md wrote:
nagapie wrote:
Brixton’s getting it’s own currency.

Is it going to be made out of a precious metal (i.e. either gold or silver)?

I can’t pretend to even understand, let alone agree with, the various long term bug bears of the small Irdial group of bloggers, but fiat currency is an issue they post about frequently, and they vehemently support the set up of independent currencies based on precious metals.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/index.php?s=fiat

They keep contradicting themselves though. First they bang on about the reintroduction of the gold standard and then they say this:

We then went on to discuss why trans-national currencies ‘Currency Monocultures’ like the Euro are a bad thing.

Imagine that the Euro never happened, and each European country had kept its own currency. Each country would be able to formulate its own response to bank failures, and their currency would suffer or gain depending on their response. Each person with savings could hold a basket of currencies to protect themselves from being wiped out by inflation.

But if you have a gold standard then the value of your currency is pegged to the value of gold, so you CANNOT formulate a response to bank failures! Your money supply is constant (or rather, tied to current world reserves of gold) which robs you of your main tool for controlling inflation and unemployment. Moreover, if everyone adopts the gold standard then exchange rates are effectively fixed (because if any country’s currency began to depreciate, everyone else would buy it, convert it into gold and then convert the gold back into their own currency). And that’s the biggest `currency monoculture’ imaginable. Tin hat vibes.

Now, lets go through this slowly:

But if you have a gold standard then the value of your currency is pegged to the value of gold, so you CANNOT formulate a response to bank failures!

[…]

http://disception.net/lk/viewtopic.php?t=8117&start=25

No, this is incorrect.

First of all, Gold IS money. Sound economies are based on gold as the means of exchange. Government cannot create the money out of thin air when it is made of gold, they cannot print it. Gold is scarce and the amount of it in circulation cannot be arbitrarily increased.

Bank failures (bank runs) happen because of fractional reserve banking. Banks, when they are given a license to do business, are allowed to ‘print money’. When you deposit £10,000 in your account, the government allows your bank to loan out say, 40 times that amount to other people. Those people then pay interest on the money that is loaned to them. If you or I were to do this, it would be called ‘counterfeiting’ but because its a licensed bank, its called ‘banking.

The system ‘works’ as long as everyone who holds an account at the bank does not ask for their deposits back at the same time (a bank run). Since the banks run fractional reserves, they literally do not have the money to pay back their depositors.

Centuries ago, when people used gold for money in every day transactions, the danger of theft was ever present. Banks used to hold deposits, and since they were trustworthy, would issue I.O.U.s to their depositors. People began to trade these I.O.U.s because they knew that the money was in the bank and redeemable at any time. This is the origin of gold backed paper money.

The bankers realized that they could print I.O.U.s for gold that they did not have on deposit. As long as the I.O.U.s did not all come back at once, they could gain interest on gold they did not have in their vaults.

Pure Genius!

Modern banking runs exactly the same way, only the ‘money’ is Fiat Currency; money that is given value by order of the government by legal tender laws. It is paper, a fiction, worthless. And of course, the government has the printing press that can create ‘value’ out of nothing.

Lets say you earn £500 pounds a week. If there are only £2,000,000 paper pounds in the whole world, then the amount that you can buy with your £500 remains the same, week on week, year on year. But, lets now imagine that the government has doubled the money supply. There are now £4,000,000 paper pounds in existence. That means that the scarcity of paper pounds has been reduced by half. There is twice as much money in circulation. This means that your £500 is now worth half as much as it was when there were only £2,000,000 paper pounds in circulation.

You have just been cheated out of half of the value of your money.

Now, if there is one currency, and you cannot vote for the government who controls it, and it is a fiat currency, you are essentially giving the printing press for that money to someone who you cannot elect. They can destroy the value of your savings. If however, you have a paper currency and it is under the control of your own elected officials, if they debase the money, you can vote them out and the next government can destroy some of the money supply and restore the value of your savings.

If the money you use is gold, then no government, no matter who runs it, can print your money. It actually is your money, literally. The pound is not ‘your money’; it belongs to the government. They control its supply, they control its value.

Inflation is just what I described; the money supply increasing because of the printing press. If we had a gold standard, we would have no inflation by definition. Take a look at this YouTube video which demonstrates how the value of gold has not changed over time.

Your money supply is constant (or rather, tied to current world reserves of gold) which robs you of your main tool for controlling inflation and unemployment.

Like I say above, gold IS money. In a gold standard currency system you use gold as money, not paper that is linked or tied to anything.

There is no ‘world reserve of gold’ central banks of separate sovereign nations have their own reserves of gold, like the gold at Fort Knox. When the dollar (for example) was backed by gold before the Bretton Woods agreement, you used to be able to go to the bank and redeem gold (and silver) for paper dollars which were certificates that represented actual physical gold and silver. When you say ‘your’ main tool, who exactly are you talking about? That ‘your’ is the same ‘you’ that destroys the value of ‘your’ savings by printing money. The people who run central banks are not able to set interest rates correctly or control unemployment, for the record. Only the market can do this. But that’s more typing.

if everyone adopts the gold standard then exchange rates are effectively fixed

There are no exchange rates, because everyone would be using real money (gold coins) to do their business with. Did you know that in Viet Nam, people buy and sell land in gold? There is nothing strange about it at all; what is strange is that people think its acceptable that government can steal your savings from you without even going into your bank!

(because if any country’s currency began to depreciate, everyone else would buy it, convert it into gold and then convert the gold back into their own currency)

This line demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what money is. When you say that a county’s currency starts to depreciate, what EXACTLY do you mean? If you mean that it loses its value, this can only happen if someone has access to the printing press that allows people to create money out of thin air. A gold currency cannot be printed, so any country using it would not suffer from inflation (which is actually what you are describing, NOT depreciation which is what your car does ten minutes after you have bought it). Take a look at this to understand what the word inflation really means in this context.

And that’s the biggest `currency monoculture’ imaginable. Tin hat vibes.

Try gold hat :)

Apart from having a gold standard, fractional reserve banking needs to be understood (note how I do not say ‘banned’) by depositors. If you are crazy enough to deposit your gold money in a bank that lends out many multiples of the amount of deposits, you are taking a big risk; they had better be paying you big interest rates. You and the bank had better be insured against bank runs. As we have seen there are moves afoot to run clean banks.

I assume that you are not in favor of war and the recent mass murdering. The war machine is financed by fiat currency running off of government printing presses. Gold currency forces discipline on governments. This alone is a reason why it should be adopted; everything else would be a great bonus.

You should also look up the Totnes Pound, which is an interesting development. Also, California is issuing its own Currency in the form of I.O.Us. They are not saying its a currency but of course, if they start exchanging them around LA, it will be a currency by definition.

Finally, if you want to watch a really fascinating documentary about this subject and educate yourself so that you can understand a little of what BLOGDIAL publishes on this subject, you could do worse than The Money Masters. When you can understand why a stick of wood with grooves in it was one of the longest running currencies ever, then you will have arrived!

UPDATE!

Added reciprocal facepalm.

This is one of Alun’s comments, that simply had to be promoted to a full post:

“Martin Barnes, chief executive of the think tank DrugScope, who sits on the advisory council, said it was crucial that a rigorously independent body was entrusted with this type of research. […]

Mr Barnes added that when no other drug was involved, ecstasy accounted for between 10-17 deaths a year. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7882708.stm

For comparison:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1091

“Figures on alcohol-related deaths in 2007 indicate a levelling-off of the trend, following rapid increases since the early 1990s. There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991. The alcohol-related death rate was 13.3 per 100,000 population in 2007, compared with 6.9 per 100,000 population in
1991.”

Back to the report and responses to it:

“The Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales has expressed opposition to suggestions that ecstasy should be downgraded to a Class B drug.

Ian Johnston, president of the association, told the BBC the downgrade could be dangerous.

He said: “This is not some academic or scientific exercise, this is dealing with people’s lives. If we downgrade ecstasy, we are in danger of sending mixed messages out to young and vulnerable people.”

Last month, the Home Office restored cannabis from Class C to Class B, against the wishes of the advisory council.

Ministers are now set to resist the council’s recommendation on ecstasy. “[…]

So, what exactly is the mixed message?
That heroin is as ‘good’ as E, or that E is as ‘bad’ as heroin?
That 30 deaths from an untaxed substance is bad, but 8724 deaths from a heavily taxed substance is acceptable?
That independent, expert advice is necessary, but worthless?
That arses and elbows are identical in Jacqui Smiths head?

Or that while HMG claims to know “What is Right and Wrong for You”, HMGs response to this report yet again only demonstrates why only idiots submit to governmental control over what goes in their body?

A vigilant lurker writes:

I had to send you this abstract. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the full article. 

1: Am J Public Health. 2009 Feb 5. [Epub ahead of print] Links

The Moral Justification for a Compulsory Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Program.

Balog JE.

The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Compulsory human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination of young girls has been proposed as a public health intervention to reduce the threat of the disease. Such a program would entail a symbiotic relationship between scientific interests in reducing mortality and morbidity and philosophical interests in promoting morality. This proposal raises the issue of whether government should use its police powers to restrict liberty and parental autonomy for the purpose of preventing harm to young people. I reviewed the scientific literature that questions the value of a HPV vaccination. Applying a principle-based approach to moral reasoning, I concluded that compulsory HPV vaccinations can be justified on moral, scientific, and public health grounds.

