Archive for the 'The Law' Category

Bitcoins are Baseball Cards

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

The responses to Bitcoin from different camps that encounter it have been fascinating to read. Bitcoin, like the Internet, is a mirror reflecting the philosophy of the person who is talking about it.

Libertarians see it as a way out.
Statists see it as a way of receiving the blessings of the state.

and so on…

One of the many interesting sets of thoughts swirling around Bitcoin is the idea that somehow, the State must be involved in Bitcoin, and there are people out there who are keen to try and shoehorn any legislation or rule that is out there to fit the Bitcoin case.

Take a look at this:

FinCEN Brings KYC Requirements To Bitcoin?

The U.S. Department of the Treasury (“FinCEN”) issued a Final Rule making non-bank providers of pre-paid financial instruments subject to comprehensive Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) regulations similar to depository institutions.

Why this particular rule, and not the first amendment of the constitution? Cryptography, it has been argued, correctly, is a form of speech that falls under the first amendment protections guaranteeing your right to write whatever you want.

Bitcoin is made up of cryptographic signatures that can be printed out as text. This means that they are clearly protected speech and not financial instruments.

Why should FinCEN have anything to do with Bitcoin at all? If FinCEN applies to Bitcoin, should it also not apply to Baseball cards?

Baseball cards or comics or YuGiOh cards could be used as money because someone somewhere values them.

They could be stored in a vault and then certificates issues against them that could be traded automatically at online exchanges.

Does that mean that these certificates are money? Does that mean that FinCEN rules should apply to them?

Of course it doesn’t. Applying FinCEN rules to Bitcoin, quite apart from the immorality of these regulations, is improper and ridiculous.

The regulations affecting “stored value” now use the term “prepaid access” which is more broad and technology-neutral. Though FinCEN has not formally asserted that Bitcoin would fall under prepaid access regulations, earlier contact with the agency referred to bitcoins as a form of stored-value. If correct, then Bitcoin sales to U.S. customers would likely be a regulated activity per this Final Rule.

The new regulations become effective on September 27, 2011, 60 days after its July 29, 2011 date of publication in the Federal Register.

This is absurd. Who made contact with FinCEN, and where is the written record of this contact? Who did the contactor represent, and whoever she was, she did not represent ‘Bitcoin’ or any of its users, but was acting on her own. The details of that contact are something that would be interesting to read.

To comply with the Final Rule, providers of prepaid access must register with FinCEN. Because bitcoins are decentralized, it is uncertain who a provider would be. Might every exchanger be considered a provider, for instance?

This is all springing from a false assumption, that Bitcoin is a store of value that FinCEN has jurisdiction over. It is not.

Also under the Final Rule, sellers of prepaid access must collect personal information from customers, maintain transaction records, file suspicious activity reports and comply with other requirements of money service businesses (MSB). Last month FinCEN issued a ruling that was intended to clarify the definition of an MSB and includes the possibility that even businesses outside the U.S. conducting money transfer over the Internet could still be classified as U.S. MSBs. Additionally, the definition no longer requires that an MSB be a business — any individual who receives funds in exchange for a stored value might be considered an MSB.

This is of course, absolutely absurd. Even if you concede that FinCEN has jurisdiction over U.S. companies and persons that deal in Bitcoin, to assert that people and companies outside the USA would need to register with FinCEN betrays a complete lack of understanding of the concept of jurisdiction.

Its like those very sad webmasters in the UK who put up DMCA takedown notification pages on their sites. The DMCA does not apply anywhere in the world other than in the United States of America, and no webmaster, publisher, company or person is required to obey its strictures who is not based in or who does not have servers in the USA.

If FinCEN actually tries to attack Bitcoin, and then tried to demand that entities outside the USA register with it, they should be met with this type of response.

Though the ruling has exemptions to not impact the typical prepaid debit card found at grocery stores, for example, the exemptions would likely not apply to Bitcoin. These exemptions give a pass to providers and sellers when the following conditions are met:

  • The funds cannot be transmitted internationally.
  • Funds cannot be transferred from one user to another.
  • No additional funds can be loaded except from a depository source (e.g., from a bank).

There is no way to limit where bitcoins can be spent and the value is easily transferred from one person to another so Bitcoin will not likely be considered exempt from the AML regulations.

Bitcoin, being a form of speech, should not be regulated by anyone. In the same way that you have protections against fraud (someone misrepresenting some reproduction Baseball cards to you as genuine, or someone stealing your YuGiOh cards) you have those same protections with Bitcoin. If someone defrauds you or breaches a contract they have with you, take them to court or arbitration.

The state is not needed to control Bitcoin, police it, regulate it or have anything whatsoever to do with it. It has, like the internet, grown in popularity all by itself, will grow in utility just like the internet has by virtue of people adopting it and using it, and any interference in it is illegitimate on its face.

Following these regulations will be a serious burden to sellers. For instance, compliance requirements as specified in an article by Perkins Coie LLP include:

Identifying information includes the customer’s name, date of birth, address and identification number. Sellers must retain this information for five years from the date of sale.

The records must be easily accessible and retrievable upon request from FinCEN, law enforcement or judicial order.

The bigger impact of following AML may not necessarily be the cost of compliance but instead will be the likely result — to effectively de-anonymize Bitcoin.

Following these regulations is unthinkable. Even if you accepted that these regulations were in some mysterious way beneficial, it would not and could not stop people from trading Bitcoins client to client, without identifying themselves to a parasitic third party.

When Bitcoin usage reaches critical mass, there will be trillions of transactions happening on a daily basis. The people who serve as enter and exit points for it would be recording meaningless details that would serve no use whatsoever after the first purchase of Bitcoins.

Bitcoin is not anonymous, despite what people think. There are services out there however, that can make it completely anonymous, and these will be improved and will multiply in number as the precise nature and level of anonymity in bitcoin becomes well understood by everyone. In the same way that The Anonymizer, Hide My Ass and the many proxy services that have come into being to cater for those who want anonymity, its a safe bet that the same entrepreneurs will apply their knowledge to the problem of making Bitcoin completely untraceable.

As for the cost of compliance, only US companies will be forced to pass the expense of these ridiculous regulations on to their customers. It will mean that customers, who see high prices due to regulation as damage and route around it, will choose exchanges outside the USA, simply because it is cheaper. This will create another tier of middle man in America; businesses that will take your money and then interface with foreign exchanges for you, rather like the Dorian Grey services we have written about.

Ironically, these new regulations may drive even faster Bitcoin adoption. These restrictions may cause many retailers to discontinue offering the prepaid cards that can be used at ATMs internationally. Since global redemption of stored value is a service that is legal to offer, is in huge demand and is something that Bitcoin does well — using digital currency might become the more popular alternative.

Unintended consequences!

And of course, as Bitcoin passes critical mass, it will become absolutely impossible to clamp down on the international flow of ‘money’, since Bitcoin is a peer to peer system.

When the global economy becomes dependent on Bitcoin, as it does now on SSL, no politician will dare raise a finger to control (damage) it, just as it is now completely unthinkable to regulate the cryptography behind SSL, as the French tried to do and which Dominic Strauss-Khan put pay to.

A more immediate consequence will likely be the employment of lawyers to specifically consider how this Final Rule affects Bitcoin.

http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/8412471372/fincen-prepaid-access-final-rule

Maybe so. Certainly there are people out there who are desperate to interface with the State when it comes to Bitcoin.

One way or another, the State is not going to control Bitcoin. Either because it is not in their financial interest to do so because it is a world-wide phenomenon, or because they cannot possibly stop the hundreds of millions of people who are going to be using it.

There are 2,095,006,005 people on the internet. That is 30.2% of all the people on earth and an increase of 480.4% in ten years.

If only ten percent of all people use Bitcoin. No. Lets say five percent. That is 104,750,300 future users of Bitcoin. There is no reason why this number cannot not be achieved, and of course we are working only with today’s assumptions; there is no knowing what new innovations related to the block chain that are around the corner. Or innovations in the shape of client that people will be using. Imagine new versions of Google Chrome or Firefox that are not only browsers, but Bitcoin clients.

Every browser, doubles as a Bitcoin client.

Think about that for a moment. An HTML5 Bitcoin client, with an interface designed by Google or Mozilla. Easy to use and absolutely everywhere; on every computer in the world, by default.

One thing is for sure, there is no going back.

People have complained that ‘the next Google’ could not come out of Britain, because Britain is toxic to business.

If Bitcoin is going to be the biggest revolution since the internet itself, and the British establishment are desperate to entice companies to set up here and take root, then any regulation on Bitcoin (or for that matter, Internet Business which is serious business) is, to put it lightly, not a good idea. In fact, the smart thing to do would be to draw an arbitrary area on the map in London, and declare that area an Internet Free Trade Zone, where there are no restrictions, taxes or regulations, for a period of 150 years.

This would instantly attract every Internet business on the planet to the UK. There would be an unprecedented inflow of brains and money into London, making it the ‘Internet Capital of the World’.

Or, you could regulate Bitcoin, and be an also-ran gaggle of losers, while Hong Kong, Dubai and other jurisdictions suck up all the brains, money, skills and entrepreneurs.

To sum up, Bitcoin is to money as PDFs are to hardback books. Bitcoins are speech, not financial instruments. The State has no business interfering in Bitcoin in any way, and US regulations and laws do not apply to people and companies outside of the continental USA.

A classic post on the origins and future of copyright

Friday, June 17th, 2011

I just came across this very wonderful post on copyright, excerpted here. Read the rest of it, its a classic, and do spread it.

A Crescendo of Copyright

Natural Finale and Reprise

Rejected by The Rethink Music Conference, April 2011, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

Abstract

  • A prologue – mankind’s culture and copyright in perspective

Copyright’s 18th Century Overture

  • 1709 Queen Anne’s privilege of copyright
  • 1787 the philosophy of Paine and the (natural) rights of man
  • 1790 the prestidigitation in which a privilege is inveigled as a natural right

Copyright’s Confrontation with Cultural Liberty reaches a crescendo

  • C19-20 the printing industry’s exploitation of its privilege
  • 1990s the propertisation of published intellectual works as an entrenchment
  • 2000s the piracy of published intellectual works as a natural liberty
  • 2010s the persecution of the people for their piracy (cultural liberty)

Copyright’s finale, and the reprise of natural rights

  • 20?? the prospectus for mankind’s future

Prologue

The extent of mankind’s primordial cultural activity stretches back at least half a million years, but thanks to repeated erasure by glaciation we start the notable cultural events calendar at 50,000BC.

51,709 years later a nascent empire and its pampered press have the impudence to decide that mankind’s cultural commonwealth would be so much better if a law was created to prohibit people from copying each other.

There are a few words for the precursory, unbridled cultural intercourse that still remain in the English language, though they are almost obsolete: ‘folksong’, ‘folkmusic’, ‘folktales’, and ‘folklore’. These primeval springs are still known to a few among us and can be found seeping through the pre-renaissance foundations upon which our modern culture stands.

Today we have the luxury of looking back over the last three centuries of ‘protection’ to see how much richer our culture has become, being effectively manacled and enclosed by corporations such as Disney. Permitted the liberty only to create purely original works, albeit with some tolerance for cultural cross contamination (if not too flagrant), we enjoy a far more creative and diverse culture. Or rather, this is what Queen Anne’s Stationers’ Guild and its descendant publishing corporations would persuade us is the consequence of her wise enactment of law to ‘protect’ published works from the grubby hands and mouths of the great unwashed.

Nothing to do with the printers’ monopolies then…

Let us see the historical accident of copyright in perspective:

65,000,000BC Primates
2,000,000BC Homo Erectus
500,000BC Division into Neanderthal & Homo Sapiens
200,000BC Homo Sapiens’ ancestral basis
140,000BC Glacial retreat after 40,000 year long glacial period
50,000BC Dawn of mankind’s culture: language, music, drawing, etc.
32,000BC Cave paintings
30,000BC Neanderthals extinct
20,000BC Glacial retreat after 50,000 year long glacial period
17,000BC Lascaux Cave Paintings
10,000BC Holocene – modern epoch
9,000BC Jericho
8,000BC Stonehenge site’s significance
3,100BC Stonehenge construction begins
2,611BC First Egyptian Pyramid
753BC Foundation of Rome
300BC Library of Alexandria
48BC Library of Alexandria accidentally destroyed by Julius Caesar
300 Book format outnumbers scroll format
1282 Water powered paper mill
1403 Corporation of London forms Stationers’ Guild
1440 Development and use of printing press begins
1492 Europeans discover New World
1536 Erasmus dies – 750,000 copies of his works sold
1557 Stationers’ Guild granted control over all printing
1572 Fall of Inca Empire
1695 Stationers’ Guild loses control upon expiry of the Licensing of the Press Act 1662
1703 Daniel Defoe endorses commercial piracy of his work – if true copies
1709 Queen Anne Establishes the Privilege of Copyright
1787 US Constitution
1790 Madison re-enacts Statute of Anne (tweaked for the US)
1791 Thomas Paine deprecates privileges
1814 Steam powered printing press
1837 Babbage designs Analytical Engine
1937 Relay computers
1943 Valve/Tube computers
1953 Transistor computers
1969 Internet begins with two nodes
1971 Microprocessor computers
1991 World Wide Web begins
2000 The people obtain the means of mass reproduction and communication
2010 The successors to the Stationers’ Guild seek possession of the Internet via ACTA
2011 Copyright recognised to be ineffective vs the people’s cultural liberty/piracy
2015?? Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals in the digital domain
2020?? Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals
2025?? Copyright is reformed to exempt the digital domain
2030?? Copyright is repealed
2031?? The author’s exclusive right to their writings is properly secured at last – ethically

Seen in a proper perspective, copyright is a legislative misadventure borne of political expediency and commercial self-interest. It is a hiccup in mankind’s history and, in the face of the diffusive nature of information, is coming to an abrupt and natural end.

[…]

read the rest of this epic, classic, brilliant, informative and insightful post here:

http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=276

No wonder it was rejected, it is so true it jumps off the screen and knocks you off your chair!

Right to rights!

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Rights, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

Apologies to John Godfrey Saxe

‘New’ rights are being shaped and squeezed, like sausages, from so much mechanically recovered political mincemeat.  The difference between a right and a good is not a difficult concept.  However, the sound ethical concepts underpinning the definition of true rights are sidelined in favour of political expediency and the generation of political power – with new rights generated and promoted, with horrendous irony, under the guise of more power for individuals.  In literal and ethical fact, the only real rights are those which apply to property in all its forms, and from which stem all personal liberties.  Yet, and particularly among the politically educated, this fact does not prevent the rapid expansion in what are, in reality, goods at best and often little more than nonsensical, illogical restrictions on liberty.

Recently I have heard many promotions of the Right to Health (rather than to healthcare, which while also an idiotic statement, is at least a clearly demonstrable good… and to which you obviously have no ‘right’).  Of course, we know what morally smug do-gooders mean when they invoke the Right to Health, but it is plainly as ridiculous a concept as the Right to A Pretty Face, or for that matter the Right to Food.  Even if, for arguments sake, we consider Health as a good, then it is personal property;  your Health (good or bad) belongs to you. Moreover, since you cannot sell your health, then it is an inalienable part of your Self, and encompassed under the first principle of the Right to Self-ownership (a true, valid, property right).  Even though you may sell or donate access to your body for scientific or other purposes your health, being an inalienable part of your self, cannot be extracted and sold as a seperate entity.

In the same set of discussions, at WHO / UN level meetings, other ‘rights’ mentioned included the “Right to the Best Start in Life” – seriously!  Which is what exactly?  $10 million in a trust fund, crib at the Ritz and Gucci nappies?  Who exactly judges what is ‘best’?  As is plain to see, any discussion of new ‘rights’ is nothing more than a hotbed of meddling, idealistic idiocy.

More timely at present due to men in wigs upholding an assinine ‘law’ made on the fly to appease men on the take, and also due to Twitter caving, are the ‘Right to Privacy’ and ‘Right to Know’.  Both of these rights pertain to knowledge, which is essentially and ultimately a good, not a right.  In the context of news stories about corporate whores, media whores and whoring whores and the abuse of law (superinjuctions) the two rights are tightly linked.

Consider a married-with-children man, lets call him Ryan Giggs, who decides to accept the oportunity (howsoever it arises) to fuck a media whore.  The Mhore then directly gains, through application of her talents (use of her labour), certain knowledge about Mr Giggs preferences about which he would not wish his family to become aware.  That knowledge has a value in our society, to newspapers and other media – these agencies believe the public has a ‘right to know’ how Mr Giggs likes his ladies to perform.   The knowledge also has value to Mr Giggs, who presumably believes the public has no right to know, but unfortunately for him blackmail is illegal here.  Were it not, our Mhore could approach Mr Giggs and offer to keep silent in exchange for money.  They would enter a contract agreeable to both, and both parties would be happy.  Mr Giggs is protected against further extortion as he has a contractual agreement on the value of the knowledge into which his Mhore has freely entered.  Should she break this and sell the knowledge to the media anyway, she could be rightly and justly punished for breach of contract (property law).  However, blackmail is illegal primarily to protect the rich, and prevents people from rightfully exploiting their property (knowledge) as they see fit.  In this clearly ridiculous situation, our Mhore is obliged to realise the value of her knowledge (it is property, she owns it) on the market with the consequence that lawyers get rich, laws are abused and everyone finds out about it anyway.

