231 is the 22nd number which is the Product of 3 distinct primes.
231 is the triangle of 21 which is the triangle of 6 which is the triangle of 3 which is the triangle of 2. Thus, 231 , is a triangle of a triangle of a triangle.
You may have seen there is ‘outrage’ from leftists and liberals in the UK that state handouts – benefits – are proposed to be capped at £24,000 per year. George Monbiot, for example, bleats until his green-eyes pop out of his misguided head about the rich, hard-working business people who should be punished for earning their money. Just when you think he has proposed the most stupid idea possible, he comes up with, instead of a benefits cap, a wages cap!
But back to benefits.
£24,000 net equivalent to an income of over £32,000 per year for a working family. Unfortunately many benefits claimants are sadly unable to survive on such a meagre sum when having to not work or contribute meaningfully to society for the privilege of receiving the money.
So, should tax-payers support these people? Let’s see how they struggle…
Current benefits: £30, 284 of money taken under threat of force from people who work for a living. More than half of it just as a reward for having bred uncontrollably.
£91 per week ‘other outgoings’: to keep the kids happy via consumerism, apparently. You don’t believe the crap about school trips, every week, do you?
£20 per week ‘entertainment’: your taxes buy this man a night out at the pub. Every week. Does he deserve this respite from his seven children and wife? Would you give him that money charitably?
£15 per week on SKY TV: ‘We get the Sky Movies package because we’re stuck in the house all week – otherwise we wouldn’t have any entertainment.’ How did people survive before SKY TV? Will the family unit collapse if they have to resort to library books and freeview? Or talking to each other, heaven forbid!
£30 transport: his eldest son is scamming him for most of this if he believes 5 return bus rides to college are £30.
£32 per week on mobiles: ‘My wife and I have mobile phones, and so do all of the teenage children. You try telling teenagers they’re going to have to do without their mobiles and there’ll be hell to pay.’ Your taxes are saving this man from growing a pair and keeping his children in a world of ‘whine and it shall be given’.
Energy: ‘ If they do cut our benefit we are going to have to choose between eating and heating the house properly.’ Or choose between mobiles and heating. Or beer and heating. Or fags and heating. NEVER believe these sob stories from ill-disciplined and spineless, willpower-lacking, idiocracy-generating fuckwits.
Rent £76 per week: As your state-sponsored incubus notes, this would be much more expensive were it private. Hence you are ACTUALLY paying much more than the £76 per week, as you are subsidizing the housing cost already, before a small portion of the cost is charged to, and then reclaimed by and from, our father-of-seven. All that admin costs too.
Shopping £240 per week. Includes food and household goods, 24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco. Has ‘Ray’ sent you so much as a card to say thanks for the fags and booze you buy him every week? And of course none of these ‘essentials’ could be sacrificed, which makes these proposed benefits cuts so damaging to people like Ray.
It’s easy to pick on people like Ray, and so it should be! He moans that “The market for my skills dried up 10 years ago – there’s a total lack of work in my area of expertise.” but has spent TEN YEARS breeding and little else. Retrain, do menial work, start a business, anything!
Stop supporting Ray and his work-shy ilk and let him remember where he left his self-respect, or let him rot in his own filth, before you find yourself sat at home on your recliner toilet chair watching nothing but this.
Data from a new study, published in the British Medical Journal, has been chewed up by the Fourth Estate and spat out to deliberately fear-monger against Home Birth.
Babies born to first-time mothers who choose a home birth are almost three times more likely to die or suffer a medical complication, according to a report.
I have read the study, linked above. The overall risk for a ‘serious adverse outcome’ did not reach statistical significance in home birth vs other birthplace cohorts. Only when a specific subset of data were analysed was a significant result reached.
And just to clarify the inflammatory quote above, see table 8.4 in the Appendix to the study for the data which show that your child does not have ANY more likelihood of dying at home compared to a ‘medical’ setting. In fact, the highest proportion of neonatal deaths were found in freestanding midwifery units. For what it’s worth.
However, having read the study and having tried to understand the data, I would like to present an alternate interpretation.
CHOOSING TO GIVE BIRTH IN AN OBSTETRIC UNIT HARMS YOU, AND HARMS YOUR BABY, BEFORE YOU EVEN ARRIVE
It’s true, and this brilliant study proves it.
THEN THEY HARM YOU SOME MORE
It’s true, and this brilliant study proves it.
Let me elucidate on the data which supports my hypothesis.
So, you are ‘low risk’ (defined by this study), gestation has gone very well (defined by this study), labour starts… at home you get on with things. Eventually a midwife usually arrives and checks you over. At this stage only 5.4% of women at home had any kind of medical complication (meconium leaking, abnormal foetal heart rate and so on).
If, however, your labour starts and you have to leave home, get to hospital and do whatever they tell you to do before a midwife sees you… 19.5% of women showed 1 or more complications! 8x as many women in hospital had 2 or more complications than those women who stayed at home. That’s a bad start.
So, baby is coming and those Obstetricians just can’t keep their hands away. If you’ve chosen hospital you have 4x more chance of little Chelsy being sucked out with a plunger (ventouse), 3.5x more use of metal salad servers (forceps), 5x more chance of being slit open (caesarean), almost 2x more chance of serious perineal trauma, 2x more blood transfusions, 5x less chance of a normal placenta delivery, 3x less chance to use natural pain relief such as water birth – but 4x more chemical pain relief (epidurals etc.), and, finally, 4x more chance of having your fanny slashed by a scalpel-happy medic.