One can contact him here:

Joseph E. Balog, PhD

State University of New York, College at Brockport
Health Science
350 New Campus Drive
19 Hartwell Hall
Brockport NYUSA
14420
Email: jbalog@brockport.edu

And if you want a laugh, take a look at his ‘justifications’ in the presentation linked at this page…
http://apha.confex.com/apha/135am/techprogram/paper_152993.htm

This reminds me of a certain Joseph Mengele:

Who also justified his human experimentation on the grounds that he was doing it for the ‘greater good’ and ‘in the name of science’.

Morality should NEVER be legislated, and it is not the job of scientists to determine what is or is not moral on behalf of anyone. It is even more of an outrage that this modern Mengele

wants to use his ‘scientific’ method to create a moral position that will be translated into a law that will cause millions to be injected with this worthless vaccine.

Here are some of the links on Gardasil from BLOGDIAL:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1256
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=490
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=846
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=838
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=831

While we are at it, HPV is not a public health issue, it is a personal health issue because HPV is an STD. In order to become infected with it, you have to have sex with someone. That is a private act that has nothing to do with the state.

HPV cannot be sneezed onto someone, cannot cause an epidemic resulting in millions of deaths due to casual contact. It is quite different from the other highly contagious diseases, and even with those, vaccination is not compulsory in civilized countries.

It’s one thing to develop a product (Gardasil) and then use corruption, fear-mongering and the perversion of statistics to influence people to choose to have it shot into themselves by the millions; it is quite another to try and engineer a fallacious malignant morality wrapped in the authoritative voice of ‘science’ as a pretext for new law that will compel parents to violate their children.

Treatises on morality should never appear in a scientific paper. They should be published in the appropriate place. Publishing a tract justifying the morality of something in a scientific journal or paper is wrong because science is about facts and evidence only; it is not about making a personal judgement.

When we mix science with morality the former lends its power, the power of facts that can be proven and all the results that have flowed from that to create all the great tools that we enjoy today, to the latter, which is purely subjective. Balog believes that all girls should be shot with Gardasil. This is not a scientific fact, or at least the question of wether or not they should be shot with it is not a fact. What he believes applies only to him, and his twisted sick morality, whereas scientific truth applies to everyone like it or not.

And for the record, by ‘scientific truth’ I do not mean what any scientist knows or does not know, or what is written in peer reviewed journals. What scientists know is a number, when all the facts of the universe are taken into account, indistinguishable from zero. I am talking about gravity. Gravity ‘holds you down’ no matter what you think or like, or what its true nature is. Homeopathic medicine works, wether you like it or not. Gardasil is junk. Get shot with it if you like, but no one should be forced to be injected with it. The same goes for all other vaccines; they should never be injected into people by force, for any reason.

Finally, monsters like this man are a part of the concerted effort to dismantle the family as the center of human culture. They want to replace the family with the state and themselves as the ultimate authority over all life on this planet.

TONIGHT, CHRIST CHURCH – Lecture Room 1, 8PM

JAMES STANFIELD – ‘Towards the Total Privatisation of Education: Lessons from History and the Developing World’

Researcher at the University of Newcastle’s E. G. West Centre, James Stanfield will speak about the incredible findings of recent research into the role of private schools in the developing world. In the absence of universal state control of education, a vibrant marketplace of schools has arisen throughout much of the developed world, previously unknown to development theorists. Privately run and funded, their costs, syllabus and teaching methods are subject to market discipline and consumer sovereignty. Their scope is extraordinary: in Lagos State, Nigeria (one of the case studies), 75% of the school-age population attend privately run schools with no government funding whatsoever. Their average fees per term are $12.41, affordable even to those in desperate poverty, with private scholarships for orphans and the children of widows. Controlling for background variables, their results in maths are 14-19% better than government schools, and in English 22-29% better. Similar ‘underground’ school systems have been uncovered by in depth research by James Tooley, the Centre’s director, in the slums of East Delhi & Hyderabad, India; Ga District, Ghana; and Nairobi, Kenya. The history of education in Britain prior to the introduction of universal state schooling also supplies evidence that the voluntary and for-profit private sectors succeeded in educating the vast part of the populace, contrary to Dickensian fiction. Dr Stanfield argues that the benefits associated with markets, far from being shunned as an inequitable way to allocate education, are in fact the best mechanisms to ensure that the standard of education rises universally, instead of stagnating equally everywhere.

This really does look to be a fascinating talk, especially if you’re interested in education or development.We covered a lecture by James Stanfield at the Libertarian Alliance conference in October on our blog: see here.

Attendance is, as ever, free. Facebook event here.

As we already knew, the state is not efficient at providing education as a service, and the market does it better, cheaper, and gives parents real choice. The children that come out of an education system driven by the market are superior to those that the state produces, and everyone is…more happy.

Which brings us to Home Schooling.

Home Schooling shares all the characteristics of the above examples, only more so. It is even more efficient and successful, and furthermore, it greatly reinforces the family.

In the light of all this, why is it that HMG is so obsessed with shutting down Home Schooling? Surely they should learn from these examples and as a start and take a completely hands off approach to Home Schooling? Ill tell you why; because firstly, Home Schooling produces people who can think and secondly, it creates stronger families where HMG wants to destroy the family and to produce uneducated, illiterate, immoral subhumans who will service their police state without question, because they will not have the psychological or educational tools to question anything at all.

If you use Apple, you will know that the new version of iLife will include updates to iPhoto that are simply astonishing.

iPhoto 09 will scan your photo library for faces, and allow you to name the people in your photos. It will then put the right name to each face in every photograph in your library automagically.

The first thing that came to my mind was the phrase, “Police state dividend!”.

What is even more fascinating is that iPhoto 09 allows you to upload your named faces to Facebook. I’m sure there are many people who know what this means; why should the state spend billions rolling out centralized databases of everyone’s faces when they can get back door access to Facebook, which not only will have everyone’s name and face, but also all of their social connections and their named faces also!

In any case, David Rowan writes in the times about how face recognition is being touted as the next big thing:

[…]

Rob Milliron, a construction worker, had a close escape back in June 2001, when, while eating lunch in Tampa, Florida, he was photographed without his knowledge by a hidden government facial-recognition surveillance camera scouring for felons and sex-offenders. Police passed images to the press and, although Mr Milliron wasn’t a match to a bad guy, his picture was printed in a magazine alongside the words: “You can’t hide those lying eyes in Tampa.” A woman in Tulsa called police to identify him falsely as her ex-husband wanted on felony child-neglect charges. When police surrounded Mr Milliron days later at his construction site, he had to point out that, yes, that was him in the photograph, but no, he had never married, never had children, and never been to Oklahoma. As he told the local newspaper: “They made me feel like a criminal.”

Tampa scrapped its facial-recognition system two years later, citing its ineffectiveness, but not before Milliron had become something of a poster-boy for the technology’s unreliability and its likelihood to trap the innocent amid its many “false positives”. Since then, the War on Terror has amplified official interest in and financing for face-recognition trials as a means of identifying the supposedly high-risk – but, in projects from Newham in East London to Logan Airport in Boston, results have been flawed to say the least. In one high-profile trial, at Palm Beach International Airport, a facial-recognition system at a security checkpoint matched faces to those in its database just 47 per cent of the time. Ordinary passengers and other airport staff not meant to be recognised, meanwhile, triggered 1,081 false alarms in a month, risking interrogation or detention.

Yet just because, for the moment, such surveillance systems are flawed – their recognition befuddled by human ageing, outdoor light, poor image resolution, even facial hair – the extraordinary pace of development means that far more accurate screening systems are imminent. Researchers are developing sharply accurate scanners that monitor faces in 3D and software that analyses skin texture to turn tiny wrinkles, blemishes and spots into a numerical formula.

The strongest face-recognition algorithms are now considered more accurate than most humans – and already the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers have held discussions about the possibility of linking such systems with automatic car-numberplate recognition and public-transport databases. Join everything together via the internet, and voilà – the nation’s population, down to the individual Times reader, can be conveniently and automatically monitored in real time.

Just listen to senior law-enforcement executives to understand their brave new intentions. Three months ago, Mark Branchflower, Interpol’s database chief, declared facial recognition a desirable means of alerting local forces about the movements of internationally wanted suspects, “a step we could go to quite quickly”. And in evidence to MPs last March, Peter Neyroud, head of the National Policing Improvement Agency, raised the prospect of “automated face recognition” to identify suspects, as well as “behaviourial matching” software that uses CCTV images to predict potential troublemakers.

So let’s understand this: governments and police are planning to implement increasingly accurate surveillance technologies that are unnoticeable, cheap, pervasive, ubiquitous, and searchable in real time. And private businesses, from bars to workplaces, will also operate such systems, whose data trail may well be sold on or leaked to third parties – let’s say, insurance companies that have an interest in knowing about your unhealthy lifestyle, or your ex-spouse who wants evidence that you can afford higher maintenance payments.

Rather than jump up and down with rage – you never know who is watching through the window – you have a duty now, as a citizen, to question this stealthy rush towards permanent individual surveillance. A Government already obsessed with pursuing an unworkable and unnecessary identity-card database must be held to account.

As for me, I’ve been re-watching for inspiration the 1997 film Face/Off, in which John Travolta wears Nicolas Cage’s face as a way of infiltrating Cage’s criminal gang. And if that fails to inspire a means of fighting back, face-transplant surgery is always an option.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5504534.ece

Before I dive in:

Mark Branchflower, Interpol’s database chief, declared facial recognition a desirable means of alerting local forces about the movements of internationally wanted suspects

What if every time they came to find someone, the people who were despatched were simply despatched themselves:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No matter what face recognition software is out there, if the above is the counter rule, the machine will grind to a halt. Today, it will not be half a dozen people with axes, but a flash mob of 500 who will not only despatch the thugs, but who will destroy whatever is put in front of them, like a swarm of hungry nanites. It will look something like this only violent.

