We’re living in an age where technology can put information that was previously held by a few into the hands of almost every one. So the argument that has applied for well over a century – that in every area of life we need people at the centre to make sense of the world for us and make decisions on our behalf – simply falls down. In its place rises up a vision of real people power. This is what we mean by the Post-Bureaucratic Age.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/25/david-cameron-a-new-politics3

David Cameron is trying, but he still doesn’t get it.

“The Post Bureaucratic Age” actually and literally means ‘a time after bureaucracy’ in order to achieve this, we need an elimination of Bureaucracy. It means reversing the creation of the ultimate bureaucratic system of total control; the NIR and the ID Card and all the other databases that central government is trying to foist upon the British people.

No matter who is in charge, wether they are at the center or in distributed mini centres; if there is a national high tech control grid made of monolithic databases that watch your every move, catalogue your children and violate your privacy, then THAT system and the people who have access to it are the true centre of power. That is the ultimate force for evil, that can be wielded by any present or future government to commit atrocities on a nation wide scale, wether that government rules from a single place or many places.

No one cares about how Parliament runs. No one cares about the minutiae of how Parliament does what it does. Everyone is fed up with it, and no matter what he says, unless they completely back off of what they are doing, they will be made to back off.

Everyone wants a simple list of things that once they are fulfilled, will satisfy them permanently. The thrust of this list can be summed up with a single sentence:

Leave everyone alone.

Shifting the the responsibility for running the nanny state from the centre and distributing this vile power to the regions does not solve the actual problem, which is that people are tired of being interfered with by power itself.

The monster state needs to be dismantled. Laws need to be removed from the statute books, and this should be the sole purpose of any new parliament; to remove legislation, not create new legislation. And it had better happen very quickly.

Nothing less than this is acceptable. The palpable rage that has swept this country is just the beginning. David Cameron may find himself in a position to be the man who restored Britain to something looking like sanity. If he doesn’t have the guts or the brains to do it, then its going to be done without him or his party. No one really cares who does it as long as it is done. The fact that he is not asking for a list of things that need to be changed and is instead, offering double talk phrases like ‘The Post-Bureaucratic Age’ does not bode well for him.

That David Cameron has no idea of the seismic rage in Britain is astonishing. That he doesn’t have the wherewithal to harness it is astonishing. Other people seem to get it. Some of them get it and can even write about it. Whatever. There are many people in the UK who have the strong hands needed to tear up the statutes, treaties and contracts that have destroyed this beautiful country. Their hands will be raw and bleeding at the end of it, but it will be worth it.

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

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

Madeline Bunting writes at the Grauniad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Your Results

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You scored 100%
You are completely liberal

As a liberal you may be interested in joining the Libertarian Party. You can find out more about our policies in our manifesto. Also, help us advertise this test with your very own blog badge, below.

We should raise taxes on the rich so we can redistribute wealth to the poor?
Your answer was liberal

It is illiberal for people to be taxed at a different rate based on their income. Also rich people are the most mobile members of society. If they are over-taxed they will simply move themselves, their assets and capital offshore. Which will in turn decrease investment in the country.

We should get rid of the minimum wage?
Your answer was liberal

The minimum wage is an illiberal restriction on free trade. It also places an artificial value on the cost of labour which makes it more difficult for low skilled workers to find work, and therefore gain experience and training.

The state should bailout large corporations in financial distress?
Your answer was liberal

This is an illiberal incursion on the free market — at the taxpayer’s expense. No company should ever receive a taxpayer backed bailout. It encourages bad financial practices and corruption between the state, corporations and unions.

It should be illegal for members of the public to own guns?
Your answer was liberal

In a liberal country people can protect themselves as they see fit. Remember if someone owns a gun it does not mean they will murder anyone. In addition it is very dangerous for a people to allow their state to have a monopoly over weaponry and therefore force.

People who hold racist or extreme views should be allowed to publicly express their ideas?
Your answer was liberal

To not would be a gross and illiberal infringement on freedom of speech. And it sets a dangerous precedent for further reducing freedom of speech. It must be noted that defining things as extreme or dangerous is a purely subjective activity. Therefore the state will only define things as extreme if they pose a threat to it. But not necessarily to the people.

The state should make people change their behaviour to tackle climate change?
Your answer was liberal

In a liberal society the state will not force any law abiding person to behave in a certain way as this is an infringement on freedom of thought and action. This is an especially acute issue when you consider there is still great debate about whether climate change is caused directly by human action. People should note that the state have a lot to gain in terms of social control from climate change catastrophe. Along with large corporations who will find it easier to cope with environmental regulations than their smaller competitors.

It is wrong for the police to retain the DNA of anyone not serving a prison sentence?
Your answer was liberal

There is no reason why in a liberal society that the state should be allowed to steal the property of a person when they have not been convicted of any crime or are currently serving a prison sentence.

The state should ban people from watching violent pornography?
Your answer was liberal

This is an illiberal incursion on freedom of thought. It is not the business of the state to involve itself in the sexual preferences of consenting adults.

It is wrong for democratic nations to overthrow foreign dictators?
Your answer was liberal

It is illiberal, and a sign of gross arrogance, for one state to impose their will on another in this way. These issues are for the people of said state to resolve themselves with their leader(s).

Free market capitalism should be forced on other nations to help create a better world?
Your answer was liberal

It is illiberal for one state to impose their way of life on another. A liberal foreign policy involves free trade with all willing participants. It does not involve forcing states to behave in a certain way if they do not wish to.

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute has an article about something familiar to all americans who have looked behind their TV sets or their toasters:

Look at the back of your computer monitor, the bottom of your table lamp, or the label on your hair dryer. Chances are you will see the symbol “UL” with a circle around it. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a firm headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, and an unsung hero of the market economy.

Most people don’t realize that dozens of products in their homes — toasters, fire extinguishers, space heaters, televisions, etc. — have been tested by the Underwriters Lab for safety. The Lab also tests items like bulletproof vests, electric blankets, commercial ice-cream machines, and chicken de-beakers, among thousands of other products.

But the Lab isn’t an arm of the government. It is privately owned, financed, and operated. No one is compelled by force of law to use its services. It thrives — and makes our lives safer — by the power of its excellent reputation. For that reason, its ideologically driven enemies on the Left despise it.

The firm was formed in 1894 to deal with the dangers posed by the dramatic increase in the use of electricity. Today, it employs 4,000 scientists, engineers, and safety specialists to render an independent verdict on hundreds of thousands of products.

The very existence of the Lab debunks the common civics-text view that, without government intervention, private businesses would seek profit without regard for safety; thus, bureaucrats have to police markets to impose a balance between private interests and the common good. The government, according to this view, is the only thing standing between us and unceasing fatal accidents.

The truth is the opposite. The market is well equipped to regulate itself, and does a fine job of it. It’s the government that operates without oversight. To discover the quality and value of products, no one would trust the advice of the scandal-ridden Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission.

Unlike quality and price, safety isn’t always at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. But that hasn’t kept manufacturers from seeking out the Lab’s testing services. For those who appreciate the virtues of private enterprise, the UL insignia is an inspiration.

The Lab was the first to set standards for certifying the safety of pilots and planes before the government intervened. It set the standards for building materials, fire-fighting equipment, air conditioners, and household chemicals. It employs safecrackers and pyrotechnicians to test safes, and a variety of unique machines and devices to test thousands of other products each year. It has been testing multicolored Christmas lights since 1905, and entered the building-code business right after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Despite its unparalleled experience and success, the market economy keeps the Lab innovating. As engineer John Drengenberg of the Lab said,

There’s always some little twist in a new product — an innovative feature or something to make it cheaper — to keep us busy developing the appropriate test procedure.

Its effectiveness in determining safety standards (even for brand-new products) and maintaining them over time has generated an interesting result. Many government regulations, especially at the state level, merely mimic the building codes and insurance requirements of the Lab.

The Lab also “regulates” in a cost-effective way. Companies come to the Lab to present their products and the tests they have already conducted. The company pays a testing fee ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the costs of the tests to be conducted.

If the product passes, it receives one of three designations:

1. To be “listed” means that the product has passed muster for sale as a final product, like a hair dryer.
2. If it is listed as “recognized,” it is safe to use as a component within the final product, like a transformer.
3. To be “certified” means that the product has met someone else’s standards, such as the Chicago building code.

Each product is tested for each use, and the Lab is strict about how its mark is used by manufacturers. For example, Securitron Magnalock sent a new lock to the Lab for testing. New standards had to be established, and the lock was duly tested and “recognized” as a component for a delayed-exit system.

When the company faxed all of its field representatives that the product was “UL approved,” Lab officials suspended the listing. It then required Securitron to inform all employees that UL does not “approve” any product.

To insure continued safety, manufacturers agree to let the Lab inspect their production facilities and to retest on demand. These on-site inspections, often four a year, are unannounced. Lab inspectors can require manufacturers to present data and to rerun safety trials and experiments. Companies, in turn, pay a tiny fee for every UL designation symbol they put on their products.

Manufacturers can modify their products to adapt to market conditions, but the Lab oversees changes that affect product safety. The Lab is inflexible and scientific, but it’s also driven by common sense and realism.

Nothing is perfectly safe, of course. The competitive marketplace and the Lab aim for safety in a framework of rational attention to costs. UL official Drengenberg has noted, “It would be very easy for us to come up with an overly strict standard,” but then no one could afford to buy the product.

In fact, the Lab once built a fireproof office for some of its employees. The expensive room featured ceramic tile on the walls and ceiling, a thick concrete floor, metal furniture, and similar standards. Not only was the cost high, the esthetic results were not impressive. As Robert Yereance, author of Electrical Fire Analysis says, “most of us cannot afford a fireproof dwelling and would not like living in it if we could.”

