There is a very exiting new service online called ToS;DR ‘Terms of Service; Didn’t Read’. With it, companies offering services over the web have their TOS pages parsed and line items rated.

Here is an example of some of their rated services:

GitHub Class B
↑ Changes can happen any time, even without notice
↓ Your personal information is used for limited purposes
→ GitHub requires cookies
→ Choice of law: California
↑ Your account can be suspended and your data deleted any time for any reason
↓ You don’t grant any copyright license to github
↑ You must provide your legal name
↑ You shall defend and indemnify GitHub
↓ GitHub will notifiy you before transfering your information in event of merger or acquisition
↓ Transparent security practices

Delicious Class D
↑ Only for personal and non-commercial use
x No Right to leave the service
↑ Your content can be exploited
↑ Non-transparent use of cookies and third party ads
↑ Your personal information are an asset for business transfers
↑ Third Parties

Twitpic Class E
↑ Reduction of legal period for cause of action
↑ Your content is for Twitpic and their partners
x Deleted images are not really deleted
→ Jurisdiction in Delaware
↑ You indemnify Twitpic from any claim related to your content
x Twitpic takes credit for your content

Those familiar with Libertarianism and BLOGDIAL can guess what we are going to say about this.

First of all, the people who run this service do not know what rights are. In the Delicious entry for example, they say that users have ‘No Right to leave the service’. There is no such thing as a ‘right to leave a service’; you may have have the power to leave a service and to stop using it, but not a ‘right’.

The promises made to you under contract on a website are a private matter of contract between you and the people or company that owns that site. If they give you the power to delete your account, that is a good thing, but you have no right to other people’s property, and no right to force them to offer you a service on any particular terms.

The difference between a right and a power is an extremely important one because (separate from mistaking a right for a power being entirely wrong) when you assert that someone has a right to something, the next step is that the violent State is called in to force people to do what they would rather not do, like force websites to offer an opt out on cookies.

Lets go through these bad entries one by one:

Github:

“Changes can happen at any time, even without notice”
Github is a privately owned website. The people who run it have the absolute right to change anything at any time. If you do not like it, do not use it and go and create your own web service based on Git.

GitHub is not lying to its users. It tells you in advance what it is going to do with the data you store there. They are completely free of evil in this respect. They are responding to the needs of their users at a very high standard. This is why they are hugely popular, and why they come to the attention of people who want to attack them.

You must provide your legal name
I absolutely loathe sites that require your legal name. I closed our account at Quora and deleted all of our thoughtful answers there because Quora admin demanded that we use real names and not the user name ‘Irdial’. Nevertheless, the position on this is clear; Quora owns their servers and service, and I have no right to demand anything from them. It is up to me to either change my user name or quit the service. The same goes for GitHub. If you do not like their ‘Real Names’ policy, do not use GitHub.

You shall defend and indemnify GitHub
Once again, if you do not want to defend and indemnify GitHub, do not use their service. Also, try and think about it from their point of view; if some user ‘steals’ source from somewhere and posts it on GitHub, this exposes the owners of the service to the possibility of an infringement lawsuit and crippling damages. In order to protect themselves from this, they need to add this language to protect themselves from stupid or malicious users. This is perfectly reasonable and logical, and is in no way an attack on GitHub users.

Conclusion
There is nothing in the GitHub TOS that is unreasonable. They are open about what they are doing, and provide an extremely useful service that you do not even have to own an account on to be able to pull some source. They, as the property owners of the service, can operate it under any terms that they like.

Delicious:

Only for personal and non-commercial use
Non commercial use restrictions make perfect sense; they have to find a way to monetize the service. If you don’t like it, store your bookmarks elsewhere, like in your browser.

No Right to leave the service
There is no such thing as a ‘right to leave the service’, and if you delete all of your entries, that is the same as leaving, and you can do that. Once again, use the word ‘rights’ correctly and understand property rights. Every item where this fallacious ‘Right to leave the service’ is listed as a defect in a TOS, ToS;DR is in grave error.

Your content can be exploited
What does ‘exploited’ mean? This service is out to make a profit. If you are socialist, and do not believe that people or companies should make a profit, that’s fine, but you cannot force other people to live by your standards or contract under terms that are not acceptable to them, and it is dishonest to condemn or vote a site’s TOS down due to this. And again, if they tell you in advance that they are going to use your bookmarks to make money, you can choose not to use their site and service. Some people take this bargain and accept it as the price of using the service. There is nothing inherently wrong in this.

Non-transparent use of cookies and third party ads
The browser running on your computer can be set to refuse cookies. It is up to you to make this setting, and to refuse to accept cookies from sites. You do not need the State or anyone to hold your hand like a child, and if you do, that is your problem, not the problem of Delicious. Caution must be the default on the web.

Your personal information are an asset for business transfers
Once again, business as a practice is not in and of itself unethical, and if you believe so, that is a personal prejudice that you should keep to yourself, if you want to remain objective. Business is not harmful!

Third Parties
With tea and cake presumably.

Twitpic:

Reduction of legal period for cause of action
Twitpic needs to do this to protect themselves from Ambulance Chasers and hostile collectivist users who like Class Action Lawsuits. If they do not have this clause, the service will be attacked for sure. There is no standard legal period for a cause of action, and in jurisdictions where there is, there should not be. Its up to you to either accept or reject these terms.

Your content is for Twitpic and their partners
They need to find a way to monetize the content on their service, otherwise it will cease to exist. This is entirely reasonable, and you have advance warning that they are going to do this.

Deleted images are not really deleted
Once you upload your pics to their service, they can do with them what they like under the terms of service. It they are lying about deleting photos, this is fraud, and they should not do that. This is a correctly flagged item, of the kind this site should focus on.

You indemnify Twitpic from any claim related to your content
Same as for Delicious. Content in a copyright world can be a hostile trojan horse, and they need to protect themselves. If you really want to make these clauses redundant, advocate for the end of the State.