The answer to all of this is very simple. There are things that the state simply should not do. It is not the function of the state to issue ID Cards, run central databases that store everyone’s communications, etc etc. It does not matter what technology scientists invent; the mere existence of something does not mean that the state should use it. Quite the opposite.

Small government, with its functions clearly defined is the answer to all of our problems. The government has no business regulating money. The government has no business regulating $whatever_they_do_now. Their job is to clean the shit off the streets with brooms and to arbitrate in disputes between people, should they choose the state as the arbitrator. As soon as they start doing other things, the trouble is set off. We see the result of it every day.

The CCTV cameras in the UK are now like a sleeping giant. Once they become intelligent they will suddenly awake and KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Just think about that.

Every empire that ever existed on the earth eventually fell to dust; these systems and the people who own them are as fragile as a chicken’s egg stretched a mile wide. In a single night the entire machine could be destroyed by an unaccepting population. Whatever happens, this will not last forever. Something will break; either the mass will reject it or the empire that uses it will collapse under the weight of its own debt, like all the others have.

In the mean time, we live in a time where the tools of oppression are available to you to play with. You can download iLife and use its face recognition to organize your photos. This is unprecedented, and very useful. It will instruct millions of people on the true capabilities of the state, causing them to be outraged…but I digress.

This is an age where everyone everywhere can use military grade encryption to keep their communications private. All you need to do is just use it. If Apple rolled it out as a part of their ‘Mail’ application, in a single day many millions of people’s communications would ‘go dark’ to the authorities.

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

In 2006, the infamous ‘anonymous email‘ of Frances Stonor Saunders that was widely circulated and published in newspapers, predicted that:

[…]

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal, (very much like the Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be ‘swiped’ to check your identity. Each time this happens, a record is made at the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented. This means for example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw more than £99 at your branch of NatWest, who now demand ID for these transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR. Restaurants and off licenses will demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.

[…]

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207

Now we see that once again, its assertions have proven to be completely correct.

This is from a column in today’s Daily Mail

[…]

at the Lichfield branch of Marks & Sparks, 30-year-old Oliver Butler was told that unless he could produce his passport, he couldn’t buy two bottles of mulled wine.

They wouldn’t accept his paper driving licence either.

Rightly, he points out that you don’t see many under-age bingedrinkers swigging M&S mulled wine by the neck down your local shopping precinct.

Alcopops and extra-strength cider are more their preferred beverage.

Oliver tells me that it was the first time in 12 years he’d been asked for ID. You’d better get used to it, old son. It probably won’t be the last.

The crackdown on alcohol sales now extends even to people who can prove they are over 18, if they happen to be accompanied by a minor.

Christine Middleton, from Edinburgh, was out shopping for Hogmanay with her daughter at her local Co-op; usual stuff – chicken, turkey, sprouts, two bottles of wine (one red, one pink champagne).

When the champagne went through the barcode scanner, an alarm went off.

The checkout girl asked Christine’s daughter how old she was. After discovering she was 17, she confiscated the two bottles.

Christine (’48, but I look good for my age’) pointed out that the wine was for her, not her daughter, and sent for the manager. Still no joy.

The manager said that her daughter could, in fact, be a local hoodie who had persuaded Christine to buy booze on her behalf.

Like Oliver Butler and his mulled wine, Christine remarked that ‘pink champagne and a cheeky wee Rioja’ weren’t exactly your average hoodie’s gargle of choice.

But the manager still wouldn’t serve her and, with an impatient queue getting restless behind her, she was forced to withdraw, empty-handed.

At first glance, this all seems laughable, to be filed under You Couldn’t Make It Up – especially after reports that grown men and women are being refused whisky-infused cheddar cheese and knitting needles without proof of identity.

The idea that supermarkets are accusing law-abiding adults of being glue-sniffers and purveyors of illicit hooch to under-age hooligans is not only risible but deeply offensive.

It would be easy to put all this down to the good old British jobsworth mentality and the ridiculous modern ‘if it saves one life’ excuse for lowest-common-denominator law enforcement.

But scratch the surface and there’s something far more sinister going on – on a couple of levels.

First, proof of identity is not just the new elf’n’safety. It has been seized upon gleefully by the ‘consumer protection’ nazis.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1110069/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-How-Mr-Sheens-enemy-State.html

And there you have it.

The contents of this article prove something else; that it is the store managers and businesses that will be enforcing this scheme, not the government. Every supermarket, every seller of alcohol and cigarettes will be a de-facto arm of government, a fine grained interface between the ID Card the NIR and the public.

It immediately follows therefore that if we want to stop the ID card from being a useful tool, we have to ask that all professionals who will come in contact with it refuse to be that interface and facilitator.

If we can secure a pledge from millions of people who are going to be dealing with this, it would strike a real blow to the proposed ID Card and NIR.

With all the shops, supermarkets, cellphone outlets, banks and every other service you can imagine all refusing to interface with this card, it will become useless and even more pointless to everyone.

Whilst trawling around on the interwebs, I cam across this amazing story, and a reason to award some brass balls:

Up Yours Carter-Ruck

Guido is with the in-laws for Christmas and only has internet access via a dial-up or his mobile. So the megabyte size attachment from libel solicitors Carter-Ruck received a few days ago has only this morning been downloaded. Guido emailed Carter-Ruck back at the time to explain he was driving and only had mobile internet access, so what were the contents of the attachment? No reply from Carter-Ruck.

The email contains a Court Order by Mr Justice Tugendhat, threatening Guido with contempt of Court if Guido even reveals the existence of the Order.

Guido believes that he is not the only leading blogger to receive the injunction. He is however the only one willing to break it. Unfortunately for Carter-Ruck they seem to have forgotten that since 1922 the orders of British Judges have been happily ignored by us Irish in our own country. So Carter-Ruck have merely tipped Guido off to a case of which he was previously unaware and Guido will, as a consequence, now share what little he knows with with his co-conspirators as a Christmas treat.

Somebody (unknown) hacked into the email accounts of Zac Goldsmith and his wife Sherazade, Jemima Khan also appears to have had her email accessed. They thieves tried to sell the illegally obtained information to the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday. Not really that interesting politically, though Goldsmith is a Conservative candidate and presumably Zac is his father’s son…

This particular case isn’t really a matter of principle and Guido isn’t claiming it as such. As fascinating as Zac’s love life probably is, it isn’t really hypocritical. It does illustrate how Britain is increasingly heading towards the French situation of a politically cowed client media injuncted and restricted by privacy laws from reporting on the rich and powerful. The government has also been making a lot of noise about curtailing online publishers and Stephen Carter is gearing up with legislation to attack bloggers. Freedom of the press is soon going to be even more curtailed in Britain.

So we will have a situation where offshore bloggers broadcast the truth to Britons in much the same way as Radio Free Europe kept the citizens of the Soviet Empire informed. The legislation won’t succeed, only Chinese style internet censorship will prevent the truth getting out. Is that the path politicians want to go down?

Guido Fawkes

Now there is a man who has a pair. Sadly, he calls Scientists, Architects and Engineers who have learned that the official story of the mythical ‘911’ is false, “Troofers“.

But hey, no one is perfect, right right right?

Here is a link to the Wikileaks page.

It is right that people should not have their private email sold to and then printed in newspapers. It is however, entirely wrong that secrete (yes, ‘secrete’) hearings and secret orders be used to silence people. Those same secret orders, like the National Security Letters being used in the USA are immoral and WILL ALWAYS result in an abuse. These National Security Letters have been used to stop librarians from disclosing that the government has investigated who has been borrowing what books from the library. When you get one of these letters, you are not allowed to say that you have received one.

The only correct response to these letters and orders is the one that Guido Fawkes made; to immediately release it to the public. If everyone who got one did this, they would be rendered useless.

This takes us to the subject of leaks and the recent government plans stupid idea to get into your hard drive remotely.

One of the comments at that SpyBlog post lead to this site that has a list of what to do’s to be an effective and safe whistleblower. One of the tips is as follows:

Anti-forensics precautions

• Licking a Postage Stamp is likely to leave both your fingerprints on it, and to preserver a sample of your DNA from your saliva.
• Sealing a letter envelope or parcel affixing a postage stamp using sticky adhesive tape or glue etc. will also tend to trap possibly identifiable fibres, dust particles, hairs, skin cells and fingerprints (which may contain sufficient DNA for analysis) , or even a characteristic scent which could be used by tracker dogs.

Commercial Postal Box rental, either from a private company or for an extra fee from the state postal service, has its place, but there is always a financial paper trail to the person who rents the box, and often CCTV video footage of anyone picking up mail from such boxes.

Wikileaks.org offers a supposedly secure Postal Whistleblowing service, for whistleblower leaks to them, but they do not seem to recommend many anti-forensics precautions. except regarding the serail numbers embedded into batches of CDROMs, and the unique Recorder IDs which most CD or DVD burners embed in each copy which they produce.

Interesting…lets think some more about it.

Most stamps today come in the form of a white adhesive label, laser printed behind the counter and then stuck on to your mail by the Post Office worker:

As you can see the date is on there as well as a serial number.