The Lab notes that 80% of accidents and fires are caused by consumers, not products. It takes this into account in its requirements. In the case of space heaters, for example, the Lab felt that enhanced warning labels would reduce as many fires as an expensive redesign, thus keeping down cost and price.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3440

The Ludwig Von Mises institute keeps pouring out example after example of why we do not need the state for the majority of things that ‘need organizing’. The above is yet another instance showing how the market can solve any problem more efficiently than state regulation. Not only does it work better, but it is sensible, unlike the insane health and safety madness that has overtaken Britain, where, for example, every pest control company operating in the UK will soon have to have two people on hand every time a ladder is deployed…by order of the state. That means that either the companies that are currently working will need to double the numbers of their exterminators and pass the greater expense of these extra wages to the infested customers or the companies will have to do half as many jobs since they are no longer able to send a single man out with a ladder to do his job. Both outcomes will result in greater pestilence in the UK. But the government likes that, because they are the ultimate pestilence.

But I digress.

The above story proves yet again that we are all better off without the state interfering in our affairs. Wether the part of our lives is schools, money, safety or anything you can imagine, when the state is removed from the equation and people are left to organize themselves the optimum and just result emerges.

As Education Othewise become less and less important for various reasons, other more focussed groups are forming and asserting themselves. Action for Home Education is one of those groups. They have a ‘Parent’s Declaration’ online that they are asking HE parents to sign. This is a good start. It shows that finally, HE families are beginning to feel the very real threat to their families and are girding their loins for the upcoming confrontation with the evil state. The first step is to do this; declare your rights and your unalterable position.

Whilst its great to have a declaration, it is important that it makes sense, and does not contain any language that allows the state to assert in any way that they are the source of your rights. They are not. Your rights have nothing to do with the state, or its myriad pieces of legislation, or fake types of right that are in vogue today, like ‘children’s rights’ or ‘patients rights’ etc etc.

Let’s do it:

PARENTS’ DECLARATION

WE DECLARE our independent status and affirm our responsibility for the upbringing and education of our children in accordance with our lawful rights and natural justice.

First of all that is ‘sole responsibility’. Secondly, any rights you have come from nature, and not from the law, therefore we can only talk about our ‘natural rights’ as opposed to ‘lawful rights’, since the state can declare anything it likes to be unlawful; like drinking orange juice. If, all of a sudden, your ‘lawful rights’, in this case, to drink orange juice, are declared unlawful, are they taken away from you? Obviously not. Your rights exist with you, and cannot be legislated away. The state may make you an outlaw, but that does not erase your rights. For a particularly nasty example of the law making criminals of people who merely exercise their rights, see this. The ‘natural justice’ part is redundant. If you are exercising your rights without interference, that is just.

WE ASSERT our right to choose the place, form and content of the educational provision for our children in accordance with the following:

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—

(a)to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b)to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.
(Section 7 of the Education Act 1996)

In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Once again, if the law changes, do your natural rights disappear? What if parliament revokes Section 7 of the Education Act 1996? That is a very real possibility, especially as all UK HE people rely on this piece of law heavily. If that is one of your pillars then you are in serious trouble if they remove it. Your right to choose the place, form and content of the educational provision for your children has nothing to do with any legislation. The Germans do not have this legislation on their books, do they not have the same rights that you do? Of course they do, because rights do not come from the law.

(Protocol 2 Article 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights)

The european court has already declined to defend the rights of German parents to Home Educate, so I would not put too much store in using them to defend your rights in the UK.

WE WILL protect the rights of our children to own their own lives, to privacy and freedom from undue official interference in accordance with the following rights:

The right to respect for a private and family life, home and correspondence

(Human Rights Act 1998)

The right to be free from “arbitrary or unlawful interference with [their] privacy, family, home or correspondence” and from “unlawful attacks on [their] honour and reputation”

(Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)

Once again, Britain chooses to ignore what it likes when it comes to the EU, and in any case, as I say above, you cannot rely on European courts to defend what is naturally yours.

WE DEMAND that state officials remain within the bounds of the powers already conferred upon them under current law in their dealings with us, the people.

WE WILL UPHOLD AND DEFEND the above principles without fear or favour where the state forgets its legitimate function, oversteps its bounds or seeks to exert undue influence or power over our lives and those of our children against our traditional freedoms and natural justice.

Finally. This translates to (if we are taking it seriously) “we will not comply with anything that violates our rights.” That means that whatever nonsense the state comes up with, all the signatories of this declaration will simply disobey.

Once again we have some troublesome wording; freedoms are not traditional, they come from you by virtue of your existence. Traditions can be broken, are arbitrary and fleeting. Your rights are not breakable, are not arbitrary, and are eternal. Natural Justice we have already dealt with.

The next obvious step is to create a fighting fund for the inevitable lawsuits that will need to be brought, as LAs pick off the most vulnerable families to make examples of. A list of things that will not be obeyed could come in handy for those who are not up to speed on just how intertwined the monsters tentacles are.

This is good news all in all. Hopefully the numbers in HE crowd that are not willing to compromise will increase and the others who would sell their children for a pat on the head or a job in government will dwindle to a handful and then be permanently sidelined.

Snarfed from Renegade Parent.

UPDATE

The declaration has been translated into Portuguese, including all the references to British Law. Clearly this doesn’t make any sense, since the laws in the UK do not apply to Portugal. Had this document been written more carefully, it could have been adopted world-wide by any parent, since it would have dealt unambiguously with rights that everyone has in common and nothing to do with any particular state and its bogus legislation.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington.

In email, some people said….

*******wrote:
Beacuse Monkton is missing the point. Nobody is trying to inform him or fool him.

Did you read the article?

The Democrats ‘…rescinded his (Monkton’s) scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing’. If anything, its the Democrats that are trying to fool and misinform the public by not allowing open debate and the submission of evidence.

Monkton is not missing any point at all, he was prevented from making any point in the first place!

We need to prepare the ignorant mass for a massive change in life style and this includes what gore has done and will continue to do

First of all, who is ‘We’ in this instance?

Secondly, lets define terms:

“Ignorance is the state in which a person lacks knowledge and is unaware of something. This should not be confused with being unintelligent, as one’s level of intelligence and level of education or general awareness are not the same. The word “Ignorant” is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware. The term may be used specifically (e.g. “One can be an expert in math, and totally ignorant of history.”) or generally (e.g. “an ignorant person.”) — although the second use is used less as a descriptive and more as an imprecise personal insult.”

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

So, in order to not be ignorant, we must not lack knowledge, or be unaware of something. In order to be aware, we need to learn, and that means listening and reading.

By blocking Monkton, Al Gore and his democrat friends are fostering ignorance. They are doing this deliberately to boost their social engineering agenda, that they know is based on junk science and outright lies. That is how they have got the ignorant to say by rote, “the debate is over and there is scientific consensus about anthropogenic global warming”, which is of course a bald faced lie. There is no scientific consensus on AGW, they know it, you and I, the people who are not, by definition, ignorant, know it, and they want to stop anyone else from finding out what we both know to be true.

whilst scientists debate in private what to do about the various environmental issues such as , oil depletion, ice melt, co2 rise, population increase, water shortage, food shortage, soil erosion, etc

We know better than to conflate different subjects, and I know that you are playing devils advocate, so lets go there:

• ‘oil depletion’ is a technical problem that will be adapted to by the market.
• ‘Ice melt’ is not happening like the environmental Fascists keep saying it is; you and I both know that, because we study the facts.
• ‘C02 rise’ is not the cause of ‘global warming’ and is not a problem; you and I both know this, because we have been exposed to the facts.
• Water shortage is a problem of efficiency not supply, the same with food shortage. If they are a problem of supply, the market will adjust accordingly.
• Soil erosion is a problem of mismanagement (even vandalism) by a very small number of companies, and is not related to the other things in that list.
• Finally, population increase is not a problem related to oil depletion (even if there were only one car on earth, the oil would still run out since it is a finite resource) or ice melt (AGW lie), or food shortage (there is enough food to feed everyone on earth; this is a problem of will not supply) or water shortage (once again, this is a problem of efficiency not abundance) or soil erosion.

Waste disposal, water pollution, pollution by genetically modified organisms, electromagnetic spectrum poisoning and many other unrelated items could have been on that list obviously.

Ignorant environmentalists who do not have a grounding in or basic understanding of science, or the history of science and technology, or any experience in growing crops or taking care of the land, regularly bundle all of these things together under the banner of ‘the environment’ when they are quite separate and only very tangentially related.

If we are going to talk about AGW, we must stick to AGW and the evidence for or against it, without conflating it with anything that is not related directly to the scientific evidence. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory (hypothesis). It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. When people try and stifle observations that destroy the AGW hypothesis, as in any scientific matter, the people trying to suppress evidence are normally lying about their work or trying to preserve their positions and prestige. This is exactly what is happening, and the Monkton affair is just the latest example.

We either win this battle or we’re all to the dogs

This doesn’t make any sense, and it is certainly not ‘a battle’. If the AGW hypothesis is true, then the effects of AGW can be corrected by taking action to cut emissions. If it is not true, then trying to stop it by cutting C0₂ emissions is a waste of time and will represent a huge distortion in the progress of man, changing the future irrevocably and unnecessarily. The hypothesis has not been proven; what we have are a bunch of non scientists shouting very loud that the AGW hypothesis is correct, and who want to silence anyone with data that says it is not correct. That is not how science is done, and it is not how decisions that change ‘society’ should be made. If society is to be run on the basis of science, then the scientific method must be applied without distortion. What we are seeing is a denial and shutting down of the scientific method for political ends. That is a fact.

and monckton should know better.