For a comprehensive explanation of the ethical basis for selling knowledge, and why blackmail is an infringement on your liberty, see Rothbard.  See Rothbard anyway.  See it all. And when you next come across a new ‘right’, you will see it being squeezed, turd-like, from the ludicrous, self-serving, logic-mincing arsehole/machine that is global politics.

Analysing the Anonymous ‘Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America’

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

That acephalous, elusive, networked, autonomous, intelligent and revolutionary construct Anonymous, has published a statement called “An Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America”, wherein they demonstrate that Anonymous is rapidly iterating towards Libertarianism.

They have a few more cycles to go however.

We have written about Anonymous before; it is interesting because it is a fulfilment of the prescient observations of Jean Baudrillard, with his assertion that there is a “mass”, with characteristics closely matching what Anonymous is and how it reacts to stimuli.

This statement is significant not only because it demonstrates that Anonymous is moving towards the locus of Libertarianism, it is also interesting in the type of thinking displayed at this iteration; Anonymous clearly understands far more than previous generations, but it is still hampered by some fundamental illusions, misconceptions and illogic, and this has prevented it from coming up with a coherent statement.

Anonymous has lofty goals. It clearly, explicitly, is seeking Natural Rights. This is a very specific goal, and one that is not compatible with some of the goals listed at the end of the statement.

Thankfully, Anonymous is full of highly intelligent, computer literate people who, once exposed to the truth, accept it as the truth, just as computer programmers must accept the syntax of a language if they are to use it, and mathematicians must accept that 1+1=2.

Let us parse through this announcement, correcting it and analysing as we go along…

Dear us citizens,

The people who live on the ‘North American Continent’ are human beings; they are not citizens or slaves of the United States Government, living in farms like cattle. It is crucial, when attacking these problems, that the persons thinking about them understand what human beings are, and what their true relationship to government and other human beings is.

Human beings are not the property of other human beings. They are individuals with inherent rights that do not come from government. Being ‘born a US citizen‘ is tantamount to being born into slavery. Anyone who wants Natural Rights for themselves rejects the idea of being born a citizen, of any state, no matter what it is called, or how that state came to be.

We, Anonymous would like to offer you, America, the opportunity to join and support our movement.

This offer cannot be made to ‘America’. It can only be made to the individuals who happen to live in what has come to be called ‘America’.

We are a group that formed on the internet – one that knows no constructs or absolutes, and one that has recently grown exponentially.

There most certainly are absolutes. There is right and wrong; stealing is wrong, for example. There are constructs also; Natural Rights is one of them. You cannot on the one hand, say that there are no absolutes or constructs, and then on the other, call for Natural Rights.

We would like to introduce an Operation. An Operation that involves Americans getting our Natural Rights and dreams back.

Your Natural Rights cannot be taken away from you. They can only be denied expression. For example, the property rights you have in paper can be denied to you if you choose to write an essay or print instructions that the state determines that you may not distribute. You have the absolute right, at all times, to own and publish; the state merely uses violence to stop you from exercising that right.

Right now, you can help by passing on the Information. Information is power. Share the power of the Information with other like minded individuals. The more people we represent, the more Power we have, both as individuals and as Anonymous. Thank you for your time and power.

I would suggest that information, that is true, needs to be shared between the like minded and the yet to be like minded.

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Many events have taken shape over the course of only a few years, and slowly our system has been working towards the gains of itself rather than the gains of the people.

It is completely wrong to characterise the State as ‘our system‘. It never was, is not, and never will be ‘our system’. Even if it were to become some sort of collectively owned, internet mediated Communist Utopia, this is completely contrary to Natural Rights.

The State does not work towards the gains of itself; it is not a living entity with its own goals, separate from those at the levers of the controls. The State is the violent apparatus through which a small number of people (who are indistinguishable from Mafia gangsters save in scale), rob, steal murder and destroy for their own personal gain.

Before you try and understand any of the problems facing free people, it is essential that you understand the true nature of the source of the trouble; the State. It is also crucial, when trying to describe this problem, to not use collective pronouns when talking about it. It is not ‘our taxes’ or ‘our schools’ or ‘our government’. These things are the property of the State. You do not own them, do not control them, and should not refer to them with a collective pronoun. Ever.

While we have all watched and rallied against the system working against us, there have been other gains of the system that have gone without a peep as back-room deals and and bargaining allow for the passing of legislation and research funding that has resulted in the loss of more liberties such as censorship, phone and internet surveillance and eminent domain laws.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with back-room deals. This message from Anonymous was, no doubt, written in such a back-room fashion; in private as it were. The assumption here is that the State is legitimate in principle, and that if its dealings were done in the light of day, this would ameliorate the problems faced by the human beings living under them. This is completely incorrect; the State is not legitimate, and wether or not its laws, deals and strictures are negotiated in public or private is immaterial to this fact.

Research ‘funding’ is of course, stolen loot redirected to corrupt scientists and crony capitalists. Censorship is the violent curtailing of property rights in paper, CD ROMS servers and bandwidth. Surveillance is a similar violation to censorship, since it involves interfering with private property to carry it out. Eminent domain is simple theft.

All of these violations have one thing in common; they all come from the State. When you peel away the layers of illogic, groupthink and brainwashing, the State emerges as the common enemy and problem behind all the usurpations, violence and evil that Anonymous opposes.

Not to mention the higher taxes, lower wages, and loss of work due to exports deals.

Taxation is violent theft by the State. Wages are a private contract between two people or a person and a company. You cannot on the one hand, call for Natural Rights, and then in the same breath, call for the violent State to guarantee you high wages by threatening violence to those who provide jobs. This is pure illogic.

Loss of work, in every form save natural disasters and entrepreneurial miscalculation, is caused by the State and its distortion of economic activity through its minimum wage laws right up to the Federal Reserve, fiat currencies, legal tender laws and monopoly on setting interest rates. Anonymous seems to understand this partially, as ‘End the Fed‘ is high up on its list of priorities, but you cannot call for the end of the Federal Reserve system, and then say that the State should guarantee wages or interfere in economics. There is some confusion here, that will hopefully be cleared away in the next iteration.

We repeat the history of our mistakes instead of evolving our society.

There is no ‘we’ in any of this, only individuals with Natural Rights. There are no collective mistakes, and there is no ‘our society’, collectively owned by everyone. These are collectivist brainwashing terms, used to prevent people from understanding the true nature of the problem by stopping them from identifying the State as the cause of all problems.

Generations in the past spoke of what we face as current issues, the only difference being that of our technological achievements. We have forgotten such words our society has found guidance and value in:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This is very problematic for anyone who wants to exercise their Natural Rights. The pursuit of happiness is not a right, and rights are not secured by or granted by government. The State cannot derive power from the governed; this is a fallacy. The State cannot do things that individuals cannot do, and cannot be ceded powers that individuals do not have. You cannot, by dint of a vote, cede the power to steal, murder and destroy to the State, because you do not have that power yourself.

The declaration of independence is a beautiful document, no doubt about it, but it is fundamentally flawed in its outlining of what rights are and where they come from, and what makes government legitimate.

No one has a right to institute a government that controls people who do not consent to be governed by it, no matter how it is formed. This document can only lead to tyranny, and that is exactly what has come to pass; a monolithic Federal Government that murders at will, like an out of control monster.

This document, and its ideas should be rejected by all people who desire the expression of their Natural Rights, for as soon as you accept its principles, you are on the way down a slippery slope to despotism, theft and every vile thing that decent people loathe today.

“In the past few months, Anonymous has made headlines through the actions of a few. The media tries to instill fear of which Anonymous is as a “group”, and in the process failed to recognize it as an “ideal” that is gaining momentum.

Ideals are good, as long as their foundation is sound.

Anonymous is an ideal that the people can use to further help other people.

People helping other people is good. Voluntarism and Natural Rights is the key to prosperity. Statism, collectivism and coercion are pure evil and should be rejected by all decent people.

In this case, you’re not being heard and transparency in government operations is non-existent in many matters.

Once again, if someone is stealing from you right in front of your face, transparently, it is still immoral theft. The fact that theft is hidden or not is not material. The meme of ‘Transparency‘ is Statist brainwashing designed to keep you from coming to the conclusion that the State itself is illegitimate. There are many such brainwashing terms, ‘have your say‘, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ – all of these are patent nonsense. If you are having your money stolen from you, and you have your say in where it goes to any extent, this does not mean that you have not been violated by theft. If the money that was stolen from you was accounted to you, i.e. “we stole 58% of your pay-check this year”, this does not erase the immorality contained in the fact that money has been stolen from you through violence.

All of this brainwashing must be eradicated and the actions of the State put into their proper context, if you are to attack this problem correctly.

Mobilize yourself to find your information, and we’ll be giving you resources to further help you. Take the information you find and tell your government your demands.

It is not ‘your government’. You have no right to demand that the State take its stolen money and do your bidding.

We want AMERICANS to wake up! We want AMERICANS to read! We want AMERICANS to think,and above all question all things! We want AMERICANS to analyze, criticize, critique and learn to read between the lines, to expose and to deconstruct! We want you to believe in the infinite power of the people! We want you to learn that we’re all truly brothers and sisters in humanity regardless of all the artificial barriers that have been set up to separate us!

Waking up is a good thing, but make sure that you wake all the way up and not just half way, like in Inception.

If you are going to read, read Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Manifesto as a starting point to your complete awakening. Its easy to read and understand, and after you have read it, you will never think about government and rights in the same way again.

It is crucial to question all things, but you must make sure that you really are questioning from the correct frame of reference, and not inside a box provided for you by the State and its brainwashing schools.

“Think For Yourself, Question Authority” -Timothy Leary

Reject authority, end the State.

Inform. Educate. Guide. Evolve. Wake up the People. The time for the next step in our species’ social evolution has come!

Social evolution is nonsense. Man has one nature and one nature only. The people who call for social evolution are of the same ilk as the Fabian Socialists, who want to destroy the family and recast populations into inhuman morasses of degradation and total control.

To effectively reform the system that has enslaved us, we must consider following the advice and

The system cannot be reformed, because it is fundamentally flawed and immoral. Government cannot draw legitimacy from the people; this is a lie, and anyone that understands Natural Rights already knows this.

example of those who have preceded us. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK are good places to start.

Abraham Lincoln was a monster, and should only be held up as such.
Teddy Roosevelt was pure evil.
JFK gave us the NASA moon landing.

All of this thinking is the result of brainwashing in government schools, especially the nauseating worship of Abraham Lincoln.

All took fierce positions against central banking, government corruption and corporate power.

This simply is not the whole story, and as you move towards the Libertarian position, the great historians who are Libertarians will dispel many myths for you. JFK through executive order 11110 tried to attack the criminal and fraudulent Federal Reserve System directly, and some say, this is why he was executed. Andrew Jackson put pay to The United States Bank that took root in the USA.

Finally, for the record, the moon project of John F Kennedy was a boondoggle where billions of stolen dollars were diverted to corporations to build the systems for NASA, for example. That is government corruption and corporate power writ large.

Americans and many other people are steeped in the myths dogmas and untruths found in the religion of the State. They accept as fact its assertions and its telling of history as related in its government schools, and it was very difficult before the internet to break through and get at the truth of it all. Now there is no excuse. You have the internet, you have the ability to read and can reason. You have no choice but to accept the world as it actually is.

The time has come for us to unite, the time has come for us to stand up and fight! You are Anonymous!

We are in the information era.
We are Anonymous,
We are Legion,
We do not forget,
We do not forgive,
Expect us.

For great justice.

Below: Grievances and demands
A starting point for reform could be established by citing a list of worthy objectives provided by ampedstatus.com;

These objectives are contradictory, based on violence, and stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what rights are and where they come from.

Enforce RICO Laws

RICO Laws are illegitimate:

Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering. Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all monies and interest in any business gained through a pattern of “racketeering activity.” RICO also permits a private individual harmed by the actions of such an enterprise to file a civil suit; if successful, the individual can collect triple damages.

It has been speculated that the name and acronym were selected in a sly reference to the movie Little Caesar, which featured a notorious gangster named Rico. The original drafter of the bill, G. Robert Blakey, refused to confirm or deny this.[1] G. Robert Blakey remains an expert on RICO;[2] his former student Michael Goldsmith also gained a reputation as one of the nation’s leading RICO experts.[3]

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

And they are a perfect example of the illegitimacy of the state, for a number of reasons. Without listing all of them, you should be suspicious that the author of this odious piece of legislation is now one of the foremost experts in RICO law.

Break Up the Big Banks

The phrase ‘break up’ gives you a clue to wether this is moral or immoral. This is nothing more than a call for violence to be carried out by the state on behalf of the mob. The state should not be interfering with economics. If you want to run your own bank, that is your affair; the state should not have the power to license, regulate or control banks or deposits in any way whatsoever. They should not insure deposits, bail out banks or do any of those things. If you do not accept this, then you are not for Natural Rights.

End the Fed

The Federal Reserve System is a creature of the State, and it should be abolished. The State should not have a monopoly on the creation of money.

Break Up the Mainstream Media / encourage citizen journalists

Once again, this is a despicable call for violence to be carried out by the State on behalf of the mob. Decent people who are for Natural Rights do not call for violence to be done to others, under any circumstances. The State should not be interfering in people’s affairs by encouraging one type of trade over another; in the UK, they call this ‘picking winners’. If you want to be a journalist, that is an entirely private choice, where you exercise your right to own and distribute paper, or own space on a server connected to the internet. It has nothing to do with government whatsoever.

End Closed Door Lobbying

The state itself should be ended; lobbying is nothing more than a pimple on the hideous face of the real, and very ugly problem.

Increase Government Transparency

See above.

End Corporate Personhood

People who understand Natural Rights know that you have the right to contract with others on terms that are suitable to you and your partners. This is an absolute right, derived from your property right in yourself and what you have lawfully acquired.

The idea behind corporations is that groups of people create a vehicle through which they can invest in a project without fear that should the enterprise fail, the investors would not be liable for the debts of the project. Before this idea, if your business suffered losses, you could lose all of your stored capital which may have taken your entire life to accumulate. Limited Liability protects you from this sort of catastrophe, and anyone can take advantage of incorporation; its not just ‘for the rich’.

There is nothing wrong with this in principle, as long as everyone who deals with every entity involved knows what they are becoming involved with and enters into agreements voluntarily.

If you have a particular dislike of corporations, then it is your choice not to deal with them. What you cannot do is impose your personal opinion on others with violence.

The railing against corporations is one of the pillars of the socialists, who have insinuated their diseased thinking into the minds of otherwise right thinking people. As soon as you scratch the surface of this thinking with a Libertarian fingernail, the lie of the ‘end corporate personhood’ argument becomes abundantly clear; this is Statism, coercion and violence under the cloak of ‘power to the people’. Its nonsense from beginning to end.

Amend Campaign Finance

Democracy is illegitimate. Majority rule is illegitimate. This is a call from inside the framework that holds that government as it is currently structured is legitimised and made moral by voting. It is not, never has been and never will be legitimate or moral, and so how campaigns are financed are totally irrelevant, when we consider that the true aim should be the ending of the State itself.

Verify All Votes

Votes, wether they are verified or not, do not confer legitimacy to governments. Once again, this is a call from inside the matrix, within a framework designed by the State to stop you from understanding that voting itself is illegitimate.

Investigate War Profiteers

The State is the source of all war. End the State and you end war. Investigating war profiteers is pointless while the State persists.

Investigate War Crimes

Rubbish. End the State.

End the Wars

End the cause of war; the State.

Restore Civil Liberties

The State is what restricts your liberties. End it, and the restoration of your liberties will follow as day follows night.

Uphold the Constitution

The constitution is a document that binds people who have not given their consent to be governed by it. That is illegitimate on its face. Worship of the Constitution and the principle that a State is legitimate when it has one is deeply ingrained in the minds of the brainwashed.

Clean Air, Water & Food

See Lew Rockwell’s Environmental Manifesto. The State cannot provide these things for you.

Reduce Healthcare Costs, Profiteering

This is straight out of the immoral Socialist thought process. There is nothing wrong with Profit. If you want to help people, it is up to you to help them. You cannot call for the state to steal to help people.

Make Healthcare a Human Right

Healthcare is a good, not a right. Rights cannot be created out of thin air by the State.

Improve Education For All, Reduce Costs

Once again, like healthcare, education is not a right, it is a good. Literacy and academic achievement have been destroyed by the State and those who call for ‘Education for all’. Costs have skyrocketed precisely because the violent statists have brayed for the State to step in and make Education a ‘right’. The State should be completely removed from the business of education. If there even is a State.

Reform Prison System

Many of the acts the State defines as crimes are not crimes at all. America has the world’s largest prison population because prison is a business outsourced by the State. Without the State, this problem would, like many others, disappear.

Reform drug laws (Stop spending so much money on drugs! NYC spent $75million alone on marijuana arrests.

The source of this is, again, the State. All laws in this area are illegitimate. They should not be ‘reformed’ they should be abolished, along with the State that created and enforced them.

Immigration Reform

In a place where there is no State, immigration is not a problem. You need to understand that immigration is only a problem because there is a State. There are arguments to the contrary. Either way, the State is not the answer to any problem, no matter what it is.

Rebuild Infrastructure

Translation: “steal more money to give to contractors to fix roads and bridges and lay down fibre optic cable”. Be careful what you ask for, because by doing so, you create more of the problem that you are trying to get rid of. You cannot be against Eminent Domain, but at the same time, be for stealing property so that roads can be built on them by the State for ‘infrastructure’.