The other types of stamp are the ones that are sold in booklets and which have peel adhesive as the backing. Licking stamps rarely happens today, but it is good advice not to lick stamps nonetheless.

A bigger threat to you is the time-stamp of these stamps combined with the CCTV that is found in most Offices. In order to see who mailed the package, all they have to do is look at the time-stamp from the serial number, and then go back to the time index on the CCTV footage to see your face.

If you want to minimize the effectiveness of a forensic attack, use gloves. Use gloves when you buy your envelopes. Use gloves when you make your photocopies in a public place. Use gloves when you buy your adhesive stamps and use gloves when you stick them to the envelope.

Do not use envelopes from a sealed pack. There are many places where you can buy packs of envelopes that are not sealed. In fact, these are often displayed adjacent to the Post Office queue. Why should you do this? If you use one of these loose envelopes, you can be sure that the sneezes, browsing touches, hairs and and breath traces of tens of thousands of people are going to be on them. These envelopes will be hopelessly contaminated, and that is good for you.

Now you can see yet another reason why setting up a National DNA Register would be such a bad thing. If they had such a register, not only could they catch a whistleblower who was not careful, but they would falsely accuse and then investigate tens of thousands of people simply because they stood in a queue in a Post Office.

I have updated our own additions to the SpyBlog post the most important one being to dump winblows if you are still using it. In the light of govenrments wanting to gain backdoor access to your files, why make it easy for them by running an operating system that is insecure by design?

Ubuntu is massively peer reviewed, and as soon as any flaw is found, it is announced immediately and patched very soon after for free. It is like being a part of a huge body with a self aware immune system that by its nature, cannot lie to itself. This is the first time ever that the vast majority can take advantage of this high level of security and openness without needing any technical prowess.

Once the penny drops about how secure Ubuntu is, several things are going to happen.

First, there is going to be a mass adoption and abandonment of windows.

Second, there will be moves to outlaw Ubuntu, since it is secure by default.

We can make the second prediction because we remember l’attitude Fraiçaise and how they had to change 180° from their previous total ban on encryption. After all, it would look ridiculous if every browser had 128 bit SSL and it was illegal to use it; it would mean no credit card transactions online etc etc. They had no choice but to cave in, and in fact, this is always true; when governments are faced with an entire population that point blank refuses to obey, or they are faced with a massive loss of revenues because they will not adapt to a new way of doing business, they cave in and ‘change course’.

If everyone switches to Ubuntu, then banning it means banning computing itself and destroying commerce, learning and communication completely. There is no way that any government would allow that to happen, so as long as Ubuntu remains under the control of its thousands of developers there would be nothing that anyone could do to stop it. All attempts to poison it would fail, any attempt to attack it would strengthen it – it would be game over for mass automatic surveillance.

By adopting Ubuntu to replace windows everyone gets:

• Unprecedented security
• Unprecedented stability
• Unprecedented ease of use on a Linux system
• Freedom to copy and distribute ad infinitum
• Free updates forever
• Free extension of the useful life of hardware
• Free world class applications (Gimp, Open Office, Evolution etc)
• Ownership of the software
• Permanent exclusion of governments ability to taint the OS

Ubuntu is a massive win for everyone. It is a game changing event, and every move to violate our privacy will simply push more and more people away from windows and to Ubuntu.

This guy doesn’t know when to quit.

Andy Burnham is trying to become Britain’s version of Al ‘I invented the internet’ Gore. This time, after lying about the ID card, trying to blackmail ISPs to send threatening letters to their users and just being a lying shetbag he now wants to bring the utterly fascist BBFC regime to…

TEH INTERNETZ!

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

What Andy Burnham believes or does not believe doesn’t amount to a hill of beans to me. When he connects to the internet and I connect to the internet we are peers. He doesn’t have any more say in anything than I or any other user does, unless he provides some useful service that someone can either use or reject. Andy Burnham hates the internet because it is something that he and his fascist neu labour scumbag control freaks cannot control because it is beyond their ability to censor, manipulate or give orders to.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

The internet is a dangerous place; it is a place that is dangerous to liars like Andy Burnham, who lie and lie and lie and lie and think that they can get away with it. The internet has changed all that; he cannot lie with a loose tongue. Someone somewhere will use Google against him and then write it up on their blog and then the whole world will see him for the liar he is, for decades to come. They have woken up to this very real threat to their lie machine and will now try anything to shut it down.

This is only the beginning.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

The only thing coming into full focus here is the depth of the insanity of Andy Burnham. Giving ‘film-style’ ratings to websites is completely unworkable. Even if it was workable, the idea is immoral. Who is going to sit and trawl through the millions of English language websites? Who is going to pay for it all? (see below for the answer to that one)? Obviously this means a massive power grab for the BBFC, who would need a new huge building filled with cubicles and an astronomical budget.

The British Board of Film Censors watches every film that is released in the UK, and then blackmails directors into making cuts of what it deems inappropriate before issuing a rating and a certificate:

They were and are total villains:

Historically the Board has faced strong criticism for an over-zealous attitude in censoring film. Prior to the liberalising decade of the 1960s, films were routinely and extensively censored as a means of social control. For example, Rebel Without a Cause was cut in order to reduce the “possibility of teenage rebellion”. Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night was cut to remove “overtly sexual or provocative” language.

[…]

and they have and do disrupt commerce:

19 June 2007, the BBFC has refused to certify the PlayStation 2 and Wii editions of Manhunt 2, meaning that it would not be legal to sell in the UK (though it would still be legal to own), unless Rockstar made extreme changes and resubmitted it,[4] or appealed the ruling.[5] Rockstar appealed to the independent Video Appeals Committee and finally won the case in March 2008, forcing the BBFC to grant an 18 certificate against its will.[7]

[…]

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

Now.

Rockstar were prevented from selling a game in the UK by this arbitrary gaggle of imbeciles, and they lost one year of sales thanks to the BBFC. They were not compensated for these loses of course.

More importantly to this post is the fact that every game film and advertisement that is given a rating by the BBFC has to be PAID FOR BY THE SUBMITTER, who they rather ridiculously call ‘the customer’.

Manhunt 2 cost million to develop. If they had caved in and ‘re-cut’ it, it would have increased their costs dramatically in terms of development and then having to sell two different versions instead of one. What is so galling about the BBFC is that they one day say that you cannot play this game, and then the next, say that you can. It was the same with ‘Video Nasties’; you could not watch ‘The Evil Dead‘ or ‘The Driller Killer‘ in your own home, but now you can watch all of these government censored films on free to air TV. Their censorship of these games and movies costs untold hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenues, and all of it for no reason, since they almost always subsequently back down and allow people to watch movies that they previously banned or ordered cuts to.

But this is primarily a financial scam in the making.

Here are the rates that people have to pay to have their works certified.

As you can see, Features, trailers and advertisements have a ‘handling fee’ of £75 per submission plus £6.00 per minute for full length of work.

If we are talking about Bladerunner for example it would cost:

(117*6) + 75 = £777

to get a certificate. Now multiply that by all the films that come out every year.

Then, they rate Video Games. The rates are ‘Handling fee’ of £300 per submission plus £6.00 per minute for full length of work.

Legend of Zelda “A link to the past” takes 5 to 15 hours to complete. That means:

(15*60*6)+300 = £5700

I’ve taken the maximum of 15 hours because I am assuming these old geezers are as thick as shit.

Now, you may say that Nintendo and Ridley Scott can afford this money. So what? It is completely immoral that the BBFC can arbitrarily block them from releasing their films and games based on their own prejudices…but that is not what I am ultimately aiming at.

If Andy Burnham were to be successful in getting the BBFC to rate websites, HMG would be in for literally hundreds of millions of pounds. They would charge fees to everyone with a blog or a website, and blogs would no doubt be subject to regular re-certification, since the content changes regularly. If you do not pay your fee and accept a government rating, you go off line. Period. They would either ask require your ISP to delete your site or simply add you to the list of unrated sites that cannot be accessed. the result is the same; you become inaccessible.

This, my friends, is a TAX on the internet, pure and simple.

ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children.

Yet another pointless burden on the beleaguered ISPs. Parents need to monitor their children’s internet use, or simply forbid them from using it.

Putting a child on the internet alone is like giving a 13 year old a Glock, £1000 in cash and a Harley and leaving them in the middle of SOHO at 1AM on a Saturday night.

YOU JUST SHOULDN’T DO THAT.

Mr Burnham also uses the interview to indicate that he will allocate money raised from the BBC’s commercial activities to fund other public-service broadcasting such as Channel Four. He effectively rules out sharing the BBC licence fee between broadcasters as others have recommended.

The license fee’s days are numbered. Mark my words.

His plans to rein in the internet, and censor some websites, are likely to trigger a major row with online advocates who ferociously guard the freedom of the world wide web.

They will never work. He does not understand the internet, computers, how and why the internet has become so successful, and how those forces will prevent anyone like him from destroying it.

He would do well to study the phenomenon of Anonymous. If he DARES to try and implement this, he will find out first hand what the words “quite a dangerous place” means when it comes to teh internetz. If he continues to even talk about this garbage he is going to face an Anonymous style flood of actions the likes of which he cannot even BEGIN to imagine.

The internet does not belong to government, or to anyone. No one can control it, and anyone who tries gets bitten in the ass.

However, Mr Burnham said: “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

The only issue here that he is concerned about is the internets ability to instantly transmit the refutations of and permanently store the facts that refute lies.

