact, they will wind up being further enslaved and pauperised.

As the guest in Max Keiser's report said, the educated (and productive) will flee Iceland to set up life somewhere else rather than be destroyed by this slavery, and who could blame them? Of course, the answer to that would be for the Government of Iceland to bring in exit visas for all Icelanders so that no one can escape, and don't think for an instant that they would not do it. They are already willing to sell the entire population into slavery at the behest of foreigners, so locking them all into a giant geysered gulag is just the next logical step.

Finally, they can demand all they like with petitions and other old fashioned and impotent strategies. Governments like those things; it shows how bereft of imagination and common sense the best of the population is. It makes them feel secure and powerful: "If this is the best that they have, 'demanding' their freedom and signing petitions on a website that WE set up, well HAW HAW HAW, we can take them any time we like!". These Icelanders, with a very small population, have fewer people to connect with, convince and organise. Their population is more homogenous than many developed countries, they are all in the same boat at the same time; it could not be better for them.

Its going to take a nation wide, 320,000 strong Old Holborn style refusal to cooperate to get them clear of their blood sucking government. That is the first step. Once that government is no more, and there is no replacement, the incredible force of the market will begin to solve their problems in very short order. They have the balls to do it; what they need to do is do it with a clear plan and understanding of their problems and the way out.

If they do it, Iceland might just become THE place to be in the early part of the 21st century!

Icelander's Emergency Reading List:

• For a New Liberty, The Libertarian Manifesto
• George Selgin's "Good Money"
• The Case for a Genuine Gold Dollar
• What Has Government Done to Our Money?

Today marks the first day of my self declared freedom to live under common law and simply ignore whatever “laws” those 646 idiots in Parliament decide on my behalf is good for me.

I have become a “Freeman of the Land”.

Great, you say. Wait and see what happens when the bailiffs or the coppers turn up. Well, that is exactly what I intend to do. Common law has worked for the people of England perfectly well until Parliament decided they could do the job better. I see this journey as a massive learning curve, involving huge amounts of researching law and challenging authority, standing up to bullies and thieves and living the one life I am lucky to have as I see fit.

The first of a raft of letters goes out tomorrow informing various authorities that I no longer submit to their authority. The fact that I was born does not mean I have to give my earned income to the State in taxes, it does not mean that I am not free to speak my mind wherever and whenever I chose and it does not mean that anyone has any authority over me. To use a religious argument, if I am made in God’s image, then he and he alone has authority over me. No one else. By law.

So, what do I expect to happen? Well, they won’t like it, that’s for sure. I expect lots of various bodies to come knocking on my door, demanding my appearance at court or payment for this or that. Tough luck guys, Old Holborn has learned how to say no and mean it. It is not negotiable and never will be.

If you want to understand how common law works, there are numerous sources on the Internet, like the excellent TPUC site. Freemen are growing in number and living their lives as they wish. They don’t drive Ferrari’s, don’t own villas on the South Coast of France and they (generally) don’t wear Ted Baker suits either. They don’t have credit cards or P60’s, Rolex’s or iPhones. But they do have their God Given liberty and they scare the establishment shitless.

Today’s first step is a little sign on the garden gate. It states quite clearly and politely:

“No Intended Access”

Walk up my garden path and I will assume you to be as hostile to me and my family as if you’d jumped over the back garden wall. You take the consequences of that action to enter my property, uninvited. (Note to self: let the milkman know)

So here’s to a year of bankruptcy, arrest, summonses and threats. Just for simply saying no.

Bring it on. Others lost their lives in wars for rights and freedom. I have my entire life to gain.

[…]

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2010/01/free-man.html

This is very significant.

Old Holborn runs a top twenty political blog (16th in the UK), which is read by hundreds of thousands of people.

Two things are going to happen. If he does this, and demonstrates that he can do it without consequences, other people will follow him and the curtain will finally and quickly be pulled back, the fat naked emperor will stand shivering in the cold and it will be the beginning of an explosion of true liberty in Britain. If the state decides to make an example of him, it could spread the message of the ‘freemen of the land’ by the power of the national press and if it’s ‘D Noticed’ by the even more powerful blogosphere.

Either way, there is going to be some noise.

There are many people in the UK who are ready to follow Old Holborn and to get O.U.T. and like we and all the other smart people keep saying, there is nothing that they can do about a mass refusal (mass implosion) to accept anything that comes from the state. No violence is required, no pointless demonstrating, 1, 2, 3, 4, and the (n+1).

The absolute last thing anyone needs is to replace one state with another ‘better’ state; the state itself, as a concept, as a way of ‘organising society’ is the problem. The freemen on the land, particulate, individual, self governing, property owning, freely interacting, contracting and exchanging without any coercion or force is the ideal. In practice not having a state would mean that there would be no one to tell you you can or cannot do something on your land or in your own house that does not affect anyone else. It means there is no one to tell you that you cannot imbibe whatever you like, say or print what ever you like, cook food for strangers and all the other things that are regulated ‘for your own good’ – in other words, you are free. Some people (and they are, despite their claims to the contrary, completely violent types) will rail against and resist freedom, claiming that violence needs to be used against people who cook food for others or who drive on the roads or who build houses or cut hair for a living etc, all meted out by a state. There will always be violent, control freak types. Without a sate to back up their violent tendencies, they will be reduced to nothing more than hot air machines.

Old Holborn has a family. He is not putting just himself at great risk of physical harm. What he is doing should be instructional to all those who still think that engaging with the state is in any way a sensible option. Pulling apart their illogic and lies is entertaining and informative and should be done, but there has to come a point where you throw up your hands and say, “enough is enough”, and mean it.

All eyes on Old Holborn, everyone O.U.T.!

There is a comment on James Randi’s blog that is just too good to miss.

Those of you interested in science will be well aware of James Randi. He, like the deceased Phillip Klass and the ridiculous James Oberg, are Ostrich Posturers ‘First Class’ when it comes to things that they would simply rather not believe to be true, despite evidence to the contrary.

Now James Randi has committed blasphemy by denying AGW, and has been roasted for it. He is not the only one by the way, to have to suffer this astonishing and shabby behaviour.

I have no sympathy for him; you cannot pick and choose what you want to believe is true in the face of irrefutable evidence and call yourself a rational man, and that is exactly what James Randi has done in the past, and it is similar to what he is doing now by back-pedalling from a standpoint of pure logic on the subject of ‘Climate Change’ and the ‘scientists’ that promote it.

Now for some definitions:

Argument from authority

Argument from authority or appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, where it is argued that a statement is correct because the statement is made by a person or source that is commonly regarded as authoritative. The most general structure of this argument is:

Source A says that p.
Source A is authoritative.
Therefore, p is true.

This is a fallacy because the truth or falsity of the claim is not necessarily related to the personal qualities of the claimant, and because the premises can be true, and the conclusion false (an authoritative claim can turn out to be false). It is also known as argumentum ad verecundiam (Latin: argument to respect) or ipse dixit (Latin: he himself said it).

On the other hand, arguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism.

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

This is the argument used by Eco loons who claim that AGW must be true “because a scientist says so”. Of course, the opposite is also true; just because a scientist says it isn’t true, we cannot accept that it is not true solely on the basis that it is a scientists that says so.

And now to the blog comment, here it is:

——-

What specifically WOULD you accept as evidence of global warming? What evidence science could uncover would you accept as proof that climate change is real?

Point ONE:/b] The appeal to authority fallacy is fully functional here because AGWers have not provided the tiniest piece of EVIDENCE for sustaining their HYPOTHESIS. It has been already falsified many times but religious AGWers still claim “they have evidence”. They are simply mistaking ASSUMPTIONS for evidence. They call “evidence” computer models projections. They are simply their programmer’s opinion. Let’s define it once and for all: GIGO. Models have been failing to project (not to mention “predict”) the last ten years plateau and decline in temperatures as shown in this IPCC AR4 graph has observed temperatures added showing the decline.

They have failed to prove any acceleration increase in sea levels. Actually, sea level increase rate was an average of 2.4 mm/year during the last 300 years, and has progressively reduced to 1.75 and 1.4 mm/year. That’s FACTUAL EVIDENCE.

I need no evidence to know and accept that climate changes, and does it continuously, in fact, it does it four times every year. And has been changing since Earth’s was created as ALL geological and paleoclimatic evidences show.

I have all evidences needed to know that the Earth’s temperatures have risen since the Little Ice Age, and all necessary evidences to know that during the 20th Century temperatures went up 4 times and down another four times, including the present temperature decline, while CO2 levels have risen in a lineal way, which PROVES its lack of correlation with temperatures, that is, that CO2 increases causes temperature increases as claimed by the AGWer’s hypothesis.

I would accept AGW Hypothesis could be right IF someone showed me that CO2 has the ability to increase surface temperatures more than 0.4 W/m2 with a doubling of its atmospheric concentration. Someone that proves to me that CO2 has not logarithmic properties when increasing its concentration levels as shown in Australian astronomer David Archibald’s graph.

Someone who can prove that during the last glacial termination CO2 DID NOT[7B] increase between 600-800 years after temperatures increased, as demonstrated by Monnin et al, (2000), a peer reviewed study published in Science and not refuted until yesterday, which proves that CO2/temperatures correlation is 100% inverse to IPCC and warmers claims, that is, temperatures rise first, CO2 levels follow.

If you can provide me with SOME FACTUAL EVIDENCE, not ASSUMPTIONS, PROJECTIONS, CLAIMS, or press releases, then I will admit AGW is real. Meanwhile, enjoy a proof of why the forcing theory as by the IPCC idea is completely flawed:

——-

I’m lovin it.

And while we are at it, read this marvellous post from the Foresight Institute it has graphs that show

the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.

so in other words, these are the FACTS, as opposed to FRAUDULENTLY MANIPULATED DATA of the Phil Jones / Piltdown man school. If after reading that page (and everything else that is based on the facts) and you still believe in AGW, you have a problem, just like Phillip Klass, James Oberg, Carl Sagan, James Randi, Seth Schlockstack and all the other religious fanatics and science cultists out there who bury their heads in the sand, plug their ears with their fingers and say ‘LA LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENINNNNNNG!!!!!’.