Protect Internet Freedom

There would be no problems of censorship, interception and internet freedom were there no State to cause these bad things like net neutrality.

Empower States’ Rights

No. States do not have rights, only men have rights. There are no gay rights, black rights, women’s rights or animal rights. Only man has rights, and all men have the same rights. Remember this quote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. That much of it is true. All men ARE created equal, without distinctions in terms of their rights. This is different to being entitled to any sort of service by your fellow man of course.

End Corporate Welfare

End the State that steals money to give it.

Fair taxes for everyone!

No. Stealing is never ‘fair’, and the word ‘fair’ is another brainwashing term.

Enforce corporate responsibility

There is no such thing as ‘corporate responsibility’, and in any case, you cannot be against the idea of corporations and FOR corporate responsibility at the same time!

Force corporations to apply local labor laws in their global operations

Which is it, for or against corporations? As for ‘labor laws’, they are all illegitimate strictures of the State, and unwarranted immoral interference in economics.

Strengthen environmental laws and force corporations to clean up their act

More calls for violence.

Work for a real separation of church and state – and a real split between corp and state?

There should be no State to separate from the church. And if there are no corporations, as is being asked for, there would be no corporations to separate from the State.

Reinstate Habeus Corpus

End the state that arrests people for non crimes like Prostitution and smoking marijuana.

Allow felons who have paid their debt to restore voting rights

Voting is not a right. End the State that creates felons in the first place. Realise also, that the idea of a ‘debt to society’ is completely fallacious.

Stop prison labor from competing with local businesses

End the State, and its prison industrial complex.

Additional objectives
End lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States is illegitimate, as are the laws it rules on.

Abolish the “Patriot Act”

Abolish the State that enacted it.

Abolish the lobbying system (no paid lobbyists)

Abolish the State that lobbyists attend to, and for whom they go to get their vicious laws passed, like the Mickey Mouse Copyright extension law and ACTA to name but two.

Close Guantánamo

End the state that owns it, and relinquish the illegitimately acquired property upon which it stands in Cuba.

Establish and define “financial terrorism” as a treasonous act and prosecute offenders vigorously

This is pure in the matrix thinking.

This is a call for the State to create a crime, based inside the financial system controlled by the State and its cronies at the Federal Reserve.

Without the Fed and the State, in a land where sound money flowed freely, this idea would be a nonsense. If you want to solve this problem, end the State that steals money through the printing press at the Fed, and switch to sound money in the form of gold and silver coins.

Treason is a crime against the State. Only the brainwashed and the Statists believe that such a thing is a ‘crime’. Calling for prosecution is calling for violence obviously, the end result being the perpetrators sent to the hell holes of the prison industrial complex, at the expense of the ‘taxpayer’.

This is a perfect example of thinking three levels inside the box; illogical, irrational and incapable of framing the problem correctly because all the givens are provided by the State.

If you REALLY want to do something to End the Fed and stop the criminal crony capitalist fractional reserve bankers, do what Max Kieser suggests as your next Anonymous Operation… GOLD FINGER!

Enshrine gender equality in the constitution

Freedom is not free, free men are not equal and equal men are not free. You cannot on the one hand call for Natural Rights, and then call for the constitution to enshrine ‘gender equality’ (the violent enforcement of laws upon free people) as an amendment. This error flows from the incorrect idea that women have rights that are separate from men; they do not. All human beings have the same rights; and these are all derived from the right of property.

End corporate money in the election process

See above, and pull the cable from the back of your head.

“Reduce non-emergency military funding”

The war machine is a creature of the State. There is no such thing as ‘funding’ it is theft, pure and simple.

And there you have it. There was only one item in that list that was legitimate; End the Fed.

For those who have not read any of the books, seen the lectures or read the articles cited above, you have alot of work to do, but you will be amply rewarded with an air tight way of thinking about the world at no cost to you other than your time.

As the iterations fold over and calculate in the hive mind GPU, Anonymous will come to these conclusions, as they are all inescapable now that the internet is everywhere. Thankfully Anonymous is iterating in internet time, and it will not be long before it will be calling for measures and thinking in terms that are consistent, logical and Libertarian.

Naïve simpletons are infinitely malleable

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Thanks to the wise Preuss, we have a nifty little pair of articles that demonstrate once again why the people who think that democracy is a good way to organise the affairs of groups of people are spectacularly naïve.

The unethical long winded men who believe that, “the only legitimate way to have a process is if everyone has their say” would do well to consider the implications of these articles, but then, if they had the capacity to understand what the implications of this are, they could not hold the unethical views that they do:

The ‘politics of the brain’ is a threat to choice, freedom and democracy – which is why spiked is declaring war against it.

Quote:
In earlier eras, the revelation that there was a Behavioural Insight Team at the heart of government, dedicated to finding ways to reshape the public’s thoughts, choices and actions, would have caused outrage. It would have brought to mind some of the darker antics of the Soviet Union, which treated certain beliefs as mental illnesses to be fixed, or maybe O’Brien, the torturer in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who boasts that the human mind is ‘infinitely malleable’.

Yet the news that David Cameron has a Behavioural Insight Team inside Downing Street, and what’s more that it is increasingly influential within the Lib-Con coalition, has been treated as if were a perfectly normal, even admirable thing. Have we lost our minds?

The Guardian article refered to gives us another prime example of how it doesn’t matter how you vote the government still get in.

Quote:
A “nudge unit” set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.

The unit, formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, is being run by David Halpern, a former adviser in Tony Blair’s strategy unit, and is taking advice from Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor generally recognised as popularising “nudge” theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society.

Thaler was in London for three days this week advising ministers, and in a speech urged the government to adopt longer term horizons. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he believed the unit could change the way citizens think.

And so, there you have it.

There are people in the employ of government whose work is to manipulate the thinking of the population. These people have the power to coercively use economics to alter the behaviour of the population, and of course, they also abuse the English language to do it.

Why do you think that the word ‘fair’ and all its derivatives are now on the lips of every Tom Dick and Harry? Do you think that it is merely by accident that everyone is measuring policy, laws and everything that comes out of government and which is related to ‘society’ is measured against this idea of ‘fairness’?

It is absolutely deliberate, and a direct result of this Behaviour Modification group at the heart of government.

Anyone who believes that democracy is beneficial or ethical is completely insane.

Anyone who believes that “having your say”, or “getting your points heard” legitimises government processes or democracy itself is also completely delusional, insane, Naïve and very very stupid.

It is clear that the frames of reference within which all the problems and non problems (like Home Education and its practitioner’s relationship to government) you face are nothing more than elaborate traps, created by this and other social engineering groups.

The Behavioural Insight Team and its predecessors, by creating the boxes within which you are allowed to address a problem have complete control over you from the outset, and because you are retarded, you cannot see that everyone having their say really does not legitimise anything.

This is why the only response to anything that is unethical should be point blank refusal. As soon as you enter into a discussion on their terms, you are thinking inside their frame of reference and all is lost.

This is why it is not irrational, confrontational or counterproductive to take the Libertarian stance when you are confronted by these persistent pests, but the complete opposite; a rational, ethical and productive thinker does not concede for a moment that the state usurping the role of the parent is legitimate. For example.

Its also why it is so important to use English words correctly:

While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is [p. 25] Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

All true, and if you have not yet read that book, go and do so immediately.

These are the facts:

‘Taxation’ is actually theft.
‘Conscription’ and ‘National Service’ are in fact a form of slavery.
Government ‘Grants’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
Government ‘Subsidies’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
‘Subsidising the arts’ is in fact redistributing stolen money to cultural gatekeepers.
Central Bank ‘Quantitative Easing’ is in fact Money Printing.
Government ‘investment in industry’ is in fact economy destroying redistribution of stolen loot and crony capitalism.

All of the above have one root thing in common; violent coercion. If you disobey the state, violence is used against you to force you to comply. This is even true in the case of Quantitative Easing, where if you attempt to escape from the criminal and inflationary central bank, you will be arrested and gaoled and your goods confiscated.

It is in no way ‘fair’ to tax people based on the level of wealth they have accumulated; taxation itself is immoral theft. It is in no way ‘fair’ that graduates should pay a tax so that others can receive a university education, or that money is stolen from you for any purpose whatsoever, no matter what the need is or what the money is to be used for.

If you use the language of the state as your frame of reference, you instantly become their prisoner, and this can have consequences that will touch every aspect of your life, quite apart from making you sound like a complete zombie.

While we are at it, what is an example of something that actually is fair?

If there is a piece of cake in a household, and two family members both want a slice, the two can agree that one can cut and the other gets to choose the first piece.

That is fair, since both of the parties have voluntarily agreed on how the cake that belongs to them both should be divided.

Dictionary says:

fair – 9 dictionary results

adjective, -er, -est, adverb, -er, -est, noun, verb

–adjective

  1. free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge.
  2. legitimately sought, pursued, done, given, etc.; proper under the rules: a fair fight.
  3. moderately large; ample: a fair income.
  4. neither excellent nor poor; moderately or tolerably good: fair health.
  5. marked by favoring conditions; likely; promising: in a fair way to succeed.
  6. Meteorology .
    1. (of the sky) bright; sunny; cloudless to half-cloudy.
    2. (of the weather) fine; with no prospect of rain, snow, or hail; not stormy.
  7. Nautical . (of a wind or tide) tending to aid the progress of a vessel.
  8. unobstructed; not blocked up: The way was fair for our advance.
  9. without irregularity or unevenness: a fair surface.
  10. free from blemish, imperfection, or anything that impairs the appearance, quality, or character: Her fair reputation was ruined by gossip.
  11. easy to read; clear: fair handwriting.
  12. of a light hue; not dark: fair skin.
  13. pleasing in appearance; attractive: a fair young maiden.
  14. seemingly good or sincere but not really so: The suitor beguiled his mistress with fair speeches.
  15. courteous; civil: fair words.
  16. Medicine/Medical . (of a patient’s condition) having stable and normal vital signs and other favorable indicators, as appetite and mobility, but being in some discomfort and having the possibility of a worsening state.
  17. Dialect . scarcely; barely: It was just fair daylight when we started working.

-adverb

  1. in a fair manner: He doesn’t play fair.
  2. straight; directly, as in aiming or hitting: He threw the ball fair to the goal.
  3. favorably; auspiciously.
  4. British, Australian . entirely; completely; quite: It happened so quickly that it fair took my breath away.

–noun

  1. Archaic . something that is fair.
  2. Archaic .
    1. a woman.
    2. a beloved woman.

–verb (used with object)

  1. to make the connection or junction of (surfaces) smooth and even.
  2. Shipbuilding .
    1. to draw and adjust (the lines of a hull being designed) to produce regular surfaces of the correct form.
    2. to adjust the form of (a frame or templet) in accordance with a design, or cause it to conform to the general form of a hull.
    3. to restore (a bent plate or structural member) to its original form.
    4. to align (the frames of a vessel under construction) in proper position.
  3. to bring (rivet holes in connecting structural members) into perfect alignment.
  4. Obsolete . to make fair.

—Verb phrase

  1. .fair off / up, South Midland and Southern U.S. (of the weather) to clear: It’s supposed to fair off toward evening.

—Idioms

  1. bid fair, to seem likely: This entry bids fair to win first prize.
  2. fair and square,
    1. honestly; justly; straightforwardly: He won the race fair and square.
    2. honest; just; straightforward: He was admired for being fair and square in all his dealings.
  3. fair to middling, Informal . only tolerably good; so-so.

Origin: bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fair

That pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of ‘fair’ in the Nick Clegg Orwellian sense; taxation is dishonest and unjust. It is illegitimately sought, given and pursued money. And so on.

The same can be said for ‘paying your fair share’ or ‘greed‘, ‘capitalism‘, ‘rights‘ and many other crucially important words that are routinely and deliberately misused to steer you into the squeeze chutes. You need to get a grip on these words, restore their true meanings in your mind, so that when someone tries to steer you and frame your thoughts for you it will be easy to deflect their nonsense. In particular, when some disgusting, unctuous and deeply sinister bureaucrat tries to justify why he should have access to your children, you will not even begin to discuss the subject, because you know that it is illegitimate.

Rather than do this by making a list of words and then re-defining them one by one, you would be well advised to read this book by Murray Rothbard. It will train you to think in such a way that words you have been misusing will automatically find their correct meaning, by virtue of your newly found ethical basis of thought. Once you finish that book, no matter what word they try and hijack as the new rallying cry for collectivism, the principle itself, having been disempowered in your mind, will be unacceptable, and the word in its new usage will cause you to bristle and your hackles to rise.

This is the place that your thinking needs to be in; a place where you are immune to the nefarious work of the ‘Nudge Group’ and the ‘Behavioural Insight Team’. Where no matter what they do, you will NEVER give up your dignity or your rights no matter what they or anyone else says.

Finally, ‘choice, freedom and democracy’; choice and freedom are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from democracy!

You Might Be a Fascist

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

August 28th, 2010 by Militant Libertarian, Originally published on March 9, 2004.

by Russell Madden

Fascism: a political-economic system in which citizens retain title to their property but in which the government determines how that property may or may not be used.

    You might be a fascist if you …

  • believe that the proper way to decide whether a casino should be built in your hometown is to vote on the idea.
  • object to individuals gambling in their homes unless they’re playing the state-run lotto.
  • think that your neighbor needs the blessing of the historical commission in order to renovate his aging home.
  • feel the urge to report the guy down the street who has a painting truck parked in his drive but no orange building permit stuck to a front window.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • experienced a sense of glee when Microsoft had to spend millions in legal fees and was convicted of monopolistic policies.
  • see nothing wrong with your city government awarding a single cable franchise while those guys who sell dishes must charge extra to customers who wish to receive local broadcast channels.
  • are grateful that the FCC dictates to cable and phone providers how they can do business because you are afraid that otherwise the big media companies would have too much power.
  • would rather have the government pass a law and set up another bureaucracy to restrict telemarketers than spend fifty bucks of your own money to purchase a screening device.
  • do not object when others are forced to pay more for their goods so you can earn a higher income while your trade restrictions put other citizens out of work.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • nod in agreement that individuals must show proof of identity in order to open a bank account because otherwise the terrorists will win.
  • don’t object to money laundering laws that make snitches of your banks so the drug dealers and the terrorists won’t win.
  • never complain about airport security checks and bag screening and weapon confiscation in order to keep the terrorists from winning.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • tremble at the thought that the person sitting next to you in the restaurant might be carrying a gun without a license.
  • want to eliminate and confiscate all guns in private hands in order to be safe since guns cause violence, unless the cops are the ones carrying the guns.
  • applaud extra taxes on guns and ammunition, prohibition of sales between private parties, licenses for gun dealers, limits on the number of firearms someone can own or buy, and bans on brass knuckles, nunchucks, pen knives, big knives, pepper spray, stun guns, sword canes, or anything else that can be used to defend against a criminal.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • laughed when an aging hippie comedian who sold drug paraphernalia via the Internet was thrown in jail but thought a well-known talk show host addicted to painkillers should receive rehab.
  • accept the widespread drugging of young boys but recoil in horror from the thought of adults receiving pleasure or relief from illicit drugs.
  • champion zero tolerance for children who bring toy soldiers to school but think the heroes at Ruby Ridge and Waco got what they deserved when they were promoted for killing women and children.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • think that taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
  • smile when the rich have to pay an even greater proportion of taxes than they do now.
  • kid yourself that Social Security and Medicare taxes are investments or premia rather than a way to pay for more welfare for old people.
  • maintain that you have a right to health care, housing, retirement income, food stamps, or government-guaranteed student loans.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • squint your eyes at the idea of parents educating their children at home.
  • want child-free people to pay for your offspring’s schooling because everyone benefits.
  • question the ability of parents to decide what their children should study, whether those youngsters should go to school at all, or how they should learn to make their own ways in the world.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • seek assistance from the government to protect you from your own mistakes.
  • ask the government to protect other people from what you believe are their own mistakes.
  • abhor the thought of foreigners flooding your country and taking jobs you don’t want at wages you would refuse to accept.
  • contend that you have a right to a job but an employer does not have the right to fire you because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a woman, a racial minority, fat, or handicapped.
  • think SUVs should be banned, seat belts and airbags required, gas mileage minimums enforced, gasoline formulations determined by the feds, and that more money should be spent on light rail systems that no one uses.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • see all lawyers as heroes.
  • hope to win the lawsuit lottery.
  • refuse to accept that legal questions can be properly answered by anyone other than a state-accredited lawyer.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • like the notion of mandated low-flow toilets and shower heads but see no problem with subsidized water so farmers or residents can work and live in deserts.
  • rejoice that grease monkeys can no longer put Freon in your air conditioner.
  • sneer at anything smacking of price gouging during disasters such as floods or hurricanes and would rather have shortages of goods than see someone make more than what you believe is a fair price.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • promote the idea of the government owning even more wilderness land.
  • are appalled that oil companies might drill offshore for natural gas.
  • wonder what all the fuss is when homeowners are forced to abandon their houses in the woods when the government destroys the access roads.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • support sending our troops to a foreign country that poses no imminent threat to us in order to liberate the natives and engage in nation-building.
  • declare that foreign aid helps the average citizens of those countries that receive it.
  • want others to pay for your humanitarian impulses.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • would rather police focus their efforts on arresting ticket scalpers and prostitutes than on tracking down, convicting, and incarcerating violent criminals.
  • want to impose your moral code on strangers.
  • itch to make other people act as you believe they should act.
  • do not accept that we still have involuntary servitude in this nation.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • operate from the premise that morality is relative.
  • condemn logic, reason, and objectivity as tools of white male oppression.
  • equate non-coercive choice and actions of which you disapprove with fascism.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • object to the examples in this essay.
  • think you are free.