Twitpic takes credit for your content
If you give your content to Twitpic under terms that say they will own your pics after you upload them, this is an explicit contract. IF they do so without telling you explicitly they are going to do this, once again, this is fraud, or ‘passing off’; its illegal and immoral. Once again, this is a true example of a correctly flagged flaw.

This is a great idea for a service clarifying and distilling TOSes for the masses, but there are some problems with the thinking behind the categorisations and descriptions of the problems described in each TOS where a fault is found.

Some faults are not faults at all, but simply terms of service designed to protect the service owners, and others are actual flaws. A clear set of ethical standards needs to be applied to each TOS, one that is free of bias.

It would be interesting to write a plugin that flags up TOS flaws or changes on every site you visit, so that as you surf the web, you are alerted to potential offences against your sensibilities.

On sites where you already have an account, where the TOS has changed, you could be alerted that this has happened for you to review. Im sure someone has already though about this.

If these people want to really help both users and the sites they visit, they need to think hard about their assumptions on the basic parts of this idea; who owns websites, what are rights, what obligations do sites have to users of their services? All of the answers to this can be found in ‘For a New Liberty‘ which spells out very clearly in simple language, everything you need to know when writing your TOS.

From BLOGDIAL, “The answer comes before the question” January 13th, 2009

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1517

[…]

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

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

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

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

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

[…]

Now look at the attached video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

The ceramics galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum are a real pleasure.

John Pilger has an article at Lew Rockwell, saying that Tony Blair “must be prosecuted”. Anyone that has an interest in permanently stopping the war machine and ending the state knows that prosecuting Blair, as satisfying as that event might be, will do nothing to stop the war machine and its murderous intentions towards Iran.

Lets do it.

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson.

I for one, am sick and tired of the soap opera of political personalities and the writers who promote it by talking about it. It hasn’t done anything to stop the war machine in the past, and it will not going forward. This sort of thinking distracts from getting to the solution, as people vent all their energy on hating a single individual instead of the war machine itself.

There are an unlimited supply of Blairs waiting to fill his shoes. Anything other than an idea to stop the next Blair from taking the levers of the war machine in his hands is a waste of time.

Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now consider Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenseless country, which the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the “paramount war crime.” This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.

I could not care less about how much money Blair makes from his memoirs. If the price of stopping the war machine for all time is that Blair becomes a multi billionaire, so be it.

This is nothing more than jealousy politics wrapped in a cloak of moral outrage over the genocide committed by Blair. Once again, this is a complete distraction from what sensible people should be thinking about; the next ‘Blair’ and Iran.

People like Pilger, by failing to get to the solution and distracting everyone with his brilliantly crafted exposés is actually a part of the problem. Like Tony Benn and StopWar, these people are not spreading the solution; they are diffusing the anger of the vast majority who are sick of war and want a stop put to it.

In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter “liberated” by the British) are now revealed as higher than those at Hiroshima. “UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,” the Defense Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic “antipersonnel” weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and American forces.

We know all of this, and all of it is now irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is the next war and how it is to be stopped. Nothing can be done to de-poison Iraq, and an eloquent recital of the crimes committed there will do nothing to stop the attack on Iran. We know this, because similar writing was done before the Iraq colonisation for decades; from Agent Orange on the crimes of the war machine have been carefully documented and exposed. More exposure will not stop the next outrage. John Pilger, who is deeply experienced in all of this, knows this perfectly.

Such carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed. On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, “We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq ….” Last month, the former head of the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot inquiry, “There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad.” Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, “Substantially.”

Once again, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

The bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s actions.

Only in the sense that he personally ordered it to happen. Are you shocked by that accusation? You need to watch this documentary.

Documents released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the “best way” to ensure UK nationals were “securely held.”

So what? Blair is out of office and Labour are not in government. What do you have to say about what is happening NOW and what is being planned NOW? And is what you say going to make any difference? These are the questions that need to be asked; these are the points that need to be made, not all of this emotion stoking garbage.

Instead of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed.

Once again, who cares if Blair shows remorse? Will that bring back the dead, or clean up the mess he left behind? Will it stop Iran from suffering the same fate? Of course it will not; Pilger (an author himeself) only cares about how much money Blair is making through his lucrative publishing deals, “I do not murder anyone and I cannot sell the number of books Blair does. I am telling the truth, history is on my side, I have the moral high ground, why can I not sell as many books as a mass murderer? ITS NOT FAIR!”.

Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated an estimated £20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with the Bush administration. The House of Commons Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets £2 million a year “advising” the American investment bank J P Morgan and undisclosed sums from financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.

More jealousy, more nonsense, all of it irrelevant to the next act of mass murder and none of it able to bring back a single life.

In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s “peace envoy” in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which awarded him a $1 million “peace prize.” In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W. Bush, the bloodbath in Iraq.

No mention of BDS which is the best way of making people change their ways. Why not? This article is a complete waste of time!

His collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed “justice secretary,” suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband, sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran as the next “threat.”

So, what should be DONE about the personalities who are about to step into the cockpit of the war machine? We know they are all for mass murder, no matter what their names are. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soap opera!

Journalists who once fawned on Blair as “mystical” and amplified his vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along.

And if they were critics all along, what difference would that have made? None whatsoever.

As for the media’s gulling of the public, only the Observer’s David Rose, to his great credit, has apologized. The WikiLeaks’ exposés, released with a moral objective of truth with justice, have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism. Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in Blair’s rejuvenation of “enlightened” imperialism, remain silent on the “moral truancy,” as Pankaj Mishra wrote, “of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary world.”

All of this, except the Wikileaks exposé is irrelevant.

Apologies are irrelevant.
Journalists are irrelevant.
Historians are irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is what is going to happen next, and how it can be stopped. If it is true that the majority do not want more war, then war can be stopped. The massive march against the Iraq invasion showed that there are literally tens of millions of people in the UK alone who do not want any more war. The question is, what can they do (or more likely refrain from doing) to stop it.

We know that marching again would be totally pointless, and that for every one of the two million people who marched on that day, there were probably five people who would have gone but who did not make it. We wrote about this before.