Also, home birth rates better than midwife-led units in all these aspects.
Obstetric Unit births were classified as ‘spontaneous vertex’ (normal head-first) births in only 74% of cases.
At home your chance of a completely normal birth was 93%. Again higher than midwife-led units.
All this data is freely available in the study manuscript online and it’s online appendices.
Millions of internet users hit by massive Sony PlayStation data theft
Sensitive personal details of tens of millions of internet users have been stolen by hackers in one of the biggest ever cases of data theft, it has emerged.
And there you have it.
Is there anyone out there who thinks that the Census data is more secure than this SONY Playstation data is? If there is, I have some beachfront property in Siberia to sell you.
Fraudsters have obtained data on millions of online video gamers – including three million Britons – after targeting Sony’s PlayStation Network.
The electronics giant is contacting around 70 million customers warning that details including their names, addresses, dates of birth, passwords and security questions have been stolen.
Sony also admitted that the hackers may have gained access to people’s credit card details.
And of course, this data can never be put back in the bottle. The credit card details can be changed, but not the names and DOBs. The same of course is true of a database containing your fingerprints. As a commenter at the Telegraph points out:
Gerry1
Today 03:35 AM
Recommended by
31 people
What legitimate business do Sony have in asking for one’s Date of Birth?
The world and his wife seems to ask always for DoB, together with Mother’s Maiden Name. That’s effectively sharing passwords, but the first Golden Rule of security is NEVER to share passwords!
Any organisation that asks for this data for ID purposes isn’t fit for purpose and should never be trusted.
unclepeter
Today 05:54 AM
Recommended by
7 people
DoB is one of the most accurate ways of identifying someone. Law enforcement doesn’t care you are or where your from. They want your DoB. One of my family is a retired police officer who explained this to me one day. He used my DoB and showed me how quickly they can narrow down who I am. It is really scary and it is one of the pieces of information I absolutely never pass on.
Indeed.
No organisation that asks for your date of birth should ever be trusted. They simply do not need that information to do business with you. That is true, and the reply to that comment is very revealing is it not? If SONY has had the DOBs of millions of people copied from their servers….
You get the picture, because you read BLOGDIAL.
From El Reg, the inside dope…
The stolen information may also include payment-card data, purchase history, billing addresses, and security answers used to change passwords, Sony said on Tuesday. The company plans to keep the hacked system offline for the time being, and to restore services gradually. The advisory also applies to users of Sony’s related Qriocity network.
Sony had already come under fire for a copyright lawsuit targeting customers who published instructions for unlocking the game console so it could run games and applications not officially sanctioned by the company. The criticism only grew after Sony lawyers sought detailed records belonging to hacker George Hotz, including the IP addresses of everyone who visited his jailbreaking website over a span of 26 months.
Hackers howled with displeasure saying they should have a right to modify the hardware they legally own. Sony recently settled that case, but Hotz, whose hacker moniker is GeoHot, has remained highly critical of the company. Many have also objected to the removal of the so-called OtherOS, which allowed PlayStation 3 consoles to run Linux.
Sony’s advisory on Tuesday means that the company was likely storing passwords, credit card numbers, expiration dates, and other sensitive information unhashed and unencrypted on its servers. Sony didn’t say if its website complied with data-security standards established by the Payment Card Industry.
Sony reminded users located in the US that they’re entitled to receive one credit report per year from each of the three major credit bureaus. The company didn’t offer to pay for any sort of credit monitoring service to help ensure the information it lost isn’t used in identity-theft ruses against its users.
[…]
Sony’s advisory on Tuesday means that the company was likely storing passwords, credit card numbers, expiration dates, and other sensitive information unhashed and unencrypted on its servers. Sony didn’t say if its website complied with data-security standards established by the Payment Card Industry.
Even a giant company like SONY, with talented and highly skilled software developers can make mistakes that can lead to data being copied. Take a look at this video to see the following:
The type of people who are hacking the PlayStation
Their motivation
Their non criminal personalities
A small taste of their culture
Clearly these people are not evil. Its clear that these people are not the sort to copy the personal data of millions of people for profit.
Who knows what the motivations of the people who copied the SONY data were. Hopefully it was a benevolent person who just wants to hurt SONY in public for ruthlessly and pointlessly attacking GeoHot, and not an actual criminal who wants to help other criminals hurt people. Who knows?
What we do know is that all databases can be breached, and there is no such thing as a ‘secure database’. They can be breached either from the outside or from inside, and once its done its done forever, and cannot be undone.
Which brings us to the matter of the Census.
We were told a story of a family that received THREE census forms. This happened because they had moved house and had been on holiday during the time of Census. Since forms were sent to all three places that they had been staying, they collected THREE FORMS to fill out, and have been advised that they must fill them ALL out.
Astonishing and stupid in equal measure, but quite apart from that, who in their right mind would fill out a Census form, in the light of everything people must know not only about databases, but about the State and its inability to keep anything safe? Add to this, the insult of the nasty company who got the contract to run the data collection, and you have an undoable proposition.