Finally, this guide to the debating tactics of fake sceptics is something that you need to have in the back of your mind whenever you read any newspaper, blog, blog comment or watch TV News (if you still do that).

Zeropaid has this story about Google CEO Eric Schmidt Google Chrome and privacy:

There has been a bit of an uproar about a recent quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. While talking to CNBC, Schmidt remarked that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Not surprisingly, the familiar pro-surveillance slogan of, “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” raises the hackles of privacy advocates, and especially so coming this time from someone like Schmidt who has, theoretically at least, more access to users’ information than just about anybody else in the private sector. And Schmidt is not the first Silicon Valley executive to say disturbing things about privacy in the digital age, as the former Sun CEO Scott McNealy once said, “You already have zero privacy. Get over it.” While not disagreeing with the current state of the situation, noted security expert Bruce Schneier despairs of just this kind of attitude, that clashes so strongly with his own principle of how privacy corresponds with fundamental human rights, preserving internal domains from prying eyes, even if nothing nefarious is occurring.

What makes the question of privacy, user tracking and data collection so complex currently is the daily, almost constant exchange that occurs between users today and the service providers that make up the backbone of the web ecology. Every time we search on Google, use Google Apps (where this post is being written actually), visit a site using the Chrome browser, click on a friend’s link via Facebook , etc. etc. we are being “paid” in a sense via these services for the data we provide to the companies. They of course collate all that data in order to sell it, manipulate it, exploit it, what have you. It is precisely that data that has turned Google into a giant of 21st century business and will likely be the eventual route to revenue for innovative companies like Facebook and Twitter and many more.

Is this exchange, surrendering our data (and ultimately our privacy) for services a fair balance? Who is coming out ahead? Do users deserve more compensation for their online footprints, or at least have more control over who gets the data and what they do with it? What are the implications of an entire Chrome OS built upon this notion of exchange?

As we continue to examine the immense promise of cloud computing and online digital services, we should always keep these kinds of questions in mind, if only to be at least aware of what we are giving up, and what precisely we are getting in return.

Zeropaid

“Maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. Hmmmm; maybe you should? Who knows.

What all readers of BLOGDIAL do know is what we think about “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”.

The fact of the matter is if you really want privacy, you can have it. We have been saying this on BLOGDIAL for many years; if you want privacy online, all you have to do is take it.

Even with cloud services like Google’s Chrome OS, that are inherently non private.

Here is how you do it.

Chrome OS is open source.
GPG is open source.
You put them together.

Imagine that your copy of Chrome OS is a layer that sits between you, GPG and the Google controlled cloud. Chrome OS and GPG are both running on your hardware, and you have total control over that hardware and what runs on it. Anything that you do on your machine, via Chrome OS is encrypted before it is sent to and stored on the cloud:

That means that when Google, at the request of the NSA or Homeland Security, look at your cloud data, all they see are a series of GPG encrypted ciphertexts that no one, and I mean NO ONE can decrypt.

That means all of your:

• Email
• Spreadsheet Data
• Documents
• Calendar items

and anything else that Google want to provide to you as a service are all encrypted and decrypted on the fly, and while they are stored on Google’s servers, they are in a form that cannot be read by anyone except you.

Your Google address book would need to stay in plaintext on the Google Cloud, since the email systems need that information in plaintext for your recipients to get mail from you. This system cannot do anything to protect you from having your email subjected to traffic analysis.

You have all the advantages of the Google cloud, without any of the privacy downside. Google maintains the parts of the Chrome OS that do their work, and people outside of Google maintain the Chrome GPG layer (under open source peer review) protecting your privacy. It’s a win-win scenario for everyone except the police state, and since all of the source is developed in the open, it will not be possible for, say, the French to cripple the GPG layer that everyone uses to secure their data, as they have done with the A5 cipher that is used to encrypt GSM phone calls.

All the cryptographic services to do this of this could be hacked into the Chrome OS so that it is completely seamless and transparent to the user; the only difference in operation of Chrome OS would be that there is a second login page where you type in your GPG passphrase that would unlock all your cloud data.

Zeropaid said:

As we continue to examine the immense promise of cloud computing and online digital services, we should always keep these kinds of questions in mind, if only to be at least aware of what we are giving up, and what precisely we are getting in return.

You do not have to give up any of your privacy for convenience. You can have total, unprecedented levels of privacy in your communications without any degradation of service whatsoever. For generations people have suffered having their letters opened, their telexes, faxes and phone calls tapped and their reading habits known to snoops; now, with GPG and ubiquitous and very powerful computing, it is possible for you to have all your letters absolutely secured, the content of all of your phone calls absolutely private, without any degradation in the utility of the services you use.

All you have to do is THINK, create the tools and then USE THEM.

And in there is a snazzy term to help you think about this… “Cloudy Cloud”… hmmmm ‘Chrome OS: Cloudy Cloud Edition’!

UPDATE

A lurker emailed, intrigued, and asked how Google Calendar could work on a shared calendar if all entries were encrypted by default to a single Cloudy Cloud users system.

Thankfully, with GPG you can encrypt your calendar entries (or any other data for that matter) with another person’s GPG Public Key.

This means that the calendar entries that are encrypted with your Public Key and a colleagues public key will be readable by only you and your colleague, and no one else.

Managing this would be as easy as ticking a single box populated by your contacts. the other person’s GPG Public Key would be imported if it did not already exist on your machine (and you would have to verify the trust of it obviously)  and then, automagically, they would have access to all those calendar entries that you want to share.

Well meaning, busy people find themselves brainwashed, and everyone is made to suffer because of their gullibility.

In a Libertarian world, where no one can initiate force against anyone else, these brainwashed masses would be rendered harmless; they can believe whatever they like, and protest all they like. Without a violent state to make their irrational, illogical, crackpot wishes come true, it would all be harmless hot air.

The root of the threat from the brainwashed socialist greens is the state. Remove the state, and they become just another freely associating group of people harming no one.

Some shameless newspaper editors and hacks are claiming that the FSB are responsible for the ‘hack’ that produced the CRU files. This is probably a result of the files being initially hosted on a server located in Russia. It is simple minded guilt by association, and it’s the sort of illogic you would expect from computer illiterate journalists who are recycling second hand news without any analysis.

But what is the truth behind this? Who is/are the hero(s) responsible for the liberation of the smoking gun data that shot Climate Change / AGW / Climate Chaos to death?

First of all, lets define some terms.

Hacker
In common usage, a hacker is a person who breaks into computers, usually by gaining access to administrative controls. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground. Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political ends, and are often unconcerned about the use of illegal means to achieve them.

Other uses of the word hacker exist that are not related to computer security (computer programmer and home computer hobbyists), but these are rarely used by the mainstream media. Some would argue that the people that are now considered hackers are not hackers, as before the media described the person who breaks into computers as a hacker there was a hacker community. This community was a community of people who had a large interest in computer programming, often creating open source software. These people now refer to the cyber-criminal hackers as “crackers”.

[…]

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

The correct term for someone who gains access to computers is a ‘Cracker’, or a ‘Black Hat Hacker’. If someone broke into the CRU computers to do this, CRU was Cracked, not Hacked, by Black Hat Hackers:

Black Hat Hacker
Black Hat Hackers (also called “crackers”), are hackers who specialize in unauthorized penetration. They may use computers to attack systems for profit, for fun, or for political motivations or as a part of a social cause. Such penetration often involves modification and/or erasing of data, and is done without authorization and hence they should not be confused with “ethical hackers” (see white hat hacker).

They also may distribute computer viruses, Internet worms, and deliver spam through the use of botnets. The term may also refer to hackers who crack software to remove copy restriction methods: copy prevention, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check (NO-CD) or software annoyances like nag screens and adware.
The Black Hat Conference is a major conference dedicated both to learning (and potentially furthering) Black Hat techniques and also to understanding and preventing them.

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

If the people who cracked the CRU facility and released the files were from the FSB, they were spies, not Crackers or Black Hat Hackers.

Which brings us to how the feat was done.

The most recent emails in the archive date from 12 Nov 2009 and the earliest is from 07 Mar 1996. This is highly significant, and produces a number of possible scenarios.

1: All files copied from backup media by an insider
If the CRU keeps its old emails in offline storage (backed up on hard discs or magnetic tape), then someone working inside the facility would have had to get physical access to those backup media and restore the files to a running system (a laptop) to make copies of them and smuggle them out on a device.

2: All files copied from backup media by a burglar
Someone broke into the facility, accessed the backup media, copied it to a device and escaped with the data.

Both of those scenarios require prior knowledge of where the backup media were stored, the formats in which they were stored, and access to appropriate device(s) to retrieve the data from the backup media for copying.

Once those files were off site, it would be a case of taking time to analyse them and then a simple matter to post them on a server anywhere.

Since the most recent file is 12 Nov 2009, if normal backup procedures are being followed at CRU, we might expect that very recent emails would not be stored in offline drives or tapes along with emails from 1996. If that is the case, then we are talking about two different types of access; one to the backup media and one to the live email server at CRU.

The scenarios flowing from those assumptions are:

1: Burglar copying files from the live system and the backup media
2: Burglar copying just the backup media while someone else copies the live files from outside the facility

The third possibility is that CRU keeps all of its email, no matter how old it is, on a live system that is connected to the internet. This would mean that a Cracker could gain access to their email server and leech the entire archive, from anywhere in the world.

All of those scenarios deal with the emails. Now for the source code samples and documents that have been released.

Once again, to gain access to the released source code and documents, we have only three different options; an insider who knew where the backups were stored in the case of the old files being stored offline, or a burglar outsider, or all of these files being stored online in the live CRU system, cracked by a Cracker.

The released documents have been cherry picked to highlight the scientific fraud at CRU. That means someone who has been paying close attention to this matter, and who knew specifically what to look for to expose this fraud has either combed through a larger set of files, or, the combing through has been done for months in advance of the release of the files.