This doesn’t make any sense either. Either he is lying and someone has proof of this, or he is genuine and wrong, and what he is saying can be disproved. Either way, the correct way to win debate is not to silence someone with evidence that challenges a hypothesis, but instead to provide evidence. The AGW side does not have this evidence, and Al Gore in particular, has been found to be a consummate liar, his film totally discredited as junk science and propaganda. The ignorant, unlike you and I, are emotionally invested in Gore and his unscientific garbage; that is the true reason why they hang on to all of this and him in particular, not because of any facts, but because they refuse to listen to the facts when they run contrary to their secular religion, ‘environmentalism’, the high priest of which is Al Gore.

he knows that life style needs to change.

Everyone knows that waste is bad, wether it be wasting paper or wasting water. What we must never do is throw away science in a blind ignorant panic and start to mix up things that do not belong together. We must also never run into the arms of the state for our solutions; they do not have any (competence or solutions); all they can offer is tyranny, violence and destruction.

What do you see in a decade?

This is an interesting question, and an interesting time horizon. I know some very ignorant people who thought that the world would be in total chaos, “in twenty years”….in 1980. Doomsayers have been with us for generations, environmental doomsayers are only the latest in the breed. The world is still going to be here. Technology is going to be better than we can imagine. The economy will be very different. AGW will be totally discredited as a hypothesis, and we will probably be back to ‘new ice age’ theories like the crackpot junk scientist James Hansen predicted in 1971 when he helped create the model that told us of the coming ice age. When that didn’t happen, he turned to global warming. Of course, it could be possible that the environmental fascists could stifle science with some absurd, ‘environmental hate speech’ statutes, effectively killing science in this field. Who knows? What I do know for certain, is that if the state and ignorant environmental religious fanatics set the agenda, we will be living in a sub optimal future constrained by the lack of imagination and prejudices of a small coterie of nutcases, cult leaders, power mad control freaks and their brainless followers.

How do you see yourself and your children?

That is a good question. I have five children. I do not want their fertility controlled by the people who I describe in the paragraph above. I do not want them taxed in a bogus ‘carbon trading’ scheme whose only goal is to enrich criminal bankers. I do not want their ability to travel to be restricted on the false pretext of AGW. I do not want them to live in a fascist world where science cannot be practiced because the ignorant masses forbid it out of religious fervor. It is my wish that my children are protected from the people who would make this planet a nightmare place. Anyone who wants their children to be caught in such a system, cannot possibly understand what it is they are asking for, and of course, once it is in place, it might never be removed for generations. We need only look at how long it took for the Soviet system to fall; seventy years. Millions of lives wasted and ruined by people who believed the theories of Marx and Lenin. Now we have Al Gore and his new religion of ‘environmentalism’; just as poisonous as Marxism Leninism, only now, it is not the proletariat against the capitalists, it is man against himself. In the environmentalism religion, man is is own enemy, and so he must destroy himself and his way of life to save himself. It is, like Marxism Leninism, utter, unscientific nonsense from beginning to end. If the environmentalists are not struck down, it will take until the models are disproved by the march of time to finally put to rest their wild imaginings. By that time, like Russia, all that will be left of the great civilizations will be wastelands of destroyed emasculated populations of cowed slaves.

And it will all have been for nothing.

As for me, I hope to be alive to see the utter destruction of all of this nonsense, from the insanity of Keynsian economics to the environmentalism religion and everything that flows from them. I live for the day when collectivism is dead and buried, where socialism and all of its masks are consigned to the garbage bin of history. There is a more than good chance that I am going to get my wish.

Neslon Mandela, president of South Africa. ANC in total control.
Barack Obama, for all his many fatal flaws, faults and failings, President of the United States of America.
The Dollar about to go the way of the hyperinflation Deutchmark.
The Internets…
Neodymium Magnets…
Cloned pets…
Cloned humans…

Oh yes, ANYTHING is possible, more than we expect.

Tough question! we really need to try and think about it because we are not part of the ignorant mass and we can go beyond some small propaganda.

I agree. Thinking about it is crucial. In order to do it, to think, we need to hear all of the evidence, not just the evidence that we like. We need to understand and apply the scientific method, and adhere to it strictly. We need to be mindful of the state, and its lust for power and absolute control over the individual and every aspect of life. Science is not propaganda, and neither is the truth. There are people out there who do not want anyone to have access to the facts. We must be suspicious of these people, and make sure that we really have all the facts to hand in spite of what they want. That is the only way that we can come to any sort of correct judgment, and think correctly.

Being rational thinking people, we are rightfully outraged that Monkton was not allowed to speak at the eleventh hour after having been invited to give evidence; what is Al Gore afraid of? That his hoax film would be exposed for the nonsense that it is? Thankfully, due to the internet that he invented, it is impossible to herd people anymore. Whatever the truth is about AGW, it will out.

What is more galling is that Gore and his religious fanatics are appealing to the legislature to enshrine their religion in the law. If they are making an appeal to the legislature, which ostensibly represents all of us equally, it is absolutely outrageous that a person offering scientific data that counters AGW was prevented from speaking. Quite apart from the debate surrounding AGW, this is an attack on Democracy and openness in government. People who believe in those two things are disgusted by this action.

If this were simply an academic debate, it would not be so important, but this is about the creation of law and the use of force on the population in order to carry out the environmentalist agenda. That evidence exists that Al Gore and his gang are dead wrong, and that this evidence is deliberately suppressed when evidence is about to be presented for the record is inexcusable.

Anyone who is reasonable, as you and I are, cannot be for such a suppression of facts.

It is only by the seeking of truth that we have had the technological means to manage our future placed into our hands. It is only through the seeking of truth that we will overcome all the myriad and very real problems that face us.

Suppressing truth, giving into irrational fear and running to the state is not going to solve anything; instead, it is going to make everything much worse, in every aspect.

I watched closely all the tea parties all over the country Wednesday. What a showing of national pride and solidarity. What a showing of subservient compliance and casual indifference. What a joke.

In Lafayette Park, Washington D.C., of all places to protest, the plan was to dump one million tea bags in the park, but the brave dissidents never did it because they forgot to get the proper permits. Are you kidding me? What is civil disobedience without civil disobedience? They even went so far as to say that they were willing to put down plastic tarps and clean up after themselves.

That’s like saying we don’t agree with your oppressive, unconstitutional despotism of our nation and to show our ire in no uncertain terms we’re going to break public law and disrupt the peace so take that, nah- nah-ne-boo-boo. But don’t worry because we’ll put everything back when we’re done as if nothing happened cuz we don’t want any trouble!

Videos on the Internet of Lafayette Park show people standing around in their trendy turtlenecks and Tommy Hilfiger and North Face jackets, chatting, socializing, drinking coffee and talking on their cell phones. Some dressed in colonial garb (how cute) and waving flags. Others even break into a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner followed by a chant of “USA, USA, USA.” What a terrific show of meaningless symbolism.

Who are they chanting to? The buildings in front of them? The birds in the trees? Themselves? What was this supposed to do, because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that it did NOTHING! All the politicians were inside, smugly and comfortably seated in their expensive leather chairs that we paid for. They were discussing their next round of special interest pandering and deficit spending at our expense while we mingled as if at a, well, tea party. But not the sort of 1773 but rather more like the sort at 4 p.m. in England that is served with crumpets.

The politicians could have cared less about the goings on outside and NO ONE took it to them. Shame on us. No one made sure they took notice. No one was put out one bit. No economic loss to the government whatsoever, as was the purpose of the original tea party, so why should they notice?

Is this like giving to a charity? You write a check to feed a starving child for 10 cents a day in some far off, nameless, faceless country and you feel better about yourself?

I attended a “tea party” in the Midwest on Wednesday and there were only about 200 people there. And it was literally a tea party: people came with their coffee mugs and sandwiches, holding signs and standing around and chatting and socializing and then everyone went home. No passion. No signs of real frustration or discontent. No real commitment to changing anything. You know why? Because nobody wants to fire the first shot! Everybody wants change, but only if they don’t have to pay for it. Only if their comfortable lives don’t have to be disrupted for their freedom. What a bunch of crap.

Then I see all these political pundits ( idiots ) on CNN talking about how the tea party movement is nothing more than a partisan, Republican, conservative movement against the Obama administration and how the majority of Americans agree with the taxing and borrowing and spending. Some numb-nuts CNN political (anal)yst named Jeff Toobin says that the Texas state legislative resolution to reaffirm their state’s sovereignty is a fantasy. Are you kidding me? State’s sovereignty is a fantasy? Well I guess that says it all. Come on everyone, down the rabbit hole.

[Background music] One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small…

Welcome to the other side of the looking glass everybody. My name’s Alice and I’ll be your host for the mad tea party today. Let me introduce some other guests: the Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, John McCain, Rod Blagojevich, Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton all the AIG executives and many, many more. Don’t worry you’ll have time to get to know them all since you can’t leave no matter what you do so might as well just get used to it. Resistance is futile.

No doubt the majority of Americans didn’t want to go to war against the British in 1776. But would anyone say now that it was the wrong thing to do? No doubt the majority of Americans didn’t want a civil war. Both those wars were, at their core, about state’s rights. About oppressive governments trying to overreach their authority and impose unlawful mandates on the states. It was about their freedom to do what they wish with their lives.

I think we have met the enemy and it is us. We’re a bunch of fast food nourished, MTV anesthetized, shopping mall, plug-in-drug (aka television) addicts who will do anything to preserve that way of life at least until we die. After that who cares?

We’re a clinically obese, socially disconnected, politically inept and intellectually bankrupt nation of douche bags who deserve everything they get.

The movement has no leader. When I listen to anyone other than Ron Paul, Peter Schiff or Lew Rockwell speak about the issues we discuss on LRC I might as well be listening to any other political party spokesperson. They sound just the same. They dress just the same. They say the same old tired things. Ron Paul has even mentioned at times that the Libertarian party has become just another political party interested more in their political posturing rather than liberty. They have all the same sorts of infighting and power struggles that are symptomatic of the fact that they have lost their way.