I gives me great pleasure to see that in fact, seven million of them according to one person, have the right idea:
Only a complete, walking dead, pure sheeple imbecile fills out a census form, especially this particular one, which by all accounts will be the last one.
In spite of all of this, the missing DVDRs full of personal data, this SONY breach, and all the other data losses, we STILL have mentally retarded people calling for ‘Son of ContactPoint’ as a cure to some problem. It beggars belief.
Finally, back to the SONY breach.
If SONY and the other companies that made telephones and consoles respected the property rights of the people who buy their products, breaches like this would be less likely.
If you buy something, you own it. You have the right to destroy it, sell it or modify it. This is an absolute right that is not negotiable, and the people who jailbreak their iPhones and who modify their consoles are doing nothing immoral. The people who sell mod chips and who write jailbreaking software are exercising their own property rights, and no one has the right to stop them from sharing or selling their work.
The sooner these companies cease their ‘one rule for us and another for everyone else’ behaviour the better. Property rights exist for everyone, not just SONY and Apple. If their business models cannot work in the real world, then its the business model that has to change, and it is entirely wrong of them to try and change the world through the state and its violent coercion so that their business models can succeed.
Every once in a while, you come across something that is so infuriating that you are compelled to try and set it right.
The other day, I came across a man’s plea to a government to tax all its people so that the ‘creative’ among their population can be ‘fairly remunerated’ with the collected monies.
Obviously, to a Libertarian, this is anathema.
It is a call for theft through violence on behalf of a special interest group. It is entirely illegitimate, unethical and immoral. I sent an email to try to start the process of showing this man that stealing is immoral.
Part of this man’s plea for theft included the claim that the state has the ‘right’ to tax one group to redistribute money to another. I pointed out in the email that states do not have rights, only man has rights. This error of attributing rights to states was fobbed off in his reply as ‘a figure of speech’, and that he, “would say that ‘persons have rights'”.
Finally his reply ended by saying that he thinks taxes are legitimate, and that the money can be spent in good ways or bad ways.
He then ended by saying, “I don’t have time to think about this”.
What?
This is like a ship owner, upon being told that his boat is being used to smuggle human beings without his knowledge, saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.
It is like a man committed to non violence who unwittingly is supplying tools and supplies to torturers saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.
This sort of attitude is completely unacceptable to decent people.
By all means, if you agree with paying taxes, you can do so voluntarily; but to call for a nation to forcibly steal money from its entire population, simply because you believe it would be a good idea is beyond passive support for the regime – it is initiating a new form of theft on a massive scale, and famous people (like this man is) have the power to make these bad laws come into force by virtue of their reputations. These people are actually dangerous.
If you are informed that what you are proposing is in fact immoral, you are duty bound as a human being to think about it and to be absolutely sure that you are not doing evil. You cannot blithely say that you ‘do not have time’ to consider the ethics of what you are doing, when two hundred million people could be violated.
The attitude displayed by this man is quite frankly, disgusting.
It seems that there is alot of work still to be done to educate people about the true nature of the state; there are still people out there who are fast asleep, or at the least, so focused on what they are doing that if the whole world ended as a result of their passive action or inaction they would shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t have time to think about this”.
The fact of the matter is, you must find time to think about this, now more than ever, because the world is actually changing at a rapid pace, towards a worst possible case dystopia scenario.
Having said all of this, its important to bear in mind that only five percent of the population was actively involved in the American Revolution. The rest of the people just went along with what was going on, probably because they ‘didn’t have time to think about tyranny’. We do not have to wake up everyone in order to be successful.
Today, many millions of people are awake, world-wide, and are actively repelling the advances of the criminal, mass murdering thieving state.
Thinking purely tactically, we only need to wake up the people who are capable of being woken up, the rest will simply follow along; and judging by their subhuman response to a direct threat, we could, if we were violent, even destroy them without them lifting a finger in response.
Luckily for them Libertarians are not violent, because we are going to win, and there is no doubt about this.
These deluded, misguided and violent people are surely to become the first great challenge of any newly emerged free society; how are we, the free people, to deal with the violent socialists and statists who want to restore a system of organised criminal theft and mob rule for themselves and their clients through violence?
It will mean putting to the test the very idea of having a free and purely voluntary society, where everyone voluntarily pays others (or does it themselves) to protect their property from the violent socialists.
It will almost certainly end in people being killed. This will be entirely the fault of the socialists and their brain dead followers who are hell bent on controlling other people, invading their property and stealing from them. They will not listen to reason, understand only force, and even those violent types who have the intellectual capacity to come to the correct conclusion, “don’t have time to think about it”.
Libertarians have the truth on their side, and the truth always triumphs over lies.
An army of non violent volunteers, backed by people with an economic interest in bolstering them will present an unstoppable defensive force for the preservation of Liberty in any future battle between the violent statists and free people.
As time wears on, and prosperity spreads like wildfire, the idea of statism and violence will become completely discredited, to the point that the people who try and rally troops for initiating violence will find that their prospective thieves and killers saying…
The Wikileaks output is being widely and heartily condemned by those with vested interests. Sarah Palin has called for Assange to be ‘hunted down’, ‘like al Quaeda’. So, he won’t be found for a decade at least then..