Something oblique, unexpected, unstoppable, simple and effective needs to be unleashed. That is the only way an attack on Iran will be stopped. What is for sure is that this strategy will never come from a journalist or a historian.

Wikileaks has demonstrated that it is possible to damage the war machine. So effective is its operation, run by a handful of people with almost no money at all, that there have been open calls for its public face to be assassinated.

That is what we need; a harnessing of all the tools we have to hand to make it impossible for the war machine to operate. Wikileaks does what it does without marching, demonstrating, picketing or any of the other now discredited 20th Century methods of changing the world.

Even in the face of this revolution, the Pilgers of this world keep harping on like its 1999.

Is it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron government understands the “threat” of a law that makes Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger, who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the care of a fugitive.

If Blair is collared, then what? All of the above still applies, and if Kissinger is a war criminal, and you compare Blair to Kissinger, then Blair has a long life of influence and wealth ahead of him, no matter what you say or write.

Two recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a “crime committed by a political or military leader which by its character, gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United Nations] Charter.” International lawyers described this as a “giant leap.” Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute that created the court and is bound by its decisions.

But not retroactively, and its over broad, as what is or is not a ‘crime’ is open to debate (dumping the dollar might be construed as an act that in its character, gravity and scale could be construed as a ‘crime’ by some). Statists want more state power knowing (or not) that this leads to more war, more aggression as people are forced to conform to artificial ‘norms of society’.

On 21 July, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing at the Commons despatch box, declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. For all the later “clarification” that he was speaking personally, he had made “a statement that the international court would be interested in,” said Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London.

I have a new phrase to describe Pilger, StopWar and all the other well meaning statists who incessantly whine about the war machine without offering any solutions ‘The Cathartics‘. I like it!

The Cathartics grasp onto any word or slip of the tongue and then scream and shout about it like it means something when it means precisely nothing. The House of Commons is the one of the centre stages of the soap opera, and Pilger quoting lines from its script is no better than a scarf wearing washer woman recounting what happened on Coronation street last night as if it were real.

Tony Blair came from Britain’s upper middle classes who, having rejoiced in his unctuous ascendancy, might now reflect on the principles of right and wrong they require of their own children. The suffering of the children of Iraq will remain a specter haunting Britain while Blair remains free to profit.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger86.1.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Blair, reflecting on what he did means nothing. What Pilger actually means is he should feel ashamed of making so much money out of his publishing deal and post PM contracts. Get over it Pilger; Blair lining his pockets is not the problem.

As for the principles of right and wrong he requires of his own children, that is an entirely personal matter that is also, not the problem, and I guarantee you that Blair is not haunted in any way by what he did. He believes that what he did was of benefit in the long run, and nothing you can say will change that. Finally, venting jealousy is a poor substitute for a solution to the end of the war machine.

What a total waste of time; Lew Rockwell, one of the biggest websites in the world, where articles are not only read but copied, re-posted and emailed by the millions; a platform of extraordinary reach, has been used by this man to spew a completely pointless jealous rage piece, repeating what everyone already knows about Iraq, singularly failing to mention even a single possible solution to the next war crime. Even offering a bad solution would be better than nothing. Not a single hyperlink to any resource that could help stop the possible attack on Iran… but there is a link to Amazon so you can buy his book.

If the attack on Iran is to be stopped, do not look to John Pilger for an answer. It will emerge from the internets via social networks, and then, all of a sudden, the war machine will be shut down.

What we are waiting for is a text; a small piece of writing containing the very simple instructions that everyone needs to follow to bring down the machine. The idea is coalescing in the mind of someone somewhere, and soon, it will arrive in your inbox, or in your timeline and it will hit you with its simplicity and its beauty. You will commit to doing it and you will forward it to all your friends and re-tweet it, and the machine will die on that day.

PRICELESS!

The Libertarian Party Manifesto is the only party manifesto that has an extensive section dedicated to Home Education. You should read it, so see what the other parties should have included in their documents.

Home Education

The Party will dismantle barriers to Elective Home Education, including the repeal of new measures being planned by other parties in or out of government.

Although the Party will be implementing a Voucher System roughly along the lines implemented in Sweden[1], this will not mirror any clamp-down or coercive programme directed towards Home Educators that exists there. One of the cornerstones for us as a Party is to dismantle monopolies, not remove one only to replace it with another.

This raises important issues in regards to the funding of Home Education. We need to strike a balance between preserving the freedom of parents and children with that of Taxpayers, who, we must never forget, are being coerced and forced to fund government spending on pain of imprisonment.

On the one hand parents may wish to be free from any State control, while Taxpayers have a right to expect the State to spend their taxes prudently. The nub is “prudently”, as it immediately becomes a value judgment and a collectivised one at that.

Our position is that we would not prevent people Home Educating, nor would be demand any kind of “notification” across the board, which can rapidly become a Trojan Horse for State control[2].

However, should the Educator request that the taxpayer fund such education – take the State’s Shilling as it were – there would need to be evidence that the funding was in fact delivering an education [3]. It is

unreasonable for anyone to demand no strings funding from the Taxpayer and we feel that genuine Home Educators will understand this point completely.

In exchange for Taxpayer funding we would expect, in almost all cases[4], improvements in literacy and numeracy over time, where literacy is one of reading, writing, comprehension and critical reasoning. We are not interested in curriculum specifics and to be so would be irrational – one of the reasons some choose Home Education is due to their rejection of a centrally controlled and imposed curriculum, regardless of if that centre is National, County, City, Borough or even Parish[5].

Should even this be unacceptable to some Home Educators, they will always be at liberty to decline the funding and its attendant measurements for a period of time or throughout. Our Policy will not demand “all or nothing”, “now or forever not” or “once and forever more” conditionality upon the funding, which would be coercive, in our view, and may distort decision-making.

In summary, it is not unreasonable to expect that Taxpayer funded spending come with strings attached, but that one shall be free to decline the funding and, consequently, the strings. Educational funding is no exception.