Rallying the troops to vote more like-minded individuals into office won’t work. That’s an old, failing strategy. When will someone step forward with the courage, character, wisdom and intelligence to lead our nation into the 21st century the way our forefathers led it into the 19th century?

Will it be Texas governor Rick Perry? Perry is using rhetoric about seceding from the union. That is EXACTLY the kind of thing we need. I believe, given the other states with similar resolutions in their legislatures, that it would begin a domino effect. It would give people a chance to actually have a clear reason to fight: their state’s rights of sovereignty and they would know that they have the state’s resources behind them. Unfortunately, even though it’s clear what a boost Texas seceding would be in uniting us, I have no doubt that Perry is not up to the task and is using the issue as nothing more than a rallying point for reelection.

Where have all the heroes gone? Where are all the pioneers? Where are the visionaries? Where are the true statesmen? Where are the defenders of freedom? What has happened to the American Spirit of life and liberty? I guess they’re all at the mall or Starbucks and are too fat to get up out of their chair and fight. Or they’re looking forward to retirement and the “good life” after spending their life being a good soldier and playing by the rules and saving for the “golden years” while their real golden years of youth were passing them by. Certainly they can’t be asked to risk all that for something as silly as their children’s futures. How selfish of me.

Or maybe we don’t want to risk our children’s well-being now, so we defer it until they’re adults and let them deal with the fact that they can’t afford college or health care or a home without going into enormous debt and we never teach them the importance of things like: character, honor, integrity, truth and freedom but rather teach them how to live in fear and how important it is to get a “good job” and play by the rules and to go along to get along and that will be safe.

We’re pathetic.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/cooper/cooper14.html

Don Cooper… one of the last remaining real human beings.

This quote is for you:

“Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna run?
Where you gonna hide?
Nowhere, cause there’s no one like you left.”

http://www.mininova.org/tor/570383

Celente Calls for “Revolution” as the Only Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Intellectual Revolution”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

Yonkers Tribune

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

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

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

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lets try and imagine an optimal revolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

We are almost there. 912 petitions is stating some of the facts plainly, but they fail in that they are ASKING for their rights. This is like a slave asking its master not to be beaten. I will strike out what is bad, and then add what needs to be added:

To the United States Congress, United States Supreme Court and President of the United States:

Whereas, the First Amendment guarantees our right to Petition for Redress of Grievances, and

Whereas, the Senators and Representatives, all executives and judicial officers of the United States are bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution, and

Whereas, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people, and

Whereas, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection of the laws, and

Whereas, Article 1 of the Constitution prohibits both the federal government and the states from passing either bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, and

Whereas, the Supreme Court has insisted that “a Bill of Attainder may affect the life of an individual, or may confiscate his property, or may do both”, and

Whereas, “All laws which are repugnant to the constitution are null and void” (Marbury v Madison, 5 US (2Cranch) 137, 174, 176 (1803)) and,

Whereas, We the People, have been betrayed through treachery and breach of allegiance, by those entrusted with the responsibility to safe guard our liberty and the United States Constitution,

We the People, in seeking Redress of Grievances, as is our right under Amendment I of the United States Constitution, ask this question of each branch of Federal Government:

“Where in the Constitution do you find authorization for each and all of the following?”

1. The redistribution of property by force and subterfuge; and the unequal application of tax laws amounting to punitive action against certain groups of American People and providing favored status to other groups
2. A paper money system that is morally and economically equivalent to counterfeiting
3. Willful and purposeful devaluation and destruction of American currency
4. Deploying military to fight undeclared wars
5. Targeting and labeling law-abiding American citizens as domestic terrorists
6. Declarations that disagreeing with policy is unpatriotic or disloyal to our country
7. Intrusions into the privacy of law-abiding American citizens
8. Perpetual massive indebtedness to foreign countries
9. Infringement upon the rights of the People to keep and bear arms through oppressive regulation and taxation designed for the very purpose of infringement
10. Passing laws and taxes without deliberation and without reading the legislation; said action is tantamount to the American People not having any representation
11. Enacting ex post facto laws and Bills of Attainder
12. Granting Constitutional rights and privileges to illegal aliens and prisoners of war
13. Funding mercenary organizations that engage in voter fraud and paid harassment of law abiding American citizens
14. Maintaining and deploying armies in peace time on United States soil
15. Unprecedented and arbitrary federal power, through the United States Treasury, for government intervention into, control of, and confiscation of, private property, private industry including but not limited to banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming and other sectors of the private economy (current and proposed)
16. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law (proposed)
17. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law (proposed)
18. Acts regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press (proposed)

We the People of the United States of America, who cherish liberty, taking into our most serious consideration, the best means of assuring our continued constitutional rights of self governance, as our ancestors in like cases have done, for asserting and vindicating our rights and liberties, declare,

That the citizens of the Unites States of America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the United States Constitution, Supreme Court case law and the Federalist Papers, have the following Rights:

• We are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and we have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever., a right to dispose of these without our consent.
• The three branches of the United States government derive their just powers solely from the consent of the governed.
• We the people have the right and the obligation to alter or abolish any government that becomes destructive of the inalienable rights endowed by our Creator and rights codified in the United States Constitution.
• We have the right peaceably to assemble, consider our grievances, petition the three branches of the Federal Government; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory and proclamations, defamatory declarations, and commitments for the same, are illegal.
• We the People of the United States of America, do claim, demand, and insist on, as our indubitable rights and liberties that the federal government must be answerable and accountable to the people; which cannot be legally taken from us., altered or abridged by any power whatever, without our own consent, and said consent has never been given.

In the course of our inquiry, we find numerous infringements and violations of the foregoing rights; which demonstrate systemic corruption formed to subvert and destroy our constitutional republic and to enslave the American people.

We submit this Petition for Redress of Grievances in an ardent desire that precious liberty be restored to ourselves and preserved for future generations of Americans.

This Petition for Redress of Grievances serves as notice and demand by the American People to on the federal government, as our agent: 1) To cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of the constitutionally delegated powers; 2) To formally and publicly recognize the natural and Constitutional rights of the American People in a manner appropriate to each branch of government (resolution, proclamation, statement); 3) To answer, point by point the question contained herein; 4) To honor your oaths to support the Constitution or resign immediately from your positions.

That we will no longer obey, since such laws are invalid on their face:

• Any law prohibiting or controlling or monitoring of the ingestion of any substance wether naturally occurring or not.
• Any redistribution of property by force and subterfuge; any application of tax laws amounting to punitive action against certain groups of American People
• Any legal tender law or law governing the type of money Americans can or cannot accept in payment for goods and services
• Any law controlling air travel safety or mandating documentation or unconstitutional search as a prerequisite for travel by air or any other means
• Any law mandating routine and unconstitutional intrusions into the privacy of law-abiding American citizens
• Any law or action causing perpetual massive indebtedness to foreign countries, such debts to be considered forgiven, written off, and not the responsibility of the American People from this moment, retroactively and going forwards
• Any law which controls or regulates arms
• Any laws and taxes passed without deliberation and without members of Congress reading the legislation
• Any laws enacting ex post facto laws and Bills of Attainder
• Any laws granting Constitutional rights and privileges to illegal aliens and prisoners of war
• Any laws creating arbitrary federal power, through the United States Treasury or otherwise, for government intervention into, control of, and confiscation of, private property, private industry including but not limited to banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming and other sectors of the private economy
• Any laws requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law
• Any laws requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law
• Any laws or acts regarding religion; limitations on freedom of political speech; or limitations on freedom of the printing press or any means of mass communication existing or yet to be invented.

You are hereby put on notice that any violation of the above will be met with deadly force as a response.
You are hereby put on notice that maintaining and deploying armies in peace time on United States soil is illegal and any such deployment will be met with deadly force.

—

There. Much better now.

In the end, this is what it will come to: deadly force as a response to any violation of your rights. In fact, we are already there. The 912 people just do not know it yet. The fact that they are creating a petition to ASK for their rights proves that they do not know it. They still think that honorable people are there to be appealed to. That laundry list of crimes proves that the people who did them are the worst type of criminal. Petitions do not work on criminals.

In the end, when the petitioned do not obey, and the 912 people want to live like human beings and not slaves, they will be forced to TAKE their liberty. The amended document above is what they will need to live by if they want to do that.

And by the way:

We are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and we have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of these without our consent.

I struck out ‘, a right to dispose of these without our consent’ and the other line with similar wording because no single generation has the right to dispose of the rights of subsequent generations, no matter how large the majority that votes for it or ‘consents’ to it, and the rights of individuals cannot be voted away by a majority. If that were not the case, the current generation of Americans could, by referendum, enslave themselves and all future generations to a foreign power without any regard for the rights of future Americans. If all people are born with inalienable rights, then those rights cannot be forfeited by anyone on an unborn person’s behalf for ANY reason. This line implies that the current generation has the right to sell future generations into slavery. They count on the ‘immutable laws of nature, the principles of the United States Constitution, Supreme Court case law and the Federalist Papers,’ as the basis of their rights, but then say that it is their right to forfeit the rights of future generations. That is immoral and illogical.

As I said at the beginning of this article, we are almost there. The most important and encouraging part of all of this is that we will not have to wait 70 years for the evil infrastructure to fall to pieces, like the people who suffered under the Soviets had to. Generations of Russians had their lives stolen from them by the Soviet system. As the 912ers and everyone else starts to wake up, it will not be very long before things are put right.

The effects on the world will be profound. Not only will Americans once again reclaim their birthright, but they will, once again, show the whole world ‘how it is done’. Other people around the world will be encouraged to emulate them. And since the world-wide war machine will be de-funded and returned to barracks, this will mean an end to the pointless and ceaseless wars. Strangely enough the greatest beneficiary of the standing down of the empire, in terms of money, will be the Americans.