However, Bob Aisworth, previously UK Defence Secretary, noted in this interview (from 1min50sec) a very interesting point. I shall quote:
There are no secrets any more. […] Anything goes. Nobody is prepared to take authority that you should not disclose this or should not tell people this and things systematically leak, and one must assume, whether you’re a politician or a security planner that anything and everything, every scrap of advice that you do is going to wind up in the public domain, not in 30 years time, but tomorrow or even later on today, and you have to do your business in that way, effectively, it’s as simple as that.
Mr Aisworth goes on to suggest that this will be damaging for the way diplomacy is done (he remains part of the old structure, but has at least seen the near-future clearly in this case). However, one could argue that it will not just be damaging, it will be absolutely and completely destructive for the way diplomacy is currently done . This can only be a Good Thing.
We may imagine a system in which there is less and less interference in the business of other nations and peoples, in which backroom deals can no longer be done to decide who invades whom and for what share of the spoils, in which influence would be curtailed, nepotism and corruption laid bare. A system in which the state of paranoia is shifted from the populus to the existing elite, who will know that their every word is essentially broadcast to the world and there will no longer be any sub- to their -terfuge.
If all the political build-up to the Iraq invasion had been leaked at the time, it would never have happened. If all the internal motions of the gravy train that is the European Union and Council Of Europe were broadcast and available for dissection, the system would rapidly dissolve in its own digestive juices. At the very least, the populace may be reduced to pleading stupidity should they then allow these things to continue, but they would no longer be able to plead ignorance.
Business will, by necessity, be carried out on a small scale, with the requisite security controls in place. Business will no longer be allowed to exert self-serving interest over public servants – directing policies and law-making to their own benefit – and neither would government be able to interfere with business.
There is already an enormous propaganda war begun by those who stand to lose most from the “novyi glasnost”, from those who will be seen as naked emperors during the perestroika that will surely follow. We will be, and already are being, told that life cannot go on this way, that secretive dealings are the only way to maintain trust and international relationships, that secrets held by the few to wield power over the many are the only way to maintain a happy life. “Go back to bed, your government is in control. Watch [$retarded_reality_show_for_retards]” (to misquote Bill Hicks). These lies, that only through secretive government can one achieve happiness, are as much a fairy story as the ugly, evil troll lurking beneath the bridge. An horrific fear existing simply to scare you away from the lush meadow on the other side. All that is required to break the fear is one small billy-goat… and one big billy-goat can destroy it forever.
Additional: Should you require any evidence that They are extremely concerned with this situation, and the potential harm it may cause their future ability to do business in the way to which they have become accustomed (i.e. in secret, doing as they please), please note that there have been calls for Julian Assange to be assassinated, and he has already been branded a rapist (in a very poor quality smear) in order to alienate him from the public. The person responsible for bringing the comments of public servants into the public arena has been branded a traitor and may be executed for his actions. In addition, the Wikileaks servers are being attacked, both digitally and politically.
All this is being done not to punish Wikileaks for facilitating this release, but instead is only to persuade any future leakers that it may not be in their best interest to do so. Very reminiscent of the way North Korea, China, Iran et al. deal with dissent to prevent it spreading, isn’t it?
The Prices, the prizes, the colors (yes ‘colors’)…. unbelievable.
After reading “Everything you love comes from capitalism” the character of and feeling you get from The Price is Right changes dramatically. Any apprehension you may have had about it from decades of anti-capitalist brainwashing is blown away, and you see that show for what it really was; an incredible exposition of the abundance produced by the free market, even as practiced under the severe duress of the state.
Take a look at this; Labour’s Pat McFaddon talks about the coming public sector cuts, as if they can be avoided by raping the private taxpayer for more money to prop up the public sector, or international investors to pump money into the UK bottomless pit.
Recorded from Sky News, 25 May 2010:
The bit we are interested in is the point at 2:30 where he says:
I haven’t met many constituents complaining about CCTV, but I’ve met plenty who want more cameras in their streets, to stop the kind of thugs who destroy the quality of life in local areas. So I’m not sure if cutting back on CCTV and cutting back on law and order in hard pressed communities is going to go down well with people.
Now look at Labour’s Caroline Flint and Conservative Malcolm Rifkind talk about the coming Queen’s Speech.
Recorded from BBC Breakfast, 25 May 2010.
At 2:00 Lucas repeats the exact same line on CCTV as McFaddon:
Well, um, I have to say I think the ‘Freedoms Bill’ as it’s been called I think raises alot of worrying issues; thinks like the DNA database, which we know is responsible for catching something like 800 rapists and murderers each year, the fact that CCTV cameras… I have to say that as a constituency MP I don’t have anybody coming to me saying we don’t want cameras they are usually saying we want more cameras in order to tackle anti social behaviour and crime in our communities. And thats something that I will be watching out for very very closely because actually I think thats almost taking away freedoms from people to live a safe life.
Oh dear. Its not surprising that they are speaking from the same talking points. What is surprising is that it seems like Labour, having just lost an election, and who are claiming that they failed because they did not listen to people, are STILL taking the Police State Kool-Aid and regurgitating it from a central command centre whose job it is to spread disinformation through the mainstream news.
These horrible, delusional, irrational, monstrous people, even after a defeat cannot come to terms with reality, are still up to the same lying fudging, spinning garbage with the taste of defeat fresh in their mouths.