Remember, the latest email is from 12 Nov 2009, and we are talking about a large amount (167m) of cherry picked text. Lets look at some possibilities.

1: The files were released wholesale by an outsider who snarfed them on or after the 12th of November.
It is unlikely that this is the case, since the information is sorted, cherry picked and organised, and the release was very soon after this date, leaving no time to sort out the vast amount of data.

2: The files were released by an insider, after long preparation.
This is more likely than 1. An insider aware of the fraud would know what to release, where to find it and would have time to patiently organise the file. They would also know how to dump a file in an anonymous ftp in Russia, and how to point to that file without revealing their identity. The most recent document is from the 11th November 2009. Someone collating a ‘vengeance file’ would collect information till the last possible moment, which is after the 12 Nov. They would have to have root access to do this and be able to cover their tracks. Or, during the many years they have been working at CRU, they already had a personal archive of all the relevant documents and source code files, copied as a part of their routine work process. This would not explain the inclusion of emails to which they did not have access privileges on the system. No matter how these files were released, the fact that emails from all the people involved were released and not just to or from a single account means that a complete copy of the email archive of CRU, either from tape or a live system, was made, and then subsequently sifted through.

3: The files were released by a Cracker, who, with root access, remotely made copies of large sections of the CRU filesystem, and who then took months to parse through the copied files, by herself, to produce the archive that was dumped in Russia.
Unlikely, but possible. She would have to freshen the archive with the most recent emails and docs for completeness sake. Doable, but why sit on the greatest scandal in the history of science for months when you can have the same impact immediately? Then again, why not wait? And if she did it by herself, it would take months to go though that mountain of data. The FSB of course, has the manpower to sift though a mountain of data like this much more quickly, but then, why not blame the NSA, Mossad or MI5? They are just as skilled as anyone else, and their motives are just as weather like.

Whoever the hero that did this was, wether it was one person or a group of people, one thing is for sure; they had intimate knowledge of either the internal layout of CRU, or intimate knowledge of the CRU network. They also know something about climate research and the personalities involved in it (or they were told who to examine and what to look for).

Finally, all of this is a total distraction.

The only thing that matters is that the Climate Change / Global Warming / Climate Chaos hoax is blown to smithereens. The earth is not going to heat up and die, polar bears are not going to drown and the ice caps are not going to melt because of man’s use of fossil fuels, and it is now irrefutable and proven that these theories are not based on science, but are instead based on fraud. It is now on the record forever. That newspapers are focussing on this rather than the scandal of the trillions in capital that the sheep are planning to divert into pointless and very harmful schemes is a scandal on top of a scandal.

believe it.

Image from FOI2009.zip which contains the entire contents of the liberated CRU files, featuring the heads of well known scientists that smelled a rat, and who are detested by ‘Global Warming’ / ‘Climate Change’ / ‘Climate Chaos’ alarmists for telling the truth.

The CRU CLimate Gate affair continues to inform and outrage. With respect to FOIA requests, Home Educators will be familiar with this behaviour and bad, un-servant like attitude:

Professor Phil Jones, Director of the CRU, explains how he lobbied to overturn UEA’s FoI Officer’s instruction to answer FoI requests and schmoozed the person responsible for FoI appeals:

“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [a popular "sceptic" website] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC [Vice Chancellor] is also aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but probably doesn’t know the number we’re dealing with.”

Prof Jones’s colleague, Prof. Keith Briffa – who is a Reader at the CRU – spells out their attitude towards Freedom of Information quite neatly:

“I have been of the opinion right from the start of these FOI requests, that our private , inter-collegial discussion is just that – PRIVATE. Your communication with individual colleagues was on the same basis as that for any other person and it discredits the IPCC process not one iota not to reveal the details. On the contrary, submitting to these “demands” undermines the wider scientific expectation of personal confidentiality . It is for this reason, and not because we have or have not got anything to hide, that I believe none of us should submit to these “requests”.”

This is of course absolutely disgraceful behaviour on the part of these academics and their institution. They might have felt this was an imposition or an invasion, and they may have felt that their research should have been out of the grubby grasp of the general public, but the law is clear.

This is a rare insight into the attitude within many public bodies towards transparency, and the refusal to accept the principle of the FoIA is undoubtedly all too common. While the people and the media love FoI for the power it disseminates, those who have lost their privileged status still resent it deeply.

Even more serious than their appalling attitude is the instruction by Prof Jones to his colleagues to delete emails that are apparently subject to an FoI request.

On May 29th 2008, Prof Jones instructs colleagues to delete emails in a message helpfully titled “IPCC & FOI”:

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

AR4 is an IPCC report that Keith Briffa and others at the CRU worked on together, and at least one FoI request on exactly this correspondence had apparently been submitted by a David Holland on May 5th 2008.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 expressly forbids – on pain of criminal conviction – destroying information that has been requested under FoI. As the Information Commissioner puts it:

If information is held when a FOIA request is received, destroying it outside of your normal records management policies will result in a breach of the Act. You must confirm that you hold the information and consider disclosure, subject to any exemption. It will also be a criminal offence to conceal or destroy information if this is done with the intention of preventing disclosure under either FOIA or EIR.
This offence is punishable with a fine of up to £5,000.

Tellingly, another email from Prof Jones later that year shows that UEA’s internal FoI team had evidently become concerned about his secretive actions:

“I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails”

If the FoI team were concerned that Prof Jones might be breaking the law – and even committing a criminal offence – on an area that they are legally responsible for, they should have reported him to the Information Commissioner. Perhaps his flowering relationship with the FoI officer and the Chief Librarian precluded this.

Happily, he’s never tried to become matey with us, so we’re reporting him and his colleagues to the Information Commissioner this afternoon.
Irrespective of how important your subject area is, what your views on the topic might be, or how much you dislike the person making the request, Freedom of Information is too valuable and too important to just be ridden over roughshod like this.

[…]

http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/11/cru-foi-emails-taxpayers-alliance-reports-phil-jones-et-al-to-information-commissioner/

“Freedom of Information is too valuable and too important to just be ridden over roughshod like this.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Now.

I wonder what sort of dirty shenanigans went on over at the DCSF, who have refused to release information requested by some diligent and persistent Home Educators on the most flimsy of excuses? No doubt there are bombshell revelations hidden in their computers also, that if released, would cause scandals, heads to roll and misconceptions to be swept into the garbage, scuppering life changing legislation in the same way that the Global Warming / Climate Change ‘Carbon’ legislation would have done.

Once again, there is a common element to both the DCSF and the CRU refusal to release information; both of these organisations are intimately connected to the existence of the state, and in both, the people working there are not adopting the position of servants. The people who work at the DCSF are public servants, and scientists are in service to the truth, wether or not they take money from the state to do their work.

If there were no state, then there would be no problem with scientists making stuff up to steer policy and social engineer; there would be no apparatus to force their crackpot ideas onto anyone. The same holds true for education. Without a state, there would be no DCSF, Department of Education or any other apparatus to interfere with you and the good of education that you want too avail yourself of.

There is that foul smell again!

There is a common element to almost all the bad things that are and have been swirling around us for decades. Here are three examples.

We already know that ‘Global Warming‘ is junk science and a complete fraud. Now there are no doubts left for even the most ardent religious fanatic that spouts Anthropogenic Global Warming garbage or its latest incarnation ‘Climate Change’.

You can read the rundown at The Telegraph. Put plainly, these people have been caught with their pants down. They have been caught trying to nobble a scientific journal, deliberately leaving out data so that they can make their case and so on and so on; every single thing that honest scientists cannot do if they are to remain objective and true scientists, they have been caught doing.

This perversion of science and the truth is behind the Cap and Trade legislation that will destroy America’s economy. It powers the thinking behind the absurd ‘saved carbon’ displays that are attached to solar panels. (in this example one million pounds was spent on solar panels, whilst the castle itself is falling to pieces due to damp). It is behind the ridiculous and illogical ban on incandescent light bulbs. It is behind the absurd rainbow styled energy rating certificates that the EU mandates for all properties that are for rent or sale (the owner is forced to pay for inspection to get a certificate; a new burocrazy), and that even extend to devices. It is behind the proposed personal carbon trading schemes that will create an artificial economy based around ‘carbon’, where you will have to swipe an ID Card whenever you buy anything or travel anywhere.

These corrupt scientists have concocted a complex and difficult to penetrate lie, so that the world economy can be distorted and a few people can become billionaires in this new artificial economy that will sit on top of the real economy. They ignore the truth, suppress it and suppress and destroy the reputation of anyone that tries to uncover their lies so that they can personally benefit.

The same thing is happening with Education in the UK:

Government’s key adviser on Academies makes millions …from setting up Academies

A key Government adviser on Labour’s flagship City Academy scheme is now earning millions of pounds in fees from the taxpayer by setting up the controversial schools.

The scheme was at the centre of the so-called ‘cash for peerages’ scandal when police were called in to investigate claims that Labour was offering honours to businessmen who invested in the schools.

Now a series of leaked documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, reveal how the Government’s vision of local business helping to rescue failing schools has been replaced by fat-cat consultancy firms earning huge fees to set them up.

Daily Mail

If you have been reading BLOGDIAL you already know that Home Education has been under serious and increasing threat for over five years, culminating in a scandalous, fallacious and vile report by Graham Badman, that, precisely like the Climate Change scientists involved in the scandal above, revolves around the misuse of statistics, fabrication, baseless opinion and fear mongering, all of which is designed to engineer legislation whose sole aim is totalitarian control over people who were previously at liberty to live as they chose, so that a few people can make money out of the existence of children.

This fear mongering was supported by evil social workers and fake charities (NSPCC) who all repeated lies about Home Education for the sole reason that it would provide them with unprecedented access to children for financial and other, more sinister purposes.

Finally we have the spectacle of ‘Lord’ Mandelson and his nauseating and corrupt intervention into the workings of the internet at the behest of the buggy whip wielding entertainment industry.

The entertainment industry has been spreading false reports of heavy loses due to ‘illegal copying’ for decades, whilst suppressing any evidence that copying music helps expand the market for music products.