The people who created and who continue to maintain the internet understand how powerful a thing this is, and they will do literally anything to keep it clean; i.e. free from the dirty hands of liars like Andy Burnham. There is no such thiing as ‘harmful content’. The actions of the BBFC prove this categorically in their arbitrary and always reversed rulings on what does and does not constitute ‘obscene material’. We will not allow our internets to be subverted, corrupted or interfered with by computer illiterate liars and control addicts. It is designed to resist control, to route around censorship as damage and there is NOTHING that the likes of subhuman monsters like Andy Burnham can do about it.

If he thinks that he can run to 0bama to help him in his quest, he is more than delusional. America has a written constitution with guaranteed rights of free speech. There is already case law preventing government from rating newspapers and other such nonsense. Anyone who wants to operate an English language website away from Andy Burnham’s fascist regime can simply move their content to a USA server; most of the Blogspot blogs are hosted in the USA already….but Andy doesn’t know any of this…is is a totally clueless luser, an ID10T of the first order.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.

And you can take that view and shove it up your arse.

This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it;

yes it is, you LIAR.

it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.

This is yet another LIE.

Anyone who does not want to see something simply doesn’t look at it. The internet doesn’t push things that people do not want in front of their eyes; Andy Burnham is one of those people who DELIBERATELY goes out of his way to find the most repellent things unimaginable to prove his point that the internet needs his control, when in fact, it is only HIM and 200 other people who are watching that filth, and the other 200 are journalists writing salacious stories about how bad the internet is!

We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

The public interest lies in YOU having nothing to do with the internet. Period. You and your fellow animal Mandelshon – yet another chinless wonder out of the same mold that spawned you – who wants to nationalize Nominet, the body that organizes (very successfully without interference from Government) .co.uk domains is another example of how you want to totally control the internet. That particular scumbag’s department wrote the following letter to Nominet:

“In a letter dated October 15, senior civil servant David Hendon, BERR’s Director of Business Relations, asked Nominet chairman Bob Gilbert: “What arguments would you employ to convince my Ministers that the present relationship between government and the company is appropriate in ensuring that public policy objectives in relation to the management of the domain name system and the standing of the UK in the internet community are understood and taken into account?”

Im not making that up; “justify why we should not incorporate you into the government” and if they think the reasons are not good enough? Well then, I guess you just have to bend over Nominet.

You people just DON’T GET IT.

The internet was created without you, thrives because you are not involved in it, and it will RESIST every effort you make to control it. If you think its bad when companies leave Britain because the business climate is so bad here, wait till you try and control the internet. With a few simple commands websites that are money making enterprises can flee britain at no extra cost to the business and transparently as far as the user is concerned.

Mr Burnham reveals that he is currently considering a range of new safeguards. Initially, as with copyright violations, these could be policed by internet providers. However, new laws may be threatened if the initial approach is not successful.

Nothing that this lame brained luser can devise will work. All it takes is a single developer to write a single protocol and the whole world changes.

Take the example of Napster (who we supported). If no one had tried to shut them down, there would have been little incentive in finding a solution to the problem of how to help people share files. Sadly, the imbeciles shut it down.

And the war started.

The first salvo came in the form of Gnutella, an attempt to decentralize the filesharing service so that there was no single point of attack for the buggy whip luddite Andy Burnham’s of this world….then came the Tzar Bomba: Bittorrent and the super popular trackers like Suprnova, Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and the countless other smaller trackers out there. One man, Bram Cohen created Bittorrent by himself. It now accounts for one third of all internet traffic.

I guarantee you, right here, right now, that if ANY sort of concerted effort to censor or rate the internet comes to pass, that someone is going to release a protocol that sits on top of the internet and brings everyone what they want without interference from any third party. People have already started working on projects that do just this. They will become infinitely more efficient once there is a real need for the software. It will work on all devices, in all places, and no one will be able to stop it.

Andy Burnham is on a hiding to nothing. He is on the wrong side of history. He is a total fool, and a laughing stock, and if he is ‘successful’ he will be personally responsible for bringing about exactly the sort of internet that he does not want.

“I think there is definitely a case for clearer standards online,” he said. “More ability for parents to understand if their child is on a site, what standards it is operating to. What are the protections that are in place?”

This is another lie. There is no case for government to take this role, there are already ways for parents to know what their children are doing online, and some operating systems have this BUILT IN. The fact of the matter is that Andy Burnham is not only not wanted for this role, he is not needed.

The OPPOSITE of what he is saying is the truth; the appalling record of the BBFC is proof that government is there merely to censor and harvest money from industry. They do not actually care about what is or is not ‘decent’. If they did, the list of banned films would not change. While we are on the subject, did you know that they CUT TNG to remove mention of peace in Ireland?

He points to the success of the 9pm television watershed at protecting children. The minister also backs a new age classification system on video games to stop children buying certain products.

TV is not the same as the internet.

This is just another example of how confused Andy Burnham is; he cannot distinguish between TV broadcasting and and internet websites and services accessed from a computer. The fact is that computers give parents absolute control of what does and does not display on their screens. TV never did that, although they tried to make it happen in the usa. Internet access now gives fine grained control to parents in a way that they never had previously. They can select only the sites that they want their children to use, and block everything else. This happened without anyone having to tell the makers of OSes that they needed to do it; people are responsible and do not need government to manage them. They can find the right balance for themselves, create the services and tools they need for themselves and Parental Controls in the major OSes is proof of that.

Mr Burnham, himself a parent of three young children, says his goal is for internet providers to offer “child-safe” web services.

I wonder how he controls internet access for his own children? I’m sure that he DOES control their access; if he can do it, what makes him think that other parents need his help?

“It worries me – like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.

And so….DONT DO THAT.

This isn’t about turning the clock back.

To when? A date before the internet was in most homes?

The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”

ROTFL.

The only stake that needs to be put somewhere is into the heart of this vampire. No one needs your help to navigate the internet you piece of garbage. The internet is very simple to use, and the world is NOT dangerous you fear-mongering sack of shit.

Mr Burnham also wants new industry-wide “take down times”. This means that if websites such as YouTube or Facebook are alerted to offensive or harmful content they will have to remove it within a specified time once it is brought to their attention.

Not going to happen. Facebook has over 100,000,000 uers. If someone writes ‘fuck’ on their profile, there is no way that the Facebook staff will be able to respond to a takedown notice on short notice. And even so, the sky is not going to fall because something that Andy Burnham, Catholic, thinks is offensive or ‘harmful’. These words my friends, are those of a delusional miscreant looking for a job; a perfect example of idle hands doing the devil’s work. And for the record, both Facebook and YouTube are based in the USA, where they have RIGHTS, which you cannot in your idle imaginings erase ‘for the greater good’.

He also says that the Government is considering changing libel laws to give people access to cheap low-cost legal recourse if they are defamed online. The legal proposals are being drawn up by the Ministry of Justice.

Judge Dredd is way too busy to be dealing with that dontcha know.

Mr Burnham admits that his plans may be interpreted by some as “heavy-handed” but says the new standards drive is “utterly crucial”. Mr Burnham also believes that the inauguration of Barack Obama, the President-Elect, presents an opportunity to implement the major changes necessary for the web.

See what I mean? DELUSIONAL.

These plans are utterly crucial to him maintaining some sort of relevance and nothing more. They will not work, will not be adopted, and are further eroding the paint layer of usefulness from his unctuous body.

“The change of administration is a big moment. We have got a real opportunity to make common cause,” he says. “The more we seek international solutions to this stuff – the UK and the US working together – the more that an international norm will set an industry norm.”

It will not happen. There are too many computer literate people, too many countries with written constitutions to allow this to happen, and finally the internet itself will not allow it to come to pass, for technical reasons.

The Culture Secretary is spending the Christmas holidays at his constituency in Lancashire but is planning to take major decisions on the future of public-service broadcasting in the New Year. Channel Four is facing a £150m shortfall in its finances and is calling for extra Government help. ITV is also growing increasingly alarmed about the financial implications of meeting the public-service commitments of its licenses.

TV is dead.

Mr Burnham says that he is prepared to offer further public assistance to broadcasters other than the BBC. However, he indicates that he does not favour “top-slicing” the licence fee. Instead, he may share the profits of the BBC Worldwide, which sells the rights to programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing to foreign broadcasters.

“I feel it is important to sustain quality content beyond the BBC,” he said. “The real priorities I have got in my mind are regional news, quality children’s content and original British children’s content, current affairs documentaries – that’s important. The thing now is to be absolutely clear on what the public wants to see beyond the BBC.

“Top-slicing the licence fee is an option that is going to have to remain on the table. I have to say it is not the option that I instinctively reach for first. I think there are other avenues to be explored.”

[…]

Telegraph

Blah blah blah Bollocks.

I have to say, I really do enjoy watching these morons make total asses of themselves. Whenever they talk about the internet or computers, they expose their complete lack of understanding, their lack of insight, their incompetence and inability to think.

We can see just what sort of people they really are, how useless, pointless and dumb they are, and most importantly, how weak they are.

Articles like this should make it abundantly clear that the world really has turned in our favor, and that it is only a matter of time before ‘people’ like Andy Burnham are consigned to the scrapheap. We will simply do without them. And their pronouncements, if they are even there to make them at all, will just be ignored or deliberately sabotaged, like the unbelievably cool people at The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea are doing right now by giving parents the option to ‘shield’ their children on ContactPoint.