They really are the most terrible people you could conjure up in your imagination… only WORSE.
On BLOGDIAL we talk about ‘the idiocracy‘, ‘the eloi‘ and ‘the retards‘ when we point out the utter stupidity, numb headed waste of fleshness of many people out there, who collectively are ‘the problem’.
You need to see this film, if you want to watch them in action.
Now thanks to the internets and the Google and a blog, we have a clear window into the workings of these ‘people’. A fantastic thread demonstrating just how STUPID the millions of eloi out there on the internets are has emerged here.
It is clear that the deliberate dumbing down of the population through compulsory education has been a wild success. People from the top to the bottom of ‘society’ do not have the capacity (or where they have the capacity, do not have the language or training) to think.
Check out this comment:
Comment 366:
This is fantastic on so many levels:
1) If Google Buzz ends up becoming a bigger service than Facebook, we can thank this blog post and comment thread for siphoning off Facebook users.
2) This shows that the primary component of computer literacy is the ability to TRY SOMETHING ELSE when something doesn’t work. For every comment posted here, there dozens of people who tried multiple times to log into Facebook on this webpage. Not to mention how many times people tried before they got frustrated and commented about it.
3) People really type like that? I mean, I enjoy a LOLCAT as much as the next guy, but I would never intentionally write something like that. A Neanderthal banging on the keyboard with a club would be more coherent. What even possesses you to put four commas in a row: “,,,,”?
4) Now we know how far we are away from internet voting. Any system that could disenfranchise people simply because a popular enough blog decided to talk about “California Voting Logins” is not going to fly. RWW, Techcrunch, Lifehacker, and Chris Brogan could decide elections.
Posted by: John | February 11, 2010 10:45 AM
My friend, this is exactly why they will try and bring in internet voting.
Remember too that these people are ‘smart’ enough to use a computer, and when they can find it, use Facebook. They are the cream of the crop.
The horrible, inescapable truth is that thinking people are sharing this world with very stupid, illiterate, computer illiterate eloi, who would be harmless enough if they could not bother anyone, but the fact of the matter is they all have the vote, and they actively bother anyone that they can.
Comment 245
This comment thread is a perfect demonstration of how Sarah Palin will be elected President in 2012. If you’re not smart enough to type, wait for it, “facebook.com” into a web browser, you sure as hell shouldn’t be able to vote.
Posted by: mudfarmer | February 10, 2010 9:37 PM
We are not the only ones who are aware that these thick as shit people having a say in anything other than their own diets cannot be a good thing. They will vote for anyone, based solely on their junk food distorted feelings. It cannot possibly be right that these people in particular (leaving aside the illegitimacy of democracy as a whole) should be able to determine what you, a thinking person, can or cannot do.
And yet, this is exactly what happens.
Bring on the howls of how this will ‘disenfranchise’ people. If you are saying that, you are one of the brainwashed.
The next time you read about some ridiculous nanny state initiative, regulation or horror story, remember just who the people are that allow this bad magic to happen.
The morlocks are harvesting human beings by building the ID Card systems, they are harvesting children through ContactPoint. The passive, unthinking, eloi, who will go along with anything for some ‘free’ blinking trinkets are allowing it all to happen without even a shout; in fact, they like to be patted on the head like pets by their lords when they do not shout, as their rights are stripped from them and their children abused before their very eyes.
In a Libertarian space, there is a place for eloi and morlocks; they are rendered harmless because there is no state that can use their numbers to legitimise and finance theft, mass murder and every other violation and pure evil that they get up to. As long as there is a state, and these ‘people’ have a say in directing it, you can be sure that everything is going to get worse.
Liberal Complaints
Left-liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold. In the last three or four decades, not a very long time in human history, they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free-market capitalism. The curious thing is that each of these complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors. But contradictory complaints by liberal intellectuals do not seem to faze them or serve to abate their petulance — even though it is often the very same intellectuals who are reversing themselves so rapidly. And these reversals seem to make no dent whatever in their self-righteousness or in the self-confidence of their position. Let us consider the record of recent decades:
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the liberal intellectuals came to the conclusion that capitalism was suffering from inevitable “secular stagnation,” a stagnation imposed by the slowing down of population growth, the end of the old Western frontier, and by the supposed fact that no further inventions were possible. All this spelled eternal stagnation, permanent mass unemployment, and therefore the need for socialism, or thoroughgoing State planning, to replace free-market capitalism. This on the threshold of the greatest boom in American history!
During the 1950s, despite the great boom in postwar America, the [p. 243] liberal intellectuals kept raising their sights; the cult of “economic growth” now entered the scene. To be sure, capitalism was growing, but it was not growing fast enough. Therefore free-market capitalism must be abandoned, and socialism or government intervention must step in and force-feed the economy, must build investments and compel greater saving in order to maximize the rate of growth, even if we don’t want to grow that fast. Conservative economists such as Colin Clark attacked this liberal program as “growthmanship.”
Suddenly, John Kenneth Galbraith entered the liberal scene with his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958. And just as suddenly, the liberal intellectuals reversed their indictments. The trouble with capitalism, it now appeared, was that it had grown too much; we were no longer stagnant, but too well off, and man had lost his spirituality amidst supermarkets and automobile tail fins. What was necessary, then, was for government to step in, either in massive intervention or as socialism, and tax the consumers heavily in order to reduce their bloated affluence.