The frictionless distribution offered by the internet represents the greatest opportunity ever for artists to expose and profit from their work. Copyright was originally envisioned as a way to encourage creativity by guaranteeing the makers of works a short time period where they would have the exclusive power to control who can do what with copies of their works, after which, everyone would be able to exercise their property rights over the copies that they own.

Now copyright is a weapon that is being used to destroy the property rights of individuals, as well as the rights of speech of people world-wide.

This is being done by Mandelson at the direct command of the entertainment industry, who, if they could, would shut down the internet entirely to preserve their ancient and hopelessly broken business model.

These luddites (the book publishers and newspaper hacks are no better) would see the greatest invention since the Gutenberg Press crippled and made less useful, for no good reason at all, simply because they lack the skills and imagination to make use of it.

Now.

All of the matters above have one thing in common; the common stink that you smell whenever you encounter matters like this. That stink is the smell of THE STATE.

Without the state, none of these things could happen; they all rely on the state to ruin progress, rape, steal money and destroy life.

The monsters involved in Education rely on money from the state to do their evil with children. That includes the people who designed and sold ContactPoint, who are making money directly off of children. Without the state, there could be no ContactPoint contract.

The same goes for those academies; the contracts to create them could not exist without the state. Some argue that education itself would cease without the state running it. This is completely false.

Every evil to do with education comes out of the state’s involvement in it. The Home Education scandal in the UK is a direct result of the state provision of education, and compulsory schooling laws; were it not for that, there would be no ‘School Attendance Orders’ that could be issued to parents. If the state was not responsible for the education of anyone, which it should not be, the idea that Home Educators should be registered would never have arisen.

The state is the rotten smell behind it.

The blatantly corrupt and evil Mandelson, plainly and clearly acting at the behest of the entertainment industry, would not be able to create a new set of laws in addition to The Copyright and Patents Act if the state did not act on behalf of industry to facilitate the monopoly on ‘intellectual property’. As is made clear in the book in the previous link, we would all be better off in every sphere of life without copyrights and patents. The internet has partially demonstrated how a copyright free world could operate and bring huge benefits to everyone who consumes and creates works. If there were no state, there would be no threat of the crippling of the internet, and the even more astonishing threat of unlimited powers to do anything as long as it is in the service of protecting copyright.

The state is the rotten smell behind it.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming hoax, a scam second only to the Federal Reserve System in its magnitude, is another example of how in the absence of a state, scientists would have little (or at least different) incentives for falsifying data.

Without a state mandating widespread changes in how people voluntarily interact with each other, it would be impossible to build a business on a lie like ‘Carbon Capture’ or ‘Carbon Footprints’, or gain employment based on a lie. Artificial stimulus of industries to cater to this Climate Change lie could not exist; the capital used to create them would be diverted into places where it is needed. An example of this is, once again, the incandescent light bulb. Capital has been diverted away from improving it and into new, unpleasant, poisonous bulbs. The incandescent light bulb, had capital not been diverted away from developing it, would have greatly exceeded its current efficiency, if indeed, that is what the market required of manufacturers.

The fact is that since AGW is false, energy efficiency is not a priority with regard to ‘carbon emissions’. You may want to spend less money on your electricity bill, but that is an entirely different matter to the artificial, state created pressure put on the light bulb industry, powered by corrupt and lying scientists.

Once again, the state is the rotten smell behind it.

The only way that everyone will be free to live to their fullest potential, is in a situation where there is no state. There is no need for a state. There is no need for one to protect anyone, ensure anything, to educate anyone or to foster creativity. All of these assumptions, that a state is needed for these functions, is false.

Finally, you cannot believe on the one hand, that we need a state for some things, but not others. As soon as there is a state, like a foul smelling weed, it will begin to rapidly grow and take over everything, killing every other living thing and strangling your liberty.

You cannot, on the one hand, be for your own individual rights, but be for the banning of smoking, or the banning of hunting, for example. If you are for the banning of anything by the state, you are against whatever rights you wish to claim for yourself. If you are for the taxing of the rich, so that they pay ‘their fair share’ then you are against your own individual rights, and furthermore, you are an advocate of theft by violence, as are the people who insist that ‘something must be done’ about Home Education, or ‘pollution’, or file sharers. The people who advocate these things are all violent types, and there is no escaping it. All of this is an unavoidable fact, and many people are having a great crisis in their lives because they are being unconsciously confronted with the stark reality that they hold and espouse two conflicting beliefs simultaneously.

Before you can begin to think clearly, you have to address the root of a problem and then align your thinking correctly so that there are no contradictions. The outcome might be unpleasant, but in the end, it is the only way to develop a mode of thought that when it is applied to or tested against anything, returns the correct, and logically consistent answer every time, giving you an opportunity to get to a solution.

The state is the cause of everyone’s problems. It destroys or distorts everything it touches. The sooner it has been gotten rid of, the better. This is the fact, the unspeakable, unthinkable fact that you must come to understand if you are interested in your rights and the protection of them.

In a move that could spell the end of the plasma TV industry as we know it, the state of California agreed today to enact strict regulations on the amount of power televisions can consume, effectively outlawing most large plasma TVs as of January 1, 2011, with many more televisions set to be banned beginning January 1, 2013.

The state had been concerned that 10 percent of a home’s energy use is typically devoted to the TV and its related equipment, and that percentage has been increasing as consumers gain access to larger and larger (and cheaper and cheaper) televisions, which command an ever-increasing hunger for power.

The new rules go into effect a little more than a year from now: On January 1, 2011, televisions will be required to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent. In 2013, a second tier of restrictions will go into effect, with average energy consumption required to be reduced by 49 percent vs. today’s levels.

Rest assured, this doesn’t mean the end of the television as we know it. As the California Energy Commission notes, as of now, over 1,000 televisions already meet the 2011 standards, so many manufacturers won’t have to panic in order to comply with the regulations, at least for now.

Those who will be heavily affected are manufacturers who make televisions that draw more than their fair share of juice. A formula related to the size of the TV’s screen in square inches will be used to determine the maximum power draw allowed by a TV. For example, Panasonic’s 54-inch VIERA plasma TV would be allowed to draw 281 watts of power in “on mode.” Today that set is rated to draw 293 watts of power. Smaller plasmas are generally OK under the 2011 specs, but virtually all of them fall short when put up against the 2013 rules. That same 54-inch plasma will be required to draw only 175 watts once 2013 arrives, a power reduction that just might not be possible.

Bottom line: Most LCD televisions will be safe under the 2011 law, and many plasmas will as well, but come 2013, everyone’s going to have to do some serious belt-tightening.

All told, the new rules are expected to save 6,515 Gigawatt-hours annually in the state, save the state $8.7 billion in costs for additional power plants, and save consumers $8.1 billion a year in lower energy bills.

One additional point of note: The new rules currently don’t apply to very large TVs, those of 1,400 square inches or larger (roughly a 58″ set), although rules are likely to be enacted against these ultra-large sets in the second phase of this legislation.

[…]

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/154936/california-outlaws-large-power-hungry-tvs/

Lets get this straight.

You buy an electricity supply from a company, or make it yourself with your own solar panels or windmill.

The state says, “you cannot use that TV because it consumes too much electricity”.

Too much of WHOSE electricity?

Once that electricity enters your house, or you make it yourself, it is completely up to you what you do with it. Why should someone who lives ‘off grid’ (or on grid for that matter) be stopped from spending his own money on electricity?

This is all part of the same core idea; that the state can get into your home and tell you what you can or cannot do there. Wether it is running a certain type of electricity consuming equipment, washing your clothes, heating your house, cook your food, flushing your loo or bathing, or eating, they are trying to regulate absolutely everything that you do, no matter where you do it.

And note the language in this piece, “more than their fair share of juice”. What does this mean exactly? Electricity does not come from a collective pool that is distributed free to everyone; it is a product that is purchased by a household for personal use. There is no ‘fair share’ in any aspect of electricity generation, distribution or consumption. And no, global warming is not a result of electricity generation.

No doubt, if america is even still there, there will be a ‘cash for plasmas’ where people are encouraged to trade in their perfectly good televisions for new ones, none of which are manufactured in the USA.

What a servant is and is not is central to understanding the proper role of government.

When the creatures who run this government and the apparatchiks who operate under them say they are public servants, they lie; it is the same perversion of language that permeates all of their speech. When they say they want to ‘strengthen Home Education’ they really mean they want to cripple and destroy it. When they say that they are ‘public servants’ what they really mean is that they are your masters. This is the way they behave, the posture they adopt when they respond to you and it is evidenced in everything they do.

Servants have characteristics:

• They are deferential
• They do not lie
• They follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters
• They do not command anyone other than other servants
• They obey their masters absolutely
• They cannot instantiate new servant classes
• They are under tight control and audit

The proper posture of a servant can be seen in the behaviour of the people who sweep the streets with brooms in London. When you pass by them, they accept your rubbish into their wheeled bins. They get out of your way when you are walking down the street.

Those people are acting as true servants – they defer to you; they respond to you by making sure they are not interfering with you, and they take your garbage from you without you having to drop it for them to then sweep up.

A street sweeper who is not adopting the posture of a servant would, when you offer him your garbage, ask you to drop it first, so that he may sweep it up, as he is a street sweeper, and not a garbage collector.

Any public servant adopting a posture other than that of an obedient street sweeper or other true servant is not a public servant.

Servants who are serving correctly do not lie to their masters. If a china cup is broken in the household, the proper servant says, “I broke it by accident ma’am”. If accidents like this happen rarely, it is forgiven, forgotten and life goes on. If however, the servant lies and says that she found it broken, then this servant is a liar, and must be sacked. This is the servant who will steal a spoon, who will steal money and do all other sorts of things; this is a servant who cannot be trusted. You would not be able to leave your house with that servant in place, and in the case of Parliament, you cannot leave the power to legislate and declare war in the hands of people who cannot be trusted; you will end up with bad laws and many wars and your money stolen.

Public servants follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters. When a properly behaving servant is asked, “why are my shirts not ironed and folded Isabel?” she does not say, “Please take this matter up with the ironing lady”. She will instead, apologise, then run down to the ironing lady and ask why the DEVIL the master’s shirts are not ironed and in place.