This is how fragile their control is; I have always said that their control and power is an illusion. It only takes a handful of people to change everything. These councilors are just a small number of people with principles and now they are going to potentially bring down ContactPoiint single handedly!

Now imagine Andy Burnham against the entire internet.

What a joke!

[Google translation from German to English. – WK]

Wirtschaftswoche
06.12.2008

On the black market for personal data after searching the business week, the bank accounts of 21 million German citizens in circulation. Then, in extreme cases, three out of four households in Germany fear that money deducted from her checking account, without ever that they have given a direct debit.

Dusseldorf magazine was the gigantic amount of data for almost twelve million euros offered. A CD with 1.2 million customers received the Business Week as a model. In addition to the Personal details such as dates of birth include the records with the bank account number and bank code, in some cases even more detailed information on assets.

The Duesseldorf prosecutor in the week, the explosive economic data on Thursday passed, must now clarify how so many account numbers illegally in circulation could. According to Business Week first traces lead almost completely on small call center operators. To serve mainly to highly competitive mass markets such as telecommunications, power or cable television many suppliers almost exclusively external service providers and call centers. These receive the relevant customer data in part by the client. Turn the service providers for their subcontractors, lost control over the data sometime in nothingness.

[…]

http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmer-maerkte…

You see?

Just like we, and other people have been saying, the data that is collected in any database, once it gets out, either wholesale or piecemeal will be collected by criminals, compiled and then sold to whoever wants it.

You are guaranteed that before this newspaper, ‘received the Business Week as a model the CD’ that this information was used for many months to slowly leech money from the accounts of hundreds of thousands of people; think about it; you take a random amount from 20 to 90 euros from each account, spread over a large number of accounts in different banks, going to many different bank accounts and there will be no pattern to discern. Once you have done this, the data is useless because any further harvesting will set off alarms. That is when the data is valuable only as something to sell to the criminals on the lower rungs, who have a different risk threshold.

This will be repeated with every sort of data imaginable, because all data is valuable to someone.

That means, again, that:

• ContactPoint will be released on DVDR.
• The NIR will be released on DVDR.
• <insert name of government database> will be released on DVDR.

And remember; just because you have not read about a particular database being leaked, that does not mean that it has not happened. Criminals can keep secrets and so can governments; many times the latter does not know that the former has access.

What a mess!

And what is so galling, infuriating and exhasperating is the fact that Gordon Mass Murdering agromegly Monster Brown admits that government can never keep databases safe and yet they are going ahead anyway with ContactPoint. A most disturbing, sickening and irresponsible action…but then again, what is putting 11 million children in a shopping cart for paedophiles compared to mass murdering one million people? It’s nothing at all, and that is the problem; once you have graduated to the level of a murderer, anything else bad that is less severe than murder is trivial.

That is what you have running the UK.

The Dutch city of Eindhoven has caused a stir with a plan to set up a cannabis plantation to supply marijuana to its coffee shops. The move was announced at a “weed summit”, when dozens of Dutch mayors urged the government to back the pilot project in an effort to clamp down on the criminals who supply the drug.

The Netherlands, famed for having one of Europe’s most tolerant policies on soft drugs, allows for the possession of less than 5g of marijuana and its sale in coffee shops, but bans the cultivation and supply of the drug to these shops. The majority of Dutch mayors say this legal “back door” has spawned an illicit industry worth €2bn (£1.7bn) a year.

“It’s time that we experimented with a system of regulated plantations so we can have strict guidelines and controls on the quality and price,” Rob de Gijzel, the Mayor of Eindhoven, told the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant. “Authorities must get a grip on the supply of drugs to coffee shops.”

There are also concerns about the increasing strength of unregulated cannabis, with the content of tetrahydrocannabinol, the active chemical ingredient, doubling in recent years.

The weed summit was called to thrash out a revamp of drugs policy after the provincial cities Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom announced plans to shut all their coffee shops in the next two years to combat drugs tourism and criminal activity. They complain that the 1.3 million French and Belgians who come every year for a puff of weed or dash of hash are often badly behaved. Worse still, they are targeted by “drugs runners” who lure them away from legal outlets to back-door suppliers that offer harder, illegal drugs.

Han Polman, the Mayor of Bergen op Zoom, said: “We are in favour of the Eindhoven experiment but we don’t see it happening quickly. That’s why we are going ahead with our shutdown.”

The Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, of the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal party, has applauded these “courageous” efforts to wipe out coffee shops.

The capital, Amsterdam, was in shock over the weekend after news that one in five of its coffee shops would be forced to close under a new law. The city council said 43 of 228 sites must close by the end of 2011 because they are within 250m of a school. This includes the famous Bulldog coffee shop, a tourist magnet housed in a former police headquarters on the Leidseplein. Three Canadian visitors were reeling from the news. One said: “We come here twice a year, we fly thousands of miles, spend probably €4,000 while we are here. It’s the place to be!”

The headmistress of a nearby school, Margriet Bosman, was equally unimpressed by the new measure: “This is just for show. Children will get their drugs if they want to anyway, and closing the shops, which are quite regulated, is not a very good solution.”

Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, is also in favour of permitting the sale of soft drugs. “There should be a system… in which it is clear where soft drugs come from,” he said. Many Dutch also want the tolerant approach to remain in place, with a newspaper poll this week showing 80 per cent of Dutch opposing coffee shop closures.

Experts agree that a ban is not the answer. “A ban is even more dangerous than the grass itself because consumers will turn to illegal circuits and criminality will explode,” said Tim Boekhout, a criminologist.

[…]

The Independent

The only thing wrong with this plan is that the state is going to be the one setting up the plantation. They should completely legalize the growing and selling of marijuana, so that anyone can grow it anywhere and anyone can sell it….just like tomatoes.

It is completely insane and absurd that you are allowed to posses marijuana, but not allowed to grow it or sell it.

When people say, “the law is an ass”, this is what they are talking about.

There are no irrational regulations on the plantation of other crops for eating, and so there should be no irrational regulation on the growing of marijuana. If there are irrational regulations, i.e. what strains you cannot grow, someone, some ‘criminal’ is going to grow those strains simply because she should not. In any case, the crime routing around the law argument is irrelevant; no one has the right to stop you from growing whatever you want. Period. (GM being the exception, since the GM pollen can contaminate other people’s crops….small digression).

Words about the ‘increasing strength of unregulated cannabis’ come directly from the prohibitionist position, and are totally wrong. The strength or weakness of what you smoke should not be regulated by anyone, except you.

As for the Belgians and French who come to get a taste of liberty, that is a problem for the French and the Belgians to sort out. If their countries were operating correctly, there would be no reason to come to the Netherlands to smoke a plant and its extracts.

This nonsense about coffee shops being near schools is, as the teacher says, “just for show”. I’m sure no one is buying it there…what amazes me is that people are so stupid as to think that such a law would be taken seriously in the first place, or that it would in any way ‘work’ whatever they think ‘working’ is in this case.

Job Cohen is wrong to say there should be a system to show where ‘drugs’ come from.

Take a look at bread making:

when people are left to get on with their stuff in what ever way they want, they set their own standards, make what people want and everyone is catered for.

Artisan Bread Original makes a wide variety of high quality breads. No one told them how to do it, what the quality should be or anything else. It sells on its own merits and people buy it and are satisfied.

The same goes for marijuana. Growers will package it and categorize it themselves and the ones who know how best to do this will sell the most, with every other seller finding their own place in the market by virtue of people selecting them or not.

Finally, the argument about what is or is not in marijuana is simply nonsense. Cigarettes are full of toxic chemicals (599 to be exact) to aid the rate of burning and other qualities that the manufacturer is not required to list on the box:

The list of 599 additives approved by the US Government for use in the manufacture of cigarettes is something every smoker should see. Submitted by the five major American cigarette companies to the Dept. of Health and Human Services in April of 1994, this list of ingredients had long been kept a secret.

Tobacco companies reporting this information were:

• American Tobacco Company
• Brown and Williamson
• Liggett Group, Inc.
• Philip Morris Inc.
• R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company

While these ingredients are approved as additives for foods, they were not tested by burning them, and it is the burning of many of these substances which changes their properties, often for the worse.

[…]

Marijuana does not currently have any of these artificial additives…but I can assure you that if the state gets involved in the marijuana trade, those deadly chemicals and others will be added.

Pilots threaten to strike over ID cards
The first wave of ID cards to be issued to British citizens has prompted airline pilots to threaten a strike rather than accept the documents.

The second Brass Balls™ award goes to the airline pilots who vote to strike.

Aviation workers have warned that proposals to make airport staff register for the cards from next year would do little to improve security. The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), which represents 10,000 of the 12,000 commercial pilots and flight engineers in Britain, said its members were being treated as “guinea pigs”. Jim McAuslan, Balpa’s general secretary, said the Government’s “early warning system should be flashing” over opposition to the plans.

The government doesnt have an early warning system. They are blind dumb and deaf when it comes to what actually works and what people’s concerns are. That is how they could ignore two million marchers demonstrating against an illegal immoral and unjustified attack against Iraq.

Pilots going on strike however is a different thing. These highly trained and completely indispensable people going on strike will cost the airlines millions of pounds. These pilots cannot be replaced with scabs. This action is going to hurt where the pain is felt most strongly; in the realm of money.

The Home Office insists the scheme will help airport workers improve security and streamline pass applications when staff move jobs.

They cannot demonstrate how these cards will improve security. All the people who work at airports currently are already carrying ID cards and have already been vetted. Another, state issued card cannot add any further security. If this is not the case, then they need to demonstrate how having TWO ID cards is better than having one.