The cult of excess affluence had its day, to be superseded by a contradictory worry about poverty, stimulated by Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962. Suddenly, the problem with America was not excessive affluence, but increasing and grinding poverty — and, once again, the solution was for the government to step in, plan mightily, and tax the wealthy in order to lift up the poor. And so we had the War on Poverty for several years.
Stagnation; deficient growth; overaffluence; overpoverty; the intellectual fashions changed like ladies’ hemlines. Then, in 1964, the happily short-lived Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution issued its then-famous manifesto, which brought us and the liberal intellectuals full circle. For two or three frenetic years we were regaled with the idea that America’s problem was not stagnation but the exact reverse: in a few short years all of America’s production facilities would be automated and cybernated, incomes and production would be enormous and superabundant, but everyone would be automated out of a job. Once again, free-market capitalism would lead to permanent mass unemployment, which could only be remedied — you guessed it! — by massive State intervention or by outright socialism. For several years, in the mid-1960s, we thus suffered from what was justly named the “Automation Hysteria.”
By the late 1960s it was clear to everyone that the automation hysterics had been dead wrong, that automation was proceeding at no faster a pace than old-fashioned “mechanization,” and indeed that the 1969 recession was causing a falling off in the rate of increase of productivity. One hears no more about automation dangers nowadays; we are now in the seventh phase of liberal economic flip-flops.
Affluence is again excessive, and, in the name of conservation, ecology, and the increasing scarcity of resources, free-market capitalism is growing much too fast. State planning, or socialism, must, of course, step in to abolish all growth and bring about a zero-growth society and economy — in order to avoid negative growth, or retrogression, sometime in the future! We are now back to a super-Galbraithian position, to which has been added scientific jargon about effluents, ecology, and “spaceship earth,” as well as a bitter assault on technology itself as being an evil polluter. Capitalism has brought about technology, growth — including population growth, industry, and pollution — and government is supposed to step in and eradicate these evils.
It is not at all unusual, in fact, to find the same people now holding a contradictory blend of positions 5 and 7 and maintaining at one and the same time that (a) we are living in a “post-scarcity” age where we no longer need private property, capitalism, or material incentives to production; and (b) that capitalist greed is depleting our resources and bringing about imminent worldwide scarcity. The liberal answer to both, or indeed to all, of these problems turns out, of course, to be the same: socialism or state planning to replace free-market capitalism. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter put the whole shoddy performance of liberal intellectuals into a nutshell a generation ago: “Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”2 And so, the charges, the indictments, may change and contradict previous charges — but the answer is always and wearily the same.
The Attack on Technology and Growth
The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented upper-class liberals. Enjoying a material contentment [p. 245] and a living standard undreamt of by even the wealthiest men of the past, it is easy for upper-class liberals to sneer at “materialism,” and to call for a freeze on all further economic advance.1 For the mass of the world’s population still living in squalor such a cry for the cessation of growth is truly obscene; but even in the United States, there is little evidence of satiety and superabundance. Even the upper-class liberals themselves have not been conspicuous for making a bonfire of their salary checks as a contribution to their war on “materialism” and affluence.
The widespread attack on technology is even more irresponsible. If technology were to be rolled back to the “tribe” and to the preindustrial era, the result would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale. The vast majority of the world’s population is dependent for its very survival on modern technology and industry. The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level. It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely higher living standard — and the reason is modern technology and industry. Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well. For all one knows, to our fanatical antipopulationists this “solution” to the population question may be a good thing, but for the great majority of us, this would be a draconian “final solution” indeed.
The irresponsible attack on technology is another liberal flip-flop: it comes from the same liberal intellectuals who, thirty-odd years ago, were denouncing capitalism for not putting modern technology to full use in the service of State planning and were calling for absolute rule by a modern “technocratic” elite. Yet now the very same intellectuals who not so long ago were yearning for a technocratic dictatorship over [p. 246] all of our lives are now trying to deprive us of the vital fruits of technology itself.
Yet the various contradictory phases of liberal thought never completely die; and many of the same antitechnologists, in a 180-degree reversal of the automation hysteria, are also confidently forecasting technological stagnation from now on. They cheerily predict a gloomy future for mankind by assuming that technology will stagnate, and not continue to improve and accelerate. This is the technique of pseudoscientific forecasting of the widely touted antigrowth Club of Rome Report. As Passell, Roberts, and Ross write in their critique of the report, “If the telephone company were restricted to turn-of-the-century technology 20 million operators would be needed to handle today’s volume of calls. Or, as British editor Norman Macrae has observed, “an extrapolation of the trends of the i88os would show today’s cities buried under horse manure.” Or, further:
While the team’s [Club of Rome’s] model hypothesizes exponential growth for industrial and agricultural needs, it places arbitrary, nonexponential, limits on the technical progress that might accommodate these needs . . . .
The Rev. Thomas Malthus made a similar point two centuries ago without benefit of computer printouts . . . . Malthus argued that people tend to multiply exponentially, while the food supply at best increases at a constant rate. He expected that starvation and war would periodically redress the balance . . . .
But there is no particular criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation. Malthus was wrong; food capacity has kept up with population. While no one knows for certain, technical progress shows no sign of slowing down. The best econometric estimates suggest that it is indeed growing exponentially.