[1] This differs from the Conservative Party approach, which still retains central control, commissioning, granting and approval powers. Fake, in other words.

[2] The idea of notification has been touted by others, including the Liberal Democrats:

The unasked question: is the “present job” of the Local Authority necessary, correct or beneficial? What is also ironic is that there are cases where the education of children by the Local Authority in schools is “of poor quality or non existent” and that is sometimes the motivation for Parents or Guardians to embark on Home Education in the first place. The problem with notification is that it rapidly becomes registration then an approval process – “granted until refused” then “refused until granted” – backed by monitoring, box ticking, targets, curricula and logistics such as teaching environment. The conceit of many that the State “owns” children, “knows best” or they need to be tagged/tracked like livestock is not lost on the Libertarian Party. We reject such self-serving notions.

[3] Blank cheques will create all manner of unintended consequences when one considers that a child might “yield” £’000’s pa in cash each year for a parent.

[4] In some cases this might not apply due to the particular child and this must be taken into account.

[5] It is important to remember that under the Libertarian Party approach to a Voucher System with its removal of barriers to the formation of educational establishments and micromanaging thereof, Educators will be free to form their own arrangements including whatever level of cooperation they are comfortable with, up to and including no longer being “Home” Educators once educational establishments form that meet their needs or forming such themselves.

[…]

http://lpuk.org/

Here it is:

Chris Mounsey is right in what he thinks of course (except his views on copyright!), and all reasonable, rational people understand that he is free to use whatever language he wants on his blog, which is his personal property.

The entire English language is at his disposal to use in whatever way he sees fit. In my humble opinion, using expletives in a blog post is less offensive than mass murder and all the other revolting crimes of the state, or journalists who write pieces to excuse those crimes, or newspaper editors whose only purpose is to reinforce the system that makes mass murder possible.

Chris Mounsey is a free thinker. It is a badge of honour to be ridiculed by the likes of Andrew Neil:

Resistance to Liberty
We can now see that the rapid growth of the libertarian movement and the Libertarian party in the 1970s is firmly rooted in what Bernard Bailyn called this powerful “permanent legacy” of the American Revolution. But if this legacy is so vital to the American tradition, what went wrong? Why the need now for a new libertarian movement to arise to reclaim the American dream?

To begin to answer this question, we must first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests — the ruling classes — who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies.

[…]

In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.” Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of religion. It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between Church and State; the Church informed its deluded charges that the king ruled by divine command and therefore must be obeyed; in return, the king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church and State. The new liberal world was a world in which intellectuals could be secular — could make a living on their own, in the market, apart from State subvention.

To establish their new statist order, their neomercantilist corporate State, the new conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between intellectual and State. In an increasingly secular age, this meant with secular intellectuals rather than with divines: specifically, with the new breed of professors, Ph.D.’s, historians, teachers, and technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians, and engineers. This reforged alliance came in two parts. In the early nineteenth century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy. By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship the nation-state and its war-making machine. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism adopted the trappings of reason and of “science.” Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of society by technocratic “experts.” In exchange for spreading this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals was rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the New Order and as planners and regulators of the newly cartelized economy and society.

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

Rock on Chris Mounsey, and next time, bring your army with you!

For many years, pro-lifers have expended vast time, energy, and money “marching on Washington” every January, to exactly zero effect. Worse, they hark back to pro-redistribution events. And always, as with the latest 9/12 extravaganza headed by red-state fascists, the marchers assemble on the “National Mall,” the government grass that extends from Lincoln’s Roman temple — where he sits enthroned like Jupiter, fasces and all — to George Washington’s obelisk, an Eqyptian monument to the god Amon Re. In the distance is the capitol, whose dome copies the Roman pantheon, temple to all the gods. In the top of the dome is a painting of Washington being assumed, like the divinized Julius Caesar, into Heaven upon his death. Even Jefferson is portrayed as a god in a Roman temple. Not far away is the the Greek temple where the nine supremes hand down the “law.” Then there is the vast executive apparatus, headed by a living god, and dedicated to killing, spying, taxing, redistributing, inflating, and controlling. Really, DC is one nasty place. So why would anyone concerned about the state and its power “march on Washington”? Such events only dissipate energy, and fool people into thinking that their time and money have accomplished something, as the regime laughs up its sleeve. Indeed, that is the purpose. So stay home. Read, write, work, organize, and avoid DC like the plague it is.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/35963.html

And of course, we have been saying this for years; demonstrations DO NOT WORK the people who call for them are either useful idiots or agents of the enemy or deeply misguided. It would have been far more effective if each of those demonstrators in their unprecedented numbers all stayed home and convinced ten other people that they would no longer cooperate with any dictate of the state, no matter what it was. That would be thirty million motivated people all detached from the system. And if each of those thirty million pledged to connect with and convince five more to disconnect, then that would be ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE.

It would mean the end of the state in a single week.

Take a look at this:

Now that the demonstration is over and millions of dollars have been spent venting, what will change? EXACTLY NOTHING. It would have been far better for each of these demonstrators to pool their money into an information campaign designed to get 150,000,000 people to decline to obey any Federal Law. Do the math yourself:

264+409 = $673 for each demonstrator on average.

Three million is the starting number (two million turned up with one million who could not make it but who were there in spirit)

that means

3,000,000*673 = $2,019,000,000

The math doesn't lie. That is two billion, nineteen million dollars.

That much money, could change america overnight. Instead, it was all wasted on a feel good fest that will achieve nothing.

The problem with these people is that they cannot comprehend the scale of the power they wield. The Federal Government, the US army, the police; none of those things are powerful enough to stop them from being free. All they have to do is understand this, and then ACT on this understanding, and by ACT I mean DO NOT ACT. Their illusory 'power' will blow away like cobwebs.

One thing is for sure, spending over a billion dollars on a demonstration is TOTAL INSANITY.

But you know this!

BLOGDIAL readers know that we are for a general and permanent boycott of everything related to the police state and its apparatus (ID Cards, ContactPoint NIR, CCTV etc). In this General Boycott Everything that touches them is ‘tainted’, so if someone contacts you because they got your details from ContactPoint, those communications are tainted, and so should be ignored. Any request to show ID for purchases should likewise result in ‘NO SALE’.