Originally seen here.

The Queen’s Speech, or Why BLOGDIAL is and has been so very great

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Take a look at this:

After massive public rejection of the surveillance state, and country wide vandalism of the millions of CCTV cameras in the UK, it was decided to remove all traces of the monitoring apparatus that cast a debilitating fog over life in the UK. Like the fall of East Germany and the STASI, the changes came overnight as the revulsion over the mutated form of British life became universal and ‘went nuclear’.

“We are not going to live like this anymore. Britain has been turned into a prison, and we have had enough”

Parliament has drawn up a list of all ‘database state’ laws going back to the early days of the now discredited Blair government, all of which are to be struck off the books in one fell swoop.

“This has been a long time in coming, but the writing has been on the wall for years; the silent grumbling of the British public has turned into an earthquake of non-violent dissent. Just like the Berlin Wall, the database state has been dismantled one camera at a time in a single day, without any opposition from the police.”

That was an imaginary scenario concocted to paint a picture of how the fall of the Police State would look.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It’s from an old BLOGDIAL post.

BLOGDIAL is great because the people who write on it are:

  • way ahead of the pack
  • know their subjects backward
  • do not mince their words
  • can synthesise the facts of the present to produce accurate predictions of how the future will look
  • all have impeccable taste

The BLOGDIAL archives are chock full of gems like the one above, and we keep getting better and better as we hone our understanding and expand our learning.

Unlike others, who believe that writing about Liberty is likely to ‘bore readers’ we understand clearly that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Now is absolutely NOT the time to pack up and go home; in fact, it is time to redouble all efforts to push back our mutual enemies and mush them underfoot for all time.

With all of that trumpet blowing out of the way, the Queens speech has just been read, so lets rip through it.

Many of the items in it are predicated on the idea that the state is legitimate in the first place, which it is not. We can however look at each item from a point of view of wether or not it makes any sense or is good in the short term:

Office for budget responsibility bill. Sets up the OBR to take responsibility for producing budget forecasts, meaning the chancellor – who under the current arrangements is in charge of producing his own forecasts – won’t be able to twist the figures.

This makes sense, because the people in charge of the money of the state should not audit themselves or do anything like that.

National insurance contributions bill. Raises income tax allowances, so that “most people would be better off relative to the previous government’s plan”, funded by a rise in national insurance. Reallocates tax worth around £9bn.

This does not make sense. It is more borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, exactly like the completely immoral Child Credit scheme, which took money from taxpayers to give to children.

You could not refuse this ‘free’ investment money, and your child was given a unique number as an identifier. If you did not respond to the agency running this fiasco, they invested the money for ‘your’ child on its behalf and sent you as the parent or guardian, regular updates by post about how ‘your child’s investment’ was doing. A scandalous, immoral, deeply offensive and irrational misuse of other people’s money, which does not seem to appear in this speech, even though its abolition is promised.

Welfare reform bill. Simplifies the welfare and benefits system, improving work incentives and “removing the confusing complexity of the benefits system”.

We all know about the Welfare Warfare state do we not?

Pensions and savings bill. Implements the findings of the review of the state pension age being conducted by the government. Currently the state pension age will increase to 66 after 2024. The review will propose bringing that forward. The bill will also restore the earnings link from 2012.

This is another Ponzi scheme. The people who pay in today are being remunerated in the future with devalued money, thanks to the fiat pound.

Financial reform bill. Gives the Bank of England control over macro-prudential regulation in the City. Not clear yet what will happen to the fate of the Financial Services Authority.

The only thing that needs to be reformed is the nature of the Pound.

Equitable Life bill. Pays compensation to savers who lost money when Equitable Life came close to collapse.

Where will the money come from for this? It’s another bailout, as immoral as any other.

Airport economic regulation bill. Promotes competition in the airport market, possibly breaking up the BAA monopoly.

Makes sense; airports should be entirely privately owned and run for profit.

Postal services bill. Allows the sale of part of the Royal Mail, in line with the plans originally drawn up by Lord Mandelson. The exact proportion being sold has not been specified.

The post office should be entirely private and for profit, just like Federal Express.

Energy bill. Promotes energy-efficiency measures in home by introducing a “green deal” charging system, with incentives to suppliers and households to save energy. The bill may also regulate emissions from coal-fired power stations and create a Green Investment Bank.

This is utter Glegish nonsense of the first order. Readers of BLOGDIAL already know why.

If the idea of a ‘Green Investment Bank’ was commercially viable, it would already exist and entrepreneurs would have created one. Nick Clegg is a complete idiot when it comes to this subject; he is more like a religious fanatic, ranting and frothing at the mouth than a rational human being. That bank WILL FAIL without government concessions to the industries that the bank lends money to, so they can generate profits which are not really profits at all but cost savings since the state will not have its protrusible proboscis on those industries, as it does on all others. This bank will therefore destroy businesses and jobs, just like the Green Jobs of Spain, that destroy 2.2 jobs for every real job. It will also divert capital from the real economy into a false ‘Green Economy’.

These are FACTS.

Academies bill. Allows more schools to become academies, giving them more freedom from Whitehall.

But this is to be paid for by the state, so it is still completely immoral at its base. Still, its better that central control is abolished, so it is a move in the right direction.

Health bill. Replaces the “top-down approach” with “the devolution of power and responsibility to doctors and patients”. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, will set out more details of his vision in the next few weeks.

Is the NHS Spine going to be dismantled or not? That is what everyone wants to know!

Police reform and social responsibility bill. Makes the police more accountable through “directly elected individuals”. The bill will also create a dedicated border police force, ensure health and safety laws do not stand in the way of “common sense policing” and overhaul the Licensing Act.

‘Overhaul the licensing act’ which means ending the freedom to drink when you please, where you please, while the patrons of the House of Commons bar can drink and smoke all day every day year round.

Public bodies (reform) bill. Cuts the number of quangos, with a view to saving £1bn a year.

Makes sense.

Decentralisation and localism bill. Gives more power to councils and neighbourhoods. Also gives residents the power to instigate referendums and veto excessive council tax increases.

What? Give more power to the same councils who use RIPA to investigate dog fouling? These people need LESS power, and to be FORCED to behave like Public Servants. Do you know what a Public Servant is? Read that last link if you have even a sliver of doubt that you do.

Local government bill. Stops the creation of unitary councils in Exeter and Norwich.

Ok….

Parliamentary reform bill. Introduces fixed-term parliaments, gives voters the right to recall MPs found guilty of serious wrongdoing and sets up a referendum on the alternative vote system.

We all know about why voting is illegitimate, and so there is no need to go into that. Recall of MPs would make them more like Public Servants, so that is good. If it ever works.

Freedom (great repeal) bill. Restores freedoms and civil liberties and repeals “unnecessary” laws.

THERE’S THE RUB! What is “unnecessary”? In whose opinion? The predicted backdown starts here!

Identity documents bill. Abolishes the identity card system and destroys the national identity register.

At long last. VICTORY!

After many years of a hard fought information war, we have WON this important battle. Without an NIR and ID Card, it will be very difficult if not impossible to run a totalitarian police state. This is the most important part of the Queen’s Speech!

Scotland bill. Implements the final report of the Calman commission, giving more devolution to Scotland.

Freedom is not free, and if the Scots want freedom they have to have their own money and complete financial separation from England. Without it, all of this is just TALK.

European Union bill. Ensures that there is a referendum on any future plan to transfer power to the European Union.

What about the Lisbon treaty you TRAITORS. There should be a referendum on that and the very idea that Britain is in the EU in the first place.

Armed forces bill. Continues in force the legislation giving the armed forces a legal basis, as well as improving provisions for service personnel.

I’m not even going to go there.

Terrorist asset-freezing bill. Gives the government firm powers to seize assets from terrorists, following a supreme court decision that quashed the previous legislation in this area.

So the court says the law is wrong, so they are changing it so that it is right. So much for all their promises of doing things differently. And of course, this law will be used on ANYONE who they want to destroy. Oh well, what do you expect? Miracles?

And there you have it.

The two most important parts of this speech, the death of the NIR/ID Card and the Great Reform act mean that at least to some extent, things are going to be much better than they would have been under the totalitarian Labour government. Sadly we have already seen the backing down on this Reform Act, which should include ALL legislation that infringes the liberties of people in Britain.

That is why now is NOT the time to stop writing; any newspaper writer with one brain cell will now be getting ready to submit a comprehensive list of ALL legislation that is immoral and an affront to liberty, so that at the very least, it can be rejected and Mr. Clegg can be made to explain why he must retain control over everyone’s personal victimless pleasures; so he can explain why he is the master and not the servant in matters where there is no harm whatsoever.

A Madeline Bunting attack, and this time, she brought her army

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Unbelievable.

After a very nice day out, some evil lurker tricked me into clicking a link to a Madeline Bunting blog post.

It’s year 10’s English class in a London comprehensive. Forty kids are debating the purpose of a school. “Teaching social skills,” they suggest. Why do you need them? I ask, playing devil’s advocate. “To get a job.” Is that the only point of having social skills? “Yes, what else is there?” One demurs, hesitant and not entirely sure how to ­express herself. “No, there’s more to life than a job. There’s happiness. Social skills are needed to make you happy.”

Yet another example of why state run schools are some of the most poisonous places on the planet. Of course, this shameless, brainless apologist for the state and all its systems of control cannot question the very idea that children are sitting in a class segregated by age, brainwashed and almost incapable of speaking English.

Talking about ethics to these prisoners is completely absurd; first of all they are all in a classroom in a state of involuntary servitude. This is like discussing ethics with slaves. Secondly, the school that they are in has been paid for through by the coerced extortion of monies by the violent state; the notion of discussing ethics in this extremely unethical environment is a profoundly schizophrenic act. On an instinctive level, any child can feel that being in school by force, and in that form is completely wrong, an injury to them, and unethical.

If this demonstrates anything at all, its that Madeline Bunting has no idea of what is or is not ethical. If she understands what she is doing, then she is a state propagandist of the first order, who gains directly from the unethical nature of the state and its predations.

Amazingly in the comments to this drivel, someone actually (partially) gets it:

Any ethical/moral debate needs to embrace issues of ownership and control – a debate thet has been effectively abandoned in the 21st century. In particular we desperately need an intelligent dialogue about the ownership and control of our money system.

We need ask if there has ever been a more dysfunctional, immoral and unethical form of money creation than our current system, which allows the private creation of money in parallel with debt (i.e. credit) for the profits of financiers and at the expense of the people: Abraham Lincoln said that “the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government?s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles? the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.” Until we understand this we are morally bankrupt and economically enslaved to the financiers.

Ethical money means gold coins in the hands of the public. It means the complete removal of the business of money production from the clutches of government.

‘People’ like Madeline Bunting cannot understand this; they belong to the school of thought that holds money to be a sort of magic thing that ONLY governments can make. They are not interested in piercing the veil on this subject, and if they do, they hate where it leads, because to be ethical at that place means LESS government and not MORE and they are ALWAYS for more government.

It was a fascinating illustration of how deeply the instrumentalist values of the market have penetrated our everyday thinking when kids talk in this way.

Actually, what it demonstrates is that school is not a place to go if you want to learn how to think. It demonstrates that those children are nearly brain dead, like a drowned man brought up from the bottom of a lake and revived only to exist as a vegetable on a respirator. Thats what these children really are, and for the record, ‘kids’ are the offspring of goats, human beings have CHILDREN.

“Social skills” is the type of phrase management experts dreamed up to put a market value on a set of human characteristics.

Its called ‘socialization‘ when people like Madeline Bunting are talking about Home Education, and why that natural, beneficial and wonderful practice is not a good thing.

Cheerful, punctual, able to co-operate, take instructions: these are all marketable skills. But to many of these kids, equipping them for the labour market was the primary purpose of education. Any idea of it as enriching and deepening their understanding of what it is to be human and lead meaningful, contented adult lives, had been entirely lost to view. The one girl who offered an alternative was just as instrumentalist, only her goal was different: social skills were needed for not a job but for her personal happiness.

Oh dear.

Firstly, the marketable skills listed above (obedient to the state being the glaring omission) are exactly why schools were designed. They are factories that produce workers and nothing more.

Education that enriches and deepens the understanding of anything can be had outside of school, and in fact, many argue that it is only out of school that such things can be acquired organically. By using the phrase ‘lost to view’ she implies that none of the bad things schools do is deliberate, that somehow everything has evolved into this state by the accumulation of many innocently made bad choices over decades. No, that is not the case Madeline.

Now to the one girl who offered an alternative. On the one hand, Madeline decries the lack of schools providing enrichment, meaning and understanding so that students can be contented (happy), but when someone wants to get to the goal of happiness in a way other than she approves, this is ‘instrumentalist’.

This can be translated to, “be happy, but only in the way that I say happiness should be achieved”. Pure paternalist drivel of the most loathsome kind.

These were bright and interested 14-year-olds, but if you ran this argument in any other school, you’d probably get pretty similar responses.

This is why so many people are fleeing schools for Home Education.

The gap that intrigued me was the absence of any notion of being a good person, or of the many values that might not be able to command a market price such as being challenging, courageous, truthful, honest, spontaneous, joyful or even kind, compassionate.

This is absolutely astonishing.

These insane people, people like Madeline Bunting, are completely irrational, brainwashed anti-freedom monsters. They are the same sort of folk who associate the word ‘democracy’ with ‘fair’ and ‘just’, and in this particular instance, ‘free market’ with evil, greed, destruction, inhumanity and badness.

This paragraph is as wrong as a paragraph can be. A person who is ‘a good person’, who is challenging, courageous, truthful, honest, spontaneous (creative) and joyful has traits that are ALL highly marketable and desirable; employers desperately want people who have even a subset of these qualities, let alone all of them, and if you are a person who has them all, especially the essential trust quality, you will be LITERALLY worth your weight in gold.

How is it that this monster cannot understand that being trustworthy has a high market value? What sort of evil mind set produces a person that thinks being trustworthy is worthless to others?

It beggars belief.

I started with this classroom anecdote because it seems a good way to make concrete an absence. The central premise of the Citizen Ethics supplement published in this paper at the weekend (the full pamphlet can be downloaded on Comment is free) is that we have lost a way of thinking and talking about some very important things.

It is only the intellectual slave class of the state and their drooling followers that have lost the ability to think and talk about ethics in a coherent and rational way. From Matthew Parris and his nauseating and fawning noises of total allegiance to the state, to Henry Porter’s similar sickening concessions and total submission to the all powerful state as the final, natural, indispensable legitimate monopolist of violence, who thinks:

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

[…]

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

These people, Bunting, Parris and Porter, none of them can explain how it is that the power to ‘act’ (murder, steal etc etc) can be given to them by people who do not themselves have that power or right.

This is the way of thinking and talking about very important issues that has been ‘lost’. Of course, many of us do not think that it has been lost at all; these aparatchicks deliberately tow the line that the state is legitimate, while they in fact know that it is not.

The preoccupation with market efficiency and economic growth has loomed so large that other activities, and other values, have been subordinated to its disciplines.

When Madeline talks about ‘economic growth’, she means the increase in pollution and consumption of resources. Economic growth does not need to mean an increase in destruction; it can come about by an increase in efficiency. The very internet that her shabby article was accessed through, the computer that I am writing this on, and the server that hosts these words are just the smallest example of what increased market efficiency really means.

Not a matchstick of wood was needed to make this transaction; this is what happens when people are free to invent what they like and use and share what they have invented in the way that they like; we get the internet. People without imagination, like Madeline Bunting, even though these miraculous cost free increases in efficiency are literally staring them in the face, still insist that economic growth is an entirely undesirable and negative thing. Its a lie of course, and there are many examples of people similar to her who made all sorts of dire predictions and miscalculations that made them look silly in hindsight, thanks to the relentless innovation of man, who continues to inspire and free us from useless toil and waste, in spite of the state and its brain dead boosters.

“You can’t buck the market,” said Margaret Thatcher

As evil as Margaret Thatcher may or may not have been, this statement by her is absolutely correct. You can no more buck the market than than you can cause light to be dark, water to be dry or change the nature of the universe on the most fundamental levels.

The market, market forces, the nature of man and of money are things that are a natural, spontaneously emerging consequence of reality. These consequences are governed by laws:

  • F=ma
  • Pe=mgh
  • Ke=1/2mv2
  • E=mc2

All of those are examples of laws that describe how nature works. They are reliable, inviolable, unchangeable and absolute.

Money is another thing that obeys strict laws, in the same way that energy is governed by laws. You cannot create something out of nothing; this is the truth in both physics and economics, the science of money.

Madeline Bunting and all of her Grauniad cohorts do not understand these facts. That is why they can print that ‘Quantitative Easing’ (printing money) is the solution to the problem of the current crisis. They believe, as a child does, that Santa Claus brings presents to all the good children in a single night. They believe that government creates jobs. They believe that government creates money. Of course, government does create money; what it cannot do is create value by printing words on paper that they pass off as money. Money does not have value, “because people believe in it”. This is the sort of fantastic thinking that these people soak themselves in, and they shun the warm dry towel of logic so they always stay wet.