What we need is more economic growth, not less; more and better technology, and not the impossible and absurd attempt to scrap technology and return to the primitive tribe. Improved technology and greater capital investment will lead to higher living standards for all and provide greater material comforts, as well as the leisure to pursue and enjoy the “spiritual” side of life. There is precious little culture or civilization available for people who must work long hours to eke out a subsistence living. The real problem is that productive capital investment is being siphoned off by taxes, restrictions, and government contracts for unproductive and wasteful government expenditures, including military and space boondoggling. Furthermore, the precious technical resource of scientists and engineers is being ever more intensively diverted to government, instead of to “civilian” consumer production. What we need is for government to get out of the way, remove its incubus of taxation and expenditures from the economy, and allow productive and technical resources once again to devote themselves fully to increasing the well-being of the mass of consumers. We need growth, higher living standards, and a technology and capital equipment that meet consumer wants and demands; but we can only achieve these by removing the incubus of statism and allowing the energies of all of the population to express themselves in the free-market economy. We need an economic and technological growth that emerges freely, as Jane Jacobs has shown, from the free-market economy, and not the distortions and wastes imposed upon the world economy from the liberal force-feeding of the 19508. We need, in short, a truly free-market, libertarian economy.
Graham Badman’s scandalous, biased, immoral and utterly vile report on Home Education contains a submission from The Church of England. By selectively omitting parts of the entire submission, Graham Badman has engaged in what is called ‘a lie of omission’:
Lying by omission
One lies by omission by omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. If a husband asks his wife if she’s at a bar, the wife may tell her husband she is at a store, which is true, but lie by omitting the fact that she also visited a bar.
To lie by omission is to remain silent and thereby withhold from someone else a vital piece (or pieces) of information. The silence is deceptive in that it gives a false impression to the person from whom the information was withheld. It subverts the truth; it is a way to manipulate someone into altering their behavior to suit the desire of the person who intentionally withheld the vital information; and, most importantly, it’s a gross violation of another person’s right of self-determination.
It is one thing to give your opinion, and say that you believe that Home Education is not beneficial, or that Home Educated children are not safe, or more likely to suffer abuse (even if that is statistically not the case as this analysis of comparative abuse stats demonstrates), but it is quite another to deceptively misuse the authority of the voice The Church of England by selectively quoting from their submission, which comes to a conclusion that is the polar opposite of the conclusion you want to manipulate everyone reading the report to come to; that the laws governing Home Education need to be changed. Had this been a scientific paper, Graham Badman would now stand convicted of academic fraud, and his paper would be thrown out by peer reviewers, and his reputation permanently tarnished:
Well done those HEors who pursued this line; if they end up working for the investigative team on Private Eye, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. You can bet they will go in search of the truth like dog after a bone and won’t be fobbed off with phoney stats, headlines and soundbites.
Reading Graham Badman’s report, you would have thought that the Church of England were fully in favour of clamping down heavily on home educators. Badman achieves this effect by quoting highly selectively from the C of E submission.
…the Education Division of the Church of England states its concern:
“that children and young people not in formal education are missing the benefits and challenges of learning in community with their peers. Children who do not go to school may not experience the social and cultural diversity encountered there; they will not learn how to deal with the rough and tumble of everyday life; they may never meet people with different faith and value systems. All such encounters, even the difficult or painful ones are enriching. We are concerned not only with the five Every Child Matters outcomes, but also with the spiritual well-being of all children and young people.
[…]
Spiritual well-being arises not only from being cared for in a loving family and/or faith community, but also in encounters with people of different opinions and backgrounds; in learning to listen to a variety of opinions; to encounter diversity and the riches and life-enhancement it can bring. Spiritual well-being depends on living and taking a full part in community life. Children and young people in schools learn about and from the five major religions. This may be a difficult part of the curriculum for home educators to provide, yet it is vital for the Government’s community cohesion agenda that all children learn in a balanced way about the variety of religious values and practices, and to be encouraged to question their own beliefs and practices.”
Badman however somehow failed to mention that the Church of England actually concluded their consultation submission with the following:
“We have seen no evidence to show that the majority of home educated children do not achieve the five Every Child Matters outcomes, and are therefore not convinced of the need to change the current system of monitoring the standard of home education. Where there are particular concerns about the children who are home-educating, this should be a matter for Children’s services.”
Home educators have subsequently received reassurances from the Church to the effect that the C of E does indeed stand by the conclusion above.
“We stand by our position as laid out in our original submission and hope that those with an interest in this subject will read our full position rather than relying on selected extracts. We understand that there are a range of deeply-held views on this subject and are grateful for your appreciation that the CofE’s position was more nuanced that was perhaps suggested in the Badman report.”
The statement from the Church’s representative is a diplomatic way of saying that Graham Badman’s report misrepresented the Church of England’s position on Home Education.
Graham Badman has demonstrated a totally appalling lack of integrity. What a completely disgusting and insulting piece of trash. This report should not be the basis of new legislation; in fact it should be the basis of an investigation into the low standards of the people who generate reports like this, and that investigation should produce new rules and minimum standards that should apply to the writing of these reports so that they are at a minimum, peer reviewed in the same way that scientific papers are peer reviewed. If this was the standard, phrases like ‘I believe’ would invalidate a report like Graham Badman’s because personal belief is not a basis for scientific understanding of fact.