Ministers will publish draft regulations on Friday to set up a trial requiring airside staff at Manchester airport and London City airport to sign up for an ID card before they can get security passes allowing them to work there. If the regulations are approved, the first ID cards will be issued at the two airports from autumn next year as part of an 18-month trial.

They should ALL go on strike and shut down the entire airport and air transport system of the UK. That would cause real economic damage and would force the government to back down.

Under the proposals, airport workers will be the first British citizens to be given ID cards, which are due to be introduced for young people from 2010.

But Mr McAuslan, whose union holds its annual conference at Heathrow later this week, said he would be consulting members on the possibility of industrial action if the Government presses ahead with the plans. “It may come to an industrial dispute,” he said. “We would want to avoid that. We would want the Government to think again about the compulsory nature of it and think again about the whole scheme. The Government has said previously that ID cards will be voluntary but the indications are that if you choose not to have a card you will not get an airside pass.”

That is a very diplomatic way of drawing a line in the sand. Bugs Bunny would have said, “Of course you know, this means war”.

The British Air Transport Association, which represents airlines including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, branded the scheme a “dubious PR initiative by the Government and one that fails to offer any real benefits”.

Thats more Wile E Coyote.

The shadow Home Secretary, Dominic Grieve, said: “Labour should take their heads out of the sand and abandon this £19bn white elephant which will do nothing to improve our security but may well make it worse.” The Tories have pledged to scrap the scheme if elected. Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, added: “It is no surprise that pilots are up in arms since they are one of the few groups selected as guinea pigs for this benighted experiment.”

And they will be the first to be lined up and violated; fingerprinted and scanned and given a number like concentration camp cattle. It is sickening, and finally everyone is starting to feel queasy.

But a spokesman for the Identity and Passport Service said: “Identity cards will directly benefit airside workers – not just by improving personnel security, but also by speeding up pre-employment checks and increasing the efficiency of pass-issuing arrangements.”

This is twice that they have said it would increase efficiency. This is a lie. Without an ID card no time is made making a meaningless check against the NIR when you apply for a job or go and buy a bottle of wine. And as for the lie of it “improving personnel security” they have to demonstrate how people who are already vetted and who already carry ID cards are going to be ‘more secure’ if they also carry a government ID card.

The timetable

*21 November 2008: Home Office issues draft rules on ID card trial at Manchester and London City airports.
*25 November: Home Office starts issuing ID cards for foreign nationals.
*March-May 2009: Regulations on trial scheme debated by Parliament.
*Autumn 2009: First airport staff to be given ID cards.
*2010: ID cards made available to young people for the first time.
*2011-12: Public invited to register for ID cards.
*2017: Vast majority of the population enrolled on ID card database.

[…]

The Independent

This timetable is nonsense of course.

They no doubt had a similar timetable for the adoption of the Poll Tax…and we all know what happened with that idea.

This idea is going to die.

Every group that they try and use as guinea pigs to stress test the enrollment system are going to violently refuse to be numbered and fingerprinted like criminal cattle.

If everyone says ‘NO!’ then the scheme dies. We have said this over and over and over again.

Of course, the Independent fails to ask any of the questions that a normal person would ask, like “how will this increase security”. They simply parrot the line from the Passport service and the Home Office like trained dogs.

But we expect that.

by Paul Joseph Watson

The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions – all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.

“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.

The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.

The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

In a separate recent interview, Celente went further on the subject of revolution in America.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”
“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”

“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

The George Washington blog has compiled a list of quotes attesting to Celente’s accuracy as a trend forecaster.

“When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.” — CNN Headline News

“A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties.”
— The Economist

“Gerald Celente has a knack for getting the zeitgeist right.” — USA Today

“There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.”
– CNBC

“Those who take their predictions seriously … consider the Trends Research Institute.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark … he’s one of the most accurate forecasters around.”— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic and business trends for corporate clients.”
— The New York Times

“Mr. Celente is a very intelligent guy. We are able to learn about trends from an authority.”
— 48 Hours, CBS News

“Gerald Celente has a solid track record. He has predicted everything from the 1987 stock market crash and the demise of the Soviet Union to green marketing and corporate downsizing.”
— The Detroit News

“Gerald Celente forecast the 1987 stock market crash, ‘green marketing,’ and the boom in gourmet coffees.” — Chicago Tribune

“The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of Popular Culture.”
— The Los Angeles Times

“If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”
— New York Post

So there you have it – hardly a nutjob conspiracy theorist blowhard now is he? The price of not heeding his warnings will be far greater than the cost of preparing for the future now. Storable food and gold are two good places to make a start.

http://www.infowars.com/?p=5938

The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.

The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:

• “The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”

• “Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ‘self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”
• “‘America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,’ chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
• “Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis….”
• “It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”[1]

Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation. Thus, one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….”[2] Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.”[3] In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.”[4] Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”

The mentality displayed in these statements is so completely and utterly at odds with the actual meaning of laissez faire that it would be capable of describing the economic policy of the old Soviet Union as one of laissez faire in its last decades. By its logic, that is how it would have to describe the policy of Brezhnev and his successors of allowing workers on collective farms to cultivate plots of land of up to one acre in size on their own account and sell the produce in farmers’ markets in Soviet cities. According to the logic of the media, that too would be “laissez faire” — at least compared to the time of Stalin.

Laissez-faire capitalism has a definite meaning, which is totally ignored, contradicted, and downright defiled by such statements as those quoted above. Laissez-faire capitalism is a politico-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which the powers of the state are limited to the protection of the individual’s rights against the initiation of physical force. This protection applies to the initiation of physical force by other private individuals, by foreign governments, and, most importantly, by the individual’s own government. This last is accomplished by such means as a written constitution, a system of division of powers and checks and balances, an explicit bill of rights, and eternal vigilance on the part of a citizenry with the right to keep and bear arms. Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force. And nothing more.

The utter absurdity of statements claiming that the present political-economic environment of the United States in some sense represents laissez-faire capitalism becomes as glaringly obvious as anything can be when one keeps in mind the extremely limited role of government under laissez-faire and then considers the following facts about the present-day United States:

1. Government spending in the United States currently equals more than forty percent of national income, i.e., the sum of all wages and salaries and profits and interest earned in the country. This is without counting any of the massive off-budget spending such as that on account of the government enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nor does it count any of the recent spending on assorted “bailouts.” What this means is that substantially more than forty dollars of every one hundred dollars of output are appropriated by the government against the will of the individual citizens who produce that output. The money and the goods involved are turned over to the government only because the individual citizens wish to stay out of jail. Their freedom to dispose of their own incomes and output is thus violated on a colossal scale. In contrast, under laissez-faire capitalism, government spending would be on such a modest scale that a mere revenue tariff might be sufficient to support it. The corporate and individual income taxes, inheritance and capital gains taxes, and social security and Medicare taxes would not exist.
2. There are presently fifteen federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce, and virtually all of which nowadays routinely ride roughshod over one or more important aspects of the economic freedom of the individual. Under laissez-faire capitalism, eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state, and treasury would remain. Within those departments, moreover, further reductions would be made, such as the abolition of the IRS in the Treasury Department and the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.
3. The economic interference of today’s cabinet departments is reinforced and amplified by more than one hundred federal agencies and commissions, the most well known of which include, besides the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the FBI and CIA, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA. Under laissez-faire capitalism, all such agencies and commissions would be done away with, with the exception of the FBI, which would be reduced to the legitimate functions of counterespionage and combating crimes against person or property that take place across state lines.
4. To complete this catalog of government interference and its trampling of any vestige of laissez faire, as of the end of 2007, the last full year for which data are available, the Federal Register contained fully seventy-three thousand pages of detailed government regulations. This is an increase of more than ten thousand pages since 1978, the very years during which our system, according to one of The New York Times articles quoted above, has been “tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be no Federal Register. The activities of the remaining government departments and their subdivisions would be controlled exclusively by duly enacted legislation, not the rule-making of unelected government officials.

5. And, of course, to all of this must be added the further massive apparatus of laws, departments, agencies, and regulations at the state and local level. Under laissez-faire capitalism, these too for the most part would be completely abolished and what remained would reflect the same kind of radical reductions in the size and scope of government activity as those carried out on the federal level.

What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional.

Government Intervention Actually Responsible for the Crisis

Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving. This is a policy it has pursued since its founding, but with exceptional vigor since 2001, in its efforts to overcome the collapse of the stock market bubble whose creation it had previously inspired.

The Federal Reserve and other portions of the government pursue the policy of money and credit creation in everything they do that encourages and protects private banks in the attempt to cheat reality by making it appear that one can keep one’s money and lend it out too, both at the same time. This duplicity occurs when individuals or business firms deposit cash in banks, which they can continue to use to make purchases and pay bills by means of writing checks rather than using currency. To the extent that the banks are then enabled and encouraged to lend out the funds that have been deposited in this way (usually by the creation of new and additional checking deposits rather than the lending of currency), they are engaged in the creation of new and additional money. The depositors continue to have their money and borrowers now have the bulk of the funds deposited. In recent years, the Federal Reserve has so encouraged this process, that checking deposits have been created equal to fifty times the actual cash reserves of the banks, a situation more than ripe for implosion.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3165

I have had some interesting conversations over the last few weeks, all centering around the current historic economic events. Two of them are notable.

The first was with a good friend to whom I gave Ron Paul’s ‘The Revolution: A Manifesto’. He said that he read it up to the point where the book supports the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “I just cannot support the right to bear arms and all of that sort of stuff”.