Academics are taking exactly this stance within their own field:

Academics boycott visa ‘snooping’
University academics say they will boycott new visa rules for overseas students that would make them into “immigration snoopers”.

Delegates at the University and College Union’s annual conference said they did not want to become a branch of the UK Border Agency.

This is absolutely excellent. We have said many times that the state cannot run the police state by itself; they do not have the resources. They need business and the people themselvs to run it. This is why all professionals should pledge not to become proxy aparatchicks; everyone must reject the Zero Trust Society if we are to avoid the creation of a hideous STASI style state where everyone is spying and tattling on everyone else.

Under the new rules universities are expected to monitor whether overseas students really attend their courses.

The Home Office said such things were part of their normal duty of care.

Once again, this is a BBC News article by an unnamed author, quoting unnamed spokespersons; you cant make stuff like this up. Voices from nowhere, unaccountable and untraceable, issue commands from secret offices that everyone is expected to read and obey without question. Yet another example of the BBC News website acting as a propaganda repeater. Absolutely disgusting and transparent.

And Neu Labour cannot understand why they are about to be flushed down the toilet in the upcoming EU and local authority polls.

More on the ‘part of their normal duty of care’ below.

Institutions must also report concerns that a student could be involved in terrorism.

This is not the job of teachers.

In a debate at the conference, in Bournemouth, delegates argued that the rules would place a strain on the relationship between staff and students from outside the European Union.

‘Pernicious’

General secretary Sally Hunt said: “UCU members are educators not border guards.”

She said later: “Politically, UCU is absolutely opposed to this legislation and we know that many members have strong and principled moral objections as members of society and as professional educators.

At last, people are beginning to stand up and simply say ‘NO’. That is all it takes, believe it or not.

“One of the more pernicious effects of this new system will be to turn our members into an extra arm of the police force, placing monitoring and reporting responsibilities onto academic and support staff.”

Precisely. They are trying to turn everyone into a spy, eliminating the normal bonds of trust that should exist between human beings and delivering everyone into a horrible, inhuman state where trust is mediated by machines and a secret police state. And as it implies above, anyone from the EU will not be subject to this; that means in reality, profiling. This indefensible, immoral and thankfully, will not be done, because someone had the guts to stand up and say ‘NO’.

One of the resolutions tabled for discussion said the new system “makes educators into immigration snoopers which could damage UK education irreparably”.

Once the word gets out that people are being mistreated by the very institutions that they are PAYING to learn in, there will be an exodus of students to other centres. No one will trust the Universities in the UK; and why should they? If these academics did not stand up and do what they are doing, it would be stupid to come here and be mistreated when you can go to other countries and just get on with learning.

When they say that UK education could be damaged irreparably, they are talking about people not coming back here for generations. They are talking about becoming a pariah system that students avoid reflexively. They are talking about a stain that will be very hard to remove.

It deplored “this pandering to anti-immigration racism” and committed the union to “non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties”.

This is the key; non compliance. What is the state going to do in response?

• Close the universities?
• Deport the non EU students en masse?
• Arrest all the academics?

Imagine any of those three happening. Imagine the other, equally absurd things the state could try and do to coerce the academics into betraying their students. None of it will wash.

But a Home Office spokesman said: “Educational institutions have a duty of care to all their students and checking that they are attending and making progress in their studies is part of that responsibility.

“The records we expect education providers to keep are those which most will keep for their own purposes anyway.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8074515.stm

Now this is the most sickening part.

Is is possible that this anonymous person is so retarded that she cannot see that information that is PRIVATE and collected as a part of running a college is perfectly natural, and the sending of that information to the state is a gross violation?

There are two possibilities:

(1) Either these people think we are so stupid they can say something like this and get away with it

or

(2) These people are so stupid they can say something like this and believe it doesn’t matter.

Whatever the reason this has been proposed and put into law, it is clear that this spokesperson and the other people who are behind this are not ‘fit for purpose’. They are of the same school that believes everyone is guilty until proven innocent, that parents have no rights, that all children belong to the state, and all data belongs to the state. Except theirs of course, which is why they constantly speak anonymously.

Whatever happens next, all of this is going to end up being destroyed. The nanny state is finished. We will soon see the end of ‘legislation by grieving parent” and all the other vile garbage that has turned the UK into what it has very sadly become – a place where the lunatics are running the asylum:

Spotted today:

A female PCSO (Police Community Support Officer, or Pretend Police Officer) stopping a father (naturally, what do they know?) who was pushing his baby daughter along the road in a pushchair. She demanded to know why his baby looked so hot – I suspect it was due to the HOT WEATHER, but perhaps she’s still working on her investigative skills. The PCSO was so doubtful of this man’s ability to parent, she even checked the child’s pulse – without asking – and took a few notes. At this point the man declined to give his details and simply walked off, shaking his head.

Scary, huh?

I had two PCSO’s tell my daughter who was about 11 at the time that she shouldn’t eat the blackberries that she was picking, because they might be poisonous. I interjected and told them they were perfectly fine and popped one in my mouth (a blackberry..not the PCSO). They both nearly fainted. I then informed them that Sainsburys sell blackberries and they said, “Oh do they? but they must be safe because they come from the supermarket”. (They hadn’t even heard of blackberries!)

I then thought of showing them my trick of picking nettles with my bare hands, but thought they had suffered enough excitement for one day!

If nothing concrete happens to fix it in the very short term, people everywhere are going to fix it themselves. This is now absolutely inevitable. Reading any of the comments in the newspaper’s websites, you will see Jultra style invective forming the majority of responses to anything to do with government.

That is what we call ‘GAME OVER’; and there is no way to re-boot this particular game. The only way to go forward is to dismantle the hardware, and switch operating systems (to use a computer analogy). This is not switching from Windows 95 to Windows XP (actually, what they are proposing is to keep the same old hardware and switch from Windows XP to Windows VISTA!), no, this is switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. This is switching to stability, real security, real choice and real freedom.