If a servant speaks out of place on a matter, she is apologetic and grateful for correction. She does not raise her hackles, huff and puff, suck her teeth and say, “well if you don’t like it, then lump it”. A true servant who behaved in this way would indeed, be told to ‘lump it’ and be dismissed on the spot.

True servants do not command anyone but other servants. The public servant in charge of street sweepers has the power to command the army of street sweepers that he is in charge of and that is all. He has no power to mandate anything or control anyone or any other aspect of garbage. He cannot, for example, tell you, the master, how to pack your rubbish bin; if he can do that, then he is your master and you are his servant.

Servants who are behaving in their proper role always obey their masters in all matters. If the venal liars who claim to be public servants were actual servants, they could never have illegally invaded Iraq, since the masters did not want this to happen. Each consultation that came up with a result that meant new legislation was not capable of being brought to debate, so total was its rejection by the public, would be obeyed absolutely and without question.

Servants do not act in the best interests of their masters against their masters wishes. No matter what the servant believes is best, the master is to be obeyed in all things at all times, without exception.

The final characteristic of servants that differentiates them from masters is that a servant cannot instantiate another class of servant. Only a master can create a new class of servant. A street sweeper or housemaid cannot hire on their own initiative, and neither can they create a new position in the household.

This demonstrates that, for example, the multitude of Czars that are being created are all illegitimate, since no servant can create a new role for filling by another servant.

In fact, servants cannot create or demand anything that will cause the master to expend money without his permission. When the stable master needs saddle soap, he takes it out of the budget allocated to the stables, which is regularly audited by the master. He cannot order replacement horses, or saddles or anything above a certain price without the express permission of the master. In this respect, servants exhibit another characteristic; they are under control.

Finally, in this equation there is another consistent factor; the behaviour of the master. In all cases, the master must behave like a master, and not a servant.

• When he asks a question, he expects an immediate, truthful and direct answer.
• He does not tolerate breaches of etiquette (insolence).
• He does not tolerate breaches of the instantiation rule.
• He sacks for deliberate misallocation of his monies.
• He sacks for disobedience.

If you do not treat a public servant like a servant, the servant is sent the wrong signals and she begins to behave in ways that are above her station.

Scullery maids are low in the hierarchy of the household, but they obey the mistress of the house in all things instantaneously. They do not owe a greater duty of obedience to the head housekeeper; this is precisely what the appointees of ministers are doing today; their loyalty is not to you, the master, but to the person who appointed them, who they consider to be their true master. You are nothing to them; you are a serf who is taxed to pay their wages. You are to be spied upon, numbered, vilified and squeezed for the pleasure of the true master; a servant running wild.

If there is to be any long term solution to the problem of bad behaviour of public servants, it is absolutely essential that everyone when dealing with these people treat them in the manner that they should be treated.

No master ever begs his servant, or behaves in a deferential way towards them. Masters give orders and make demands of their servants on penalty of the sack should they fail to obey or function properly.

Being a master does not give you license to abuse a good servant. Good servants are like good dogs; you pet them, treat them and treasure them. ‘Please’, ‘thank you’ and all other forms of courtesy are due to servants; being a servant is not the same as being a slave. This distinction is the crucial block that prevents servants from committing immoral acts against others on the orders of their masters. Slaves are compelled to murder on the word of their master, free men who are servants are not. That being said, a servant who is not acting as a servant can never be tolerated, and must be sacked, not only to protect yourself and your household, but as a warning to other servants that should they not behave correctly, the sack is a word away.

No one forces people to become public servants. If they are not willing to behave as proper servants, obeying absolutely the points that are listed above, then they should not enter into public service at all, and should work for companies (where by the way, they will be under a modern version of the sort of discipline that you find in a good household with servants).

Without competent masters who understand their position in all of this, public servants, like untrained dogs, will ride roughshod over you as if they were your masters, and we have all started to see what that looks like.

What are the five most important words in the computer industry?

1. What
2. Are
3. Your
4. Latest
5. Warez?

The luddites are at it again. Sith Lord Mandelson says:

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, warned internet users today that the days of “consequence-free” illegal filesharing are over as he unveiled the government’s plan for cracking down on online piracy.

The real question is WHAT consequences. Everyone who has read the very enlightening academic work ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ knows:

• File sharing is not theft
• Patents retard progress
• Copyright hurts society

These are not assertions, but are provable facts.

The consequences of this ill considered legislation will be that people’s connections will be temporarily disrupted whilst doing absolutely nothing to stop the flow of files across the internets.

Anyone who knows anything about computers or file-sharing or the decades old, bigger than ever, Warez scene knows this.

Mandelson, speaking at the government’s digital creative industries conference, C&binet, confirmed that the internet connections of persistent offenders could be blocked – but only as a last resort – from the summer of 2011.

He added that a “legislate and enforce” strategy was the only way to protect the intellectual property rights of content producers.

This is of course, a lie.

The intellectual property rights of content producers are not violated by people who makes copies of files with their computers, any more than sharing a light from a candle diminishes the light of the person who owns the first lit wick:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Thomas Jefferson

What people copy when they share files are not physical objects, but ideas. Every file is a unique number, and nothing more. It is a representation of an idea, and when you copy it, you merely recite that number using a machine, allowing another machine to listen to it and ‘write it down’ for you. Nothing is lost when this happens. Nothing is ‘stolen’ and in fact, filesharing improves the condition of man and it also benefits the people who made the first copy. The question is how are the people who made the first copy going to be able to make a living out of doing it. Many people have ideas.

Lets be clear; you sharing a file that you got from someone is in every way legitimate if two people are sharing files consensually. If however, someone hacks into a computer in a studio and then shares files that are not released, that REALLY IS stealing, since the owners of those copies had not released them to anyone. Once you get a copy of a record, tape, CD or file, and the transfer to you was legitimate, i.e. did not involve violating someones consent to give it to you, those copies are YOUR copies, and you can do whatever you want with them and no part of that is immoral, including selling those copies.

Against Intellectual Monopoly goes into how this is so in detail; see in while you are at it, the section on the report of the 911 commission, and how that work made a fortune for the publisher who printed copies of it, despite there being no copyright on it.

And speaking of ‘Terrorism’ we all remember how the pathetic, discredited, whorish, corrupt and bias soaked BBC shamelessly and stupidly tried to equate Bittorrent with terrorism and the omni-present Paedophile threat, climbing down later with the statement:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

I wonder how they are going to spin this Mandelson mandate that says filesharing IS theft.

But I digress.

The strategy, which will be officially set out in the government’s digital economy bill in late November, will involve a staged process of warning notifications with internet suspension as a last resort.

The vast majority of people in the country share files. This is the reality (and its not new; people copied cassettes before the internets), and it is an entirely good thing. The only way that you will be able to stop it is by shutting off or crippling the internet. The damage that a crippled internet will do to human progress will be incalculable.

The story of James Watt and his steam engine patent as recalled in Against Intellectual Monopoly is informative:

In the specific case of Watt, the granting of the 1769 and especially of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine: innovation was stifled until his patents expired; and few steam engines were built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occurred immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations. This should not surprise us: new steam engines, no matter how much better than Watt’s, had to use the idea of a separate condenser. Because the 1775 patent provided Boulton and Watt with a monopoly over that idea, plentiful other improvements of great social and economic value could not be implemented. By the same token, until 1794 Boulton and Watt’s engines were less efficient they could have been because the Pickard’s patent prevented anyone else from using, and improving, the idea of combining a crank with a flywheel.

Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills were badly allocated: we find him spending more time engaged in legal action to establish and preserve his monopoly than he did in the actual improvement and production of his engine. From a strictly economic point of view Watt did not need such a long-lasting patent — it is estimated that by 1783 — seventeen years before his patent expired — his enterprise had already broken even. Indeed, even after their patent expired, Boulton and Watt were able to maintain a substantial premium over the market by virtue of having been first, despite the fact that their competitors had had thirty years to learn how to make steam engines.

The wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges is referred to by economists as rent-seeking behavior. History and common sense show it to be a poisoned fruit of legal monopoly. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension was clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Hornblower’s engine is a perfect case in point: it was a substantial improvement over Watt’s as it introduced the new concept of the “compound engine” with more than one cylinder. This, and not the Boulton and Watt design, was the basis for further steam-engine development after their patents expired. However, because Hornblower built on the earlier work of Watt, making use of his “separate condenser” Boulton and Watt were able to block him in court and effectively put an end to steam-engine development.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3280

This chapter of Against Intellectual Monopoly goes on to describe how the rate of increase in efficiency of steam engines in the years of Watts patent was low compared to what happened after his patents expired; the rate of increase in efficiency shot up spectacularly when people were free to incorporate his ideas into their designs. Society benefited from these new machines, and Watt’s business was not harmed in any way.

It is abundantly clear that if the reason why copyrights and patents exist is to benefit society, then they should be abolished, since everyone is better off without them. This is not an opinion, but is a fact based on research.

“It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over,” Mandelson said. “Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting.”

There is no technical measure that can be implemented without fatally crippling the internet itself. If the goal is to reduce the internet to a Minitel level service, then this imbecile will succeed.

Even if it is not reduced to that level, the artificially and unnecessarily increased cost of access to the internet will have a distorting effect, as will the shifting of scarce resources inside every ISP, as they are turned from being service providers to police men for the monopolists.

Think about it. No one will be able to update their computers; the files for some updates can be 100meg. YouTube will be off limits, as watching to much of it will flag you. Unless they are going to sniff all of your traffic to see wether or not it is infringing, they cannot possibly cut people off for downloading ‘too much’. In any case, if you want to copy the contents of a CD, that is only 65megs, which is nothing in the days of broadband. A movie is 750meg, once again, nothing. This whole plan is absurd on every level, but most importantly, it is an immoral, culturally damaging plan that will retard the progress of everyone who uses the internet.

The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year.

Like so many other pieces of legislation, this one too will be totally ignored.

The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people’s internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year.