This man owns two shotguns.

I am telling this story because it demonstrates that there are many people out there who simply cannot think. I had to go through the reasoning behind the Second Amendment, why it applies today more than ever and how many people react in a knee-jerk fashion to it thanks to a constant stream of propaganda. At the end of the conversation, he said, “I have to get more ammo”.

Sadly, this unthinking reaction to the Second Amendment is not uncommon, and I have had the same reaction to Ron Paul from a software developer who had only heard a little about him, “he’s not one of those ‘Right to Bear Arms’ people is he?, because I’m not down with that”.

These people, if they are lucky, understand the importance of bearing arms only when it is spelled out to them very slowly. If they are unlucky, they understand it only when it is too late, and the state is stealing their property from them, or they are being slaughtered in ethnic cleansing operations.

Which brings us to the other of the two conversations.

I informed a friend with suitable dread that Nicolas Sarkozy called recently for a world currency controlled by a world bank. My good friend replied, “So? Whats wrong with that? It would mean that you can trade anywhere in the same currency”.

I then explained to him that a world currency would be controlled by a single group of people,  and a single bank, who would control its value by either printing or not printing it, they would also control the interest rates and there would be absolutely nothing anyone could do about it.

He gasped, “My God, that would be TERRIBLE.”

This person already has a limited (but growing) understanding of the problems with fiat currency thanks to the internet. It only took a little push to make him totally reject the idea of a world currency. That is a good thing; someone starting to wake up and who is able to see the problem with only a small amount of prompting.

We then went on to discuss why trans-national currencies ‘Currency Monocultures’ like the Euro are a bad thing.

Imagine that the Euro never happened, and each European country had kept its own currency. Each country would be able to formulate its own response to bank failures, and their currency would suffer or gain depending on their response. Each person with savings could hold a basket of currencies to protect themselves from being wiped out by inflation. The Italians might opt to let their banks fail so that the system is cleaned out of bad debt. The Lira, the Italian people and anyone holding Lira would benefit. The French might nationalize their banks and bail them out with taxpayer’s money. The Franc would suffer from inflation, the French would suffer separately from other states, and the FrenchCitoyen would have an opportunity to get out of the Franc and into a currency that was not inflating.

Monocultures make it easy for disease to spread. In computers, everyone running windows makes it easy for viruses and trojans to spread like wildfire. Flu spreads rapidly when many people are sharing the same space in a crowded city. If you want to make it impossible to have a world wide systemic monetary crash, you make sure that every economy, every country is insulated from the others by each having its own currency, its own independent financial policy and you reduce the importance to near zero of currencies like the Dollar, whose status as the world’s reserve currency exposes everyone to risk.

The absolute last thing you do is create a ‘world currency’. This would create an opportunity for a crash that would make this one look like a picnic with apple juice and marshmallows as the food. It would create a monoculture where any disease would be instantly caught by everyone everywhere, where there would be no place for anyone to run to protect their wealth, where a handful of naturally incompetent people would control the destiny of the whole world.

A world currency is the very definition of insanity.

Those in the know are heading for the Yen to get out of the way of the oncoming train. Gold is already in very short supply or sold out world-wide as people flee to it to protect the value of their money.

That last link was from The Guardian. The newspapers have demonstrated that they are no longer the place to get any sort of real information. There has been a rush for gold not because anyone in any newspaper has explained why inflation is coming, but everyone who knows about this has found out about it from the internet. Newspapers like The Guardian are still trying to sell the utter nonsense that mega salaried executives and lack of regulation are the cause of these problems. Everyone who takes the time to find out about the truth behind all of this (that it is regulation and interference by the state in the market, combined with central banks and fiat currencies, mostly the dollar, being printed to excess) knows that the Guardian, Gordon ‘Man of Clay’ Brown and all the other newspapers have got it totally wrong either because they are being told to print lies or they just do not know anything about economics.

Notice the words that are missing from every explanation of what is going on. There is no mention of ‘Fiat Currency‘, for example and never any reference to any of the people who predicted every element of all of this.

But I digress.

Anyone who calls for a bailout, anyone who calls for more regulation, anyone who calls for more centralization, anyone who calls for fewer currencies, or the worst possible scenario, a world-wide single currency, just doesn’t know what they are talking about.

They are not going to get away with this. Too many people are aware of what is really happening (as demonstrated by the rush to buy gold world-wide, without any prompting and a total lack of real information from any major news source). When they fail, we will return to local currencies on a national or even smaller basis, so that everyone will have built in protection for their wealth. The disease spreading central banks are now totally discredited. They do not have the ability to set interest rates correctly; no one can, in the same way that no one can predict the weather. The weather man always gets it wrong to some extent, but in the case of central bankers, they make the bad weather wheras the weather man merely reports it.

We will return to a state where no central control of money exists. The dynamic, chaotic yet stable, market will take control and everyone will understand that there is an underlying stability, (in the summer it is hot, and in the winter it is cold) and inside these variations there are flucituations that are understandable. Those with a background in maths know what this looks like as a picture; a Lorenz Attractor a shape that describes a chaotic system, yet which is self contained and understandable on the large scale. Students of dynamical systems will also know that chaotic systems can tolerate a small amount of parameter change without flipping into another stable state. When those parameter changes, i.e. tweaking of the economy, too much regulation insane taxation, are too great for the system to absorb, the market becomes distorted, and the attractor that describes it doesn’t stay in a shape that anyone can understand or predict, especially as the changes imposed by the state keep happening regularly.

On every level and by every measure state interference in markets is wrong. It is morally wrong because the state steals from people to do its dirty work. It is wrong objectively, and this can be demonstrated by mathematics.

It is high time that people everywhere cut the state out of their affairs and restricted them to the servant position where they belong.

From Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram, yet another crystal clear explanation of why the TSA’s list of ‘terrorists’ is completely bogus:

The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to secondary screening. Then the Transportation Security Administration realized that meant someone on the government’s no-fly list — the list that is supposed to keep our planes safe from terrorists — could just fly with no ID.

Now, people without ID must also answer personal questions from their credit history to ascertain their identity. The TSA will keep records of who those ID-less people are, too, in case they’re trying to probe the system.

This may seem like an improvement, except that the photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

The problem is that it is unverified passenger names that get checked against the no-fly list. At security checkpoints, the TSA just matches IDs to whatever is printed on the boarding passes. The airline checks boarding passes against tickets when people board the plane. But because no one checks ticketed names against IDs, the security breaks down.

This vulnerability isn’t new. It isn’t even subtle. I wrote about it in 2003, and again in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google “print your own boarding pass” can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That’s just not true. The no-fly list — a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them — and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives. It catches innocents such as Ted Kennedy, whose name is similar to someone’s on the list, and Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), who was on the list but no one knew why.

The no-fly list is a Kafkaesque nightmare for the thousands of innocent Americans who are harassed and detained every time they fly. Put on the list by unidentified government officials, they can’t get off. They can’t challenge the TSA about their status or prove their innocence. (The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided this month that no-fly passengers can sue the FBI, but that strategy hasn’t been tried yet.)

But even if these lists were complete and accurate, they wouldn’t work. Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the D.C. snipers, the London subway bombers and most of the 9/11 terrorists weren’t on any list before they committed their terrorist acts. And if a terrorist wants to know if he’s on a list, the TSA has approved a convenient, $100 service that allows him to figure it out: the Clear program, which issues IDs to “trusted travelers” to speed them through security lines. Just apply for a Clear card; if you get one, you’re not on the list.

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response — security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

My previous articles on the subject:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0308.html#6
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/forge_your_own.html
http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html

This article originally appeared in the L.A. Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-schneier28-2008aug28,0,3099808.story or http://tinyurl.com/6dmcl4

All true, all correct.

What the article does not do however, is to explain the irrational TSA policy and how they can continue to do what they are doing unchallenged. TSA admins must know that what they are doing is incorrect and innefective in every way; they are not that stupid to believe the fairy story that they give as the pretext for their procedures.

There therefore must be another reason why they are persisting with this nonsense, instead of abandoning it completely as a big mistake.

Once explanation is that they want to put everyone in the country, and I mean every single man woman and child, on a new ‘Clean’ list, not for the purposes of anti terrorism, but for control of every aspect of life. I am talking about a national ID card that is needed for every transaction, no matter how small, as we have written about so many times.

We all know that the ‘security’ measures they are trying to roll out world-wide are not about security. It is high time that everyone start trying to figure out (for themselves) what the real agenda of all of this is. They will find that any conclusion they can come to is not pretty.

Trying to second guess the final maneuver and true agenda will also help us force the people who are trying to do this to state explicitly why they are doing it; if they cannot give a satisfactory answer they will be forced to shut it all down permanently.

Either way, we are fast approaching the point where the road forks, and they will either get away with rolling out the global police state or they are utterly destroyed.

How the U.S. Garrisons the Planet and Doesn’t Even Notice
By Tom Engelhardt

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard — that is, the population of an American town — are functionally floating bases.

And here’s the other half of that simple truth: We don’t care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that’s the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that’s more than you care to know, stop here.

[…]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174972/being_in_base_denial

The scale of the fall of the American Empire will be in proportion to its reach.

It will be a spectacular contraction more than the Roman Empire or any other empire in history.

The worst part about it, is that if this collapse is ugly, the idea that man can live in a free, sovereign country may be taken down with the USA.

And that would be a bad thing.