Until Madeline Bunting and the other fools at the Graunaid and everywhere else in the media either decide to stop lying for the state or come to their senses, i.e. wake up from their delusions and magical thinking, you will never read a factual article in their papers that deals with ethics and money. Period.

, and no government has disagreed since.

That is a lie. The crash would not have happened if that were really true.

It was the adage that was used to justify soaring pay for the highest earners and stagnant earnings for the low-paid.

Jealousy politics raises its revolting head yet again. Rates of pay are always justified. People are never paid more than what they are worth. There is no such thing as ‘too much money’. These are the ideas of the fantasist where the world is an unjust place every second that men everywhere are not absolutely equal. There is no such thing as a ‘fair’ wage. Minimum wage laws hurt people, not help them. Minimum wage laws make jobs scarce. It is all the fault of the state and its insane supporters, the Madeline Buntings of this world, and everything I just wrote is true.

The market ruled, and questions of injustice, honour or integrity were all secondary or irrelevant.

The market always rules, just as gravity always pulls down, wether you like it or not. The crash is the market asserting itself against the delusionists who think that you can eat yourself fitter.

Injustice is the state stealing money while Madeline Bunting and Henry Porter cheer them on. These people are not honourable by any definition; they are for violence, theft, murder and enslavement of their fellow man. They have no integrity, as on the one hand they call for conditional rights and ‘civil liberties’ and then on the other, profess their undying loyalty and support for the state (Porter and Parris). Yes indeed, honour and integrity are secondary to these people, secondary to their love of the evil state.

A poll for the World Economic Forum last month found in 10 G20 countries that two-thirds of respondents attributed the credit crunch and its ensuing economic recession to a crisis of ethics and values.

And that tells you all you need to know about the depth of understanding of economics at the World Economic Forum and of Madeline Bunting. They know nothing whatsoever about economics.

The crash / credit crunch had nothing to do with a ‘crisis of ethics’ not even when you turn that phrase onto the murderous state and its insane lust for the printing press, because the state is fundamentally unethical, and so there is no possibility of crisis in ethics there, since there are no ethics to begin with.

Sir Thomas Legg declared in his final report on MPs’ expenses that there had been a failure of ethics.

Here we have a scandal over a thimble full of water dipped into the ocean of stolen money. The trillions stolen by these MPs to murder and enslave is not the scandal, but instead, Madeline Bunting wants you to believe that a few pennies here and there to repair the houses of, and to service and entertain the thieves, is the great crisis of ethics. Never mind that these people want to force all children into the very schools that even a monster like her finds disturbing, making illegal any better, natural human alternative that produces the people that she claims she wants to see coming out of the education system. Never mind that they mass murder, colonise and destroy at will, unquestioned by these Grauniad ‘journalists’; none of that is important; only the duck house of an MP is a crisis in ethics.

This is a classic case of the media diverting attention away from the true crimes to focus on the sensational, the irrelevant and the petty, while crimes of mass murder and unprecedented theft go unreported, and when they are reported they are justified with false reasoning. Appalling, unforgivable behaviour.

There’s a widespread perception that social norms have subtly and gradually shifted towards the centrality of personal self-interest. As long as it’s legal, it’s legitimate; no further individual judgment is necessary.

And here we have the call for all actions to be illegal, whatever they are. A permission based society where everything is illegal to replace the free society, where everything that is not illegal is legal. Madeline Bunting wants a world where you have to have permission to do everything, no matter what it is. That is the only way she will feel safe from the chaotic free system, where people are able to peruse their own ideas of what is or is not good. This is anathema to Porter, Bunting and Parris, who would have everyone under control of the monolithic state ‘for their own good’.

It is only the unfettered personal self-interest that has brought mankind the great achievements. Men working to fulfil their destinies as they see fit, working voluntarily for profit or not; this force of nature – man unleashed – is the only way we can have peace and prosperity in abundance. Madeline Bunting and her imagination-less monster companions would have us live without, for example The Google, because they want to enrich themselves by printing books. They would keep us in horses and carts to save the buggy whip manufacturers. They are the luddites, the fear soaked nanny statists, the health and safety fanatics; they are everything that is wrong with the west.

However much we may have laughed at the Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” line, we can now see how it seeped into powerful institutional cultures such as the City and parliament.

Greed is good. Greed is the manifestation of the desires of men to make things and to act in the world. Greed is self interest; the lust for knowledge, for a better toaster, for commercial space flight, for faster computers. Greed is what makes the world good. Greed IS good.

The City is a collection of private firms; it is not a ‘powerful institutional culture’ any more than a packet of yeast is. Yeast does what it does and people in business do what they do.

Parliament on the other hand is a criminal organization that is precisely like a mafia gang. It extorts money, murders (actually the mafia NEVER murdered as much as any state ever did) and uses violence to get what it wants solely to prop up its own existence. It is a parasite, a drain on the resources of the good, the innocent and the productive. Once again a Grauniad hack fails to make the distinction between private business and the state; but this should come as no surprise to anyone; these are the same people who think money comes out of a printing press.

Citizen Ethics was a project to ask nearly four dozen prominent thinkers what this was all about. Did ethics really have a role to play, and had it failed? First, despite plenty of disagreements, on one thing there was a clear consensus: ethics are crucial.

Whose ethics?

There are people who believe (correctly) that the Madeline Buntings of this world are fundamentally unethical, and they can prove it. Without stating the source of your ethics, its foundation, its basis, its formulation, this word is just another meaningless posture.

Ethics are not something that you can make up as you go along. It is not something that you can design by the pick and mix method, like some of the very confused people who want to be free in their lives, but who insist that others should be violently restrained, licensed, inspected and controlled.

Like economics and physics, there is only one set of ethics that is correct for man, within which he is able to act morally and when he acts in groups of people, all achieve their full potential in harmony.

This one set of ethics is not self contradictory, does not make exceptions that allow for unprovoked violence or theft or other immorality. It is complete, logical, and unassailable, just like the basic laws of motion, that produce predictable results every time ad infinitum. You know its name because you read BLOGDIAL: Libertarianism, as described by Murray N. Rothbard.

They are the underpinning to all political debate; they frame the questions we ask of ourselves and of our political economy and therefore do much to shape the answers we end up with.

And that is why if you start without the facts and the laws that govern reality, you will never be able to predict where the cannon ball will fall when it is shot, or put a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Without Newton’s laws you cannot do these things, and without Murray Rothbard and Libertarianism and Austrian Economics, you have no starting point based in the world as it actually is to be able to get to the correct answers.

They are vital to the civic culture in which both politics and economics are ultimately rooted.

Economics is rooted in immutable laws. The way men deal with each other ethically is rooted in what their true nature is. From those two things flows the shape of how the world should be.

So, as Will Hutton will do in his book, Them and Us, out in the autumn, if we really want to understand how some of the incredible myths perpetrated over the last couple of decades have gone unchallenged, we have to go back to some basic arguments of philosophy. What is justice? Who deserves what? What constitutes human flourishing?

What is justice? First we need to know what man is. Who deserves what? Once again, what is man, where do goods come from, what is property, who owns property, what is theft, what are rights, what are not rights; these are the questions that are answered by Murray Rothbard. What constitutes human flourishing? That is not for anyone to define except by those who want to impose their will on other people, I can tell you that for free.

Too many of these questions have simply been shelved for too long.

They have never been ‘shelved’ unless you are writing for the Grauniad, where they hold that they are the protectors of the revealed truth of how the world works. People all over the world are turning to Libertarianism because it is demonstrably true and because it tells us what is wrong with how the world is currently organized.

Austrian Economics can predict the crashes, why they happen and how money really works. On the contrary, rather than being shelved, these questions are being asked and answered more now than ever, and the Madeleine Buntings and Henry Porters of the world are running scared, because their false world view is crumbling before their very eyes, just like the Soviet Union disintegrated before the eyes of the people who believed in that immoral, unethical, unworkable system.

Questions of justice and reward were left to the market to resolve; questions of human flourishing were privatised.

Justice is the business of courts. Remuneration is an absolutely private affair. Human flourishing takes care of itself, just like weeds do. This is a perfect example of wrong thinking, where there is no distinction between the sphere of the state and the world of the private, where words have lost their meaning, where an ethical foundation is missing.

It was left to everyone to decide their own sequence of pleasurable experiences in life with little acknowledgement of how many of those depend entirely on mutual co-operation.

It is only through everyone deciding and taking their own path that all man can reap the maximum rewards. Men voluntarily exchanging causes mutual co-operation to spontaneously emerge; we need each other to achieve our pleasure, whatever that may be. Madeleine Bunting does not understand how the world really works. She does not understand where prosperity comes from, what prosperity is, how innovation works, how capital flows, and what man is.

The classic paradigm is sitting in a traffic jam in your 4×4 with its astonishing powers of acceleration rendered useless.

If all the roads were privately owned, and there were no speed limits, traffic would flow better.

One explanation for this abandonment of the debate is that we lost a language in which to think and argue about ethics.

There is no ME in your WE.

Perhaps this is partly attributable to the vexed legacy of institutional religion and the long shadow it still casts. The promotion of ethical behaviour has been bound up with particular institutions, and as they decline, it leaves a vacuum of authority.

I agree with the second sentence.

Who dares talk on this subject with confidence?

The Libertarians especially Lew Rockwell.

It prompts fear that any such discussions are really a Trojan horse for promoting a religious belief. There’s a suspicion that words such as “morality” tip us quickly into the kind of instinctive conviction made infamous by Tony Blair in which sincerity is regarded as an adequate substitute for careful reasoning.

Whatever the basis of your morality, as long as you do not bother anyone, what you choose to believe and how you choose to act is entirely your own business.

Even the language itself is mired in a history of social control; morality and virtue are words that are reluctantly used, since both still convey overtones of intrusive monitoring of (particularly female) sexual behaviour.

Unbelievable; this person talks about brainwashed children in schools and “intrusive monitoring of behaviour” in the same breath!

But since most of the contributors to this pamphlet express their commitment to ethics without any reference to religious practice, perhaps it is finally possible to move beyond these familiar anxieties and resume a task of ethical reasoning regarded through most of history as essential to being human. This is philosophy as the Greeks understood it – love of the wisdom to lead lives of meaning and fulfilment, not some kind of abstract game with words.

Ethical reasoning starting from where? And with whom? Whose definition of meaning and fulfilment? Violence is not an abstract or a game with words; what these people want is total violence against everyone who does not believe what they believe. They want children imprisoned in their brainwashing schools, so they they can indoctrinate them in THEIR ideas of what is and is not ethical, that they have muddled together from scratch.

Ethics is a word that derives from two Greek words, ethos for habit and ethikos for character, and it better fits what Citizen Ethics proposes rather than “morality”, which comes from the Latin word “mores” for social institutions and customs. This is not about reasserting conventions, a preconceived code, but about reinvigorating a habit, a process of reasoning to the perennial question: what is the right thing to do?

This is not the perennial question, and that a group of people should want to force their version of what the questions should and should not be is a gross form of violence. As far as I am concerned (and you can do and think whatever you like, I could care less as long as you do not interfere with me in any way whatsoever) the questions are, “what should I NOT do?”, “how can I DO NO HARM?” and all the other questions the answers to which will ensure that I never harm anyone else with violence either by my own hand or by proxy through the state or its agents. With this as the basis, a moral existence is a natural consequence; what you do with it, on top of it, voluntarily, is all bonus.

People who are interested in ‘doing right’ are the most dangerous humans in the world. They are the sort of people who come up with political correctness, affirmative action, miscegenation laws, minimum wage laws, censorship and ever other evil that decent people hate. All of those are a direct consequence of not having a properly operating ethical code that prevents the doing of evil, that does not define what man is and what his true relationship is with the world and with other men.

We wouldn’t claim there is a consensus waiting to be found – on the contrary, our aim is to provoke a noisy debate on what kinds of habits and characters we need to run the good society.

Is it now?

Habits are how animals behave; men do not act out of habit, they act from reason. Once again, who is this mythical ‘we’ that she speaks of, and why is the running of the ‘good society’ (whatever that is) the goal? Who decided this, and why should anyone be forced to go along with it all? The answer is they should not, and anyone who wants it forced upon everyone is violent.

To go back to the lovely kids in the classroom, what is the good society we want to inspire them with – beyond their future roles in the economy as workers and consumers? What habits and character can we offer them as conducive to deeply rewarding lives? If we don’t know plenty of possible answers to that question, it’s no surprise they don’t.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/21/ethics-failure-market-moral-code

  • What is ‘the good society’?
  • Who is the ‘we’ that wants to inspire other people’s children with it?
  • Who is the group that decides what animalistic habits the children of today are going to be brainwashed to reflexively exhibit?
  • Who decides what is or is not a man of good character?
  • Who decides what is or is not a ‘rewarding life’?

And what an insulting condescending monster to assume that just because SHE does not have these answers, children cannot find them out for themselves by whatever means, without HER HELP.

The ever insightful Mimi Majick puts it plainly, “This woman knows exactly what she is doing; she is utterly wicked”.

I agree.

Now on to the document ‘Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis‘ which is hosted on Scribd… wait a minute, I thought Scribd was EVIL?!

No surprises here; an intolerable, appalling mishmash of violence, pronoun abuse, lies and vile collectivism.

Here is a nasty taste:

The financial and political events of the past year have given rise to a crisis of ethics. Bankers and MPs acted legally but without integrity, and we lacked a language to respond. How are we to articulate our misgivings? How can we regain our ability to reason ethically?

Bunting. What a joke!

‘The times call for new ethical understandings as much as remembering old ones’

Anyone who wants to redefine what a human being is or is not is your mortal enemy. That is EXACTLY what Bunting is saying here; ‘we’ (whoever that is, and we know she means the authors of this bad document and their sick followers) have to construct a new ethics; in the same breath she admits that ‘we’ (meaning actually THEY) do not have the language to create such an ethics. Very very DUMB!

WE NEED A PUBLIC LIFE WITH PURPOSE

Michael Sandel

NO ‘WE’ DO NOT!

So, as frustration with politics builds on both sides of the Atlantic, it is worth asking what a new politics of the common good might look like. Here are four possible themes.
A first concerns citizenship, sacrifice and service.

Slavery, theft and violence. Pure evil.

To achieve a just society, we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life

‘Reason together’; this translates to “we have to enslave everyone to obey the majority rule”. No thanks, and no sale!

HOW TO LIVE AS IF WE WERE HUMAN

In a world that has laid bare the pitfalls of individualism, we must learn once more to live in the real world, says the Archbishop of Canterbury

Apostate Christian calls for enslavement:

‘We have looked into the abyss where individualism is concerned and we know it won’t do’

There we go with the ‘we’ business again. Individualism (which is the true face of what it means to be a human being) is the only way that man can reach his full potential. Real Christians understand this through the idea that man has been given free will, and that this is the only way that he can actually choose good over evil.

These apostates want man to be FORCED to do what THEY think is good. That diminishes man entirely to a creature. But then, this is exactly what they want, and the very language they use to describe their brainwashed followers reveals this; this man has s FLOCK. Nuff said.

Self-interest and calculation have derailed our values. To get back on track we must remember the affective bonds that link us to one another

Mark Vernon

Heavens above, they are all INSANE.

Self-interest and calculation are the ultimate tools for enlightenment, prosperity and freedom. Without them, man is reduced to property.

our current moral discourse lacks a compelling vision of what it is to be human

It doesn’t have to be compelling, it only has to be true.

Ethics is a form of practical intelligence. Like friendship, we nurture virtues best by our engagement with others and the world. Such skills must be learnt afresh in every generation – another reason why a fixed, codified system never inspires: it contains little conception that life is to be lived.

This is completely false.

What man is is FIXED, just as the laws of nature are fixed. The result of setting the ideas and beliefs of what man is to zero every generation is so absurd that I can barely believe that someone would be stupid enough to print it.

The entire reason why man is able to do what he does is precisely because he can transfer information across generations. Each generation can do what it likes, but what they cannot do is redefine what man is or what right and wrong are. What is ethical and what is unethical is fixed. The result of not knowing what these set rules are is tyranny accepted as normal and ethical, as the people who write in the Guardian do. It would be like people having to learn mathematics from scratch every generation. I can tell you exactly what those people are; they are Gorillas and the other primates who never change, who act by habit and instinct only, who do not write anything down and who do not have any awareness of what they are.

By the nature of what knowledge is, there will always be a first person who correctly identifies and then codifies the one true ethics that emerges from the nature of man; that philosopher was Murray Rothbard.

He discovered and wrote down the ethical equivalent of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica where the laws that describe what man is and is not and how he is governed by this immutable nature and the immutable nature of reality have been laid out clearly and completely.

Murray Rothbard’s triumph was to expose the absolute base of what man is as he exists. He did this without any reference to religion; it is purely logical and derived from reason only.

From this basis, everything else that you want to believe and any action that you want to take can be tested to see wether or not it is ethical. Libertarianism is unambiguous, clean, without contradictions and easy to understand. In the same way that Newton’s laws of motion can get you to the other planets with pinpoint accuracy, Murray Rothbard’s Libertarianism can get you to a complete understanding of the way the world should work, with absolute clarity and precision, with an infinite amount of space for any personal belief you wish to hold, an infinite amount of leeway for you to help others in any way you choose, to collaborate, exchange, build, grow, live, worship and be a total human being.