Amazing. There is no evidence that downloading movies and music impacts on the sales of tickets or CDs.

Remember FOX’s film ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ that had a work print released onto the internets?

Lets look at the numbers for this movie:

Domestic Total Gross: $179,883,157
Distributor: Fox Release Date: May 1, 2009
Genre: Action / AdventureRunning Time: 1 hrs. 47 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $150,000,000

[…]

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=wolverine.htm

They made all their money back and more. Clearly these creative people were compensated despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people downloaded that work print.

What about ‘The Hulk’, which also had a work print leaked:

Theatrical Performance
Total US Gross $134,806,913
International Gross $128,542,344
Worldwide Gross $263,349,257
Home Market Performance
US DVD Sales: $58,230,676 Weekly Breakdown
Production Budget $137,500,000

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2008/HULK2.php

That movie also was widely available on the internets, and yet, it made a huge amount of money.

There are now, suspiciously, many work prints available on teh inernets. The fact of the matter is that these studios know that leaked copies of movies have no effect on DVD and ticket sales, and might actually increase the two if the film is any good. And who, whilst in production, thinks they are working on a lemon?

Finally, for the biggest example of all, ‘Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’, which was leaked days before its release:

Domestic Total Gross: $380,270,577
Distributor: Fox Release Date: May 19, 2005
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy Running Time: 2 hrs. 26 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $113,000,000

[…]

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars3.htm

That is a healthy profit, and of course, every Star Wars film is being actively shared every day, with no effect on the bottom line of LucasFilm. Once again, these leaks if they came from theft were immoral acts. This has nothing to do with the correctness of people who share legitimately obtained copies of works.

Are you starting to get the picture? Filesharing does not harm the bottom line of companies that are offering something that people want.

“If we reach the point of suspension for an individual, they will be informed in advance, having previously received two notifications – and will have the opportunity to appeal,” Mandelson added. “The British government’s view is that taking people’s work without due payment is wrong and that, as an economy based on creativity, we cannot sit back and do nothing as this happens.”

An economy based on creativity? The internet is the one of the most efficient ways that that creativity can be spread all over the world. By crippling it, Mandelson will be breaking the legs of this ‘economy based on creativity’.

Mandelson said that the strategy was a “proportionate measure that will give people ample awareness and opportunity to stop breaking the rules”. “The threat for persistent individuals is, and has to be, real, or no effective deterrent to breaking the law will be in place,” he added.

It is clear that ‘the rules’ serve only a handful of people and not the majority of people. Those made up, illogical rules that he claims are being broken are in fact, the thing that will push back the emergence of a culture never before seen by mankind, where fortunes beyond avarice will be made, everyone will be free to share and knowledge and good will spread everywhere.

Of course, this is precisely what Mandelson is against. These people are the snuffers out of light. They are for darkness, ignorance and are opposed to every natural instinct that man has.

They will be defeated. Just as Watts patents expired and steam engine efficiency shot up, Mandelson, Geffen and the monopolists will eventually be destroyed. Linux is destroying Microsoft Windows. Android is destroying Symbian. Human beings are not designed to live in chains as slaves, and they will do anything to get out of them. The question here is wether or not Mandelson and co will succeed in retarding progress like Watt did.

There would be a “proper route of appeal” for those that do have their internet accounts suspended, Mandelson said. He added that he did not want to see internet service providers “unfairly burdened” by the new system.

“ISPs and rights-holders will share the costs, on the basis of a flat fee that will allow both sides to budget and plan,” he said.

ISPs want nothing to do with any of this. They provide your connection, what you do with it is your business. BT is not responsible for the content of your phone calls, so why should ISPs be responsible in any way for what websites you look at or the files you transfer?

The staged roll-out of the strategy will see Ofcom assess the effectiveness of the warning notification system on cutting illegal filesharing, backed by the threat of legal action by rights holders and content companies, in about April 2011.

If the 70% reduction is not achieved the use of technical measures to cut off persistent offenders’ web access will be introduced by about July 2011.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/28/mandelson-date-blocking-filesharers-connections

How are they going to measure this number? Where did this number come from? These are the missing pieces of this article. But this should come as no surprise, since The Grauniad is a 100% Kool-Aid drinking anti-progress copyrights and patents promoter.

Anyone who knows anything about this knows that ‘piracy’ is good for business and the consumer. Tentatively, the people who make software have embraced superdistribution in the form of shareware and crippleware; the more copies you have in circulation, the more likely it is you are going to make money, either from donations or by someone making commercial use of your work.

Remember CoolEdit? That was a free sound editing application that you could download, that was very useful. Some people bought licenses for it, the majority did not. In the end, the people who wrote it sold it to Adobe for a very large sum of money. 16.5 million dollars in fact.

The shareware world demonstrates that people when left to their own devices will find out ways to make money off of their work. What Mandelson is doing is protecting the interests of people who do not have the imagination or means to adapt to the new conditions of business. In effect, they are like Watt going to parliament to ask that his patents be extended. In fact, Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is an example of this happening successfully.

The question you have to ask is this; are you going to allow these small minded, computer illiterate, venal, nasty monopolists to cripple arguably the greatest invention that man has created to date? Are you going to allow them to retard the flowering of human knowledge and interaction that has literally changed the world?

Once again, it is up to business to grow a pair of balls and say that they are not going to take responsibility for the actions of the people they provide a connection to. If they do not, first they will be forced to police ‘piracy’ then they will be forced to police everything else the government does not like meaning speech.

Either way, even if the rise of the internet era of man is retarded by thirty years, it will come to pass, and scum like Mandelson will be swept away. They will be remembered as wreckers of civilisation, the new luddites, idiots, men without vision and the servants of monopolists.

And everyone will be able to look it up on the free internet.

Read it and deal with it:

1. Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?
2. Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.
3. Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.
4. Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.
5. If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, the above goes double.
6. Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.
7. We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
8. Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
9. Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.
10. We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
11. Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.
12. If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.
13. Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.
14. Stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.
15. Stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.
16. Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.
17. Stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.
18. If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.
19. Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.
20. Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.
21. Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.
22. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.
23. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.
24. Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.
25. Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html

Priceless…

We now have a story that will be of great concern to those Home Educators that believe they will be able to ‘move to New Zealand’ so that they can be free of fascist Britain:

French police grab 4 kids on German orders
Homeschool family’s children accused of ‘being alone’

By Bob Unruh

Four children of a family that fled Germany to avoid further fines for homeschooling have been snatched from their home in France by police and accused of “being alone,” according to a report today on the ongoing war against home education across the continent.

The word comes from the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has been involved in a long list of cases of persecution of homeschooling families across Europe, especially in Germany.

The report said two French social workers and two police officers appeared without notice at the home of Dominique Chanal in St. Leonard, France, where Dirk and Angela Wunderlich and their children have lived since July.

“The four officials told a stunned Mrs. Wunderlich that they had come at the request of German authorities and that they had to take the family’s four young children because they were ‘in grave danger,'” the HSLDA report confirmed.

“A copy of the report justifying immediate seizure of the children was obtained by HSLDA. The reasons given for the seizure were that the children were ‘socially isolated, not in school and that there was a ‘flight risk,’ – none of which appear to be true,” the report said.

The family fled Germany because of a series of fines imposed for homeschooling and the concern that German authorities inside Germany would take custody of the children.

After the children were seized by French authorities, the Wunderlichs contacted their lawyers in Germany, and they now are being represented by a local attorney in France.

Armin Eckermann, chief of a German group involved in defending homeschoolers, told the HSLDA that when he contacted Germany authorities, they denied asking French police to get involved.

The children were taken into custody Sept. 28, and it was three days before the parents were allowed to see them again.

“The social workers told us that the reason they took our children was because they ‘have no contact with other children, that school education is guaranteed and that you are a risk of escape.’ But this is nonsense, as anyone who knows our family can tell,” the parents said in a statement.

Michael Donnelly, a staff attorney with the HSDLA who is familiar with a number of egregious persecution cases coming out of Germany, said the development is alarming.

“We are concerned about the increase in negative treatment of homeschoolers in Europe. This apparent trend is counter to all the evidence that shows that homeschooling is effective both academically and socially. Because homeschoolers in Europe are relatively few, it is important that homeschoolers in America encourage and support them,” he said.

The HSLDA noted that another family, Uwe and Hannalore Romeike, now has a political asylum request pending in the U.S. because of the potential for persecution should they be forced to return to Germany.

Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman has scheduled a hearing on the case Dec. 16 in Memphis, Tenn.

The landlady for the Wunderlich family said she was shocked.

“This is a wonderful family,” Chanal told HSLDA. “There are always children coming to the home to play with the children and my daughter. It is like a school in our house.

“These are very good parents who protect their children from dangers. They are better parents than most parents in France, because they do not let the children wander the streets or get involved in other bad behavior,” she said.

“I believe that this was an illegal act by the German Youth Welfare Office. We are no longer residents of Germany,” Dirk Wunderlich said. “As citizens of the European Union we have the right to free mobility, and we are complying [with] French education laws. The Germans should leave us alone.”

Donnelly reported another family, still in Germany, has been assigned a new trial date of Nov. 16. Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek of Archfeldt, Germany, previously were sentenced to 90 days in prison for homeschooling their own children.

The penalty earlier was overturned on technical grounds, and they have been ordered to a new trial.

The HSLDA warned that the behavior of German authorities is a foreshadowing of what American parents should expect if the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child ever is ratified in the U.S. Its concerns are detailed at Parental Rights.

WND reported recently on a similar situation in Sweden in whichi authorities snatched a 7-year-old child from an airplane on which he and his parents were moving to India.

The HSLDA has dispatched a formal letter to a local Swedish social services unit involved in the case in which Dominic Johansson, of Gottland, was forcibly taken into custody minutes before he and his parents, Christer and Annie Johansson, were due to take off to start a new life in India, Annie’s home country.

“This kind of gross disregard for family integrity and simple human decency is becoming the hallmark of countries like Germany, and now apparently Sweden,” Donnelly said at the time, “where the state is more interested in coerced uniformity than in protecting fundamental human rights and fostering pluralism.”