Everybody wins!

By Paul Craig Roberts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Porter has now completely discredited himself, with a shameful piece of luddite nonsense masquerading as a call for justice:

If indeed a new era of global responsibility has come into being with measures that actually restrain banks and isolate tax havens,

See this. The politics of sour grapes is alive and well at the grauniad. Irrational, illogical and destructive, like the rest of the ideas in this misguided, buggy whip cracking article.

it may be time for the planet’s dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.

The greatest invention of the 21st century, equivalent in importance to the invention of the printing press, characterized as ‘destructive’ and ‘anti-civic’. The greatest force for empowering the little guy, thanks to which the playing field is made forever flatter; this is a ‘bad thing’. A set of devices and protocols that allow you to have a private conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world for free…and all the other myriad things it can do and will do. This is something ‘to be stopped’.

Only a total computer illiterate, luddite, anti-freedom, anti-human imbecile could believe such a thing.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs – worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.

The internet and the World Wide Web are two separate things, as this commenter points out:

1) Tim Berners-Lee created the WORLD WIDE WEB, which is a distinctly different thing than the Internet. The World Wide Web is a layer on top of the internet that provides the websites that we see, but the largest portion of the internet is not visible, and does not interact with home computers. The internet is hardware, software, protocols, servers, undersea cables, standards, repeaters, satellites and so forth, all operating on the same protocols (IP, Internet Protocol). Tim Berners-Lee certainly created a revolution with the World Wide Web, but the creation of the Internet is an even grander achievement, which took decades, cost billions, and was mostly the responsibility of three groups: AT&T, Cisco Systems, and The United States Department of Defense.

In the strictest sense, the internet was born in 1971, just under 20 years before Sir Berner-Lee’s breakthrough, when many of the standards and theories that became Internet Protocol were developed.

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

One day we will live in a world where everything that is quantifiable knowledge will be contained and indexed by Google. And it will be a good day for mankind, because all that information will be equally available, so long as you speak the English language.

What Google does, to put it stiffly, is vastly more important than some novelist exploring how much the human condition absolutely sucks.

Thanks to the commenter called ‘Netwrk’.

Google is the most prominent WWM,

Is that something like WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) I wonder? Hmmmmmmm…. Guilt by acronym association!

but let’s start with an American site that is making a name for itself in straightforward misappropriation. Scribd.com offers free downloads of every kind of book, magazine, brochure, guide, research paper and pamphlet to 55 million readers every month. Many have been uploaded illegally. Last week the publishers of JK Rowling, Ken Follett and Aravind Adiga took action to remove books that had been illegally published on the site.

First of all, Scribd is a wonderful service. It is being used by the computer literate to disseminate knowledge. Only the completely ignorant, imagination-less luddites are against it.

Mr. Porter, you are on the wrong side of history. You need, as a matter of priority, to read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘. The arguments you put forward against ‘piracy’ are from an imaginary world before the internet (like buggy whip salesmen before the motor car). The ‘community’ you speak of would be much better off living in a world without patents and copyrights, and Against Intellectual Monopoly proves it. The new services like Scribd, are clearly more beneficial than harmful, even with the present copyright regime in place. No matter how loud you shout, and complain, copyright, like alcohol prohibition is dead, and we are all better off for it.

To add injury to insult, your type of ‘thinking’ is disrupting the flow of materials that are out of copyright. Our own Scribd account was the subject of an attack from your lobby this last week.

On our Scribd account, I publish some of our works, and other historical works that are free of copyright. Because Scribd is under attack from mentally retarded luddites, we were sent the following:

Subject:

Copyright notification

From Jason Bentley, on 2009-04-03:

Message:

Dear Irdial-Discs,

We have removed your document “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd.

Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.

As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms

Jason Bentley
Directory of Community Development
jason@scribd.com

People like you might believe that all works should be copyrighted forever no matter how old they are. The fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally tolerated in the belief that they served society, and rewarded the creators of content whilst promoting innovation and creativity. This is why the term of protection was short, so that the works would pass into the public domain, where they could spread and be of benefit to the public after the creators had reaped the benefit of protection via a state sanctioned monopoly over their ideas and how they could be used and copied.

The work in question above is by Adam Smith, published in 1776:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

[…]

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

In case you are unfamiliar with it.

I replied:

From Irdial-Discs,
on 2009-04-03:

Please restore this deleted document. It is in the public domain:

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

It would be an interesting project for Scribd to add the entire contents of the Project Guttenberg texts to your checking system, so that you can exclude documents like this from being flagged.

./akin
./irdial

Scribd.com complied:

Jason Bentley, Apr 04 10:33 pm:

Hi,

I’m sorry that our automated copyright protection system misidentified your document as infringing. We try very hard to protect the rights of authors, and sometimes our copyright robot get a little oversensitive.

I’ve restored your document and removed all references from your account.

Cheers,

Jason

***

Jason Bentley
Community Director and Copyright Agent
Scribd, Inc.

This is the sort of world Henry Porter wants; a world where everything is unavailable because of the incredibly small number of giant publishers and their prostitute luddite lackeys whining that the old days are over. At the very least, Porter is calling for a web where everything must be screened by copyright police before it is posted. This is the same voice that wants ‘civil liberties’; the very voice that is calling for a fascist regime to enforce the insanity of copyright transposed to the web.

Scribd.com complied, but what is interesting is the company’s institutional lack of guilt when the piracy was exposed.

‘Piracy’ (as it is defined today) only takes place when someone sells a book or movie; a ‘movie pirate’ is someone who copies movies onto DVDs and then sells them instead of buying discs from the manufacturer and re-selling them. People who copy movies are not ‘Pirates’, what they do is not ‘piracy’ and in fact the act of copying music, books and movies is beneficial to society even if they sell copies. Furthermore, the people who make movies, music and who write books are able to make a living without copyright laws (state enforced monopolies) in place. This might come as a shock to people like Henry Porter, who writes in the bosom of a nest of copyright brainwashed computer illiterate vipers, but it is a fact nonetheless. Against Intellectual Monopoly has some illuminating examples of why (in this case patents) are a bad thing:

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts above suggest a different interpretation. Watt is a clever inventor who, after getting one step ahead of the pack, remains ahead not by superior innovation, but by clever exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner is a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, is not a minor help.

The evidence suggests that Watt’s efforts to use the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two. The granting of the 1769 and, especially, of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine:innovation is stifled until his patents expire; and very few steam engines are built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occur immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations in an effort to avoid the fate of Hornblower. Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills are badly allocated: we find him spending as much time engaging in legal action in an effort to establish and preserve a monopoly as he does in actual invention.

Indeed, this story contains most of the important elements of our argument Against Intellectual Monopoly. The sort of wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges we have seen in Watt is one of the greatest dangers of monopoly. It is commonly referred to as rent-seeking behavior. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension is 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. Finally,there is the slow rate at which the steam engine was adopted be for the expiration of Watt’s patent. By keeping prices high and preventing other from producing cheaper steam engines, Boulton and Watt hampered capital accumulation and slowed economic growth. Intellectual property, as it is currently conceived, has other damaging social effects but the three listed here and exemplified in Watt’s story are the most serious ones: rent-seeking, innovation suppression, and slow-down in the process of economic growth. We shall see that Watt’s experience is the rule, not the exception.

[…]

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Anyone with even one brain cell can see the parallels between this story and the others in Against Intellectual Monopoly in the context of Google, Scribd, the services that run on the Bittorrent ecosystem and the other internet services today. The world, ‘the community’ that Porter is so eager to protect and serve would have been far better served if Watt had not been able to use government force to stop other inventors from improving the steam engine. As soon as Watt’s government granted monopoly ended, the efficiency and power of steam engines increased at a rate far greater than when Watt was able to stifle innovation with his patent, and what’s more, when his patent expired, Watt’s profits continued undiminished.

This is a very important lesson for everyone involved in any sort of creativity. We at Irdial knew instinctively that releasing our catalogue for free would benefit us more than keeping it locked up. That is why we freed our works for non commercial use in 1999. If we lived in a society where there were no copyrights at all we would gladly give up the commercial use rights in an instant.

Instead of fighting the reality, resisting the new tools and clinging on to broken models, it made sense to us to embrace it all and use it to get our works in as many places as possible. To us, it’s obvious. To people like Henry Porter, the future and its wondrous tools are a threat to be destroyed, and he doesn’t care about all the historical works that are burned in his insane quest to cleanse the internet of copyrighted works. We see the direct result of people like him in the erasure of Adam Smith’s work from Scribd.

Instead of admitting it and apologising, it issued a statement claiming Scribd possessed “industry-leading copyright management system which goes above and beyond requirements of Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.

So, Scribd should now apologize for innovating, for bringing millions of documents to millions of people, for nothing. They should apologize for having to invent a piece of filtering software thanks to lobbyist bought government pressure, which might never work accurately and which diverts time away from the software developers improving Scribd, and which diverts capital away from improving Scribd. This is totally insane, and exactly what is described in Against Intellectual Monopoly. Thanks to the luddites like Henry Porter and his distant cousin Watt, innovation is being retarded, as companies divert resources to satisfy monopolists.

That’s like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he’s covered by the best insurance company. What matters is the crime, the theft of someone else’s content, which has taken care, labour, money and expertise to publish.

This is wrong. What you are doing is protesting that the internet should not exist so that you can continue to collect a rent on your works at the expense of the entire world’s population and at the expense of the progress of mankind itself.