This is what the writers of this pamphlet DESPISE.

often on the fringes of critical debate, Islam has much to offer when it comes to the development of an ethics based on our common citizenship,

Tariq Ramadan

Uh oh…

‘Our’ Common citizenship? Of WHAT exactly? I am not a citizen of ANYTHING in common with you Mr. Ramadan. The same goes for you Rowan.

Ethics based on anything other than the true nature of man is worthless. Libertarianism, with its infinite space for any sort of belief, accepts every type of religion. What you believe is your own business. You are even free to offer it to others, ad infinitum. The only thing you are forbidden from doing is harming others or their property. You cannot steal, coerce or initiate the use of force against others, for any reason whatsoever.

And now, we have the very disturbing, suspiciously ineffective Shame (yes SHAME) Chakrabarti, who answers a questionnaire:

What’s the fundamental code we all should live by?
The simple code for living is equal treatment. There are all sorts of rights and freedoms we have and hold dear – freedom of speech, privacy, conscience and so on. And they can’t necessarily be absolute, but what we can say is that any changes to them have to be universal. So for example, take the issue of body scanners at airports. You can argue that it’s an invasion of privacy to have them, you can argue that it’s necessary to prevent terrorism, but what you can’t argue is that it’s ok to compromise someone’s privacy and not others. So it’s not going to be ok to isolate certain sorts of passengers, who look different maybe, and only use body scanners on them. It’s about equal treatment: if you make compromises on liberties, you make them for everyone, not just for some people. That’s paramount.

Equal treatment? Equally good or equally bad?. I think the answer is BAD, since this monster believes that rights are not absolute, but conditional on the word and by the leave of the ever present ‘we’, who will decide what ‘beneficial changes’ are to be made… universally of course… by the power of the omnipotent state, for which this witch is a shill.

Look at her treatment of body scanners; they are justified as long as ALL people go through them equally. These are the words of MONSTERS, and collaborators and TRAITORS, traitors to all souls everywhere… These words should make you BRISTLE with anger.

Clearly not one of the people who were invited to write for this document or answer the questionnaire have any idea of ethics, where they come from, or anything else about them. They are without a moral compass, evil, violent, control addicted, statist MONSTERS, ‘the enemy’ if you will.

Capitalism has been undermined by an abuse of the very principle that is its cornerstone: fairness. It is essential that we reclaim the idea of just rewards

Will Hutton

Profit is ethical to the extent it is proportionate to effort and not due to good luck or brute power

I’m not making these up, they are directly copied and pasted!

And finally, before I vomit all over my keyboard:

What would the economist John Maynard Keynes make of the state we’re in? We asked philosopher Edward Skidelsky to press Keynes’ biographer, his father Robert, on what the great man might say

‘The great man’

oh… no… I’mgoingto p-huuuuuurllllargh!!!!!!!!

Special Branch

Monday, February 1st, 2010

It just got worse

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Dumped into our inbox; it’s worse than your worse nightmare:

This is bad. Here is the link to the bill on home education.

http://www.publicat ions.parliament. uk/pa/cm200910/ cmbills/008/ 10008.38- 44.html#m01s

You would have to apply to register your child for home education. It lasts one year. This seems to me to mean that you have to get permission to home educate your child, because in some circumstances, like when they decide your information is inadequate, the LA can decline to register your child, and if they think it would be “harmful to your child’s welfare” to home educate, the LA must refuse registration.

You have to give prescribed information about your child’s education when you apply to register. (To be defined in later regulations or guidelines.)

The local authority should arrange to see your child, and the parent or educator, at least once during the year, and visit at least one of the places where education is taking place at least once a year. These arrangements “may, unless the child or a parent of the child objects, provide for a meeting with the child at which no parent of the child or other person providing education to the child is present.” (So maybe you can meet at a museum? And maybe you can stop them meeting with your child alone, but then again, you may get a lot of pressure and they just might decide that you are not cooperating? see below.)

The local authority is to decide whether the education is suitable, whether it accords with the information you provided them, what the child’s wishes and feelings are, and whether it would “harmful for the child’s welfare for the child to continue to be a home-educated child.” I

The LA can revoke your registration if :

  • you “fail to fulfil an undertaking” given in your statement of prescribed information — ie you didn’t do what you told them you planned at the beginning of the year;
  • information provided in connection with your application is incorrect or inadequate in a material respect whether or not it was correct when you gave the information — I can’t figure out just what this means but it seems like if circumstances change, the LA can revoke your registration;
  • it would be “harmful to the child’s welfare” to continue to be home-educated; or
  • you don’t co-operate with the LA, by not cooperating with the annual meetings with you and your child or if you give an “objection to a meeting” and the LA decides this does not leave them “adequate opportunity” to decide if your education is ok.

I have to say the lawyer in me is very worried about how fuzzy these standards are, and the many opportunities to deny the right to home educate, fearing that in some ways this is worse than I feared from the dire Badman report . . .

Unbelievable.

So you have to not only be licensed, but you have to APPLY to be licensed.

Autonomous learners need not apply obviously.

This bill is completely outrageous in every way that something can be outrageous.

Notice at the end, there is language that hints they understand that ContactPoint is going to be scrapped:

A local authority in England must make arrangements to enable

them to establish (so far as it is possible to do so) the identities of

children

If they have ContactPoint in place, they would have written that the ‘national register of children should be consulted to create a list of all those who are unaccounted for’ etc.

But all of this is moot.

The legislation is drafted. They will successfully argue that it needs to be passed intact.

If they do pass it, there will be no route out for anyone that wants to educate their child at home without interference.

Take a look at this:

(4)

In determining whether the condition in subsection (1)(d) or (f) is

satisfied, an authority shall, so far as is reasonably practicable and

consistent with the child’s welfare, give due consideration (having

regard to the child’s age and understanding) to any wishes and

feelings of the child ascertained by them.

This essentially means that the the Local Authority becomes the parent of the child if you apply for registration as a home educator, and ‘your’ child can short circuit your parental authority, duty and care either by accident, misinterpretation or deliberately, causing your licence to be revoked, and your child withdrawn from your care.

For all those who bristle at the idea of children being property, your registration of ‘your’ child will turn over parental responsibility and ownership to the Local Authority, who will have control over your child in the same way that a parent should. Registration of your child is a transfer of property and of responsibility.

No doubt, this bill is going to be picked to pieces by the people who are good at that. There is nothing good to be found in it whatsoever; it is thoroughly bad.

This bill gives carte blanche to Local Authorities to absolutely control Home Education and Home Educators, and of course, the next round of legislation and or guidelines defining what a suitable education is is just around the corner, and will be the final nail in the coffin.

It effectively destroys it completely, leaving no room for anything other than what the Local Authority thinks is good for ‘your’ child.

They said that they respected Home Educators. This is their version of respect. They said that Home Educators would be operating within the law, unlike the Germans. Clearly there is not going to be any real Home Education at all in the UK should this bill pass.

I said that everything they say is the reverse of what they really mean; they said they want to strengthen Home Education, when they actually mean they want to destroy it. Well, now we see that this is precisely the case.

Your children are property

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

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

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

By Bob Unruh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The landlady for the Wunderlich family said she was shocked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans, you are next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Astonishing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

germanmilitariacollectibles.com

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

And yet…

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

It beggars belief.

FURTHERMORE

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

EVEN MORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

Absolutely nauseating.

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

What they do is, ‘abandon the cart’.

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

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

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

Period.

And now MOAR

Thanks to ChangingChops for this heads up:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

Daily Mail

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

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

Britain is dying – action is needed now

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

As I walk about the small town in the South Wales valleys that I now call home, I sometimes reflect on how vibrant and alive this place once was. I am not going back too far with my memories, but today the town is dying.

When I first came here to Blaenavon there was a butcher, a baker, a shop that sold all manner of things including the candlesticks, a number of florists, newsagents, hairdressers, greengrocers selling fresh fruit & veg, a plethora of book shops, cafe’s ranging from a greasy Joes to a bohemian meeting place. There was manned Police Station, a Fire Station, 3 petrol stations, 20 public houses, 2 Post Offices, a swimming and sports complex and a population of around 6,500 who had painfully recovered economically from the closure of the mining industry a decade earlier.

In its day it was much larger, with a peak in population in 1921 of 12,500 supporting the string of mines that were present on both sides of the valley, the finest steel works in Britain and an Iron works that today stands in ruins and is supported by Heritage funds as a museum. The largest of the mines, Big Pit, still remains, although unproductive as it is now open to the public as a living museum.

Today however, after 12 years of Labour interference and mis-management in the Economy and the daily lives of everyone who lives here, the town is dying. The Butcher sold up, the baker has gone, the shop that sells everything now sells very little, the book shops are all gone, so are the cafes. The Police station is closed after an experiment to only have it open 2 hours a day, the Fire Station is part time, only 1 petrol station remains, 11 of the 20 pubs are gone, 1 of the post offices has been up for sale for over a year, the Swimming pool originally built with miners funds has been torn down, sold to developers (who intend to build a new police station?) and an increasingly confused population wondering where their next job and income is going to come from.

Pushing them further are the regulations, the interference in their lives, the touring DVLA vans with the ANPR camera, the host of newly installed CCTV poles, the mass of double yellow lines, the cut back in bus services, seeing Heritage grants diverted elsewhere, seeing their public buildings sold to developers, lack of toleration for any minor infraction of the rules, a lack of police presence.

The town itself has for many years been used as a training ground by the utilities companies, with more test holes dug and road patches laid here than anywhere else I have ever seen. Ex miners and their families had retrained as carpenters, electricians, builders, window fitters as they followed government advice and gained work from the rise of the social housing trusts that sprang up in surrounding towns and villages, that work is now dry as the funds are no longer flowing. The majority of those who still work are in public sector jobs or with companies that support the public sector.

That the people of this town have a work ethic goes without saying, given the opportunities they are hard working, given the opportunities they are adventurous as they have proven in rebuilding their lives after the mine closures, but yet again the rug is being pulled from beneath them by the very politicians who say they support them. It is soul destroying to see a town where nearly 40% of the population is on benefits of one kind or another sinking slowly because the disposable incomes have gone, and over the past 10 years the entire local economy has become dependent on government work or companies that provide services to local government or quangos, even then there is only enough to survive the daily payouts.

This situation is not unique to the one place where I live, it is repeated in town after town right across the UK, consequently to look from the bottom up we can see this country dying on its feet. That vital element in the recovery of any economy, the sustainable element, disposable income, has either gone or is diminished to such a level that everything begins to grind to a halt.

The Libertarian Party sees the recovery in a very different light to the other political parties. We do not see that bailing out banks and factories with taxpayer funds is either desirable or sustainable, nor is the latest Conservative idea of community work for benefits (pure communitarian not conservative). We do not believe that central and local government should be the only employers, further increasing the burden on taxpayers to sustain this huge monolithic spending machine.

People here do not want more state involvement, they do not want more debt through bank loans to survive, and the few businesses that are left want to be able to survive and grow on profits, not bank loans, and to do this they need customers.

Libertarians want to see people who are working keep their earnings, not working on half pay, giving them the disposable income to spend in the Butchers, the bakers, the candlestick shop, the pubs and all the other shops in the area. We know that this will mean replacement and replenishment, providing orders and growth to the factories and support businesses, who in turn will need to order and buy more raw materials. This is how the local, and in turn the national economy will recover.

In order to do that, we have proposed along with major reforms in monetary and fiscal policy, a range of far reaching manifesto items not least of which is the initial reduction and then elimination of income tax, not fiddling around the edges of tax policy, but scrapping it altogether. Putting money back into the powerhouse of any economic strategy, purchasing power.

In order that businesses can rise to this challenge, and survive afterwards we also propose scrapping many of the regulatory controls that currently restrict both the opening of new business and the sustainability of SME’s. A huge reduction in Corporation Tax, setting it at a 10% flat rate and including a commitment to investigate the possibility of a 5 year exemption from Corporation Tax for start-ups (not deferment, an exemption).

We know that 10 factories paying the headline rate of corporation tax of 28% will not sustain the economy of this area, but 50 factories paying 10% will. Growth will be self sustaining as more people enter the workplace to support that growth, there will be more disposable income being spent, spurring even more factories and business to support and service that spending. The best bit however is that it can be done without reliance on bank lending, as it will be real money flowing up the chain, real profits creating that growth.

When growth is based on turnover in this way, taxation receipts will actually rise through volume, rather than decrease as it is at present by taking an ever bigger percentage of a diminishing pie, allowing everyone to gain and remove the need for government to borrow.The current level of spending by Government cannot continue, and the Conservative and LibDems are already to committed to either maintain or increase spending in many areas. This is unsustainable. Only today the PSBR (Public Sector Borrowing Requirement) has been released for July. In one month alone government has overspent and had to borrow the unsightly sum of £8.016 billion. That means the government was over-spending by more than £258 million per day last month, which is living beyond our collective means by more than £10 million an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (H/T Guido) This means that the productive parts of our economy can no longer support such a huge government, the overspending and the restrictive regulations. (To give an example of how desperate these regulations have become, read this, punishment for attempting self help)

I look forward to the day when with the help of the Libertarian Party this small town that I live in can enjoy once again the vibrancy that it once knew, where it and its inhabitants can again be proud and self sustaining and above all self regulating as we diminish the power of the state to interfere and control.

[…]

The Libertarian Party (UK)

The Satirical Prints of James Gillray

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

James Gillray (1756-1815) was the pre-eminent caricaturist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is considered by many to be the father of the political cartoon. His colorful political and social satires were wildly popular in his own time for their cruel and scurrilous content, which was often directed at George III, his family, and other leading political figures. Just as popular were his military caricatures of Napoleon and both French and British forces during the Napoleonic Wars.

James Gillray, sometimes spelled Gilray (13 August 1757 – 1 June 1815), was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810.

He was born in Chelsea. His father, a native of Lanark, had served as a soldier, losing an arm at the Battle of Fontenoy, and was admitted, first as an inmate, and afterwards as an outdoor pensioner, at Chelsea Hospital. Gillray commenced life by learning letter-engraving, at which he soon became an adept. This employment, however, proving irksome, he wandered about for a time with a company of strolling players. After a very checkered experience he returned to London and was admitted a student in the Royal Academy, supporting himself by engraving, and probably issuing a considerable number of caricatures under fictitious names. His caricatures are almost all in etching, some also with aquatint, and a few using stipple technique. None can correctly be described as engravings, although this term is often loosely or ignorantly used of them. Hogarth’s works were the delight and study of his early years. Paddy on Horseback, which appeared in 1779, is the first caricature which is certainly his. Two caricatures on Rodney’s naval victory, issued in 1782, were among the first of the memorable series of his political sketches.

Gillray is still revered as one of the most influential political caricaturists of all time, and among the leading cartoonists on the political stage in the United Kingdom today, both Steve Bell and Martin Rowson acknowledge him as probably the most influential of all their predecessors in that particular arena.

The look of the Vogon race in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film were in part inspired by Gillray’s work.
There is a good account of Gillray in Wright’s History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865).

[…]

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

The prints of James Gillray come from a time when Britain was a very different place. It was a nation of tough, independent minded people, freedom loving and enjoying, with a love of free speech to the extent that the caricatures of James Gillray, that ‘attacked’ anyone he liked (or rather disliked), from the King down, were widely circulated and much admired. It was a time of reason, of true scientists exploring and improving life; when the true spirit of Britain was out in the open, working in the world for the good (mostly).

What is Britain like now?

It is a country where not only are the citizens disarmed, and where they cannot even send a shooting team to compete anywhere, but they cannot even use their own language for fear of reprisals from a group of unaccountable aparatchicks, leeches and social engineers. The new ‘hate speech’ laws have turned Britain into a place where even in private, you cannot say what you think without fear of losing your job.

Schoolboy ‘bullies’ are now hauled into court for speaking words. Whatever you might think about the way children should behave in a school, it is totally insane that the headmaster of a school should not be able to discipline and expel a bad pupil who breaks school rules, and that an actual court case was brought against the pupil in that last link.

Which brings us on to the Badman report saga, which is becoming more absurd by the day.

DCSF have refused to release the Submissions to the Elective Home Education Review, citing that its author is being ‘harassed and vilified” on the internets.

All of the Home Educators commenting on this independently and quite naturally come to the same conclusion; they have been hurt by this report, which equates their parenting to a form of abuse. It is THEY who have been vilified:

M Stafford left an annotation (19 July 2009)

So telling the general public in purposely twisted press releases that home education is a cover for abuse and servitude is not vilifying and harassing.

Graham Badman has produced a poor and dishonest report, misused statistics and compared apples and pears in order to produce a predecided result.

The DCSF needs to be open and transparent about this information, that is what would be in the public interest instead of trying to hide the duplicity involved in this report.

and

Emma Hornby left an annotation (20 July 2009)

I think Mr Badman should be looking long and hard at his conscience.

He is being heavily criticized for a piece of work which, it gradually emerges, is substandard in many respects. It went beyond the explicit terms of the brief, and the terms on which he consulted the public, and the recommendations follow neither from the brief nor from the data, so far as that can be verified. The use of stats is embarrassing. He has misrepresented the submission of the CofE and at least one selectively-quoted HEer, as well as, it emerges, working from notes of meetings with people who are not prepared to sign off those notes as an accurate record of the conversation.