WND has reported on multiple cases of persecution of homeschooling families in Germany, including situations in which jail terms were ordered for parents of homeschooled children, a family sought political asylum because of the persecution, and a teen was taken into German state custody and ordered into a psychiatric ward for the crime of being homeschooled.

[…]

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=112106

So, if you think that you are going to be able to escape to New Zealand, think again. Your children will either be snatched off of the plane before it takes off, or when you get there, the New Zealand police will kidnap your children and put them into care right there in ‘your’ new home.

Lets make something absolutely clear: the German people still love Adolph Hitler and the Nazi philosophy of National Socialism. In their heart of hearts they worship Hitler and they demonstrate their love for him by executing his laws in his honour. That is exactly what the ‘social workers’ who arranged the kidnapping of these children in France are doing; expressing their love for the long dead Führer.

The morality of the German people is once again in question.

They can either say that they ‘did not know‘ that Hitler’s laws on Home Education were being executed today, OR they can say that they AGREE with them, and that ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. Either way, they are guilty of the same crimes that the Germans of WW2 are.

The social workers who did this should be named. The French officials who collaborated with these Nazis and Nazi law should also be named. Part of the reason they get away with outrages like this is that no one is ever made to account for and explain their actions personally.

If you are a Home Educating family and you think you can run to New Zealand to escape the new laws that may be enacted in the UK, think again; This is the true face of Graham Badman and Ed Balls’ Final Solution to the Home Education problem.

You had better make your stand here and now, because if you do not, there will be nowhere for you to run.

Americans, you are next.

Obama wants children to spend more time in school. Once this happens, he will see to it that all US Home Schoolers are registered. Then, he will mandate a state curriculum, and if you do not accept, you will be forced to send your children to school to be brainwashed.

This is the reality you are facing. This is the fight of your life. There is nowhere for you to run. You are compelled to stand and fight or give up your children.

While we are at it, lets look at what you are giving your children up to:

More than half of primary teachers ‘are unable to name three poets’

More than half of primary school teachers cannot name more than two poets, a study has shown.

Research found 58 per cent could name either one, two or none at all.

The study, by academics at the Open University, Cambridge and Reading, warned that teachers’ ‘very limited’ knowledge of poetry is damaging children’s reading skills.

They found 22 per cent of 1,200 teachers quizzed could name no poets at all. Just 10 per cent were able to mention six – the number they were asked to name by researchers.

The findings emerged after a separate study revealed how comics and magazines have overtaken story books and poems as children’s favourite reading matter.

Both reports will deepen concern over ‘dumbing down’ following a damning world league table which exposed falling reading standards among England’s ten-year-olds.

In just five years, our schools fell from third to 19th in a table of reading achievement.

Research commissioned by the UK Literacy Association showed many teachers when asked to name poets, found it not an ‘easy task’.

Most mentioned authors whose verse ‘might be seen as light-hearted or humorous’, such as Spike Milligan.

Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, told the BBC: ‘There are obviously an awful lot of young people writing and reading poetry, with teachers encouraging them.

‘However, there are also a lot of teachers who do not know and understand poetry and can’t then communicate it.’

Research commissioned by the UK Literacy Association found that while teachers enjoy reading for pleasure, they have a ‘relatively restricted repertoire’.

They were found to rely on a ‘limited range of authors when it comes to classroom practice and are not therefore in a strong position to recommend texts to young readers’.

A report by Ofsted has warned that classic poems are disappearing from schools in favour of nonsense verse and rhymes that are easy for children to imitate.

It said ‘too few’ poems were ‘genuinely challenging’ and only a small minority use poems such as Daffodils by William Wordsworth or Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, has warned that poetry is being squeezed out of primary schools by the demands of testing and Ofsted inspections.

He demanded a curriculum for poetry because it was currently being ‘frozen’ in the ‘ice’ of Government literacy policies.

Teachers covered it superficially by using poetry collections which ticked the required boxes in the National Literacy Strategy, he said.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1219130/More-half-primary-teachers-unable-poets.html#ixzz0TWenK1VR

Astonishing.

As I said before, children are a special form of property. You need to accept this principle as one of absolute truth. They are either your property, or the property of the state.

The Germans clearly adhere to this principle; they arrived in France to retrieve their property.

All the specious arguments the German SS give for their actions are irrelevant. This is about who owns children, and if you do not accept that children are property and you as the parent are the absolute owner of that property, then you are declaring that the state is the absolute owner of your children. There are no in-between positions on this, and you should not complain when the state confiscates your property if you, in the first place, do not assert your rights and claim it.

The Nazis that went to France to kidnap those children should be made to explain how it is that they do not come to the UK to kidnap Home Educated children here, so that they may attend German schools.

They can argue that these particular children, being blonde haired and blue eyed Aryan types, belong to the Reich as a form of property; this is the only argument they can offer, otherwise, these Nazis would be running all over the world kidnapping ‘kinder’ to attend their schools.

This is the key to the whole affair; German children have the ‘right’ to German culture, not ‘non Germans’.

German children therefore, can be kidnapped from foreign countries where Home Education is legal, so that they can grow up immersed in the Nazi training programme.

Just what is it that makes these particular children the property of the German state?

Part of the problem is that the German SS have no fear of Home Educating parents. THey are literally like wolves chasing and devouring chickens. If the German SS knew that it potentially meant the end of their careers or their lives if they tried to kidnap children, they would think long and hard before going on a raiding party. It is clear that they have some fear, otherwise they would not turn up with police to enforce their violence.

The Germans really are the most absurd nation in Europe. They have a plethora of laws forbidding the singing of Nazi songs, forbidding the selling of Nazi memorabilia:

It is illegal to trade in Nazi memorabilia in Germany, France, Austria and Poland.

In Germany, the maximum penalty for dealing in Nazi items is a three-year prison sentence.

[…]

germanmilitariacollectibles.com

And as you can see from that link, it is illegal to trade Nazi memorabilia in France.

And yet…

In Germany, they ban all the symbols and ephemera connected to Hitler and the Nazis, yet they follow the laws laid down by them, and the French OBEY Germans making requests based on those Nazi laws! How is it that France can allow Nazi laws to be enforced in their country, after everything they suffered during the war?

It beggars belief.

FURTHERMORE

If you think that the British do not have the national character of the Germans, and that you will be able to leave and that will be that, take a look at this. No facts, but it sounds true given everything that is going on.

EVEN MORE

This story is interesting, but not for the reasons many of the comment droids think:

Mother is refused wine at Morrisons – in case daughter, 17, drinks it

Morrisons supermarket condemned for ‘absurd’ interpretation of rules on alcohol sales to young people

Management consultant Jackie Slater thought she was completing a normal shopping trip to Morrisons until the checkout assistant demanded to see her ID before scanning two bottles of wine.

“I told her I was really flattered, but I was the wrong side of 50,” she said. But the assistant pointed to her 17-year-old daughter, Emily, and her 18-year-old niece, Annice, who were standing at the end of the checkout chatting.

“She asked: ‘Are they with you?’ I said they’d come to help me carry the bags back to the car. The assistant said: ‘You could be buying the wine for them. It’s the policy – I have to see everyone’s ID to make sure they are all over 18′.”

In vain, Mrs Slater insisted that the wine was for herself and her husband, Peter. But the assistant and then the store manager refused to budge.

Nor was their decision deemed an over-enthusiastic interpretation of company rules. Morrisons’ head office last week backed the store – a move that suggests new guidelines, introduced to limit access to alcohol among youngsters, could soon cause chaos if other shops follow Morrisons’ lead.

“Under current licensing laws, stores are unable to sell an alcoholic product to a customer they believe could be buying for a minor or for someone who is unable to prove their age,” said a spokesman for Morrisons, citing the Think 25 scheme that has been put in place by major retailers to prevent the sale of prohibited items to under-age shoppers.

Morrisons does not contest Mrs Slater’s version of events. The assistant even agreed that she would have sold the wine to a mother who had younger children with her because “no one would buy wine for a 12-year-old”. However she still refused to scan the wine without seeing Mrs Slater’s daughter’s ID – which she did not have with her.

[…]

Morrisons is unrepentant about its Leeds store’s decision. “We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously.” said the spokesman. “The rules are in place to protect our customers and their families, as well as local communities who, in the majority of cases, appreciate our vigilance in the sale of age-restricted products.”

Mrs Slater’s MP, Greg Mulholland, a health spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: “Whoever thinks this policy will do anything to stop antisocial drinking by kids is in cloud-cuckoo-land.

“This is simply absurd and Morrisons should be ashamed of themselves.

“We need a more mature and sensible approach to alcohol in general – and refusing a mum a bottle of wine with the weekly shop because she has her 17-year-old daughter with her is ridiculous. Morrisons need to think again and this time do so with just a little common sense.”

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/11/morrisons-wine-ban-mother

This story is the symptom of the disease that is taking over Britian; The Cancer That is Killing Britain.

What this story demonstrates is the push to remove responsibility for children from the parent. It is not, by the way, illegal for children to drink alcohol that is given to them by their parents.

This is also an example of the state rolling out their trust-less society model, where they are the absolute mediators of trust via the ID Card system, run by proxy through the business community.

Absolutely nauseating.

I know some people who, whenever this happens to them, respond in a uniform manner.

What they do is, ‘abandon the cart’.

They buy all their shopping, including the alcohol that they want. they check through everything except the alcohol, which they leave till last. If the check out robot asks for ID, they say they do not have ID. If she refuses to scan the bottles, they immediately say, “Ill be right back”, and abandon the cart. They then leave the store and do not return. They call the manager of the store and explain what they did, why they did it, and then they call the head office and explain the same thing.

If you are not willing to do this, then you must accept the abuse you are given.

All of these stores must be forced, by the power of the money in your pocket, to ether stop selling alcohol altogether so that the ‘problem’ cannot arise, OR they must return to normal business practices.

Period.

And now MOAR

Thanks to ChangingChops for this heads up:

Revealed: The secret report that shows how the Nazis planned a Fourth Reich …in the EU

The paper is aged and fragile, the typewritten letters slowly fading. But US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128 is as chilling now as the day it was written in November 1944.