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.

The Daily Mail published a blistering attack on HMG, written deliberately to raise questions. Shall we answer them?

Why not?!

This Parliament has now lost all moral and political authority and ought, by rights, to dissolve itself.

Thats like asking a bank robber to turn himself and his bag of money in, or more accurately, a counterfeiter to hand in his printing press and plates, ink and paper stock voluntarily. No corrupt political power ‘dissolves itself’. That would be an act of decent, moral people. These are not decent moral people.

It is now not only the Government that has ceased to deserve our trust. So many members of the House of Commons have disgraced themselves so completely that their right to make laws for the rest of us has evaporated.

These people have been abusing their positions for years. All during that time, they schemed up the ID Cards, ContactPoint and countless other evils. They never had the right to make laws for anyone. So, if this is the case, should not all legislation introduced by New Labour be struck off of the books? If we are going to start with a clean slate, then let’s actually clean it; the 3000 laws of New Labour should be removed, and all of their purely evil and fascist proposals permanently scrapped. That means ID Cards, ContactPoint, the NIR and everything to do with them – SCRAPPED.

Nothing comparable has happened to British politics in modern times. The revelations of surreptitious greed – sometimes pathetic, sometimes outrageous, often both at the same time – are uniquely damaging.

These people are not greedy. They are behaving like human beings. The mistake the Mail makes is to put these people on a pedestal and expect them to not be human. Instead of asking for this, they should ask instead why these people need to ‘cheat’. Once they find the answer to that question, they will come to the conclusion that everyone in the country should be relieved of the insane burdens that they live under.

We have always known that MPs are human and imperfect, like the rest of us. In fact, it is important, for the sake of our democracy, that they are.

Nonsense. Since no one can be trusted, no one should be put in a position of trust with exceptional powers over anyone else. No one should be able to steal money or property from other people. No one should be able to murder. No one should be able to initiate force against another person. This is true of individuals or collections of individuals, no matter how that collection is selected.

But we also assumed that on election to that hallowed chamber, they recognised the seriousness of their tasks, the long, honourable traditions of freedom and courage which they had been elected to defend and the need to be honest above all things.

This is a joke right?

Nobody can assume that now. Grubby, grasping, shameless, these essentially little men and women are now shown to have become worse, not better, to have shrunk rather than grown, once they took their solemn oaths and added the letters ‘MP’ to their names. What did they think those letters stood for? Manipulate and Profit?

Murder and Pillage
Money and Power
Milking and Pilfering
Menace and Poison
Manacle and Prison
Monsters and Parasites
Money-grabbers and Prostitutes
Movies and Popcorn
Morons and Pipsqueaks
Miscreants and Poopheads
Meddling and Profane
Mad and Pathetic
Mountebanks and Pillocks
Malignant and Perfidious
MMORPG and Pwned
Muffdivers and Poodlefakers

Feel free to add to this list.

They seem to have been gripped by a sort of collective madness, combined with an astonishing heedless arrogance.

Almost there… COLLECTIVIST MADNESS!

How did they dare to finance their unearned profiteering and nest-feathering using taxpayers’ money – and then actually exempt themselves from tax?

‘Who dares wins’ thats how. People like the Mail allowed it to happen by consistently failing to rise to the challenge (as if they even had the choice) of confronting evil from the root; that collectivism itself is the evil.

Like the members of some pampered rubber-stamp Soviet in the old days of communism, their relationship with the State has been the exact opposite of that suffered by ordinary citizens.

Firstly, they are not LIKE members of a rubber-stamp Soviet, they ARE the NEW rubber-stamp Soviet Britain. Everyone knows it.

The hand of Government reaches ceaselessly into the pockets of the hard-working and the productive: when they earn, when they spend, when they travel, when they try to provide for old age, when they die.

And the solution to this is?…. Wait for it…..

For MPs it is the other way round. The State kindly subsidises their forays into the housing market, pumps other people’s money into their pensions, furnishes their little bolt-holes, provides them with free car parking and fat car allowances. Tax free.

The Daily Mail doesn’t seem to understand, THEY ARE THE STATE. The State is not separate from them, they are the State INCARNATE.

Tax free – two little words. Most of us would faint with shock if we were allowed even for a single year to see how much wealthier we would be without this burden.

There it is!

When the Daily Mail types wake up and understand that there can be no State without their cooperation, then the image will have cracked, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” will be everyone’s new reality, and all our troubles will soon after be over. Not only would everyone be wealthier, but this country would start to resemble the sort of place that it used to be; not a police state.

Yet MPs, who impose most of our taxes, do not even have to pay them on what is for many the bigger part of their income, an arrangement that places them in the luxury class. No wonder they are so carefree about loading taxes on everyone else.

‘The luxury class’ what does that even mean? Whatever it is you own or make, no one has the right to steal it from you. Whatever happens, nothing must distract from this and the fundamental principles.

Even now, they do not understand how their behaviour appears to others. Monstrously, it is proposed that the police should act against the source of the leaked information. How doubly ridiculous.

“Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done”. Hmph! What their behaviour appears like is IRRELEVANT. It is what they are ACTUALLY DOING that is important. All the time they were ‘cheating’, they were passing draconian measures to enslave the British people, all the while, appearing to be decent and behaving correctly. Correct behaviour, or at least the appearance of it is enough to keep everyone quiet in the UK. This is TOTAL INSANITY; as long as they are not spitting in your face, they can steal your money, your property, your liberty and …. you do not care? How can people BE like this?!

Modern Whitehall, so keen on gathering our secret details on its databases, so blithe in its promises that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, has proved yet again that it is not fit to be trusted with a bus ticket, let alone information of any value.

Actually, they have control of Bus Tickets also and you are right, they cannot be trusted with that either. As for all the other databases, you are paying for them; you are financing your own oppression. When are you going to join the dots and complete the hideous picture? Not only are they taking your money to live lives of ‘luxury’ but they are using your money to put you all in virtual cages from which you will never be able to escape, short of a total revolution. Wake up you dunderheads!