What matters here is that copying books is in no way ‘a crime’, is entirely beneficial to society, and in no way detracts from an authors ability to make money on the works that they have taken care, labour money and expertise to create. I have no doubt that some non-BLOGDIAL readers will not believe that this is even possible. Not only is it possible, but we have made money from giving our works away for free, and Against Intellectual Monopoly has examples in it where works that are not copyrighted have made millions for publishers; look at the case of the title The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States where the publisher (Norton) printed this rather large book at a huge profit, despite there being no copyright on the text and it being downloaded world-wide by millions of people:

[…] To be clear: what Norton received from the government was the right to publish first, and the right to use the word “authorized” in the title. What they did not get was the usual copyright – the right to exclusively publish the book. Because it is a U.S. government document, the moment it was released, other individuals, and more important, publishing houses, had the right to buy or download copies and to make and resell additional copies– electronically or in print, at a price of their choosing

[…]

Assuming that St. Martin’s has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money, this suggests Norton made at the very least on the order of a million dollars. We also know that their contract with the government called upon them to donate their “profits” to charity – and we know that they did in fact “donate $600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism prevention.”

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[…]

The point is that even if Scribd removes books, it still allows individuals to advertise services for delivering pirated books by email, which must make it the enemy of every writer and publisher in the world. In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

Advertising a service is everyone’s right. The right to publish (or ‘freedom of the press’) is not ‘the right of newspapers and journalists to write what they like without restriction’. In this case, ‘The Press’ means not ‘the press corps’ but THE PRINTING PRESS as in a device to disseminate writing to a large audience. Journalists always make this mistake; they go berserk when their newspapers face censorship, but when its Bloggers or individuals who claim their right to print and distribute whatever they like, then it’s another story. Shameful.

Scribd is the friend of every writer and publisher in the world, wether they know it or not. Copyright law needs to be abolished, not just turned on its head, and the internet has made this progress begin to happen. If it does not take place before hand, the deaths of the luddites like Henry Porter and his employers and their replacement by ‘The Pirate Generation’ will spell the end of copyright, and the removal of all related legislation from the statute books. As it is, if these laws remain on the books, hundreds of millions of people will be and are being criminalized at the behest of luddites, lobbyists and the corporations they serve…people like Henry Porter.

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community.

This is so absurd I actually LOL’d. Google makes it easy to find authors; easier than it has ever been before. It makes all sorts of research easier by orders of magnitude; every link on this page was found for me by Google. Henry Porter wants a world where this, the greatest research tool ever invented is deliberately broken, just like Scribd is being broken. This is the ‘benefit’ he wants to bring to ‘the community’, and it is laughable that he thinks that ‘commercial institutions’ work for the benefit of ‘the community’… only when they work for HIS benefit… which community PRECISELY is he talking about? I think it’s the community of published authors and publishing houses; the intellectual monopolists, who want to strangle innovation and hold humanity back.

One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

This is called ‘rent seeking‘; the artists concerned, Socialist Billy Bragg and his strange bedfellow, falsetto Robin Gibb, intellectual monopolists both, threatened Google that if they did not pay the rent for videos on YouTube they would face action. Google removes the videos, the infringement, and then is accused of ‘playing very rough’. Do they want their material infringed or do they not? They complained, and their wishes were acceded to; why are they complaining? The fact of the matter is that they want to collect rent. They would like their music to be posted and hosted on YouTube without them having to lift a finger, but they want the rent also. 22p per play is absolutely ridiculous, and if every rent seeker asked for and recieved this money, there would be no YouTube. YouTube is turning out to be one of the most potent political tools available from, the UK to Saudi Arabia. Henry Porter wants it killed so that his (completely irrational) rent seeking socialist friends can make money they do not deserve.

Socialists really are ridiculous creatures; they claim that they are for the masses being empowered, but when something comes along that gives them more power than anyone has ever had EVER, they are AGAINST IT, and want to DESTROY it. The fact is that Socialists are not for anyone other than themselves; they want to be the bosses, the controllers with absolute power. Billy Bragg is a perfect example of this. A luddite that would smash the internet so he can collect rent. Robin Gibb is at least consistent; he is a rich man who doesn’t want the party to end – at least he is honest.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

This is total garbage. Google can in no way be characterized as putting a boot on anyone’s windpipe…though in the case of Billy Bragg, that would save us from hearing his ‘singing’.

Secondly, songwriters have everywhere else to go. This is because the internet is essentially infinite; they can set up their own site and sell their wares; they have had over a decade to do it, and have failed miserably to meet this new challenge. Instead of buying Napster, they destroyed it. Instead of working with Mininova and The Pirate Bay, they are trying to outlaw them. Even Apples iTunes store, where they were making money, met with fierce resistance from them. The fact of the matter is, these people, Henry Porter, Billy Bragg and the entertainment industry are collectively unintelligent and unimaginative. Were this not the case, they would have seen the opportunity for super-distribution of their works and embraced the internet at the beginning.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

That is incorrect; what we are seeing IS heroic young enterprise, being misunderstood and slandered by old rent seeking luddites, who are the REAL monopolists in this story, the Intellectual Monopolists. It is Henry Porter that is trying to destroy industry’s enterprise – new industries – Google, Scribd and all the other content services empower individual enterprise by allowing the creative to circumnavigate the luddite gatekeepers at the Guardian and the major record labels.

Google make profits and the entire world benefits from a tool unprecedented in human history, that no one has to pay for to use, and which helps authors and publishers make more money and reach more people than they ever dreamed possible. Only a total fool would be against it, and given the facts of the history and nature of copyright and patents, only the evil and utterly selfish would try to destroy it.

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is covered by the comments on this very bad and revealing article:

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

[…]

To say that Google produces nothing is ridiculous. As many people have mentioned the search algorithms they have developed make the internet useful for millions. One might as well dismiss Dr Johnson for compiling a book of other people’s words.

Beyond search they have produced some of the easiest to use and most compelling software available. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Calendar have reset expectations for what can be done in internet applications.

They may not be the perfect institution and I love to know if one ever existed. I want to live in a world of Newspapers and Google but if Newspapers don’t survive it won’t be Google’s fault.

[…]

“… Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time”.

This is utter blindness. It’s like arguing that the Ordinance Survey have never done anything useful, because everything on their maps was created by other people, or that Henry Ford added no value because he only shuffled around metals, wood and leather into different shapes.

Google have made searching on a vast scale incredibly easy, and they are the only company who has done so, covering everything from Ethiopian restaurants to the notebooks of Leonardo, at any time, from anywhere. In fact, for absolutely nothing, they provide me with a service worth several times more than any other company does, bar none. If this puts them in a position to earn a lot of money, good on them. If Billy Bragg would still prefer to be back in the workers’ paradise of the GDR, he’s welcome to it.

Closer to home, I note that 95+% of what the Guardian provides overlaps several times over with what is provided by the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Economist, etc, and that the marginal value of any one of these is minimal. The challenge for newspapers is to make themselves distinctively useful, (e.g. the New Yorker’s employment of Sy Hersh), rather than, like the Guardian, recycling a huge amount of content from the AP in manner that makes it, “in the final analysis, a parasite …”.

[…]

What a bitter and twisted load of oldschool, oldfashioned, defensive Fleet-Street-Journalist dinosaurian rubbish this article really is.

Just listen to the decription of the Internet and Google: “amoral”, “destructive, anti-civic”, “exuberant contempt”, “threat to livelihood of individuals”, “a parasite that creates nothing”, “delinquent”, “sociopathic”, “invaded the privacy of millions”, “needs to be stopped in its tracks”.

This is the typical rant of the dying newspaperman – yes, mate, your “power” as a “journalist” with your beholden readers IS on the wane, your influence IS falling, your role IS diminishing – I can understand why you see the Internet and Google as bad.

But this isn’t journalism – like so much we now see inthe papers against the Internet, it’s massively ill-informed, superficial, frightened, self-serving invective. I fear it will do nothing more than to confirm the authors as dinosaurs who have received the last rites.

[…]

And there you have it.

On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

Twitter, if they want to be bought by Google, is a private matter. It’spurchase will benefit the users of that service…in any case, that has nothing to do with the thrust of this article, intellectual monopoly. It does point however shine a light on Henry Porter’s hatred of the rich and innovative, his sour grapes politics. As for ‘contested by academics’, this is ‘some people say‘. That is the company that Henry Porter keeps.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.

Newspapers are dying because they do not provide what people need. If the Guardian provided what people want, the truth, then it would be a thriving business. The fact of the matter is, as the commenter says above, the Guardian’s content overlaps with every other newspapers content. they run the same stories, from the same point of view, and everyone is sick of it. This is why readers have turned away from newspapers:

Definitely the most ill-informed piece of propaganda I have read in a very long time and a great example of why nobody wants to pay for newspapers

Well said commenter. This is an absurd article that flies in the face of reality and the truth; why should anyone PAY to be lied to when they can get the truth for free and unfiltered from the internets?

Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Newspapers, if they were to remove their content, would be committing suicide. They should do this, and go out like an hero instead of whining like spoiled brats. They have executed themselves by prostituting their non advertising column inches for anyone with money, and the Guardian is the biggest whore of them all. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google no one would notice; the content in all the papers is the same, and so it is already like there is only one newspaper… no breach of competition rules is possible between those bird cage liners.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

I think this Thomas Jefferson quote is more appropriate:

“Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Quote found by Google of course.

Sharing knowledge is just like sharing a light from a candle; Henry Porter and the intellectual monopolists want us all to live in darkness.

If, at a time of profound challenges, newspapers fall out with Google, it could be pretty serious for British society, which is why I referred earlier to anti-civic forces.

British society is in trouble because the newspapers have utterly failed to raise the alarm about the police state. They have failed to rally the people into revolt. They have failed in the very task that Henry Porter believes is their raison d’etre and sacred duty. The internet has done more than any newspaper to galvanize inform and solidify the revolt against the police state, as we are well aware; even email circulars are more powerful than newspapers in properly informing the public. Then there are the Blogs which have changed the game entirely. And now, YouTube, which shamed television news into playing catch up on one of the most important speeches delivered in front of a sitting Prime Minster ever. That is a blog post, by the way, NOT a newspaper article. No, newspapers are an irrelevance now thanks to their prostituting their power, and this article, this shameless, vulgar piece of transparent propaganda, is a perfect example of it.

Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 – now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand – does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

The only delusional people in this story are Henry Porter and the lobby he represents and is shilling for. The only people without conscience are the ones who would retard or destroy man’s progress for their personal profit. It is Henry Porter who is acting like a breast fed 11-year-old, whining that the world is changing and he can no longer get his ‘bitty’….”I want my rent mummy!!! WAAAAH WAAAHHH WAHHHHH”

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience.

Henry Porter is painfully unaware about the history and true nature of intellectual monopoly, and how it is damaging to society. He wants to prevent failure of fossilized and sclerotic businesses by strangling innovators so that methods can never change and business and culture remain in stasis.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

Henry Porter perfectly conveys spoiled and ignorant immorality that poses as righteous indignation. He chastises Google for obeying the laws of other countries while whining that Google does not better obeying the insane laws of the UK. This is hypocrisy, but when it comes to China, all journalists at the Guardian are in the same boat.

And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain’s civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

And yet, all the journalists who jumped on Google for Streetview, which everyone can use equally, did not make so much noise when the CCTV started to go up, which no one can access but the state. How is it that CCTV, ANPR etc is not as bad as Google Streetview? Henry Porter has been making the right noises about CCTV to be sure, but the newspapers as a whole have totally FAILED to make the right noises about CCTV. Google Streetview is NOTHING compared to the real-time CCTV and ANPR that the state has, and yet, where is the universal moral outrage? Where are the pig ignorant little Britain villagers taking down the surveillance cameras en masse? Oh, I remember, Henry Porter says:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499

which means that he is FOR CCTV as long as the democratic state is behind it, acting on behalf of us. Those villagers are FOR CCTV as long as its the government behind them! They are all as thick as two short planks.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy?showallcomments=true

I am happy to say that articles like this are the death rattle of the pure evil that is newspaper journalism.

I am also happy to report that the majority of the comments on his article are entirely against it, for all the right reasons.

Farewell newspaper journalism, don’t let the door slam behind you.

That which is seen …. if you have the right equipment.

That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen

If you have the right equipment.

The Oxford Libertarian Society is hosting a talk:

Thursday, 12th March – 8pm – Christ Church (Lecture Room 1)

DOUGLAS CARSWELL MP – ‘The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain’

Conservative Member of Parliament for Harwich and Clacton since 2005, Douglas Carswell is one of the leading advocates for limited government in Westminister. As a contributor to ‘Direct Democracy: an Agenda for a New Model Party’ and author of ‘The Localist Papers,’ he established himself as amongst the vanguard of the highly effective localist movement within the Conservative Party. He strongly favours the devolution of most functions of government to the local level, and greater participatory democracy through referendums and citizens’ intitiatves. He will speak about a book he has recently coauthored with Daniel Hannan MEP, ‘The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain,’ a set of policy proposals to radically change the role of the central government in a single legislative session. Amongst the key ideas proposed are health savings accounts, school vouchers, and elected sheriffs. He blogs at http://www.talkcarswell.com, and the book can be downloaded from http://www.renew-britain.com.

As long time readers of BLOGDIAL will know, we believe that the only purpose of legislative bodies in the 21st century should be to remove legislation from the statute books. Now it seems that some more people are starting to wake up.

Sadly, this particular group is still completely deluded.

From Douglas Carswell’s blog:

Sir Paul Judge is setting up a new “open source” political party – which aims to make great use of the internet and direct democracy.
He seems to have grasped that the internet will remove barriers to entry in politics as surely as it has done already in business and commerce. In order to retain market share, the big, established political parties are going to have to either adapt – or lose out.

[…]

http://www.talkcarswell.com/show.aspx?id=521

‘Direct Democracy’. Can you imagine what that would be like? Imagine the mobile phone generation being able to decide how you can or cannot live? The generation that cannot even speak in complete sentences, thanks to a device that has created a new form of english. Chicken nugget eaters voting by text message on wether or not foi gras should be eaten or not.

This is just about the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

What makes people free are concrete rights, not access to voting. Democracy IS turkeys voting to outlaw Christmas. Democracy IS three wolves and two sheep voting on what is for dinner. Spreading it into the hands of every uneducated, ignorant moron with a mobile phone is absolute insanity. It is the technical perfection of mob rule; ‘mobocracy’…or ‘mobileocracy’ or ‘txtrcsy’…you get the idea.

Even if increasing democracy were a good idea, we all know that all voting should take place only on paper, and should never be done electronically. There have been recent scandals about this, as you may recall.

In any case, here is the last part of the article in The Times by Sir Paul Judge. The emphasis is mine:

[…]

Everybody knows that the system is broken, everyone agrees that reform is required. However turkeys do not vote for Christmas. It seems that if we want to change the system we have to change the turkeys.

On Monday 16th March, we shall be launching the Jury Team – an organisation that will run a web-based Open Primary to let anyone put themselves forward as a candidate. If they win the popular vote, conducted using mobile phones, they will be selected to head the list of candidates we are putting up for the European Parliamentary elections in June.

Other than prohibiting our platform from being used by extremists, we will demand of our candidates only that they support our principles of good governance. Beyond that, they are free to vote on issues unburdened by any party whip.

With the newspapers filled with stories of sleaze and corruption and with political apathy spiraling, we are in the midst of a perfect storm. The European Parliamentary elections offer the electorate the opportunity to show that there is an appetite for change and a longing for British politics to be cleaned up by people selected from the general population, rather than from the political class. We shall then build on this for the general election. All we need is your support.

You can make a difference by going to www.juryteam.org.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5864626.ece

Any system that can exclude people because they are ‘extremists’ is broken by definition. There is no such thing as an ‘extremist’, and in a free country, where conduct between people is based on rights, it doesn’t matter what you or your neighbor believes; as long as you do not cause harm to anyone, you can believe and do what you like in a free country.

That means you can publish whatever you like, smoke whatever you like, drink whatever you like and so on and so on. None of these people are awake enough to grasp this. Furthermore, when they talk about ‘our platform’ they give the game away completely. They will be using ‘their’ platform to make sure that only their points of view are expressed; of course, its their right since they own the platform, but the guiding principle is all wrong, and trying to create something to fix a problem should not be made from the same problems that it is trying to fix. You cannot say that ‘anyone can put themselves forward as a candidate’ when in fact, there will be a vetting process to weed out ‘extremists’. This is called ‘FAIL’.

The problem with everything the way it is is that it is owned by one group that exploits other groups by force. They create the contexts, the definitions (like ‘extremist’ or ‘the five outcomes’ or ‘the social contract’) make the rules and everyone is expected to obey. Truly Open Source Politics would accept all ideas and all candidates as equal, and then allow the market (the electorate) to decide which ideas and candidates have merit.

These computer illiterate people have seized on the idea of Open Source software, and are trying to squeeze their increasingly discredited careers into the new paradigm. It is not going to work. They do not even know where to start, as can be seen by how they price their ‘plan’. See below.

Of course, we know that this cannot work because democracy is mob rule and a form of tyranny, so even if this project was open to all ideas, it is fundamentally flawed and a part of the problem.

This is something that cannot be tweaked, adjusted, fixed or set right. The best you can do, if you want to keep the present system in anything like the shape it is currently in, is to pare it down to almost nothing. Other than that, with all the laws, regulations, controls and bureaucratic infrastructure intact, all schemes like an ‘Open Source Political Party’ are failures precisely because they are political parties that dovetail into and amplify the present mess.

And now, from the Renew Britain site:

Britain is heading in the wrong direction. The Plan shows how to put our country on the right track. Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell show how a future government could actually shift powers back, from Brussels to Westminster, from Whitehall to town halls, from the state to the citizens. Their plan aims to restore honour and meaning to the ballot box. It would disperse power among communities, through localism and through referendums. Things do not have to be as they are. The Plan shows how we can change our country for the better.

[…]

http://www.renew-britain.com

Point of order m’lud; the book is for sale at £10. The download is on sale for £5. These people need to read this book. Going ‘Open Source’ means giving away the source of the idea so that other people can copy it without restriction. You utterly FAIL!@!@

Britain has been heading in the wrong direction for generations. This plan cannot put britain on the right track, because they want to shift an immoral power from one group to another group. In order to put Britain on the right track, the train and the rails need to be dismantled completely. Even if the plan could work, these people are doing everything they can to prevent people from reading it, by charging for a download of a digital copy.

But I digress…

Moving power from Brussels to Westminster leaves Westminster with power. FAIL.
Moving power from Whitehall to town halls leaves town halls with power. FAIL.
Moving power from the state to citizens leaves the citizens with power. FAIL.
Restoring meaning to the ballot box means empowering the dictatorial electorate. FAIL.
Dispersing power amongst communities puts power in the hands of back burner vigilantes. FAIL.
Referendums are mob rule, otherwise known as tyranny. FAIL.

Things do not have to be as they are. This is the only thing we agree with. Everything is going to change, like it or not, and the shape it is going to take will be not what the ruling elite want:

A silent $1 trillion “Run on Britain” by foreign investors was revealed yesterday in the latest statistical releases from the Bank of England. The external liabilities of banks operating in the UK – that is monies held in the UK on behalf of foreign investors – fell by $1 trillion (£700bn) between the spring and the end of 2008, representing a huge loss of funds and of confidence in the City of London.

[…]

The Independent

People are quitting the over legislated, super socialist, police state Britain, and they will not be bringing their money or their businesses back. Not only have New Labour / Tory Britain cut out the heart of the city with their sour grapes attack on Non Domiciled people but the pound, being printed into hyperinflation is being run away from like the plague has legs and is chasing investors.