The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany’s post-war recovery, prepare for the Nazis’ return to power and work for a ‘strong German empire’. In other words: the Fourth Reich.

The three-page, closely typed report, marked ‘Secret’, copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany’s economy by sending money through Switzerland.
They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.

The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire – but not just German.

The Red House Report, which was unearthed from US intelligence files, was the inspiration for my thriller The Budapest Protocol.

The book opens in 1944 as the Red Army advances on the besieged city, then jumps to the present day, during the election campaign for the first president of Europe. The European Union superstate is revealed as a front for a sinister conspiracy, one rooted in the last days of the Second World War.

But as I researched and wrote the novel, I realised that some of the Red House Report had become fact.

Nazi Germany did export massive amounts of capital through neutral countries. German businesses did set up a network of front companies abroad. The German economy did soon recover after 1945.

The Third Reich was defeated militarily, but powerful Nazi-era bankers, industrialists and civil servants, reborn as democrats, soon prospered in the new West Germany. There they worked for a new cause: European economic and political integration.

Is it possible that the Fourth Reich those Nazi industrialists foresaw has, in some part at least, come to pass?

[…]

Daily Mail

Anyone who has been paying attention to the painstakingly thorough and accurate Alex Jones knows that all of this is true and that furthermore, the USA is being dismantled by design as a part of this nefarious plan, via a deliberate destruction of their dollar.

By all means, watch Endgame so that as the spectacle unfolds before your eyes, you, at least, will know what is happening as it happens from your ringside seat.

Pete Darby nails the farce of the Badman report, which was incomplete and which used statistics based on poor methodology. We now know this because the author of that scandalous piece of bird cage liner has gone back for the information that he should have included in the first place, BEFORE submitting his report to the bird cage:

The bad penny, the pee into the wind, he just keeps coming back.

After he turned in his woefully prepared report into home education, for which, as far as we can understand, the conclusions were written first, we tried to challenge either him or the DCSF on it.

And we were told “Mr Badman does not work for the DCSF, he is independent, and has turned in the report, so it is nothing to do with him any more, and since it was independent, it can’t be wrong, so the DCSF can’t be challenged for putting forward a legislative program based on it.”

So we got a hearing arranged for the select committee on education. AHEd, working through freedom of information requests, got very robust figures where not only did Badman give none, but Baroness Morgan claimed that they “weren’t the basis of the report”.

And today..?

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/publications/documents/laeelectivehomeeducation/

I’m sorry, WHAT?

This “independent researcher”, who no longer has anything to do with the report, can get the DCSF to forward his request for “better figures” (and with a later deadline than other evidence) to every LA in the country?

Now, as far as I make it, that makes at least three different versions of the state of play that Badman and the DCSF have spun.

1) Badman is independent, the report is soundly based in empirical evidence.
2) Badman is independent, the report is based on soft evidence that we can’t find right now.
3) Badman is working for the DCSF, we’d like some evidence that we forgot to collect. Since the dog ate the last lot.

What really annoys me isn’t so much that it betrays a set agenda from the outset.

We knew that.

Nor that their evidential cupboards (along with their coffers) are bare and that the stats in the report are a triumph of auto-proctological accounting.

We knew that.

It’s that they thought no-one would notice. It’s possibly the most half-arsed, cloth-eared, pig-ignorant attempt at a cover-up that I’ve seen since my chocolate encrusted three-year-old son claimed the biscuit tin fell on him.

It makes the machinations of The Thick of It look like machine like competence.

More than anything, it shows the level of dismissive contempt that Badman, Balls and all their little wizards have for home educators, parliament and the population as a whole.

They’re trying to move the goalposts and think no-one will notice. I spurn them as I would spurn a rabid dog with dysentery.

[…]

http://pete-darby.livejournal.com/237803.html

And there you have it.

The fact of this matter is that hard working and careful people like Pete Darby and AHED have dug up the truth about this and shown the report to be completely lacking in rigor.

The next and naturally following question to ask is this; if this crucial aspect of the report was not done to a proper standard, what else in the report is lacking in rigor?. We already know that the summations to the report are being withheld on the most flimsy of excuses, and we can guess why; they are the smoking gun that will blow apart this report and its author PERMANENTLY.

It is completely unacceptable (quite apart from the principle of who should control the education of children) that this Soviet Style system of lawmaking and policy forming should continue. This report was clearly submitted with faulty information. If this were not the case, there would be no need for Badman to call for further statistics to bolster his case; the report should be able to stand on its own as a complete work of truth, which clearly it is not. There would also be no need to arbitrarily make secret the submissions he used to write it.

That this faulty report should be accepted unquestioned, and then used to make law is an outrage. That the submissions made to form its conclusions can be held secret is doubly outrageous; what this amounts to is the making of law using secret evidence. It is the polar opposite of transparency, and the sort of thing you find in totalitarian police states, not free countries.

The lives of over 100,000 people are going to be affected by what happens next. The futures of these families and of future families is on the line. That they believe they can push through legislation in this way makes any decent person sick to their stomach. If they REALLY believe that that they are working for the benefit of children (which clearly they are not), and are not simply circling the wagons so that they do not lose face, then they should have nothing to hide; they should release everything that was used as input into this scandalous report, to PROVE that it is not a work of bias, with a predetermined conclusion written in from the outset.

Renegade Parent points out that this is known as ‘Policy based evidence making’:

The term Policy based evidence making is a pejorative term which refers to the commissioning of research in order to support a policy which has already been decided upon. The name has been suggested as a corollary to evidence based policy making.
As the name suggests, policy based evidence making means working back from a predefined policy to produce underpinning evidence. Working from a conclusion to provide only supporting evidence is an approach which contradicts most interpretations of the scientific method; however, it should be distinguished from research into the effects of a policy where such research may provide either supporting or opposing evidence.
The term “policy based evidence making” was referred to in a report of the United Kingdom House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology into Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making issued in October 2006. The committee stated:

[Ministers] should certainly not seek selectively to pick pieces of evidence which support an already agreed policy, or even commission research in order to produce a justification for policy: so-called “policy-based evidence making” (see paragraphs 95–6). Where there is an absence of evidence, or even when the Government is knowingly contradicting the evidence—maybe for very good reason—this should be openly acknowledged.
Paragraph 89, House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making

The term has also been applied outside the strictly scientific arena, for example in a position paper for the Arts and Humanities Research Council

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_evidence_making

This sneaky and shabby request for further information, I am sure, is just the tip of the iceberg. I have no doubt that there is an effort to dig up any dirt, no matter what it is to try and tarnish the practice of Home Education. Brain dead journalists are no doubt being briefed right now as part of a campaign of poisoning to put the nail in the coffin. Even on a good day we cannot expect journalists to behave like they have any common sense… such is life.

Whatever they come up with, no matter what evidence they show to this select committee, no matter what the newspapers say remember this:

• No single group or organization can represent HE as a practice.
• A single bad parent cannot discredit all parents.
• A single bad parent cannot discredit Home Education.

There are millions of Home Educators all over the world. If we take the line of the morons who try and assert that Home Education needs to be ‘abolished’ because some parents are bad, then this logic should be extended to ALL parents no matter how their children are educated. This would mean the abolition of parenting itself.

All schoolchildren spend their summer holidays, three months of them, with their parents ‘unsupervised’ (by the state). Is it REALLY the plan of this government that all of these children be subject to home inspection and ‘summer holiday plans’ to make sure they are ‘safeguarded’? It is utter nonsense of course, and Home Educated children are no different to children who go to school and are off on summer holiday in the care of their parents. They are safe by default.

Where are the calls for home inspections of all parents after we hear the horror stories of feral children assaulting other children? We do not hear them because these purely evil imbeciles are not interested in dealing with children who are not a threat to the status quo; violent, sexualized, children running wild and causing mayhem are encouraged because they give the state even more of a reason to increase the powers of the totalitarian apparatus.

Take special note that the author of this illiberal and nauseating report calls for children to be seen by strangers without the parents being present by the force of law, and that he is a member of the same organization calling for children as young as five to be taught about masturbation in schools. Given the fact that all the recent cases of child abuse by teachers and nursery workers were instances of ‘trusted people’ (CRB checked as ‘safe’) being let lose with children, and the above UN recommendations, this call for children to be seen alone is deeply suspicious and sinister in nature.

Finally, his report has nothing to do with education, and they knew that they could not attack Home Education using ‘lack of education’ as a pretext as it is well known that Home Educated children outperform state schooled children by every measure, even socialization.

This is an attack on people who are non conformist. It is a preemptive attack on a growing trend to reject state education. As I said before 100,000 home educated children constitutes an army that could and WOULD change the character of a country, and with more people opting for Home Education every month, there would in the end be two distinct groups of people in the UK, the highly educated and free thinking Home Educated class (combined with the tiny minority from the top private schools) and everyone else.

The number of people who run the UK today is far less than the number of Home Educated children in the country. They could easily swamp parliament and fill the civill service with their numbers. It would mean GAME OVER for the police state; and they simply CANNOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN.

Even if Home Education became the norm and Home Educated people entering public service resulted in the enshrining of Home Education as we have known it, this alone is too much of an insult and threat for the apparatus to bear; they want EVERYONE in the system WITHOUT EXCEPTION, so that there is no one left who does not believe with all their heart, the state’s perverted, sickening, utterly brainwashed and dystopian view of the world (Matthew Parris graciously provides us with a perfect example… my emphasis):

Let me, a lifelong Tory, spell it out.

I believe in the State.

I believe in a strong State.

I believe in the State’s core purpose: to regulate and arbitrate.

I believe in the State’s power to do good; to bring justice, security and order; to defend and protect its citizens; and to make their lives better.

I believe in the State’s duty to care for the needy; to ensure that the rich help the poor, and that the weak are helped by the strong.

And I believe finally in the State’s nobility as an idea; the inspiring power of the national ideal; the tremendous possibilities unleashed by collective action; and the love and duty owed by citizens to the State.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article6831413.ece

We will not have it you BASTARDS.