There are two possible courses of action for Mr Badman here. One is to reject the criticisms, instead seeing himself as vilified and harassed (and this course becomes harder to sustain with every fresh revelation, to be honest), and the second is to say “mea culpa”, withdraw his report and either rewrite it more honestly and competently, or return the fee and let the DCSF commission someone else to complete the task.

I do not intend either to harass or vilify Mr Badman here. But his report and his conduct are both vulnerable to justified criticism, and the sooner he appreciates that, the sooner he will be able to begin restoring his reputation.

Those are just two of the many comments swirling around the internets. The fact of the matter is that this report, if it had been done with any kind of academic rigor, would be able to withstand any scrutiny. And another FOIA requester, Harold Davis, puts it very plainly, that there is no justification whatsoever for these submissions to be withheld:

[…]

You refer to vilification and harassment. Vilification means presenting as vile, and while it may often be uncondonable, it is not a criminal offence, and politicians and other public servants are vilified in numerous publications every day. As you are doubtless aware, many have been vilified in respect of expenses claims they have made. Indeed, when such information has been released, many in the population have very quickly formed or agreed with the view that the makers of such claims are “vile”. That is all part and parcel of the holding of public officials to account. Such a course of events does not in itself constitute the breaking of any law or the commission of any civil wrong. When vilification goes too far, surely the correct course of action is a civil suit for defamation or an application for a court order against the individuals responsible, not the use, without the prior launch of any such suit or the application for any such order (I presume you would have referred to these if they had happened), of s38 of the Freedom of Information Act.

If you would maintain that the risk of vilification is so great as to endanger Mr Badman’s health, this of course raises the question of what information you might hold that, if released, would give grist to the mill of the unidentified vilifiers. Section 38 is not meant to be invoked to protect individuals against the effects of the disclosure, for example, of actions by them which, if disclosed, would JUSTIFIABLY affect their reputations in a negative direction. This is so even if other individuals are already speculating in public that such information may exist, to the “distress” of the individual concerned. Of course there is a risk test, but the test, in my submission, is much stronger than the Department appears to believe. The assumption should be in favour of disclosure.

[…]

Home Ed Forums

Now this is an interesting situation. They do not want to release these documents, clearly because their release will fatally compromise this report, and destroy the reputations of everyone involved in its manufacture. It would not take a great leap of imagination to speculate that all the submissions have said the same thing that the CofE said; that there is no need for a change in the law, and that the status quo is more than adequate.

If they do go to court over this ‘vilification and harassment’, then during the discovery process the opposition will certainly demand everything submitted to this report to be released and entered into the public record, since they are material in determining whether or not what everyone is saying about the report is true or not, and whether the ‘vilification’ was justified or unjustified.

That is what is called being between a rock and a hard place.

This report, as we said before, should never have been written. Had it never been written and the conclusions of the 2007 consultations taken on board as the final word, Britain would still be the best place to Home Educate, and no one would have had to waste their time knocking down this utter rubbish. Now we have the very real prospect of families being disrupted as they either fight this insanity or flee the country to more rational freedom loving countries.

What sort of country can produce a report like this, where the submissions that fed it are made secret on the most weak and irrational of pretexts, the report being clearly biased, ill informed and wrong, which subsequently be accepted unchallenged and unquestioned to make new law? I would guess that reasonable people who know what Britain used to be like would not say that Britain is that sort of country. Secret contributions to false reports used to make bad law are the sort of thing you used to expect and get in the Soviet Union, not a ‘free society’ or ‘free country’ like Britain.

The Home Educating parents that are mounting a vigorous defence of themselves are demonstrating that they are head and shoulders above the crowd. These are the parents who are going to unleash a generation of Britons who are of the same quality and strength of character that we know the British used to have in the days of James Gillray. Even now, some of these Home Educated children are writing letters to complain that they do not want to be disturbed in any way, taking the authorities up on the claptrap that the voices of children are to be heard, only to be patted on the head and patronized.

Those tactics might work with a child, but they are clearly not working with the parents of these children.

Apart from the nauseating patting on the head, the people who are refusing to release the submissions are allowing themselves to be sucked into the black hole that this report has become. Clearly they are not being advised correctly, or are being given orders to suppress this information. If they have been advised to withhold this information, they need to say who it is that gave them this advice or these orders in order to separate and insulate themselves from these incorrect decisions; clearly the people who are the public interface for answering these requests are not applying the law correctly, and this could come back to damage them as this report is destroyed and discredited, as they will have acted improperly by invoking rules that should not have been invoked to try and stop the report being exposed. The first people that will be sacrificed as scape goats are these low level aparatchicks who are, in every instance, expendable. All the people who were responsible for this debacle have already secured new jobs for themselves or will never be discarded from their high level positions; they might get shuffled around, but they will not be brought down. It is the underlings, the messengers who are being ordered to act improperly who will get the chop.

If I were any of the people behind any of this I would now declare that this has been a monumental error in judgement. They failed to understand the true nature of Home Education, and this caused them to ask for a report with a pre-determined outcome that they should not have commissioned. They misjudged the parents who Home Educate who are clearly amongst the most intelligent, creative, capable, resourceful, dogged and passionate people in the UK (actually, they are REAL PEOPLE of the type that made Britain Great). These Home Educators have demonstrated that they are able to act in concert when necessary. This is highly effective in both Home Educating and in refuting and repulsing attacks, as has been amply demonstrated by the spectacular results reflected in the children of Home Educators, and the state’s pathetic response to being put under a high powered microscope controlled by Home Educators.

Many Home Educators are working on this problem from every conceivable angle. They are not going to rest until this report is totally exposed for what it is, and it is thrown out in its entirety. They have been forced to do this in order to protect their families from the outrageous, unjustifiable and absurd recommendations of this report.

It is patently absurd that the staff of a department and the people associated with it can discriminate against and call an entire group of people unfit parents and accuse them of being child abusers, who must allow their children to be separated from them for arbitrary, humiliating and deeply suspicious inspections during a home invasion; only to withdraw into their dirty little shells when those very same offended and injured parents defend themselves vigorously by requesting the facts and using all their skills to expose the villains.

But then again, this is just about what we expect from these people who are The Cancer That Is Killing Britain.

Those Who Can’t Do, Teach, Those That Can’t Teach, Manage…

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Gavin Webb is a Libertarian Liberal Democrat councillor for Stoke and Trent Vale ward on Stoke-on-Trent City Council.

He has just written something that was sent to us, so lets look at it shall we?

Those who can, teach – like parents!

As a matter of principle, Liberal Democrats should support home educators in their opposition to Graham Badman’s recommendations in the Review of Elective Home Education in England. However, I fear the Party leadership will not do so.

That is because they have no principles, obviously.

Instead, it looks at though it will be seeking to find a ‘balance’ between the rights of parents to decide for themselves how best to educate their children, and the collective welfare of children as a whole.

Why am I so concerned that the Party may side with collectivism as opposed to defending individual rights? Upon seeking clarification on the Party’s policy on home education from Cowley Street’s policy boffs, and in particular on the Badman recommendations, I was reliably informed of the need to find that balance. In short, I was told the Party is generally supportive of the Badman recommendations.

Which is just what we expect from a party filled with irrational people.

I have several problems with siding with this subjective piece of rubbish. As a libertarian, I say the Party should not be endorsing coerced collectivism at all. Sure, if a group of parents want to voluntarily come together and register their children with the State and the evil database that is ContactPoint, then let them do so. I would say they are foolish in their choice but they should be free to do so nonetheless.

Parents should not be ‘free to register with ContactPoint’. That is completely absurd. If the government of TODAY says its voluntary, any future government could suddenly make it COMPULSORY. This is why we should never support totalitarian infrastructures being built in the first place; you may trust Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, but in the future, someone who you do not trust may take the reigns and do something dastardly with all that collected data. Also, for some parents to be able to use ContactPoint, the parents who do not want it will have their money stolen from them to pay for it by the state. The state should never put something like this together. If parents want to create and run their own private ContactPoint, that is another thing, but one designed and run by the state is always unacceptable to Libertarians. This is pretty basic stuff, how can you get it so very wrong AND support No2ID?

If however, parents decide they want nothing to do with the State, they too should be free to exercise their rights.

They should be free to live without interfacing with the state.

Under the Badman proposals home educators will not be permitted their rights.

They will have their rights stripped from them. They will not be free to exercise their rights.

They will be forced to register their children with their local education authority, and their children will be entered onto the ContactPoint register, and if parents’ standard or type of education doesn’t conform with that which is prescribed by the State – which most of us know to be crap – then the freedom to home educate their children will be denied them. Opposition to this is a matter of principle for all Liberal Democrats.

No, it is a matter of principle for all libertarians. Liberal Democrats HAVE NO PRINCIPLES except BAD ONES.

Of course, if a child is being abused – which, as an aside, government do-gooders have attempted to use as a justification for more regulation and control of home education – then that is another matter. No-one should be aggressed against contrary to their will. If there are victims of abuse, then the full weight of relevant laws should fall upon the aggressors.

Home Education has nothing to do with children at risk. The two should never be used in the same context, except to refute that vicious lie.

And the current laws and systems in place are more than adequate. In fact, in every one of the cases that the state trots out as pretexts for more control, the social services and police were fully aware of the families involved, were concerned and took no action. The fact of the matter is that they consistently fail to protect children; this is the message that is never propagated and brought to light. More powers will not help them improve their common sense. Putting ALL children into a database harms ALL children; it creates a needle-in-a-haystack scenario where people are looking into the affairs of perfectly innocent and ordinary people for no good reason.

If however a child is not receiving an ‘adequate’ education, this in itself should be no business of the State’s to resolve. Despite it being written in man-made Human Rights laws (that by the way also protect the State so should perhaps be referred to as Human and States’ Rights laws) the truth is that under natural law no-one has a right to education.

Agreed.

Yes, it would be nice if every single human being on this planet had access to not just a ’suitable’ education, but excellent education too; but I say this again, no-one has a ‘right’ to education. For if they had, the question is then what standard of education? Mediocre to poor? For that is the general standard delivered by the State to our children.

True.

If people want better than the State can provide, they should be able to opt out of State provision without fear of threat and hindrance from government and its agents. They should have unrestricted freedom to choose what they believe is best for their own kids because – and this is a fundamental point – the kids belong to the parents, not to society or government!

True!

Once bureaucrats gets involved and starts dictating the terms, quoting laws and targets, the already high standards that are achieved in most cases through home education – and indeed independent sector education – will be dragged down to State level.

True.

I hope the Party leadership sees sense and doesn’t allow the collectivist malaise undermine home educators’ freedoms, for if it does, it may as well ditch the word ‘Liberal’ and replace it with ‘Social’.

It is YOU that clearly have no place in the Liberal Democrat Party.

Are you a Libertarian, or are you a Liberal Democrat? How can you possibly remain a member of a party that explicitly wants to eradicate the rights of people to run their families as they choose?

You cannot serve two masters; you can either be FOR liberty or AGAINST it, and liberty is indivisible. Its like someone who is a member of the BNP saying on the one hand that they are FOR immigration but at the same time they are members of a party that is explicitly AGAINST immigration.

Gavin Webb’s council is going to run ContactPoint. Unless they say otherwise, he will be involved in the mass violation of children by working in a place that runs that system. I would like to see a written declaration that he is going to refuse to do any work that comes from, is in any way touched by ContactPoint.

When populations are being rounded up for ethnic cleansing, many people working in the apparatus simply got on with their jobs, even though they might not have agreed with what was happening. Every person who works at a council and who touches ContactPoint instantly becomes an accessory to the sale of children. By using that database, they are helping the contractors make money out of the children they have been paid to put into that database.

I do not immediately see a policy position on ContactPoint at Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s website but we do find this:

Elective Home Education

Information for Parents/Carers

The education of your child is a great responsibility, one that Stoke-on-Trent City Council takes very seriously. We have 93 schools across the city, catering for a wide range of needs and abilities. We are proud of the way they meet the challenges of an ever changing environment, whilst continuing to provide a rich diversity of experience for pupils of all ages.

It is a legal duty of parents/guardians to secure appropriate full-time education for their children. Most parents/guardians do this by ensuring that their child attends their local school. However, for a variety of reasons, a small number of them decide to take on the duty to educate their child themselves. In Stoke-on-Trent there are about 45 families educating their children at home, out of a total school population of over 32,063.

Educating at home is sometimes known as ‘Education Otherwise’, named after one of the independent charities set up to support such parents. More information about this charity can be found on the ‘Useful Contact and Links’ page.

Children should not be taken out of school simply because of a disagreement with the local school. There are many ways of solving such problems and talking to the Headteacher, or consulting with Children and Young People’s Services, will often resolve any difficulties. In Stoke-on-Trent, we will always make every effort to find a place at the most appropriate school for your child.

Home education is a major undertaking for a family. It will require serious amounts of time, patience and energy, and can have financial consequences.

[…]

http://www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/education/home-education/

It is not the place of Stoke-on-Trent City Council to ‘take seriously’ the education of children who they themselves admit, are ‘yours’. How many schools you have is irrelevant… and for that matter, lets take a peek inside one of the schools that you ARE responsible for:

Peer Support at Longton High School

Longton High School is a large comprehensive on top of a hill on a mostly council housing estate on the edge of Stoke-on- Trent. The building consists of a tall tower block and a maze of buildings on the ground floor.

The kinds of problems students face are racial and bullying problems such as harassment, name calling, violence and singling out occurring both in between lessons on the schools corridors, and during break and dinner. The school has had a few major racial disputes but mainly faced with minor disputes between students, which with the skills we have been taught through our training, we are confident to deal with.

[…]

Anti-Bullying Alliance

Uh huh, just as we thought, your schools are as bad as everyone else’s.

They then say that:

It is a legal duty of parents/guardians to secure appropriate full-time education for their children.

This is a LIE. The actual wording of the law is:

Duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age
The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—
(a)to his age, ability and aptitude, and
(b)to any special educational needs he may have,either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

As you can see, the word ‘appropriate’ is not there. What is or is not appropriate is the affair of the parent, not Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Also, as someone clever said on a blog, if a parent sends their child to a school that they know is not providing an efficient full-time education, are they not ‘in violation’, since it is the duty of the parent to ensure that their child receives such education? Or are they relieved of all responsibility under that section of the law should they hand their children over to the state?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm!

Educating at home is sometimes known as ‘Education Otherwise’

Say WHAT?

Children should not be taken out of school simply because of a disagreement with the local school.

Says who? It is precisely because of disagreements with the local school that children are removed from school.

Home education is a major undertaking for a family. It will require serious amounts of time, patience and energy, and can have financial consequences.

Having a family is ‘a major undertaking’ educating your children is a part of it. Raising a family requires serious amounts of time (whatever that means), patience and energy, which parents (especially women) have in abundance, and having a family costs money.

We know this.

Major digression there, but I just could not let it lie. I will leave you to splutter your tea over your keyboards at their useful contacts page and their outrageous FAQ, where you will find gems like:

What evidence will the Local Authority expect to receive?

Basically, we are satisfying ourselves that the education received by the chid is ‘efficient, suitable and full-time’, so the sort of evidence will be:

  • long and short-term planning;
  • possibly a weeks outline programme;
  • a diary of work covered; and
  • evidence of the child’s own work.
  • Often talking to the child will be important evidence

and

What does the law actually say about the parent’s duty?
A parents’ duty is actually defined under section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, which says:

“…to cause the child to receive efficient full-time education suitable to his/her age, ability and aptitude and to any special educational needs he/she may have either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.”

Unfortunately the words ‘efficient’ and ‘suitable’ are not defined. ‘Efficient’ is usually taken to mean that the activity achieves what it sets out to achieve, and it is ‘suitable’, if it prepares the child for life in our society and enables the child to fulfill their potential.

My emphasis on the last one.

We are now at the stage where everyone has to draw a line and say, “I am morally obligated to refuse to work with this.” Everyone has their limits and their pain threshold, however it is clear that unless people refuse to take a stand and refuse to assist this infernal machine, it will continue to gain momentum and end up turning us all into hamburger meat.

Its good to read words from people who are waking up; we must give credit where credit is due, every time. At the same time, illogic, inconsistency, errors of judgment etc have to be flagged, otherwise, people persist in believing nonsense. Im sure Gavin is a nice guy. Clearly he can think, and he is aware of what is going on to a great extent. What I cannot accept are inconsistencies that actually hurt people. By all means, everyone can believe what contradictory stuff they like. When it becomes a matter for concern is when those people have their hands on the levers of the machine.

FURTHERMORE

I updated and reinforced the section about parents who want ContactPoint being entitled to it.

Family structure to be defined by the state

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Yes, I typed that and thanks to Debs for the heads up.

Take a look at this:

Judge warns over family breakdowns

A senior judge has called for the creation of a national commission to tackle the “epidemic” of family breakdown.

More must be done to promote marriage, a senior judge has urged;

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, said the consequences of family break-up for the wider society are now so great it can no longer be treated as a purely private matter.

Action is needed, he said, to achieve a “fundamental change” in individual attitudes and behaviour to re-establish marriage as the “gold standard” for relationships.

The problems are so great that no one political party on its own could resolve them and only a national commission drawn from a wide constituency would have any any chance of success, he said.

Judge Coleridge sparked controversy last year when he said family relationships in Britain were in “meltdown”, likening the problem to a “cancer”.