Every day, thanks to the hard work of Home Educators, this report is becoming more and more discredited. Soon it will be seen for what it really is; a worthless smear piece with no rigor, no peer review, chock full of hearsay, glaring omissions and baseless opinions.
I have been looking into this creature over the last few days, and found two articles that sum him up perfectly:
Our children have had the MMR jab, says Brown’s Cabinet friend
By GLEN OWEN
A key Cabinet ally of Gordon Brown has let it be known his children have had the controversial MMR vaccine, in a clear break with former Premier Tony Blair’s policy of refusing to discuss the issue.
Going public: Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls with baby Elle in 1999
Schools Secretary Ed Balls, who has three children with his wife, Communities Minister Yvette Cooper, sanctioned the release of the information in the week that officials revealed Britain is in the middle of the worst measles outbreak for 20 years.
In allowing the disclosure, Mr Balls – who was Mr Brown’s right-hand man at the Treasury for nearly a decade – has broken ranks with Mr Blair’s long-standing ban on Ministers saying whether their children have had the controversial vaccine.
Campaigners are now calling on the Prime Minister to declare publicly that his children, too, have had the MMR inoculation.
Take-up of the vaccine, which also protects against mumps and rubella, plummeted after Dr Andrew Wakefield published research in 1998 that claimed it was linked to autism and bowel problems.
Mr Blair – who has repeatedly refused to say whether his son, Leo, had the jab – was furious at the embarrassment caused to him in January 2001 when Ms Cooper told a newspaper that her daughter, Ellie, had received the inoculation.
He later slapped the ban on Ministers speaking about their personal decisions.
Since then, Mr Balls and Ms Cooper – who is also in the Cabinet – have had two more children reach vaccination age (there are two injections, one at 13 months and a booster between the ages of three and five).
Mr Balls’ decision to lead by example follows a warning from the Health Protection Agency that the number of children suffering from measles has trebled in the past 11 weeks.
The HPA, concerned that even more children will be infected as the autumn term begins, has urged parents to add MMR to their back-to-school list.
After Dr Wakefield published his research in The Lancet, take-up of the vaccine fell to 80 per cent.
It has since recovered to 88 per cent, which is still short of the 95 per cent rate the HPA recommends.
The study is being scrutinised by medical watchdog the General Medical Council in a professional misconduct hearing involving Dr Wakefield and two of his co-authors.
Meanwhile, in a series of briefings timed to coincide with the start of the new term, Mr Balls announced he will write to every headteacher in the country to urge them to help deliver ‘a world-class education for every child’.
The new term also sees the start of a ban on schools selling fizzy drinks, chocolates or sweets in vending machines.
From now on, pupils will have to choose from foods such as bagels, muffins and breadsticks.
This is a man (and his ‘wife’) who would use (and if he gave the MMR specifically for this purpose, SACRIFICE) his daughter’s health to show support and undying loyalty for the evil gargoyle Gordon Brown, and to curry political favor.
If he will do this with his own child, imagine what he would do with yours? Well, you do not have to; you have the Balls and Badman report in your hands.
And here, we have an example of the Balls anti family agenda, where the school and the state are the new parent in the totalitarian dystopia being born in the UK:
Teachers ‘must worry about pupils when they go home’, warns education secretary Balls
Teachers have a responsibility for what happens to children after they return home from school, Education Secretary Ed Balls warned today.
On the day that he and Gordon Brown are launching a national debate in Bristol on the future of children’s services, Mr Balls has urged schools to do more beyond their gates.
“Not every school sees their responsibility as worrying about what happens when the child goes home… and they should,” he told The Guardian.
Praising breakfast clubs for giving children a good start, Mr Balls added: “A little boy may not eat between leaving school and coming back the next day. There’s no way the school can solve that problem.
“It requires parents with the support of social services to do that, but the school can provide an early warning.”
Mr Balls dismissed Tory claims that society in Britain is “broken” following the spate of killings of teenagers in London and other cities.
“There are always going to be some kids that get into more serious trouble with the law, but we shouldn’t demonise young people.”
Prime Minister Gordon Brown today opened the first new school built under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.
He arrived at the Bristol Brunel Academy in the inner city Speedwell area flanked by Mr Balls.
The school is the first in England to be completed under the Government’s £45 billion BSF programme.
The initiative is intended to re-build or refurbish every one of England’s state secondary schools over the next 15 years.
About 1,000 pupils moved into the school this morning which replaces Speedwell Technology College whose crumbling buildings sit immediately in front of the gleaming new academy.
The Prime Minister will tour and then officially open the new school.
Later this morning he will take part in the first citizen jury held in the school’s sports hall.
The Prime Minister looked at a “wishing wall” at the school entrance which is covered in messages from pupils.
One message read “I wish I could eat toenails” while another read “I wish to become a successful accountant”.
He then chatted with pupils, each with their own personal laptop computer, in a Year 7 IT class being taught in one of the school’s many open-plan classrooms.
The Prime Minister then visited pupils undertaking a soldering lesson in a craft design and technology class.
The pupils were guided by overhead monitors in a state-of-the-art classroom as they worked on circuit boards.