The 2005 Parliament is, in all important respects, not just a lame duck but a dead one. The Cabinet is an assembly of haggard political ghosts awaiting the end, bereft of ideas and even of the gimmicks and stunts that have served it so well till now.

It has been like this since before Bliar took office. This is not a new phenomenon. This is not news. What people like you need to talk about is how nothing like this is ever going to be allowed to happen again. What are you going to do to ensure that this is the case? That is the question.

Prime Minister’s Questions is a futile, modern version of bear-baiting in which nothing is revealed or gained. Nothing will come out of this nothingness.

“Welcome to the real world.”

The ‘modernisers’ and radicals who have sneered for so long at the Monarchy might now reflect on the fact that the one part of Government completely untouched by scandal and wholly above suspicion is the Sovereign herself.

I defy anyone in Britain to name a modern prime minster that would be preferable to absolute monarchy. Its an interesting question!

As she surveys the behaviour of her MPs, the pitiful failure of the Speaker and of the House of Commons authorities to check their behaviour, the involvement of Privy Counsellors and of the Opposition in the scandal, she must be more than tempted to summon her Prime Minister to the Palace and suggest to him that it would be a kindness to dissolve one of the most disgraceful Parliaments of modern times. This could begin a process of cleansing which is sorely needed.

And the Royal Prerogative to declare war should be returned to the monarch also. The power to wage war is too dangerous to be left in the hands of peasants. Yes, PEASANTS.

The Speaker should, of course, go. The officials supposedly supervising MPs’ allowances should likewise go. The MPs themselves should be compelled to face their constituents, who should all be provided with full details of their member’s expenses claims. The ex-MPs can then explain how they plan to reform their own institution and work out a system by which they would be adequately paid and properly recompensed for genuine expenses. Some of them might then be allowed back.

‘Allowed back’. This is why you FAIL. Its like voluntarily letting a thief back into your pockets for a second rifle around. Are you all TOTALLY INSANE?!?!

Voters face an awkward problem here. This is not – as will become increasingly clear in days to come – a party political issue. The Conservatives were trembling last night, wondering when their own misdeeds would begin to be exposed alongside those of Labour.

If you are a voter, then you have more problems than political parties. If you believe that voting can solve your problems, you are insane.

It is worth recalling that when The Mail on Sunday first uncovered the misuse of housing allowances in December 2002, it was the Tory MP Michael Trend who was found out.

So, between 2002 and 2009, nothing has changed and yet you want to go back to the polls, AGAIN, for MORE OF THE SAME. That is insane. There is no other word for it. Total unhinged insanity.

This newspaper has continued with its bipartisan pursuit of this abuse ever since, following a long trail. This has led more recently to the exposure of the increasingly preposterous Jacqui Smith’s slippery arrangements and to the unveiling of Tony McNulty’s similarly suspect claims.

These stories, doggedly and consistently investigated, undoubtedly helped bring about the mass exposure now under way.

It is true that Labour has made matters worse than they were, repeatedly trampling on rules and institutions which once preserved integrity at Westminster.

Without a paradigm shift, nothing will change. You can write all the articles you like; as long as you prop up the system by pretending that it is legitimate in its form and only needs ‘the right people’ to make it work properly, you will consistently FAIL and continue to be stolen from.

It has debauched Civil Service impartiality, imposing political commissars on Whitehall. It told deliberate lies to Parliament and people to gain support for an illegal war, the one single action that has done most to undermine good government, corrupting everyone involved. The lasting shame of the MPs gulled in this episode has no doubt demoralised them.

That war really and truly broke something. What you are doing by talking like this and holding back is trying to glue back together the dust of the porcelain vase that was the illusion you were living. Instead of trying to glue dust together, you should seize this opportunity to build a truly just britain, with a very small government that does not tell anyone what to do, and that does not steal money from its citizens.

Labour has also connived at torture and presided over the worst economic catastrophe for 80 years, bleating that it is not to blame.

A country with a small government cannot act as the poodle to any other country. Britain should get out of the EU, and tear up all the other treaties that cede sovereignty to foreign bodies. As for the financial crisis, if Britain had sound money no one in this country would be suffering the secret taxation of inflation and all the other problems to do with currencies controlled by a central bank.

At the same time it has extended the system of MPs’ allowances, and accelerated the process (already under way for many years) by which MPs have become the compliant, feather-bedded employees of Downing Street rather than the vigilant representatives of the British people.

When were they EVER the ‘vigilant representatives of the British people’? Those people are nothing more than warmongering ignorant control addicts hell bent on gaining absolute control of every British person down to their urine. After years of publishing articles about this, SURELY you all realize that that is the truth.

The Mother of Parliaments has been transformed into a personal wealth-creation scheme on the moral level of Las Vegas.

When has it been otherwise? It has always been an organ of organized theft and murder. It is only now that they not only steal and kill, but seek to totally oppress the population in a system of absolute control facilitated by technology. The vegas analogy is interesting. Let’s flesh it out.

At a Las Vegas casino, the house (parliament) always wins. The casino owners make a fortune. They ‘own the joint’. The difference is, people CHOOSE to gamble there, the rules NEVER CHANGE, and players can win MILLIONS of dollars with a single pull of a lever on a small stake. While you are there, you are treated with great respect and friendliness by the casino employees, there are free shuttle busses to everywhere laid on for you by the casino, you and your family have lots of fun, the food is cheap, plentiful and high quality, the weather is nice, and when you leave, you cannot wait to come back and spend more money.

Does that sound like Britain’s Parliament to you?

But both major parties have played their part in the transformation of politics into a well-paid and comfortable career for people who probably could not succeed in any other field.

True.

Both have done this as the European Union has hoovered power from Westminster to Brussels, leaving British governments with little to decide and not all that much to divide the parties.

Britain out of the EU.

Wise, experienced and forceful men and women have increasingly turned away from parliamentary politics. Inexperienced and unqualified backstairs-crawlers have taken their places.