In the end, the only people who will be left in the UK will be those who cannot afford to leave, those too fat to leave and the delusional politicians scrambling around with crazy ideas of how to rule over this impoverished, dumbed down, hopeless and trapped population.

Britain will become the next Portugal.

What a pity.

And it is only balls that will solve this problem.

Editorial
The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
Article history
It was never in a Labour manifesto that individual freedom should be surrendered in the interests of collective security. Nor was it written that society should submit itself to a blanket of surveillance by the state.

It was never announced as a political creed of the current government that trial by jury is an expensive inconvenience that modern democracies can, in certain circumstances, do without. Nor was it proclaimed that the principle of habeas corpus, that prohibits the crown from detaining a free individual without his or her knowing the charge, was redundant in the face of terrorist threats in the 21st century. And yet, one way or another, all of those views have been expressed in laws introduced by Labour since it came to power.

Whether by complacency, arrogance or cynical design, the government has erected an edifice of legal constraint to liberty that would suit the methods and aims of a despot.

That is not to say, of course, that we have become a police state, or that a slide to authoritarianism is inevitable. It is simply a matter of fact that basic freedoms, conceptions of the moral autonomy of the individual to act without impediment by the state, have been systematically disrespected. Vigilance and resistance to that process is an obligation that rests with every citizen in a democracy.

Crucial steps towards the fulfilment of that obligation were taken by the Convention on Modern Liberty yesterday. Hundreds of people, representing a spectrum of political affiliations and a wide plurality of opinions, gathered to express a single response to the erosion of civil liberties: enough! It is the message that Henry Porter, one of the convention leaders, has urgently conveyed from the pages of this newspaper many times.

Delegates included representatives from all major political parties, non-governmental organisations, local councils, media organisations, trade unions, and – most important – private citizens concerned about the vandalism to the constitutional order is being done in their name.

Until now the government has by and large scorned the civil liberties lobby, seeing it as a peripheral and largely irrelevant fetish of the chattering classes. That arrogant disregard for democratic principle has been uncovered. The call for liberty is rapidly migrating from the margins to the mainstream of politics, and it is time for the government to listen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/01/civil-liberties-surveillance

FAIL FAIL FAIL.

Like we have been saying, all the conferences, meetings and articles have already been done. There is no need for any more that do not result in a concrete plan of action to finally and totally restore the liberties that have been stolen from the people of this once great Island.

Henry Porter and his cohorts now all feel very satisfied that they ‘pulled it off’. They think this is the start of a movement. If the only thing to come out of this is an unnamed editorial saying, “its time for the government to listen”, then they are doomed to fail.

Government must be TOLD.

This government does NOT LISTEN. You have had many MANY examples of this, from the nauseating government run petitions that are ignored, to the biggest ever demonstration of TWO MILLION PEOPLE against the immoral, illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was also completely ignored.

How many times do you people have to be ignored before you understand what it is that you are dealing with?

Let me help you.

The Guardian, if it is really serious, needs to organize its own civil disobedience campaign, where it makes a list of things that will not ever be obeyed, because they are in violation of their readers civil liberties.

1. Absolute refusal to comply with any aspect of the ID Card scheme. This also means that all Guardian staff must also take the pledge to not comply with any of its measures also.
2. All CCTV cameras that point into the street are to be removed by members of the public on sight. That includes all speed cameras.
3. Any and all actions of the state derived from surveillance systems, that do not involve violent crime, are null and void, are to be disobeyed. That means (for example) you cannot be accused by the evidence of a CCTV camera, even if it is operated manually (automatically generated tickets), and also (for example) that if your council tries to prosecute you and used surveillance to ‘catch’ you, the whole case is null and void.

Do you get the picture?

Not only must all the technical apparatus be physically destroyed, but any action brought about by the police state should be null and void and unenforceable.

That is how you TAKE your liberty back.

I’m sure that you can insert your own measures into that list. No more fishing expeditions. No more mass surveillance. No more huge databases of personal information. This is a zero tolerance strategy. The state will cease to function if it is done, and everything that the population does will remain unaffected.

If you are not willing to do this, to have some balls, then NOTHING will ever change. If you are like Henry Porter and The Guardian, who are servants of the state in thought, word and action, then you may as well stop now and save yourself the bother. You will LOSE.

Finally, as we have said many times before. The root of all these problems is bad money. The Guardian cannot have it both ways. They cannot on the one hand be FOR the fiat currency fueled welfare warfare state and ALSO against the police state. The aspects are inseparable. Even the super socialist George Monbiot has had a Eureka moment where he suddenly seems to understand that the root of the problem is fiat currency, and that commodity money is a way out. When someone like Monbiot starts talking about Austrian Economics as being a good idea without knowing he is talking about Austrian Economics, you know we have reached a tipping point.

It’s up to everyone to push it right over the edge; to tip it over. That means taking some ballsy actions en masse, and not just talking about the problems, which we have all been doing for ages.

Finally Jack ‘Mass Murderer’ Straw says that Britain is not a police state, and if you do not like the government, you can always vote it out. Well, we all know how that works.

When, for example the BNP gets votes, democratically, everyone goes berserk, saying how they should be banned or at the very least controlled etc etc. On the other ‘extreme’ you have the LibDems who can never get into power, and even if they did, they would be an unmitigated disaster. That leaves them with two parties that are essentially interchangeable. Face the facts; democracy is hopelessly broken and can never be fixed. The only answer is a de fanged government that is so powerless that it doesn’t matter who is in charge; your rights trump everything they could possibly come up with.

If you do not face this fact, there will always be another Jack Straw or Tony Bliar on the horizon, waiting to destroy your money, take away your rights and sell the sovereignty of your country to foreigners for nothing.

Finally, it seems that everyone realizes that refusing to obey is the only way out. Congress just passed a 1000 page bill without a single member reading it. Even if they had read it, and initialed every section, if it is a bill that violates your rights, you are under no obligation to obey its provisions. We have been saying this for ages. So have other people:

Children’s Books in Dumpsters: Washington’s Madness Continues

by Gary North

The kiddie police have begun to march across America, threatening thrift stores, as I warned.

On February 10, workers in America’s thrift stores tossed out every children’s book that was printed prior to 1985. That is the law.

A parent is not allowed to go into a thrift store and buy a book printed before 1985. Those books are now gone.

On the dumpsters filled with children’s books, read this.

Congress has spoken. Well, not quite. The bureaucrats who use Congress as their hand puppet, agency by agency, have spoken. The bureaucrats spend their careers identifying threats to the people. They get paid to do this, and they are paid well. They invent a presumed threat and then terrorize Congress into passing a 500-page bill that no Congressman has read. Then the bureaucrats add more regulations in the name of this 500-page law.

This has gone on since 1913, and it will continue to go on until the system finally breaks down. This is the logic of the system.

Here is the new reality, one week old. If you can still find any pre-1985 books, it is because the thrift store’s managers don’t know they are breaking the law and could be fined or sent to prison if they persist.

Congress passed the enabling legislation law last year: The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. It has 239 sections. I don’t expect you to read it – after all, no Congressman or Senator did – but click the link and skim it: “Most parents are irresponsible and must not be trusted.”

Every Federal law looks like this one. This was true when I was a Capitol Hill staffer for Ron Paul in 1976, and it will be true for as long as the Federal government is solvent by means of (1) our tax money, (2) Treasury debt investors’ money, and (3) Federal Reserve fiat money.

The bureaucrats are now enforcing the letter of the 2008 law. Congressmen will feign ignorance. “Gee, how were we to know?”

Too late. The books are in landfill.

But why? “Stop dangerous lead paint!” Right. The lead paint in pre-1985 kids’ books in minuscule traces. There is no known example of any child being injured by lead paint from a book. No matter. The law’s the law.

This seems insane, but it is the relentless logic of the State: “Nothing is permitted unless authorized by the State.”

The Federal government has authorized abortion on demand. But, once a parent allows a child to be born, that parent is not be allowed to buy the child a pre-1985 book. Such books are too dangerous for children.

This is the logic of Washington. This logic is relentless. It will be extended by law into every nook and cranny of our lives until it is stopped.

This will stop it: (1) the destruction of the dollar, (2) the bankruptcy of the Federal government, and (3) a decision by millions of Americans to say, “I will not obey this law.” Law by law, people say, one by one, “I will not obey. Arrest me. I will hire a lawyer. Maybe I will simply defend myself in a court of law. I will resist.” Gandhi did it. It worked. People will organize, law by law, to clog the courts, jam the legal system, and vote out of office every politician who does not repeal a specific law. Nothing else can stop this madness.

Americans have surrendered their liberties to Washington, one by one. The process is relentless. No insanity is too great for the bureaucrats. Yet the public is oblivious.

It stems from a simple assumption: “My neighbors are irresponsible. They must not be allowed to make voluntary exchanges, no matter how harmless.” This belief leads to a principle of law: Nothing is allowed unless authorized by the State.

Some of your friends may think you are extreme for not trusting Congress and the bureaucrats. Forward this report to them. They may not yet perceive the nature of Beltway madness.

It is going to get much worse. We can be certain of this. Bureaucrats respect only one thing: budget cuts. That’s a long way away. But the destruction of the dollar may not be.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north688.html

There aren’t enough cops or apparatchiks to control everyone all the time. Once the teeth of the monster’s mouth reaches the meat of the crisis, then all bets will be off.

It will be something like the fall of the Berlin Wall, where everyone suddenly wakes up and the illusion of power fades away, only this time, the wall that will break will be inside people’s minds

It’s already happening. The cracks are widening. All it will take is one strike of a chisel, or a heating and then dousing in cold water for the whole thing to shatter.

At long last…