In his speech to the Family Holiday Association at Westminster, he blamed unrealistic expectations about relationships for the extent of the disputes and breakdowns which “overwhelmed” the family courts.

“What, I hope in all humility, I am drawing attention to is the endless game of ‘musical relationships’, or ‘pass the partner’, in which such a significant portion of the population is engaged, in the endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship which will be attained, it is supposed, by landing on the right chair or unwrapping a new and more exciting parcel,” he said.

With many children growing up “scarred” by the effects of their parents’ break-ups, he said that it could no longer be seen as just a matter for the individuals involved.

“The fundamental change in individual attitude and behaviour that is required is in our assumption that the way in which we conduct our private lives in relation to both the production and parenting of children, or the break-up of a parental relationship, is a private matter which only affects the individuals directly concerned,” he said.

“Although, superficially, these are private issues, they become matters of public concern when they are happening on such a huge scale and affect detrimentally such a significant proportion of the population of all types and ages.”

[…]

Yahoo News

First of all, Marriage is not the business of the state. It is a purely private (and often religious) commitment that should not be regulated by, licensed by or interfered with by the state. The only cancer here is the government.

If you are a Catholic, and get married as a Catholic, then you cannot expect a divorce. The state should not be involved in marrying people (‘Civil marriages’) and were that the case, would not have any right to offer to dissolve marriages that it has not sanctified.

The very idea that the state can marry people is at the heart of this problem; the state is not God, or a replacement for a philosophy or religion. It is not a sanctioner of people’s commitment to each other. The idea that the state can act as a replacement for something that is private is what has caused the problems that this Judge is whining about.

The state has made it easy for people to get married and divorced. When people take advantage of these rules and regulations and the consequences are the destruction of the family (which pre dates the monolithic state) everyone reels back in horror. This Judge decries the ‘musical relationships’, and ‘pass the partner’, behavior of people today, yet it is the judiciary that facilitates this by sanctioning divorces on demand.

What is worse, they do not diagnose the problem correctly, and prescribe MORE STATE INTERFERENCE through commissions, the inevitable raft of consultations written by the worst possible, most inappropriate, monstrous creatures imaginable to be followed by guidelines and then legislation putting the state right into your business where it does not belong.

The state will define what a family is, outline precisely what each member of a family must do etc etc, and then they will have a whole army of apartchicks to inspect, tick box and monitor these state ordained model families.

Oh! so you don’t think it will come to that? You must be one of the delusional ‘It can never happen here’ people who never thought that Britain would try and outlaw Home Education.

I hope you are paying close enough attention to notice how this Judge says, “…the production and parenting of children“.

PRODUCTION, used in the same way that that word is applied to cars made in factories; this is the beginning of the defining of children as products that are the property of the state. Home Educators in the UK are starting to feel what this is like, with the looming and soon to be destroyed recommendations of Badman and Balls. What this judge is proposing will end in people having to apply to the state for a license to produce children, who will not have the same relationship to the mother and father as has been the case for thousands of years, but who will act as ‘carers’, provisionally, since the children will be the registered property of the state. You will nave no say in how your children should be brought up, taught, treated medically or anything else, and should your children become dissatisfied with your parenting, they will be able to seek a divorce from YOU.

The fundamental change that is needed here is not in individual attitudes, but in the role of the state in the private affairs of human beings. It is the courts and these Judges using the powers of the legislature that have caused these problems, not the individual, who only ever acts in her own interest.

Throughout all of this, the ‘primitive’ third world, that has retained its sanity throughout the twentieth century will have the benefits of strong families. As the west descends into total chaos and confusion on every fundamental level, dehumanized beyond all recognition, the people of the third world will sit back and watch while the populations of the west disappear up their own arseholes; there will be no one left to carry on their culture as it has all been legislated away, regulated away and relegated to history. Like the inbred members of dead aristocratic lines, British culture will disappear because it will have become fundamentally unhealthy, unnatural, ugly (no sane person from the third world would marry into a death culture like the one that is being engineered here), impotent, infertile and useless.

Unless they turn it around RIGHT NOW, starting with the reversal of the Home Education attack.

Finally and for the record, if we are going to have any sort of gold standard, it should be money that is 100% redeemable in gold coins.

The Post-Bureaucratic Age

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave everyone alone.

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

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

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

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

Evil unleashed: ContactPoint pilot goes live

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

ContactPoint, the pure evil paedophile directory invented by the monsters of New Labour and developed by Capgemini, has ‘gone live in a local authority pilot’.

The reprehensible and vile BBC News has a nauseating article, that has an inappropriate picture, and which trots out all the lies HMG want you to swallow unchallenged. Of course, you and I know better.

Since we have been through ContactPoint sufficiently, we can now turn to something fascinating that is related to ContactPoint tangentially.

This is an article, a dreadful article, from ‘CIO‘: “Business Technology Leadership”. This is from their ‘about’ page:

CIO is the leading information brand for today’s busy chief information officer. Available online at www.cio.co.uk and in print via our monthly magazine, CIO addresses issues vital to the success of chief information officers worldwide. CIO provides technology and business leaders with analysis and insight on information technology trends and a keen understanding of IT’s role in achieving business goals.

Ok…… if this is piece of writing is an example of what they describe above, it is no wonder that there are people out there who say things like:

The database is only intended to be accessed by professionals working with children, such as social workers, doctors and the police, and the government has said users cannot download the contents from ContactPoint.

That line was repeated in print, unchallenged by ‘Siobhan Chapman’ in Computerworld UK, who commits an unpardonable sin. Either this idiot is a paid liar for HMG, or she is computer illiterate, or completely immoral or as stupid as they come; whatever way you slice it, that she has written this article is deeply shameful and disgusting. That two magazines / websites that pretend to have expertise in IT can accept and reproduce a piece of writing like this that is clearly full of nonsense / propaganda makes them look bad and is absolutely astonishing.

Every schoolboy knows that it is IMPOSSIBLE to create a database system accessed by browsers that can prevent the users of the system from copying the entries. The fact that ContactPoint holds ‘minimal’ (more on that later) details makes it easier to copy entries, since they can all fit in a small space in the browser and can be copied with a single click of the mouse. And remember, we are talking about COPYING entries; to use the word ‘download’ is disingenuous. The point about the dangers of this database is that the entries can be copied, will always be copyable and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop copying, short of not having a database at all. It is very important that right now, some journalist puts up a bounty for a photograph of a ContactPoint entry to demonstrate that anyone can make a copy of a ContactPoint entry, and that those copies can be transmitted to anyone anywhere, and the idea that the entries are ‘not downloadable’ is purely farcical.

Now, lets get onto the insanity of Siobhan Chapman:

ContactPoint children’s database rolls out

Not so. It has not been ‘rolled out’ it is being piloted. This is important; it is easier to stop ContactPoint and the escape of all the data on the children living in Britain at this early stage. To imply that it is a fait accompli is to be on their side; the side of the paedophiles, child farmers and monsters.

System has been dogged with security faults

This is a magazine about IT. What on earth is a ‘security fault’? The people who write for this magazine should know that ContactPoint cannot be secured. They should know how databases work, how browsers work, how operating systems work, and they should have a good understanding of what data is. Someone who fits that bill would not use the phrase ‘security faults’ – it is meaningless.

A controversial database featuring the details of every child in England has become available to childcare professionals today.

Up to 800 social workers, head teachers and health officials will be able to use the new system, called ContactPoint, as it begins its national roll-out in the north west. Eventually, the system will be rolled out across the country.

This is underplaying the horror of ContactPoint. We know that over 300,000 ‘professionals’ will have access to it. To say that 800 people have access makes it sound like only a carefully selected few will have access to it, when it fact, a million people will have access. The implications of this have been discussed on BLOGDIAL, at length.

The system, which cost an estimated £224m has been dogged with data security fears and has been delayed twice due to faults.

Once again, this is a magazine for IT professionals; what were the ‘faults’ that you are writing about? And as for ‘dogged with data security fears’ have the people who created ContactPoint changed the nature of the universe and solved the problem of the security of the data on this database? If you are competent, you should know that it is impossible for them to secure ContactPoint. These are not ‘fears’ they are FACTS.

ContactPoint has also come under heavy criticism from civil libertarians. A report written by information policy experts at Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust described the database as “almost certainly illegal”, and warned that storing information leads to vulnerable people, such as young black men, single parents and children, being victimised.

If it is illegal, a legal challenge should be mounted immediately. I have £100 to contribute right now to the fighting fund.

In 2007, Deloitte and Touche said in a report that the project could never be totally secure.

And what is the opinion of Siobhan Chapman? How is it that CIO has no opinion on this dastardly database? How can a magazine like this not lambast ContactPoint? Do these idiots not have families of their own? It beggars belief. They are busy talking about greening their CIO activities as a part of corporate citizenship, but do not attack ContactPoint, which is pure evil and a clear and present danger. Absolutely pathetic.

In March, the launch was delayed after a fault sometimes exposed the information of vulnerable children, including victims of domestic violence and those in witness protection schemes.

This is nonsense. All the children on ContactPoint are vulnerable by virtue of being on the database. Since every entry on it can be copied, the system exposes all children’s information by default, no matter who they are. There are few things more annoying than a person without brains writing about something like this.

Think about it; if all the people who access ContactPoint are trusted, then how can it be a bad thing that the details of ‘vulnerable children’ are exposed to them? Surely these people, being good, can do no harm by seeing the details of ‘vulnerable children’?

The truth of this statement is that the details of the children of the rich and famous was found to be not hidden from the users of the system, meaning that curious ContactPoint users would be able to look up the details of people who have had their details ‘shielded’. If it is necessary for the rich and famous to be shielded because of harm from the supposedly trusted users of ContactPoint, how is it that the children of everyone else are safe from these trusted users? The whole thing doesn’t make any sense!

But Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary (pictured) said there has been “important and careful work” to build ContactPoint over the past four months.

Including lines from Ed Balls is…..balls.

No matter what this aparatchick says, ContactPoint is immoral and a danger to children. To repeat his words is give credence to the logic of a paedophile violator who would sell the children of Britain to a company for money.

“If we are to do our best to make sure children are protected and that no child slips through the net, then it’s crucial the right agencies are involved at the right time and get even better at sharing information,” said Balls.

This is utter garbage. To protect children, just like the children of the rich and famous, ContactPoint must be dismantled. The children of the rich and famous are vulnerable by virtue of being on the database, that means that ALL children are vulnerable by default.

Also, all of the recent cases involving abuse, like the ‘Baby P’ case were known about by social workers in detail, and yet, in each case, the worst possible outcome was the result. This database will not prevent people from being hurt, will not stop criminals from committing crime and will do nothing but violate people on an unprecedented scale, and put children at risk.

“ContactPoint is vital for this because it will enable frontline professionals to see quickly and easily who else is in contact with a child.”

Once again, total drivel, and of course, unchallenged by Siobhan Chapman, who lets this monster get away with lying in an article under her name. Absolutely horrible collaboration with evil. There is no need whatsoever to put EVERY child in the country in a database because an extremely small number of children are at risk. The common sense thing to do would be to put only those children on a list of vulnerable children not every child by default. Even then, since the state has insane ideas about who and who is not at risk (gypsies being regularly targeted for abuse from the Local Authorities) you would regularly get children put onto ‘ContactPoint 2.0’ because Local Authorities are staffed by racists. ContactPoint is a bad idea, plain and simple.

It has been welcomed by children’s charities and organisations, including Barnardo’s, KIDS and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. Martin Narey, chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said it “would make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services”.

And so what? Barnardo’s is not a part of government, and will not even have access to ContactPoint; who cares what they think? Martin Narey is an imbecile, clearly. Since when does the opinions of imbeciles justify the violation of millions of children? Once again, Siobhan fails to challenge this by asking the obvious question; HOW is ContactPoint going to, “make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services?”. He is bullshitting of course, as is Ed Balls, and you let them get away with it Siobhan. SHAME ON YOU.

ContactPoint, built by Capgemini, is described as an “online tool” that holds “minimal” identifying information of around 11 million under 18 year olds in England, including names, addresses, dates of birth, gender and contact details for parents or carers. Each child is also given a unique identifying number, as well as contact details for the child’s school, GP practices and any other practitioner services involved.

This is incredible. To describe the information as ‘minimal’ is an abuse of the English language. There is enough information on ContactPoint to UNIQUELY identify the parents and children of all families in Britain. There is nothing ‘minimal’ about that at all, in fact, it is quite the opposite. It is more than the Nazis had when the rounded up undesirables with the help of IBM. A tatooed number on your arm is ‘minimal information’ is it not? After all, its ‘just a number’. Of course, we cannot rely on the likes of Siobhan or the anonymous propaganda repeaters at the BBC to tell us this!

The database is only intended to be accessed by professionals working with children, such as social workers, doctors and the police, and the government has said users cannot download the contents from ContactPoint.

CIO

This article appears in two different magazines, with the same unchallenged garbage. The editors of both publications failed to stop this propaganda from hijacking their platforms. This is what we call a ‘lapse of standards’.

We can only hope that a legal challenge is forthcoming, or a Tory victory and the scrapping of this, the NIR, and ID Cards; preferably all of them, all at once. One thing is for sure; with ‘people’ like Siobhan Chapman and the inexcusably inept rags she writes in propping up the propaganda, the task of getting the fact out in the public is made that much harder. We expect nothing but evil from the BBC, so that is par for the course. Thanks you jackasses.

Anyone who boosted ContactPoint, who let propaganda for it pass by them unchallenged, who coded for it, argued for it, made excuses for it, allowed data to leave their office to enter it; everyone who helped make this happen is going to BURN IN HELL for what they have done. It is inexcusable, unforgivable and totally horrible. Any council worker who touches it, trains people for it or even makes a single telephone call where the number came from it, is also going straight to the lake of fire, where they will join the concentration camp runners, PW Botha and all the other villains of history.

ContactPoint is a particularly nasty thing because it uses children it farms children for money; there is no other way to describe it. The company that developed it, Capgemini, has become the greatest abuser of children in the history of the world, along with the government that commissioned it. They are making money out of children; they will have priced for the work they did based on the size of the database, i.e. the number of children it records; they were paid per child. This is a sin in every culture in the world. How these people can sleep at night is beyond me, and the irony is clearly lost on them that they are using children to make money and justifying it by saying that the act of using ALL the children in the UK to make money is going to stop the abuse of children.

You can’t make stuff like this up…. and these days, you don’t have to. That is the problem; every dystopian nightmare is trying to come true right before our eyes.

Finally, do not suffer under the illusion that just because they have put all the pieces in place that ContactPoint cannot be completely dismantled. It CAN be dismantled, and all the data erased. The DNA database climb-down is the most recent demonstration of what it looks like when HMG is forced to stop doing evil. Not only should all the data be erased, but it should be illegal for anyone in government to create a database of children that is accessible to people outside of a council. Capgemini can keep their fee. That money will condemn them forever.

Think about it; under what circumstances would a council need to keep a database of all children in its ward? The schoolmasters know how many places there are and who is applying for places, the doctors know who is on their (preferably paper) records and do not need to be served by a database run by the council or central government; for decades everyone has done without this ‘service’, so why should the privacy and dignity of families be violated in this way? The general census provides enough data for planning, so why do they need to do this? For ‘efficiency’? If that is the criteria, then why not take all children from their parents at birth and house them in a central Kibbutz, where efficiency is absolutely maximized? I’m sure that this idea appeals to the New Labour monsters, but most normal people would reject it outright.

Efficiency is not everything and certainly people should not be violated to provide the state with greater efficiency. Inefficient systems that protect people and their dignity are infinitely preferable to efficient systems that violate people. That is why a doctor’s office that runs on paper, even though it may be less efficient than a doctor’s office that runs on databases, is far preferable than the latter. Paper is private. Paper is decent. Paper protects the sacred oath of confidentiality that all doctors pledge. That it takes more time to organize the information of a patient in a ‘paper practice’ is NOTHING compared to the loss of confidentiality, and as we have seen with ContactPoint, there are unintended consequences to ‘modernization’, like the automated uploading of confidential patient records to the NHS Spine, the elimination of prescription privacy and everything else that flows from the availability of digital information.

Unintended consequences lead to what we call ‘feature creep’. We see that ContactPoint is going to be used to see who is and who is not ‘fully recorded’. The ‘minimal information’ that is supposed to re-assure everyone that ContactPoint is benign is actually extremely intrusive. For example, by keeping a list of what doctor you have, should there be a blank in the ‘GP’ field, (because your child has never needed to see a doctor for example) a Local Authority worker will immediately say that you are an abuser because your child does not appear to have a GP. And make no mistake, ContactPoint will allow the Local Authority to print a list of all children who have missing fields; that means children not registered with a GP, children who are not registered at a school, etc etc.

At the very least, the Local Authority will generate automated letters to all the parents from these records. That means that millions of letters generated from ContactPoint will be in the post, presumably with the child’s unique identifying number. As we saw before with the stolen child benefit DVDRs, the letters that were sent out to apologize to parents ended up being sent to wrong addresses, exposing the private information of families to strangers.

This is the sort of nonsense, and worse, that we can expect should ContactPoint be allowed to go live.

ContactPoint must be scrapped and the data permanently deleted. Nothing like this must ever be attempted again. There is no justification for it by any stretch of the imagination, an you should do everything in your power not to be touched by it. It is pure evil, a recipe for multiple disasters and for sure, a child is going to die as a result of this database.