So, you prefer to be stolen from by ‘wise, experienced and forceful’ men? That does not make sense. Also, even if those men WERE decent, there is always another Bliar or Brown around the corner. Only a system that permanently defangs government can prevent future theft, murder and abuses.

This change, until today too little noticed by the public, is now exposed in all its squalor.

Serious citizens of all parties and none should recognise that they have not been paying enough attention, that they have trusted too much and questioned too little.

Bloggers would disagree with this. Clearly.

We cannot expect Parliament to hold the executive to account, if we do not ourselves hold MPs to account, in every sense of the word.

Now is the time to do so. The people can and must recapture Westminster from the careerists and the cheats.

AND THEN WHAT?!

[…]

Daily Mail

Judging from the comments on this related post many people seem to instinctively understand that something fundamental is wrong, but they are incapable of making the leap to the final conclusion that the whole system is fundamentally evil. There is talk of throwing them all out and starting again… starting again with the same rules? That is going to inevitably end up with more of the same.

Speaking of rules, Labour’s Lynne Jones, MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, had this hilarious line:

She said: ‘It’s a very difficult situation. People retire on certain financial assumptions and we can’t just change the rules.

[…]

Daily Mail

Astonishing? Hardly.

These are the same people who do nothing but change the rules in the middle of the game (people’s lives); the most recent example is the change of the rules for ‘Non Dom’ workers:

Many people came to the UK because the rules were favorable. Now, after settling down, doing good work, bringing prosperity and creativity to the UK, the government wants to change the rules halfway through the game. That is not cricket.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=986

This is a perfect example of the hypocrisy of government aparatchicks; the rules cannot be changed when it comes to THEIR PLANS FOR THEIR OWN FUTURES, but the plans for ANYONE ELSE are infinitely mutable. I do not need to go into how these parasites are not even productive, producing nothing ever, whereas the people in business are actually productive.

Like we have been saying for many posts, there are too many laws and regulations. If you are going to bring back parliament at all, it should sit in an unprecedented form whose sole Raison d’être should be to remove legislation.

Parliament in its current form sits to create legislation. If it continues to exist as it was, it can only make things worse for everyone, since it justifies its existence through the creation of legislation. As time goes on, they will, logically, have to legislate on every aspect of human life. This is unacceptable. Its like a runaway population of consumers producing garbage until there is no more space to live on earth. And no, the laws cannot be recycled.

Such a parliament could sit for many decades carefully undoing the byzantine and irrational laws and regulations that their venal predecessors conjured up. They would be assured of jobs for life, and great, even unprecedented popularity, as their role would change from ‘oppressors’ to ‘liberators’.

As it stands now, they are revealed as almost completely illegitimate and actually dangerous. They have very little room to maneuver; they can either go forward with the police state and risk being obliterated by force, or they can re-define their role and survive till the end of this century as heroes.

Either way, business as usual is off of the table!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re pathetic.

[…]

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

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

This quote is for you:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

There. Much better now.

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

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

And by the way:

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

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

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

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

Everybody wins!

We at BLOGDIAL have blogged about this subject a few times before:

By David Coates, The Detroit News, via AP

In Detroit, three downtown businesses have created a local currency, or scrip, to keep dollars earned locally in the community.

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.
Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

“We wanted to make new options available,” says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. “It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace.”

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

By law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States, says Claudia Dickens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

“We print the real thing,” she says.

Yes, we know; THAT IS THE PROBLEM!

The IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Tom Ochsenschlager of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “It’s not a way to avoid income taxes, or we’d all be paying in Detroit dollars,” he says.

Pittsboro, N.C., is reviving the Plenty, a defunct local currency created in 2002. It is being printed in denominations of $1, $5, $20 and $50. A local bank will exchange $9 for $10 worth of Plenty.

“We’re a wiped-out small town in America,” says Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels, which accepts the Plenty. “This will strengthen the local economy. … The nice thing about the Plenty is that it can’t leave here.”

[…]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-05-scrip_N.htm

Now.

Imagine if all the dimwitted and destructive demonstrators got together to disseminate the ideas behind sound money and then print and promote their own money.

Wouldn’t that be effort better spent instead of smashing an RBS office? Or gathering impotently in the streets to be corralled like cows?

We have been over this again and again and again:

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.
Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

Join Amnesty
Visit and sign up online:
web.amnesty.org/pages/join-eng
Join Liberty
Visit and sign up online:
www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/join
Email Your MP
Demand to know what they are doing about the issues raised in the film:
www.writetothem.com
Join the Mass Lone Demos
Demonstrations take place 5pm to 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, forms [MS WORD] [PDF] must be handed in or sent by recorded delivery 1 week beforehand.
[…]

Joining Amnesty will not cause one law to be repealed, nor will it stop new bad legislation from being enacted.

Similarly, Joining liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

Emailing the very people who pass the laws that enslave you is just STUPID.

And joining demonstrations we know about, don’t we?

Telling the truth is not enough. Acting is not enough. Correct Action is the only thing that will change what you want changed.

But you know this!

If you want to fix a problem, DO SOMETHING TO FIX THE PROBLEM, DO NOT do something THAT WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM.

If your problem is a currency that is being inflated by a criminal government who is stealing your value to give it to their partners in crime, and you cannot change the government, CHANGE THE CURRENCY YOU USE AND ACCEPT, since THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Demonstrating against bailouts is like dancing to stop the damage to your car caused by hailstorms.

GET YOUR CAR UNDER COVER IF IT STARTS TO HAIL.

Demonstrating against taxation is like applauding to stop your drive from being blocked by snow in a blizzard.

IF YOUR DRIVE IS BLOCKED BY SNOW, GET A SHOVEL AND DIG YOURSELF OUT.

Demonstrating against a leaking roof is like waving a banner to stop being hungry.

IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, MAKE YOURSELF A SANDWICH.

It’s simple really, but to my constant amazement, even intelligent people persist in believing that demonstrations are a good thing. They are not, not because they are inherently bad, but BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WORK!

FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME