‘Extreme’ blog councillor resigns

The blog claimed there should be compulsory sterilisation

A Medway councillor has resigned after claiming on his website that there should be compulsory sterilisation for parents on benefits. John Ward prompted comparisons with the Nazis after attacking what he called “professional spongers” whom he claimed “breed for greed”.

The Tory councillor, who lives in Chatham, told BBC South East Today the views were not his own.

He lifted them from other sites, and has since deleted the page, he added.

When asked if he supported the concept of sterilisation, Mr Ward said: “No.

“I’d hope that before it became such a big problem that the nanny state does impose something like that the way they tend to do, with compulsory ID cards, compulsory whatever.”

‘Extreme and unpleasant’

The sentences from Mr Ward’s blog said: “I think there is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have a second, (or third, or whatever) child while living off state handouts.”

Now, then. What are you thinking right now? What is that seedling thought sprouting under that pile of old Guardian newspapers in the recycling bin of your mind?

Am I being harsh on you? Or are you actively censoring your own thoughts? These are interesting questions, should you choose to address them. In the privacy of your own head, should you wish.

On Tuesday, he said he had lifted the words from other websites to promote debate, and had been interrupted before he had had a chance to make that clear on the web page he then published.

Adding that he had resigned, he said he felt “delighted”, with a “weight lifted from his shoulders”.

But councillor Bill Esterson, from Medway’s Labour group, said: “It had nothing to with the benefits culture issue.

“It had everything to do with some extreme and very unpleasant views about forced sterilisation of people – the sort of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes, that happened in Nazi Germany.”

Of course, Nazi Eugenics. But discussions about eugenics have not stopped since world war II, but have been swept from the table of politically correct society. There are people who make the case for eugenics today. They argue:

1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary.

2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence. Without innate intelligence, civilization would never have been created. When intelligence declines, so does civilization.

3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population. Civilization is not an either-or proposition. Rather, it’s a matter of degree, and each degree, up or down, affects the well-being of every citizen.

4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation. Why is this happening? Simple: the least-intelligent people are having the most children.

5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline. Any decline in civilization produces a commensurate increase in the collective “misery quotient.”

It’s hard to argue against those statements, isn’t it? So what should society do? That’s the important question. The eugenics supporters would say society at present not only stands idly by and watches the less intelligent members of society breed, but actively encourages and supports this behaviour by supplying them with free medical care, housing and food!

Of course, normal people (you are normal, right?) would find the eugenics argument abhorrent, arguing perhaps that by providing care and education society can propel these people upwards on the scale to the benefit of all mankind. But didn’t the eugenics people say intelligence is mostly genetic? Hmm. And is there evidence that providing handouts is helping society? Hmm.

Political blogger Iain Dale said: “The problem is if you’re writing a blog and you get angry about something, you’re anger transmits itself from your brain through your fingertips on to the keyboard and on to the internet.

“Ten minutes later, you might think ‘maybe I’ve gone a bit over the top there’, but it’s too late.

“You can amend what you’ve written, but it’s already out there and someone, somewhere, will have found it.”

I wonder how many kids this man has.

Googles cache of the ‘offending’ blog:

Saturday, 15 March 2008

What You Probably Won’t Read in the Press

One side of the Shannon Matthews story you are unlikely to read in the mainstream Press is what the police themselves know about this sorry tale. Inspector Gadget has it HERE. Note the “seven children” part in particular, and the implicit reasons for that…

At least there was a good outcome on this occasion, which makes a pleasant change from so many of the “missing child” news stories of recent years.

This one, though, is yet another example of “Breakdown Britain”, about which so much has been reported over the last several years, much (if not most or even all) of which stems from the Government-encouraged change away from the hard-working and decent family structure to an increasingly self-indulgent immoral and State-funded lazy lifestyle, with huge handouts to provide for just about all one’s needs and desires, at next to no personal expense or effort. Children become just a means toward that end, and are of themselves of little if any further significance in this new society. What was once a small issue has now become mainstream.

I think there is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second (or third, or whatever) child while living off State hand-outs. It would (if one thinks about it) clearly take a lot of social pressures off all concerned, thus protecting the youngsters themselves to some degree, and remove the incentive to “breed for greed” — i.e. for more public subsidy of their lifestyle (a now well-known dodge, worth ever greater amounts to countless thousands of professional spongers).

With over-population being the root cause of so much that negatively impacts Planet Earth, and thus needs to concern human society, the very last thing the world needs is to encourage excessive breeding.

There are some subjects in society that are taboo, and openly discussing eugenics is clearly one of them. But it should not be. Some very important people are discussing eugenics, and if you are censoring yourself then you are no longer able to argue either way. If you are guilty of being your own Thought Policeman, give yourself a nightstick upside your head.

…

Lightening the mood a little, here’s a little something for the idiocrats out there.

Enlarge

The TwoDaLoo is billed as the world’s first toilet two people can use … at the exact same time. It brings couples closer together and conserves our water supply all with one flush. The TwoDaLoo features two side-by-side toilet seats with a modest privacy wall in between. An upgraded version includes a seven inch LCD television and iPod docking station.

It’s just a small evolutionary step from this to spending 18 hours a day on a Lay-Z-Boy armchair with built-in toilet, watching trash TV and ‘bating.

The Proms attract too narrow a section of society, culture minister Margaret Hodge has suggested in a speech.

Margaret Hodge biography includes:

Margaret entered politics in 1973 as a councillor for the London Borough of Islington where she was Chair of the Housing Committee from 1975 to 1979 and Deputy Leader from 1981 to 1982, before becoming Leader from 1982 to 1992. She spent two years as a consultant for Price Waterhouse from 1992 to 1994.

She was educated at Bromley High School and Oxford High School before obtaining a BSc at the London School of Economics. Margaret Hodge is married with four children and one grandchild.

So, the qualifications to be a Minister for Culture are…? I would prefer to see Brian Sewell, Mark Kermode, Jon Wozencroft, Bruce Gilbert.. even Rolf Harris!

She praised “icons of a common culture” from Coronation Street to the Angel of the North and said culture could “enhance a sense of shared identity”.

Icons of a common culture? The Angel of the North? To share a liking (or a dislike!) for a particular sculpture does not ‘enhance a sense of shared identity’.

As for Coronation Street, Hodge clearly misinterprets a commercial vehicle designed to attract the largest audience of a particular category in order to sell premium advertising time as a piece of ‘art’ through which one can connect with peers from all manner of social backgrounds.

But the Proms was one of several major cultural events many people did not feel comfortable attending, she said.

So by extension, any public performance (or ‘major cultural event’) should be dragged down to the lowest common denominator. Is classical music, as a part of culture, not intended to push boundaries, to increase our understanding of each other and ourselves through the generation of shared emotions? Why then should anyone feel excluded? Everyone has the personal choice to go or not. When the Hodges of this world start telling you what you may and may not enjoy as part of our ‘culture’ then something is seriously awry.

Tory leader David Cameron said she did not “get it” and said the Proms were a “great symbol of our Britishness”.

He is kind of right, but he only really means that non-skinheads get to wave the Union flag without getting beaten by policemen. The Proms are certainly a symbol of openess. Look at this list of concerts at last year’s Proms, the sheer breadth of music should be lauded as a wonderful acheivement, moreover since every night is sold out. That does not strike me as a series of concerts failing in their task.

He also stressed the numbers of other Proms during the concert season – such as Proms in the Park and the Electric Proms.

‘Feel at ease’

In a speech to the IPPR think tank on Britishness, Heritage and the Arts, Mrs Hodge said a “shared sense of common cultural identity” was a key part of social integration and cohesion.

Since the rise of the British Empire, how can the population of Britain possibly have a shared sense of common cultural identity? This statement is either based on a misunderstanding of ‘cultural identity’, possibly mistaking ‘living in Britain’ with ‘being British’, or a misunderstanding of what constitutes ‘culture’. Living near Stamford Hill in London did not let me share a cultural identity with the Jewish community. My living in Hackney did not encourage my muslim neighbours to drink ale or eat black pudding, things I may place as part of my cultural identity. By not choosing to get hideously drunk on tasteless lager while wearing a short-sleeved shirt in all weathers and letching at anything with 2 X chromosomes every Friday and Saturday night I am culturally alienated from a large part of my generation. What should I do?

But then what does Hodge mean by ‘culture‘? It is a word with a particularly broad meaning, and I would very much like to hear her definition.

She said she wanted to “challenge our sectors square on”.

I would also like to hear what the blue blazes “challenge our sectors square on” means!

“The audiences for some of many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking particularly of the Proms – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this,” she added.

Just as culture pushes the boundaries it can make some people proud to belong, it can make others feel isolated and deeply offended Margaret Hodge Culture minister

“I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can.”

Hodge should try reading Lydgate (and Lincoln) …

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

If one point of art (and culture, of which art is a part) is to challenge, then not everyone will like everything. It’s no more than common sense, Margaret. Is she determined to demonstrate exactly why Rolf would make a better Minister than her?

In her speech, Mrs Hodge praised other institutions for “creating the icons of a common culture that everybody can feel a part of” – such as the Angel of the North, the British Museum and the Eden project as well as TV and radio shows “from Coronation Street to the Archers” and shared public holidays.

Well, I can take or leave the Angel… I’m certain some of Britain’s Greek, Mexican, Egyptian, Italian, Indian (et al.) communities are offended by the contents of the British Museum (or, rather, by the fact that the British Museum contains THEIR stolen cultural artefacts while portraying them as part of Great Britishness … the Eden project (if one can call it a cultural ICON is highly doubtful) is simply dull compared to the natural landscape of Bodmin Moor, for example, or the Cornish Coast, or Yorkshire Dales, Highlands… Coronation Street we have covered, and I abhor it… and if there is one programme which has a particular and non-inclusive audience then it is the Archers on Radio 4!

National motto

But she acknowledged that culture could also be divisive – citing the examples of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which Christians said was blasphemous and Behtzi, a play which depicted sex abuse in a Sikh temple and was cancelled after protests.

“Just as culture pushes the boundaries it can make some people proud to belong, it can make others feel isolated and deeply offended,” she said. […] From BBQ.

Did she not notice as The Point Of It All flew right over her head? “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”

I can’t dissect further. Her idiocy is certainly all-inclusive. Her sectors are undoubtedly challenged square-on. Yet this woman has powet to decide ‘cultural priorities for museums and funding projects supported by you and I. It is not funny and it could be very damaging. I would not be surprised if the only culture Margeret Hodge is familiar with is thrush.

It looks like the term “thought police” just might take on a whole new and real meaning. This depends on what happens in the U.S. Senate after receiving House bill H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. This act (now S-1959 – Senate version) is now being considered by Senate committees and, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, will become law. Common sense would indicate that something this vague and dangerous would not make it out of committee, but considering that the House passed it on October 23 with 404 ayes, 6 nays, and 22 present/not voting, I’m not holding my breath. Of course, Ron Paul was one of the 6 nay votes, but that is to be expected.

The most disturbing aspects of this bill, and there are many, are the definitions noted in Section 899a. The three offenses defined in this document that will warrant prosecution are:

“Violent Radicalization: The term ‘violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.”

“Homegrown Terrorism: The term ‘homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

“Ideologically based violence: The term ‘ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”

Besides the fact that this Act would greatly expand an already monstrous bureaucracy (Homeland Security Act of 2002), it is on its very face a threat to all ideological thinking not approved by the state. Any citizen at any given time could be considered a terrorism suspect and accused or prosecuted for “bad” thoughts. Since the very act of thinking could now be considered a crime, how would the populace react to this new paradigm? Would political debate among the citizenry become more subdued? Would watch groups, whether police or private, arise to monitor individual and group conversations? Would speaking out and writing against the government become a dangerous activity?

The language contained in this proposed legislation is not only vague, it is also broad, sweeping, and unclear. The tenebrous and obscure nature of the above definitions is obviously not an accident. The broader the net, the more who are caught; the more who are caught, the more who live in fear of being caught. Ambiguity and fear are mighty deterrents, and ambiguity and fear foster obedience. In this case, unconditional obedience to the mighty state and its many dictates.

In the definition of “violent radicalization,” it is a crime to adopt or promote an extremist belief system to facilitate ideologically based violence. Neither “extremist” nor type of political, religious, or social change is defined. And what about “ideologically” based violence? Is it violence to simply advocate radical change that might lead someone else to initiate violence? Who decides what beliefs are okay and what beliefs are not? The state, of course, is the final decider. The door is left open for interpretation, but for interpretation by government only.

“Homegrown terrorism,” although similarly defined, is notable in that it concentrates strictly on U.S.-born, U.S.-raised, or U.S.-based individuals and groups operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States. The Bush administration has had its problems in the courts at times concerning American citizens and their rights, sometimes setting it and its agenda back. This bill could help alleviate those problems. In addition, to intimidate or coerce the U.S. government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives, is forbidden and considered criminal. Let me repeat; to intimidate the government to further political or social objectives is forbidden. If this is allowed to stand, what does it do to demonstration, protest, petition, and the right to assemble?

Remember, this proposed act is attached to the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This is what gives it the teeth so that the enforcers can pursue and detain those considered guilty of holding or promoting an “extremist” belief system or wishing to advance political, religious, or social change. I use the word “enforcers” because this bill allows for the federal authorities, including intelligence and law enforcement, to use any state or local law-enforcement agencies. In addition, the commission may contract to enable enforcement. Also, “The Commission may request directly from any executive department, bureau, agency, board, commission, office, independent establishment, or instrumentality of the Government, information, suggestions, estimates, and statistics for the purposes of this Section.” (Section 899C.) What little privacy still exists will not exist for long with the passage of this bill.

One of the tenets of any totalitarian society is that the citizenry must acquiesce to government control. The state itself is supreme and sovereign, not the people. This has been true throughout history whether it was during Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s or any other of a number of brutal dictatorial rulers’ reigns. Dissent was stifled, whether it was ideological or physical, and accused parties faced humiliation, incarceration, or death for their unwillingness to conform. Is that where we’re headed?

The newest weapon we have at our disposal in our fight against tyranny is our advanced communication systems, especially the Internet. Reaching untold numbers of persons, something not possible only a few years ago, is now possible because of the Internet. With the mainstream media kowtowing to politicians and government, the Internet has become the major tool for those promoting liberty and truth. It has allowed many brilliant freedom lovers to reach and change minds. Even this has not escaped the watchful eye of Big Brother in this bill. In Section 899B Congress finds the following:

“The internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”

This bill, if passed into law, will do nothing less than muffle, if not destroy, our ability to speak out against government. Considering the combination of the USA PATRIOT Act, The Homeland Security Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the now-enhanced executive power, adding this single piece of legislation fills the only loophole left. With the passage of this abominable act, all U.S. citizens are at risk, not just those few radical persons and foreigners spoken about by government, but all of us. This very article could be considered as ideologically based violence, subjecting me to punishment by government. This could be the final piece of the puzzle.

This new proposed legislation will help an already tyrannical government in its effort to become supreme.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/barnett2.html

The only response to House bill H.R. 1955: ‘KILL THEM ALL’.

The only response to something as hideous as this is a torrent of abuse, a torrent of ‘illegal’ language, publishing and thought, a cascade of threats, plots and plans and death-lists.

Laws like this are a direct personal threat to all free people in The Dying usa™. We have already had a glimpse of what it will look like only this time, they will take you straight to gaol without any impolite questions.

Before our very eyes, america dies. Only one man stands between her and complete death.

This is the preface to his forthcoming book, which I ordered last night:

Every election cycle we are treated to candidates who promise us “change,” and 2008 has been no different. But in the American political lexicon, “change” always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.

Real change would mean something like the opposite of those things. It might even involve following our Constitution. And that’s the one option Americans are never permitted to hear….

With national bankruptcy looming, politicians from both parties continue to make multi-trillion dollar promises of “free” goods from the government, and hardly a soul wonders if we can still afford to have troops in – this is not a misprint – 130 countries around the world. All of this is going to come to an end sooner or later, because financial reality is going to make itself felt in very uncomfortable ways. But instead of thinking about what this means for how we conduct our foreign and domestic affairs, our chattering classes seem incapable of speaking in anything but the emptiest platitudes, when they can be bothered to address serious issues at all. Fundamental questions like this, and countless others besides, are off the table in our mainstream media, which focuses our attention on trivialities and phony debates as we march toward oblivion.

This is the deadening consensus that crosses party lines, that dominates our major media, and that is strangling the liberty and prosperity that were once the birthright of Americans. Dissenters who tell their fellow citizens what is really going on are subject to smear campaigns that, like clockwork, are aimed at the political heretic. Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion-dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom. But as we’ve learned through hard experience, we are not going to hear a word in its favor if our political and media establishments have anything to say about it.

If we want to live in a free society, we need to break free from these artificial limitations on free debate and start asking serious questions once again. I am happy that my campaign for the presidency has finally raised some of them. But this is a long-term project that will persist far into the future. These ideas cannot be allowed to die, buried beneath the mind-numbing chorus of empty slogans and inanities that constitute official political discourse in America.

That is why I wrote this book.

No matter what happens, no decent person will alter their writing by one comma, no matter what insane law they pass.

Starting right now.

The question, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you do it?” has been coming up in discussions both private and public for many years. Which of the candidates (or even the bush administration) would a person from the future be compelled to assassinate? John McCain promises more wars; the probability that a person from that particular unpleasant future with an urge to correct history would exist and be ready to act is, I would wager, very high. When would they do it? Probably when he was in a cage in VietNam, then there would be less shifts in the timeline related to a prominent politician being assassinated – he would be just another casualty of the VietNam war. Clean removal from history.

The same goes for Hillary, a proven warmonger liar and murderess. It would be harder to remove her from history wihtout causing major unwanted shifts in the timeline related to overt assassination. But there is an answer; an assassin would merely have to kill her in childbirth. Happens every day. Mitt Romney has shown that he is predisposed to mass murder and that video even has war drums in it at the end to further drive home the point. But I digress. Mitt Romney would have to be taken out at a time before he had made any impact, whenever that may be, in order to avoid the consequences of spectacular assassination. We need to avoid spectacular assassination because it has particular consequences for societies; it makes martyrs, causes bad legislation to be enacted, puts people in the mood for revenge; all the sorts of things a clever person from the future wants to avoid having to deal with upon his return to his own time. All you star trek watchers out there will be aware of the theoretical problems of selectively altering a timeline. Unintended consequences, unwanted outcomes.

That is the sort of speech that will get you gaoled in the usa should this bill become law and should you happen to be a “U.S.-born, U.S.-raised, or U.S.-based individual or groups operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States”. We can expect an exodus of the newly awakened Naomi Wolfs of this world and her colleagues to the remaining free shores on this planet wherever they may be.

Or, we can expect a fight to the death from “U.S.-born, U.S.-raised, or U.S.-based individual or groups operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States”. In the final analysis, when it comes to the last straw, there will be people who will not run, who take ‘Live Free or Die’ literally, who will band together and stand their ground. Think about it; if the forces of the police state will not back down in the face of a population that has been woken up and that is ‘mad as hell and not going to take it anymore’, that will be the conclusion; a violent struggle…unless even the police are woken up and there are no foot-soldiers left to murder the citizens and man the concentration camps. It could happen that way. It could happen another way.

If you read BLOGDIAL, and of course, you do, you know that these horrible scenarios are anathema to us. No one wants to live in a world where assassination is needed, or even on the list of solutions. Sadly, the facts are the facts, and if everything keeps going in the same direction that it is presently heading, then there will be a big, unfortunate and unpleasant problem, a final conflict, a last stand that many millions of real Americans are going to have to face, and it will not have been caused by the citizens. It will have been created entirely by that small cabal of monsters masquerading as human beings who have somehow (most likely because they are not squeamish, weak and childish in their world view) managed to take power and manipulate people on an unprecedented scale.

It should never have come to this. This is not the way it is supposed to be. Everyone, even the partially asleep, can feel it in their bones.

It is not all bad however. Like I have been saying for years, only america has the ability to pull itself out of this hole (which is actually a grave) it has dug for itself. We have a way out. How many generations have had it so easy? ‘None’ is the answer.

The UK Says It Shut Down 44,000 Pornographic Web Sites Last Year

The Associated Press

LONDON

The UK shut down 44,000 Web sites and arrested 868 people for Internet pornography last year, state media said Wednesday.

The UK’s Public Security Ministry launched a crackdown on Internet pornography last year, saying it had “perverted the UK’s young minds.”

Nearly 2,000 people involved in Internet pornography activities also were penalized, the official BBC News Agency said.

Separately, the BBC said 33 people were arrested in connection with a Web site that allowed customers, mainly in Scotland, to view live sex shows filmed at 12 separate locations in the northern British city of Grimsby.

The BBC said 23 of those arrested were performers who were ordered detained for 15 days, while the 10 others, including two Scots, were managers. It did not say when the arrests took place, but said the heavily trafficked site had been among those targeted in the crackdown last year.

Cash, computers and film equipment were also seized, the BBC said.

The UK forbids pornography and paid sex in virtually all forms, although prostitution is common and the government’s Internet police struggle to block pornographic Web sites based abroad.

The UK’s online population has soared to 21 million people and could surpass Greece this year to become one of the world’s biggest, the official UK Internet Network Information Center said earlier this month.

The government will increasingly concentrate on Web sites that have audio or video, blogging or send information to cell phones, the BBC said.

The UK recently said it wanted to exert more control over Internet videos and video-sharing Web sites.

The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and British Web sites often hire their own censors to eliminate certain content.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

[…]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=4175590

Associated Press has another story. And there are many others.

Of course, these sorts of measure can never work. What will happen is this; someone will produce a list of al the sites that are being filtered, and then someone else will create a proxy gateway so that anyone that wants those sites can get to them without having to change any settings on their browser.

Jacqui Smith is yet another in the long line of imbeciles who have taken the job of Home Secretary. This list reads like a who’s who of evil monsters. Jultra had the best lines on Charles Clarke; sadly, he is not posting regularly anymore.

This afternoon, we went up to Notting Hill for a late lunch.

Sitting to the right of us was a softly spoken american couple. Many americans in London have loud voices where the letter ‘R’ is brutally over pronounced and the work ‘like’ is used liberally and inappropriately. These two were not of that type. The female was reading a Sunday Tabloid paper, and spontaneously started tutting loudly.

I bit.

“Thats why I don’t read newspapers in the UK”.

“Oh! I know, they are so TERRIBLE!”

Then it came to, via a circuitous route, to the 2008 election.

They did not know who Ron Paul Was.

It transpired that these two people are using ‘The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from, and How You Can Choose‘. as their method of deciding who to vote for.

They did not know that america is borrowing money from China to run the war in Iraq.

They did not know that the head of the GAO is, in an unprecedented move, sounding the alarm about america’s debt crisis.

I told them that it would be useful for their decision making process to look up Ron Paul on the internets.

The man sitting to our right said that he is supporting John McCain, because, “He (John McCain) is against the earmarks and pork spending of Washington.”

I pointed out that John McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. I also pointed out again that america doesn’t have the money to pay for this, and that america is borrowing money from China to run this ‘war’.

“Even if you agree with John McCain in principle, who is going to pay for this adventure?”, said I.

He said, “america needs to keep troops all over the world. The Soviet Union fell because of those troops, and they help spread democracy. I’ll pay for it.”, said the man.

And we petty much left it at that.

This is the level of insanity and pure ignorance that the american public is operating at, and these people were not the lowest common denominator, but very educated, well spoken types.

Then the female came out with, “what is the central part of Ron Paul’s platform?”.

“Obey the Constitution, small government, no nation building, don’t be the policeman of the world. You can see him talking about this all over the internet, and when you read up about him and his background you will see that he is not like any other candidate”, I replied.

“Does that mean he is for americans being able to own guns, because if he follows the constitution, that means he is for guns, and I am against guns”.

I’m not making any of this up.

This is a person who has just been told that america is about to go bankrupt, there is a dream candidate whose voting record is perfect, who wants to end the insane wars and hatred that is (rightfully) tilted against america, that america is borrowing from China to run its wars….and she is concerned about GUN OWNERSHIP.

That is like a rat being concerned about finding a warm place to sleep on the Titanic.

They both promised that they would ‘Google Ron Paul’, being intrigued as to why it was that they had not heard or read about a man who has just won second place in the Nevada caucus.

Once thing is for certain; american international adventurism is over. The question now is how is it going to end. The idiots who still believe in the lies and false reasoning of the type that John McCain spouts are going to get a nasty wake up call in the future if they do not wake up right now. In any case, the world is a much bigger place than the usa; there are more genius level people in China than there are people in the usa and there are more people learning English in China than the entire population of the US. The world will go ahead without america; she will become a dream, a thing of the past, with only a flag on the moon to remember her by…and that will be plucked out of the lunar soil by Chinese lunar colonists.

People like this charming couple have a choice. They either wake up and hunker down, or have america subsumed after a disastrous crash the likes of which they have not got the brains to imagine.

All of this in around ten minutes.

What a life!

This article from ‘less than toilet paper’ rag Newsweek written by ‘Gretel C. Kovach’ is causing a stir on the internets.

It is a blantant (yes, ‘blantant’) propaganda hit piece against Ron Paul, but what Newsweek and Gretel C. Kovach did not count on is the fact that everyone is now on the internets, and if you lie, you will be caught out the moment you press ‘publish’.

Here is a sample of some of the comments on this scandalous piece of yellow journalism and pathetic low brow lying:

Posted By: tempnewsweeker @ 12/08/2007 10:47:45

Comment: Thank you. I have not heard anything about this, but the facts in the article seemed to lend credibility to the fact that “something” was being planned, yet the author concluded otherwise. I am glad to know I am not the only American who can still add 2 + 2 and get 4. If it were not for bloggers, we would not get any real news.

Posted By: litlbitione @ 12/01/2007 8:48:11 PM

Comment: I get really tired of being called names. I’m a 61 year old grandmother, a registered nurse and I’m not a conspiracy wacko. I happen to like Ron Paul and the ideas he represents. I contribute to his campaign. I’m old enough to remember previous snow jobs by the government and have no doubt that they continue. I think the media frequently does the public a disservice. Finally, I think Dr. Paul deserves a bit more respect having served in Nam and having been a doctor. He’s no dummy and his supporters are smart people.

Posted By: Archiphage @ 12/01/2007 8:59:27 PM

Comment: No wonder no one reads Newsweek anymore:
——————
Trans-Texas Corridor- Because there are issues of confiscation of private land, State and National sovereignty and other similar concerns, we urge the repeal of the Trans-Texas Corridor legislation.
—————————————————–
Quote from wacko-conspiracy-theory document called Texas GOP 2006 Party Platform (page 10) http://www.texasgop.org/site/DocServer/2006_Plat_with_TOC_2.pdf?docID=2022
Get a clue, Newsweek!

Posted By: barracuda_trader @ 12/01/2007 9:33:46 PM

Comment: Gretel, do your homework. Is Judicial Watch a conspiracy nut house too?

Judicial Watch
http://www.judicialwatch.org/SPP.shtml
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_Prosperity_Partnership_of_North_America#_note-3
Security and Prosperity Partnership Of North America
http://www.spp.gov/
http://www.treasury.gov/press/releases/20025142045298118.htm
http://www.treasury.gov/press/releases/reports/200251420452981182.pdf
—
You’re not only ignorant on the matters you discuss, you’re also arrogant – thinking you know – when you don’t.
Hey BREAKING NEWS: Rudy Giuliani’s law firm represents Cintra-Zachry. Rudy makes millions off of selling America’s infrastructure to other countries. Talk about “prickley”.
FYI Gretel… “Terror” IS the real conspiracy. Follow the money honey.
TSA – Do you fly”
Homeland Security – Not really
REAL ID – “Papers Please”
Crashing US DOLLAR – Go look at a chart.
Google the AMERO – the new currency that will be introduced as our “solution” when Bernanke et al can’t stop the markets from convulsing with rate cuts anymore. The US DOLLAR is already well below it’s all time low and has been dropping further for weeks! Wall street already knows about it. Do you?

Posted By: EdBrown2008 @ 12/01/2007 9:25:00 PM

Comment: Kovach, you are either obtuse or just a plain idiot. You should be a rep. for Chewlies Gum.

And so on.

The last two comments are interesting; when someone lies like this, I am interested in looking at their faces. A quick google of this monster reveals that she used to write for the Dallas Morning News. I doubt that she would not have heard about the Superhigway and the legislation against it and the outrage over it, working for a news organization based in Dallas Texas.

We also learn that this swine:

Gretel C. Kovach was stationed in Baghdad, Iraq, from December 2004 through January 2005 as a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. She covered the U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Division from Fort Hood, Texas. E-mail her at gkovach@dallasnews.com.

Interesting ay? This person was embedded in Iraq, spewing out propaganda for the illegal invasion and colonization.

When you see the sort of pure evil garbage she has been writing it comes as no surprise that she is behind this hit piece.

This bird is a Mockingbird, plain and simple.

It is important to remember that there are evil journalists out there in vast numbers, and the propaganda war that is being waged on the world population uses these corrupt people to dispense lies. If it were not for these dishonest writers, the evil ones would not be able to wage an info war against us at all.

Do not be surprised at Newsweek publishing this story; compliant and corrupt publishers are as needed by the enemy as the scumbag journalists who fill their columns with bile.

What we MUST do is be vigilant, use the internets, and consistently short circuit the lines of these venal liars.

And believe me, it is working.

This is why Tucker Carlson says on air that he is frightened about the “persistence of these conspiracy theories”. On this subject, what can we make of a man who says, “I don’t want to know these kind of facts about america”; a man who refuses to face the truth, an ostrich posturer, a coward.

These journalist and the people who command them are in the extreme minority, and their power and influence has been effectively swept away by the internets. The lies they publish are the death rattles of their positions and the shocked expression on their faces are the looks of men who see death staring at them in the face. Bill Maher’s attack on hecklers in his studio audience are the act of a man in the trenches about to be overrun leaping up to be mown down.

They have LOST.

The people at Bizarre magazine have pointed out to their readers, the details of a most illogical, immoral, unjust, unworkable, idiotic, ill conceived and undemocratic piece of legislation, to be debated in October.

This bill is an illiberal bill, which no free society would even dream of tabling for debate.

It is part of the the new Criminal Justice Bill, which will make it illegal to possess certain images.

Lets take a look at what the bill says, and tear it to pieces.

64 Possession of extreme pornographic images

(1) It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image.

(2) An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both ~

(a) pornographic, and

(b) an extreme image.

First of all, its a good thing that the servant of satan David ‘scumbag adulterer’ Blunkett is no longer in high office; we would have no one to finally determine what is or is not pornographic or extreme.

People have been over this for the entire twentieth century. Careers and lives ruined, businesses trashed and yet, ‘here we go again’. If two people want to create an image, whatever it is, it is their business, it is also their business if they want to publish those images and it is their absolute right.

The laws of copyright are enough to protect people who publish images (model releases etc etc) and the criminal laws covering violence of all kinds are adequate to protect people whose images are taken during acts of violence.

This law is simply not needed. It is yet another knee-jerk jack-boot reaction. More on that downwards.

(3) An image is &quotpornographic” if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.

Nonsense. People can be aroused by anything, including pictures of feet. This definition does not work.

(4) Where an image forms part of a series of images, the question whether the image appears to have been so produced is to be determined by reference to ~

(a) the image itself, and

(b) (if the series of images is such as to be capable of providing a context for the image) the context in which it occurs in the series of images.

(5) So, for example, where ~

(a) an image forms an integral part of a narrative constituted by a series of images, and

(b) it appears that the series of images as a whole was not produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal, the image may, by virtue of being part of that narrative, be found not to be pornographic, even though it might have been found to be pornographic if taken by itself.

So, if you have a movie where there is a plot where something bad happens that’s OK, but if you take a still from that film and distribute it, then that is a crime.

That is INSANE.

(6) An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following ~

(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,

so all the stills of people being killed in Iraq who have their shoes off are now illegal. Very smart!

(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

This line says more about the people who drafted this bad bill than any decent person would care to know. What about serious injury to a persons feet? As we all know, there are people who are obsessed in a sexual manner with feet; why are these parts of the body singled out? It is just irrational nonsense.

(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,

First of all, corpses do not have rights. Secondly, you cannot do violence to an inanimate, non-living object which is what a corpse is. This bill is written by someone with no experience of life, the arts or the history of pornography, and dare I suggest, the law.

(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.

This is entirely problematic.

By extending these rights to animals, you go down a slippery slope ending in the banning of meat. But I digress. This part of the bill not only outlaws the depiction of images of real bestiality, but it outlaws, simulations of bestiality you can never, ever ban the depiction of something from someone’s imagination, that is the ultimate restriction of your right to free thought and expression.

An image of an act, conjured from the imagination is protected speech. There are no victims, no animals are harmed; there is no crime, unless you consider thinking to now be a crime.

Then there is the aspect of images conjured from the imagination that are not staged photographs, i.e. simple drawings made with paint, or crayons or computer graphics. Those images too would be subject to this absurd legislation.

Your first thought when you read about this is that it is designed to prevent the ‘Mr. Sebatians‘ of this world from making and distributing images of their consensual S&M fun and games, but actually, it encompasses everything, and not just those works.

(7) In this section “image” means ~

(a) a moving or still image (produced by any means); or

(b) data (stored by any means) which is capable of conversion into an image within paragraph (a).

This is interesting from a technical point of view; all files can be turned into images and sounds; what you need is the right tool to do it. Going into the details here would be a major digression, but suffice to say, you can (circular) file this in the same place where the arguments covering DVD decoding codes (strings of nummbers) and DCMA violating t-shirts are stored. Use the Google.

(8) In this section references to a part of the body include references to a part surgically constructed (in particular through gender reassignment surgery).

???!!!

It is a defence if

(c) that the person ~

(i) was sent the image concerned without any prior request having been made by or on behalf of the person, and

(ii) did not keep it for an unreasonable time.

What is a reasonable amount of time?

It’s all garbage clearly.

Now on to the reason why this part of the bill exists.

A woman’s daughter was brutally murdered by an insane man who liked to look at ‘violent images’. This grieving mother modeled herself on Mary Whitehouse and collected 50,000 signatures in a petition that caused this bad law to be written.

I have some questions.

Why is it that a petition of 50,000 people results in a new law being written, an absurd and bad law, but if MILLIONS of people sign a petition against road pricing, that is TOTALLY IGNORED?

How is it that two million people can march in the streets of London in the biggest ever demonstration in this country’s history against an immoral illegal and predictably murderous war, and they are TOTALLY IGNORED?

Those are rhetorical questions of course, as we know the answers.

This is another piece of knee jerk legislation, as is the way in this country, where the law is created by newspaper editors and grieving parents with a disproportionately loud voice.

We see it with the ban on dangerous dogs (brought in after a child was savaged), and the ban on handguns (after some nutter killed some children, in that case, with a gun). The same process unfolds every time; the parents ‘go public’ the newspaper editors get behind them and pressure parliament to ‘DO SOMETHING’ or look like they are soft on crime.

The only law that comes out of this is bad law, and it is bad law every time.

What is also shocking (actually, not really shocking because this is normal behavior for them) is that the government gives the excuse (as Bliar did for his police state measures) that only a small number of people will be affected by this legislation.

This is astonishing and evil in equal measures.

If one person has their rights taken away by this law, we all suffer. Thats like saying, “we will only exterminate a small number of people to solve this problem”. Everyone’s rights are as precious and important as everyone eles’s and you cannot take away someone’s rights and then justify it because the numbers of the victims will be small.

I’m not making this up.

And you can read all the other lies and deceptions that they regularly take out of the Fascist Neu Labor toolbox at that link.

Needless to say, no one will obey this law should it come into force. Thanks to the internets, you can look at whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, and no one will know what you are looking at as long as you are computer literate and take the necessary precautions.

The days of risking mail order to get your copies of ‘Piercing Fan International Quarterly‘ are over, and so are the days of legislation like this being enforceable.

You BASTARDS.

Open letter to the Generalbundesanwaltschaft against the criminalization of critical academic research and political engagement

On 31st July 2007 the flats and workplaces of Dr. Andrej Holm and Dr. Matthias B., as well as of two other persons, were searched by the police. Dr. Andrej Holm was arrested, flown by helicopter to the German Federal Court in Karlsruhe and brought before the custodial judge. Since then he has been held in pretrial confinement in a Berlin jail. All four people have been charged with “membership in a terrorist association according to § 129a StGB” (German Penal Code, section 7 on ‘Crimes against Public Order’). They are alleged to be members of a so-called ‘militante gruppe’ (mg). The text of the search warrant revealed that preliminary proceedings against these four people have been going on since September 2006 and that the four had since been under constant surveillance.

A few hours before the house searches, Florian L., Oliver R. und Axel H. were arrested in the Brandenburg region and accused of attempted arson on four vehicles of the German Federal Army. Andrej Holm is alleged to have met one of these three persons on two occasions in the first half of 2007 in supposedly “conspiratorial circumstances”. The Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) therefore assumes that the four above mentioned persons as well as the three individuals arrested in Brandenburg are members of a “militant group,” and is thus investigating all seven on account of suspected “membership in a terrorist association” according to §129a StGB. According to the arrest warrant against Andrej Holm, the charge made against the above mentioned four individuals is presently justified on the following grounds, in the order that the federal prosecutor has listed them:

– Dr. Matthias B. is alleged to have used, in his academic publications, “phrases and key words” which are also used by the ‘militante gruppe’;

– As political scientist holding a PhD, Matthias B. is seen to be intellectually capable to “author the sophisticated texts of the ‘militante gruppe’ (mg)”. Additionally, “as employee in a research institute he has access to libraries which he can use inconspicuously in order to do the research necessary to the drafting of texts of the ‘militante gruppe’”;

– Another accused individual is said to have met with suspects in a conspiratorial manner: “meetings were regularly arranged without, however, mentioning place, time and content of the meetings”; furthermore, he is said to have been active in the “extreme left-wing scene”;

– In the case of a third accused individual, an address book was found which included the names and addresses of the other three accused;

– Dr. Andrej H., who works as urban sociologist, is claimed to have close contacts with all three individuals who have been charged but still remain free;

– Dr. Andrej H. is alleged to have been active in the “resistance mounted by the extreme left-wing scene against the World Economic Summit of 2007 in Heiligendamm”;

– The fact that he – allegedly intentionally — did not take his mobile phone with him to a meeting is considered as “conspiratorial behavior”.

Andrej H., as well as Florian L., Oliver R. und Axel H., are detained since 1st August 2007 in Berlin-Moabit under very strict conditions: they are locked in solitary confinement 23 hours a day and are allowed only one hour of courtyard walk. Visits are limited to a total of half an hour every two weeks. Contacts, including contacts with lawyers, are allowed only through separation panes, including contact with their lawyers. The mail of the defense is checked.

The charges described in the arrest warrants reveal a construct based on very dubious reasoning by analogy. The reasoning involves four basic hypotheses, none of which the Federal High Court could substantiate with any concrete evidence, but through their combination they are to leave the impression of a “terrorist association”. The social scientists, because of their academic research activity, their intellectual capacities and their access to libraries, are said to be the brains of the alleged “terrorist organization”. For, according to the Federal prosecutor, an association called “militante gruppe” is said to use the same concepts as the accused social scientists. As evidence for this reasoning, the concept of “gentrification” is named – one of the key research themes of Andrej Holm und Matthias B. in past years, about which they have published internationally. They have not limited their research findings to an ivory tower, but have made their expertise available to citizens’ initiatives and tenants’ organizations. This is how critical social scientists are constructed as intellectual gang leaders.

Since Andrej Holm has friends, relatives and colleagues, they now also are suspect to be “terrorists”, because they know Andrej. Another accused individual was blamed for having the names of Andrej Holm and of two others charged (but not jailed) in his address book. Since the latter are also deemed to be “terrorists” – this is how “guilt by association” is established.

Paragraph § 129a, introduced in Germany in 1976, makes it possible for our colleagues to be criminalized as “terrorists”. This is how, through § 129a, the existence of a “terrorist group” is claimed.

Through these constructs, every academic research activity and political work is presented as potentially criminal – in particular when politically engaged colleagues who intervene in social struggles are concerned. This is how critical research, in particular research linked with political engagement, is turned into ideological ring leadership and “terrorism”.

We demand that the Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) immediately suspend the § 129a-proceedings against all parties concerned and to release Andrej Holm and the other imprisoned from jail at once. We strongly reject the outrageous accusation that the academic research activities and the political engagement of Andrej Holm are to be viewed as complicity in an alleged “terrorist association”. No arrest warrant can be deduced from the academic research and political work of Andrej Holm. The Federal Prosecutor, through applying Article § 129, is threatening the freedom of research and teaching as well as social-political engagement.

Initial signatures by:
Prof. Dr. Manuel Aalbers (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Prof. Dr. Rowland Atkinson (University of Tasmania, Australien), Prof. Dr. Lawrence D. Berg (Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Diversity & Identity, University of British Columbia), Prof. Dr. Neil Brenner (New York University, Sociology), Prof. Dr. Craig Calhoun (President, Social Science Research Council, and University Professor, Sociology, NYU), Prof. Dr. Mike Davis (Prof. of Urban History, Irvine/USA), Dr. Michael Dear (Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California/Los Angeles), Prof. Dr. Michael Edwards (The Bartlett Centre for Architecture and Planning, UCL, London), Prof. Dr. Geoff Ely (University of Michigan, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor), Prof. Dr. John Friedmann (University of California, Los Angeles), Prof. Dr. Herbert Gans (Columbia University, New York), Prof. Dr. Alan Harding (University of Salford, UK), Prof. Dr. Michael Harloe (University of Salford, Vice-President), Prof. Dr. David Harvey (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York), Prof. Dr. Andreas Huyssen (Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University), Prof. Dr. Martin Jay (Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California Berkeley), Prof. Dr. Bob Jessop (Lancaster Universtiy), Prof. Dr. Roger Keil (York University, Toronto, Canada), Prof. Dr. Rianne Mahon (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada), Prof. Dr. Peter Marcuse (Columbia University, New York), Prof. Dr. Margit Mayer (Freie Universität Berlin), Prof. Dr. Frances Fox Piven (President of the American Sociological Association, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, City University New York), Prof. Dr. Andrew Ross (New York University, New York), Prof. Dr. Saskia Sassen (Columbia University, New York, and London School of Economics) Prof. Dr. Andrew Sayer (Lancaster University, Sociology), Prof. Dr. Richard Sennett (Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, Bemis Professor of Social Sciences at MIT, Professor of the Humanities at New York University), Prof. Dr. William Sewell (The Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and History Emeritus, University of Chicago), Prof. Dr. Neil Smith (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, Director of the Center for Place Culture and Politics, Graduate Center of the City University of New York), Prof. Dr. Michael Storper (Centennial Professor of Economic Geography, London School of Economics, and Professor of Economic Sociology, Science Po, Paris), Prof. Dr. Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester, UK), , Prof. Dr. Peter J. Taylor (Loughborough University, UK), Prof. Dr. John Urry (Lancaster University, Sociology), Dr. Jennifer Wolch (Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California/Los Angeles).

Media contact to solidarity group in Berlin: einstellung@so36.net
German lawyer and media contact for Germany:
Wolfgang Kaleck
Immanuelkirchstrasse 3-4
D-10405 Berlin
Germany
fon: +49-(0)30-4467-9218
fax: +49-(0)30-4467-9220

Media contact for international affairs:
Prof. Dr. Neil Brenner (New York University, fon: USA-212-998 8349)
Prof. Dr. Margit Mayer (Freie Universität Berlin, fon: 030-8385-2875)

[…]

http://www.statewatch.org/swpubs.html

And these are the people that the UK wants to get into bed with.

These are the people who are in charge of the EU, whose arrest warrants are now good throughout the EU.

The fact of the matter is that this is only the beginning. If the signatories to this document and anyone else who values their freedom do not do something to stop the root cause of this, the war machine, then they might as well not bother doing anything. Certainly, petition signing will not help these people after they have been arrested.

I wonder just what has to happen before these people take anything seriously. Do people have to be kidnapped off of the street and tortured to outrage them into action? Obviously not since that is already happening. Of course, the people who are suffering rendition are not Germans, so they don’t count. Do people (specifically their German colleagues) have to be executed without trial just for doing the above? Will that be enough to spur them into action?

For a bunch of academics they are not very bright.

I sympathize with these people.

They want to believe that the world is still run by decent people. That despite the outrageous power grabs, insane laws, illegal wars and venal leaders, that in the end, everything is still essentially the same, and that decency will win out. They want desperately to believe that they merely have to point to injustice for it to dissolve under their righteous gaze.

I am sorry to report that the world is not like that anymore, because decent people are not behind the judges benches or the police uniforms or in the legislature. Those men could be arrested, imprisoned and executed and no amount of petition writing will save them. Indeed, no amount of pressure can even get them out of gaol.

It must be very startling and sad for these people to finally wake up to find that everything they counted on is gone, and their whole world is destroyed. How horrifying it must be to them as the realization that they may have to pull down everything that they depend upon and believe in in order to restore justice and freedom.

In the end, they are going to be forced to make a choice. They are going to be forced to choose a side. Outrage is just the very beginning, and their enemies are well advanced in their plans. They already have the camps ready to hold them all, and of course, none of these academics have guns, after having been brainwashed into thinking that guns and gun ownership are ‘a bad thing’.

If they ever decide that enough is enough, what are they going to do against a well equipped army?

You ‘demand’ that the “‘Bundesanwaltschaft’ immediately suspend the § 129a-proceedings against all parties concerned”. And if they say ‘no’ THEN WHAT ARE YOU GONG TO DO?

Maybe if there are some chemists amongst them they can fashion some home made weapons…but I digress, these people would rather die than defend themselves, their colleagues or their liberty.

And that is why all is lost.

Doreen Lawrence attacks Tory frontrunner, saying black people will not vote for him

Patrick Wintour, political editor
Saturday August 4, 2007

Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, yesterday launched a fierce personal attack on Boris Johnson, saying he would destroy multicultural London if elected mayor, and that no informed black person would vote for him.

Ms Lawrence, who does not normally become involved in party politics, said she had been moved to make the criticisms by her anger at Mr Johnson’s attitude to the Macpherson inquiry in 1999 into the Metropolitan police’s failure to bring her son’s killers to justice 14 years ago.

Her intervention comes as David Cameron, the Tory leader, steps up his efforts to woo the black vote in the capital.

Ms Lawrence said: “Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multi-cultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city’s unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.

“Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.”

Mr Johnson wrote a series of articles at the time of the Macpherson inquiry, claiming some of its recommendations were born of political correctness and that the furore around the murder had created the whiff of a witchhunt against the police. The inquiry team found the police institutionally racist.

Mr Johnson was especially condemnatory of a “weird recommendation that the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour ‘other than in a public place’.”

“Not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen,” he wrote. “No wonder the police are already whingeing that they cannot make any arrests in London. No wonder the CPS groans with anti-discrimination units, while making a balls-up of so many cases.”

He argued that “the PC brigade, having punched this hole in the Metropolitan police, is swarming through to take over the whole system” and went on to say that he feared “what started as a sensible attempt to find justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence has given way to hysteria”.

In his articles – mainly in the Daily Telegraph – Mr Johnson also made it clear that he believed there had been “grotesque failures in the Lawrence murder case, and they may well have originated in racism”, adding the police officers “may have jumped to the wrong conclusions due to a racialist mindset”.

In another article, presumably for stylistic effect, he has referred to children as “piccaninnies” and described the “watermelon smiles of black people”.

Ms Lawrence said such remarks made it surprising that Mr Cameron was backing Mr Johnson. “[David Cameron] says he is trying to change the Conservative party from its past, and support multiculturalism, and bring in new communities, then supporting Boris Johnson is not a way of doing that.”

[…]

Guardian

This woman is insane.

Under ‘Red Ken’ Livingston, London has been turned into the very model of dehumanized surveillance grid living, where everyone’s privacy is violated routinely by a system that he personally implemented; the ‘Congestion Charge’. It was Red Ken who extended it despite the explicit objection of the majority of Londoners.

Under people like him, the so called ‘blacks’ will have an increasingly hard time as the biometric net / Quantized Human Pleb Grid is rolled out. They will be the ones routinely stopped and fingerprinted. They are already the ones most represented in the appalling and unprecedented DNA database. It is people like Boris who are for removing these monstrosities; she should be FOR him not AGAINST him.

This woman simply is not thinking:

She added: “He felt that people should be entitled to say what they want. It sounds to me that what he believes is that because something is said and done in private it is acceptable, but clearly it can never be acceptable to hold those views. Anyway, what is said in private normally manifests itself out in public.”

See what I mean?

Not once does this deranged person mention a single policy that Boris wants to implement. But this is not about policy. This is about the inmates taking over the asylum.

What has happened to her is unbelievably sad, but it has clearly caused her to become irrational. The media have made her into a sort of saint figure, and they listen to and print her every word uncritically. This is crazy. Her suffering of an unimaginable injustice does not qualify her to set the standards by which we should all live, and I deeply despise people who want to control what we can and cannot say.

Boris Johnson, as a British man® is free to write whatever he wants. This is the freedom that people in Britain have, and just because he has a sense of humor that someone somewhere might find offensive, this does not exclude him from running for office, and it does not mean that he would not make a brilliant Mayor of London. I would rather have a ribald Boris as Mayor of London tearing down the Congestion Charge system, anonymising the Oyster Card system, mandating that busses take cash, reinstating the Routemaster, overturning the smoking ban … returning London to what it is meant to be, than some politically correct, fascist police state facilitator who is turning the entire city into a giant concentration camp.

Increasingly, people are going to have to accept that people ‘say things’. All sorts of things. The internets can bring you these things instantly. This woman would have us living in a paranoid world where everyone is thinking one thing and writing another; where everyone is writing as if they are under surveillance, where their freely expressed thought can come back to ‘haunt them’ in the future, as PC witchunters Google their words for expressions of forbidden thought.

That is not a world where any decent person wants to live and work. It is the world of fascism, and people who say things like she does are the absolute enemies of mankind … and she has every right to say it, as wrong headed as it is. This unelected figurehead has the right to say whatever she wants, and so does Boris. That is freedom of speech in a free country. She should not be toppled from her position as a ‘community leader’ for spouting twaddle, and Boris should not be put off the list of Mayoral candidates for using his own unique brand of expression. Everyone can choose for themselves who they want to control London…that is where the person is elected.

But I digress…

Everyone is going to have to accept that people write what they write, and this has no bearing on the sort of person they really are, or what their policies are and how efficiently they implement them. If we do not accept this, then only the people who have never written are going to be ‘fit to be employed’ or ‘fit for office’. If someone doesn’t write, keeping their innermost ghastly thoughts (if a thought can be ghastly) secret and to themselves, this doesn’t mean that they are ‘nice’, or that they will be able to do the job well. If someone only writes smooth things, does this mean that we can trust them more? Of course not. What we have to talk about are ideas applied to problems and then performance and execution. Writing for fun or employment has nothing to do with either of those things, and these personal attacks on Boris Johnson are just childish, stupid and pointless. Opinion must always be separated from Policy. Informal thought written down is NOT POLICY.

Lets see what Boris wants to do with London / what he is informally thinking shall we?

Transport

A dedicated cyclist, Boris Johnson wants to get rid of “Ken Livingstone’s 18-metre-long socialist frankfurter buses” and speed humps “which necessitate the need for 4x4s”. He has attacked legislation on car booster seats for children as “utterly demented”.

He has bemoaned “the unbelievable and chronic chaos on the tube” and the state of the railways, observing: “The fundamental problem is not that the train companies are monstrously abusing the travelling public, though they are … Gordon Brown and the Treasury are … making them pay so much for the franchise that they simply don’t have enough to invest in services.”

I agree with all of this.

Marriage

“David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith are plainly right to extol the benefits of marriage, and, if a £20 tax credit would really begin to bubblegum together our broken society, then that would clearly be a price worth paying … It is outrageous that the benefit system should be so heavily skewed in favour of single parent families,” Johnson wrote recently.

Marriage is good!

Diversity and integration

The Tory MP has argued that society must “inculcate … Britishness, especially into young Muslims”, adding: “We should teach English, and we should teach in English. We should teach British history. We should think again about the jilbab, with the signals of apartness that it sends out, and we should probably scrap faith schools.

“We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English … we cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid.”

Last year he said localism could lead to sharia law because “large chunks of the Muslim population” did not feel British. He added: “Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system?”

The Mayor of London cannot forbid people from preaching in Arabic… or Latin for that matter. This is just TALK. Real democracies have checks and balances in place so that no matter what the personal opinions of elected officials are, they cannot violate your rights. Sadly, the Mayor of London can violate your rights willy nilly, and there is nothing that you can do about it. If a bad man, like Red Ken is in charge, then bad things like the Congestion Charge can and will happen. The rights of people in the UK need to be enshrined….but thats another blog post.

Inequality

He admits the low tax rates enjoyed by many in the City are “odd”, but argues: “Without their efforts, there would be no squillions, and a windfall tax might simply kill the goose.” He suggests philanthropy should be encouraged instead.

He has accused Labour of waging a middle-class war against “the bottom 20% of society – the group that supplies us with the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts and the 70,000 people who are lost in our prisons … They keep them snared in a super-complicated system of means-tested benefits … They tax them an exorbitant proportion of their incomes.”

Completely correct, and he is completely right about Philanthropy, as are others.

The environment, Housing, Health its all good. This is a man who has some common sense, who is not in thrall to political correctness, which means that he is free thinking. We need free thinkers…heavens above, we need people who can THINK. That is why Boris Johnson should be Mayor of London. ‘Shock Jock’ Nick Ferrari is just thick, and anyone who used to be ‘ShowBiz Reporter at The Sun’ shouldn’t be left in charge of a ten penny piece let alone one of the greatest cities mankind ever created. Ken Livingston has been an unmitigated disaster. Whoever the lib-dems are fielding they are unelectable thanks to their absurd local income tax ‘ideas’.

and finally, a nifty comment from a real person:

Bye ken, and welcome Boris, who is someone who will say what we all feel, and not scared by the do gooder groups, who so many bow down to now!

– Graham, Southend on sea, UK

from This is London

See what I mean?…again?

UPDATED FOR THE 2010 ATTACK!
Crytome, a very old and very useful service run by John Young, has been told by its ISP that its contract is being terminated. This is a shenanigan, since his ISP was very supportive of the site up till now:

[By certified mail, received 28 April 2007.]
VERIO
An NTT Communications Company

Writer’s Direct Numbers
o) 303-645-1912
fax) 303-708-2445
e-mail: dthompson[at]verio.net

April 20, 2007

Via Certified Mail

John Young
Cryptome Org
251 West 89th Street
New Yor, NY 10024

RE: www.cryptome.org

Dear Mr. Young,

This letter is to notify you that we are terminating your service for violation of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective Friday May 4, 2007. We are providing you with two week notice to locate another service provider.

Sincerely,

VERIO INC.
an NTT Communications Company

[Signed]

Danna Thompson
Legal Department

Verio Inc.
8005 S. Chester Street
Suite 200
Englewood, CO 80112
www.verio.com

————————————————————
Cryptome note:

This notice of termination is surprising for Verio has been consistently supportive of freedom of information against those who wish to suppress it. Since 1999 Cryptome has received a number of e-mailed notices from Verio’s legal department in response to complaints from a variety of parties, ranging from British intelligence to alleged copyright holders to persons angry that their vices have been exposed (see below). In every case Verio has heretofore accepted Cryptome’s explanation for publishing material, and in some cases removal of the material, and service has continued.

In this latest instance there was no notice received from Verio describing the violation of acceptable use to justify termination of service prior to receipt of the certified letter, thus no opportunity to understand or respond to the basis for termination.

It may be wondered if Verio was threatened by an undisclosable means, say by an National Security Letter or by a confidential legal document or by a novel attack not yet aired.

Every few months our Verio service rep, Warren Gleicher, Senior Account Manager, (wgleicher[at]verio.net) writes to see if service is satifactory.

Danna and Warren: Cryptome would appreciate your telling what has led to the termination for publication. Send the information anonymously if necessary to keep your jobs.
————————————————————

Sample legal notice[s] from Verio:

Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 13:06:12 -0400
To: cchunt[at]hway.net
From: John Young 
Subject: British Request to Remove Document

Mr. Charles Hunt
Acceptable Use Department
Verio
Tel: 561-912-2536

Dear Mr. Hunt

It was a pleasure to speak with you today about the
document on my site Cryptome:

 http://cryptome.org/mi5-lis-uk.htm.

Your courtesy and supportive remarks are very much
appreciated.

This will confirm that I decline to remove the document
in response to your forwarded request from a "British
Intelligence Agency" made to Verio's legal department.

I do not believe that posting the document is illegal
under US law and does not violate Verio's terms of
acceptable use. And that an informal request, not a
court order, is insufficient reason to remove the
document which provides significant public information.

I told you that I knew of three other instances of
British intelligence documents being posted on the
Internet, and that they had been removed by the ISPs
(Yahoo and Geocities) without public explanation of
why or what justification was given for their removal.
Thus, I would like to obtain information on the British
request to Verio in or to publish the information on Cryptome.

In response to your invitation to send a letter for
forwarding to Verio's legal department I would very
much appreciate learning, in writing if possible:

1. Who made the request: person, title and agency.
2. When it was made.
3. To whom it was made.
4. Its format, whether verbal or written or both.
5. A description of the request or a copy if it was written.
6. Other means discussed between British Intelligence and
Verio to remove the document.
7. How the request relates to Verio's acceptable use policy.

Verio's response and this message will be published on
Cryptome to provide information on how British Intelligence
conducts its affairs in the US.

Regards,

John Young
Cryptome
251 West 89th Street
New York, NY 10024
212-873-8700

That is how REAL PEOPLE respond to threats, in case you didn’t know.

I am sure that Mr. Young is being flooded with offers of free space. All he has to do is take all the offers, upload Cryptome to each of them, and then keep them all identical with rsync.

Then, like TPB he will be impossible to shut down.

Shutting down Cryptome is like burning books. The BASTARDS who have ordered this are the lowest ‘humans’ on the scale.

FAST FORWARD

its 2010 and the completely evil Micro$oft has managed to get Network Solutions to deregister cryptome.org, effectively making it invisible.

Here it the document that Micro$oft does not want you to read. I suggest you download, it, read it and then seed it.

Not only is Micro$oft unable to innovate, its worthless products destroy your work, track you, allow the totalitarian governments of the world back door access to your private documents… the list goes on and on. If you do not already shun them, you should shun them completely. If you have money, buy Apple, who are less evil. If you want to keep your equipment, switch to Ubuntu; it is a superior and moral operating system. You have no excuse, other than your own lazyness, to keep putting up with and financially supporting the evil of this bad company.

Now M$ seems to think that they can remove other people’s websites and stop information on their nefarious acts from spreading. They did not understand the internet when it first started to become important, and now they demonstrate that they are without any clue when it comes to the modern internet, the intentions of the people who run it (you and me) and most importantly, the Striesand effect. Now that they have tried to remove this document, the number of people reading it and storing it will increase by orders of magnitude.

No one is safe whilst evil companies like M$ are able to use the violent state as their enforcing arm. There must be a consequence to this company being evil. That means you must boycott them and their products completely.

Micro$oft is evil, stupid, destructive and in this instance, on the wrong side of history. In the future, Micro$oft will replace Watt in a book about how copyright and patents were eventually destroyed.

At the time of this update Thu Feb 25 10:34:26 GMT 2010, whois says the following of Cryptome.org:

Domain ID:D7496146-LROR
Domain Name:CRYPTOME.ORG
Created On:25-Jun-1999 14:58:29 UTC
Last Updated On:24-Feb-2010 18:47:18 UTC
Expiration Date:25-Jun-2011 14:58:29 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT HOLD
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:24163306-NSI
Registrant Name:Cryptome
Registrant Organization:Cryptome
Registrant Street1:251 West 89th Street
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:New York
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:10024
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.9999999999
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:+1.9999999999
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:jya@PIPELINE.COM
Admin ID:24163306-NSI
Admin Name:Cryptome
Admin Organization:Cryptome
Admin Street1:251 West 89th Street
Admin Street2:
Admin Street3:
Admin City:New York
Admin State/Province:NY
Admin Postal Code:10024
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.9999999999
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:+1.9999999999
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:jya@PIPELINE.COM
Tech ID:24163306-NSI
Tech Name:Cryptome
Tech Organization:Cryptome
Tech Street1:251 West 89th Street
Tech Street2:
Tech Street3:
Tech City:New York
Tech State/Province:NY
Tech Postal Code:10024
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.9999999999
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:+1.9999999999
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:jya@PIPELINE.COM
Name Server:NS47.WORLDNIC.COM
Name Server:NS48.WORLDNIC.COM
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
Name Server: 
DNSSEC:Unsigned

Contact: Ilona, Urban, Blakeley – Press Secretary to Aaron Russo
Company: All Your Freedoms, Inc.

Website: http://www.freedomtofascism.com

Winner of numerous Awards, Aaron Russo, announces documentary milestone:

“America: Freedom To Fascism” a groundbreaking non-partisan political documentary jumps overnight to #1 on “Google Video United Kingdom” and #4 on “Google Video Worldwide”.

“America: Freedom to Fascism”, the Grassroots-driven, underground documentary by Writer/Director/Producer, Aaron Russo is a full length feature film with a 5 star “highest rating” on Google Video.

Overnight, the film jumped in rank to #4 on Google Worldwide and to #1 on Google United Kingdom. As of the morning of February 5, 2007 “America: Freedom to Fascism” has been viewed a total of 1,522,097 times since it was first uploaded to Google on October 20, 2006.

Mr. Russo is gratified with the public success of the film despite the fact it has not received a single review from any mainstream television or major media organization.

The American people are to be congratulated for waking up to the fact their Government has shirked its responsibility to coin money, and instead handed it over to a private banking cartel, the Federal Reserve, which charges the government interest on the paper they print.

This fact explains the American government’s burdensome debt which falls squarely on the shoulders of every working American. Yet no Politician is addressing this issue.

Mr. Russo’s previous films have received 6 Academy Award nominations, and he personally has won an Emmy, Tony, Grammy, Golden Globe and an NAACP Image Award for Best Film of the Year; AND is credited with the all-time classics: The Rose with Bette Midler and Trading Places with Eddie Murphy.

The amazing success of this film illustrates the power of the internet and grassroots word of mouth activism.
This compelling documentary has captivated grassroots audiences worldwide since its Fall theatrical and internet release.

“America: Freedom to Fascism” chronicles the history of the Federal Reserve System, the resultant income tax, and leads the viewer into the imminent future of our soon-to-be controlled, way of life. Russo has brilliantly written a documentary about a seemingly “dry” topic and turned it into a riveting masterpiece. This is one history lesson you’re not likely to forget anytime soon.

Russo affirms, “The People are ready for this. They know something isn’t right, and this explains it all. They are hungry for this information”. People want the truth. Aaron is ready, able and willing to deliver it. Perhaps Mr. Russo is on to something.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff said on Monday.
Click to learn more…

“We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the Internet,” Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police.

“They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination,” Chertoff said. “Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites.”

Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London’s transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat.

To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into “intelligence fusion centers,” where they would work with local police agencies.

By the end of the next fiscal year, he said the department aims to up that to 35 staffers. […]

Yahoo News

My emphasis.

We can substitute ‘radicalize themselves’ for its true meaning, ‘educate themselves’.

Most interesting is the quote, “Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites”.

Indeed. The people who cannot be stopped but who can stop everything are those who do not. Those who do not march in the streets for example. Those who do not do more than those that do, and they cannot be stopped, and what they do not can do more than those that do. You do remember this do you not?

British President Tony Blair has joined a burgeoning international community – by starting his own weblog.

The launch of www.tonyblair.con was reported on state TV BBC, which urged users to send in messages to the president.

Mr Blairs’s first posting, entitled autobiography, tells of his childhood, Blair’s National Socialst revolution, and the country’s upcoming war with Iran.

There is a postform for users to send in questions for the president, and a picture gallery containing a series of images of the blogger himself.

The move by Mr Blair comes amid continuing internet censorship by the Blair government.

In a country where the media is strictly controlled, the internet has become the main forum for dissident voices.

But in its bid to crack down on anti-government bloggers, the government uses one of the most sophisticated internet monitoring systems in the world.

Such monitoring will not pose a problem for the president. However, at the end of his first posting – which runs to more than 2,000 words in English – he promises to try to keep things “shorter and simpler” in future.

“With hope in God, I intend to wholeheartedly complete my talk in future with allotted 15 minutes,” he writes.

Nose bleed

Mr Blair’s first entry on his blog, which is available in Persian, Arabic, English and French and includes an RSS feed to get future new entries to readers, is dated Friday.

He begins by telling users of his humble origins. “During the era that nobility was a prestige and living in a city was perfection, I was born in a poor family in a remote village of Edinburgh” he writes.
His father was a “a barrister and lecturer” and a “pious man”, who had decided to move the family to London when Mr Blair was just a year old.

Describing himself as a “distinguished student”, the president tells how he excelled at school, coming 132nd out of more than 400,000 students to take a university entrance test – despite suffering from a nose bleed at the time.

He talks about his admiration and affection for the leader of the Bolshevik revolution Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and discusses Britains’s upcoming war with Iran, calling former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein an “aggressor” who was “intoxicated with power”.

The French are also heavily criticised by the president. At one point he describes it as “grease of the Axis of weasles” for what he says was its support for the “terrorist groups” which had tried to support Iraq’s secular government.

And the blog’s current poll asks the question: “Do you think that the US and UK intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another world war?”

‘Publicity stunt’

It is not yet clear how well Mr Blairs’s blog will be received. User figures already appear high – by 1100 BST on Monday, nearly 12,000 people had taken part in the online vote.

But Jultra, a London-based blogger, told the Associated Press news agency he thought the president’s efforts were merely a publicity stunt.

“Blair used to have nothing to do with the internet and even talked against journalists and bloggers before he became president,” he was quoted as saying.

[…]

BBQ Strikes Again.

The comments of both the Guardian and The Times today are totally immersed in the paralell reality of Bliar and the entirely owned Murder inc. subsidiary.

The first comment on The Guardian (where they have the guts to allow comments) demolishes that insane diatribe entitled, “These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam” perfectly:

“What an appropriate headline this column has.

You forget, for example, that there were American soldiers in Saudi Arabia from very early in the 1990s, well before the WTC bombing.

You forget the vicious overdone sanctions and continual bombing of Iraq both of which continued throughout the 1990s.

You refer three times to ‘war against Islam’ or ‘war on Islam’ – the open letter which prompted your leader does not refer to any such concept.

You write of the absurdity of implying that mass murder is less atrocious when motivated by a sense of grievance. Who has implied this? Certainly not the signatories of the letter.

You, on the other hand, write such words as ‘the conduct of the war in Iraq, regardless of the virtues of removing Saddam…has been riddled with error’. How would you react if someone were to say, ‘the conduct of Al Qaeda, regardless of the virtue of protesting US aggression, has been riddled with error’? War in Iraq and terrorism are both criminal, not simply error-ridden.

If you’re concerned about *mass* murder, about the number of killings, then Al Qaeda with a few thousand dead is to Blair and Bush, with hundreds of thousands dead, as Blair and Bush are to Hitler or Stalin or Mao, with tens of millions dead.

Al Qaeda’s terrorism and Bush and Blair’s wars are both equally unjustified.

Why are you being so defensive? It is absolutely true that Islamic terrorism is provoked by Western aggression against Moslem countries. Tony Blair does not act in the interests of the UK and its people. He doesn’t even act in the interests of the USA, rather he acts in support of George Bush’s mistaken policies.

Why is the Guardian leaping to his defence with, to use your own phrase, such ‘arrant nonsense’?”

indeed. Like I said in an earlier post no one with any education or understanding of this ‘problem’ believes the lies that are being trundled out on rusty whellbarrows by rags like the Guardian and The Times.

There is something interesting however about the screeching screed published by The Times today. It ends with;

[…] This low-level war is going to take a huge effort of will and courage. It is going to mean applying what may seem illiberal measures in order to save lives. In return, the state must exercise massive restraint and not abuse that responsibility. But the real key is for Muslims to realise that their future lies here and to embrace British values and reject violent Islamist theology. The country may indeed be in its greatest danger since the second world war, as John Reid, the home secretary, said last week. But as Britain prevailed then, so it will again.

!!!

It ends with “England Prevails”. And we all know where THAT comes from; that’s the motto of the fascist government of Britain in Alan Moore’s brilliant ‘V for Vendetta’. Whoever wrote that piece for The Times is sending a message that he knows the whole scenario, hysteria and Murdoch driven line that the paper is taking is total bullshit.

No one at The Times is so stupid or deluded that they do not understand (even if they never say so in public or in print) that what is happening today is based entirely on lies, and need not be happening at all. They are all constrained by the people who control that paper, and rather than lose their jobs, they keep quiet…which some would see as a crime…but I digress; someone in there took the risk of putting this message in the paper at a time of extreme hysteria.

Bravo to you.

BBQ staffers are not feeling the love:

The thing I find strange about all this is that often people who write blogs, or contribute to them, somehow think that they are involved in a private forum.

Don’t be stupid. No one thinks this. What they fear is someone from that festering nest of lies and nepotism looking at their blog. They fear it beceause they know that it is possible that BBQ will read the words and take the ideas from their blog, link to them ro print them out of context, and then blatantly misrepresent them in one of their unauthored, unnatributed pay for insertion PR pieces. There is no avenue of redress; BBQ is the face of power, and since everyone (almost everyone) blindly trusts it, it is more dangerous than FOX news since they have ‘back door access‘ to shape opinion in the UK. This is changing however.

If you and your blog are attacked by BBQ, you are the victim. Bloggers are ‘the little guy’. You are the guys putting advertisements that threaten the public on TV. You are the guys calling Bittorrent a tool for perverts and criminals. The fact that you cannot sense this or understand it perfectly, and pretend to be ‘just another voice’ speaks volumes about you and the problem. That is why people think its ‘spooky’ that BBQ is reading their blog, and lets not forget that you are in the pocket of spooks, which in and of itself is ‘spooky’.

It wasn’t the confidentiality issue that bugged me, but that anyone would think that we as programme makers don’t have as much right as everyone else to read what you’re all writing, especially if you are writing about us. So, what do you think? Stick it on your blog and I’ll respond.

Once again, we are not journalists. We understand from the beginning that freedom of speech and freedom of the press is everyone’s right, and not just the right of journalists in the pay of the state. We feel the same level of pain no matter who is killed in a conflict; we don’t reserver our best words feelings and airtime just for people in our profession.

You go on TV every night and with foreknowledge, lie, spin and distort, knowing full well that you are doing so. ({insert Pre-Emption} this is the part where they say, “you pointed to a set of BBQ comments telling us of our error, see? we are unbiased!”. This is the logic of a villain. You deliberately lie, and then say sorry we were wrong, and think thats absolves you.) This is what ‘buggs’ us. You are unnacountable, and even when you are pulled up on your shenanigans, you are utterly unrepentant.

It has to be said that we find it astonishing that you can use Technorati to find all the blog posts about you ‘in seconds’, but you cannot use it or Google to find out the truth about any subject. Actually, we suspect that you can do this, but that when you do, you deliberately distort what you find anyway.

So spare us your ‘we have feelings too’ whining about porr wittle jewemy ‘slumped over his computer’; if you are not doing somehting right, you deserve to be roasted, and that is what you are getting, because you are habitually and deliberately perveyors of lies, distortion and spin, and to add insult to injury, everyone in the UK is forced to pay for the ‘service’.

Thankfully we have Technorati, Digg and the blogosphere in general to act as a vaccination to your lie virii. You can never again lie without being instantly caught, countered and castigated, and the only thing you can do about it is slump in front of your computers. It is going to get worse for you. As more people become computer literate (there is a person in your comments that doesn’t know what a blog is. An increasingly rare creature surely), your ability to spread lies will be curtailed to the point where you will either give up the lie game entirely or start to report only the facts, as you are meant to, but often actually fail to do.

The best part of this is that we are now seeing the end of the role of Editors. We do not need editors. We also don’t need moderators censoring out comments that go against the BBQ line. We have our own massively powerful network of free writers in a self correcting environment where the truth always comes out quickly and efficiently; all you have to do is look. Compared to the very small numbers of people who read the comments on your site this is a force you cannot possibly compete with or overcome. Speaking of the comments, this one hit the nail right on the head:

I think the amount of time you spend thinking about yourselves is totally grotesque and seriously unhealthy for you and for us. […]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/

Amen to that. The amount of stories decrying the lack or attacks on freedom of the press is amazing. Whenever ‘ordinary people’ are killed in a conflict, one tone, (similar to the one used when recounting the rainfall for the day) is taken, but when a journalist is killed, all of a sudden, the level of tragedty is 1000 times greater. It’s sickening, but now tolerable because you are on the wane, you know it, we know it, and we will all benefit from your permanent elimination.

Your treatment of an educated historian is beyond belief. You have persecuted David Irving just for having a thought process that differs from yours, in other words your thought police have struck again.How dare you jail a human for expressing free thought, because as free people, free thought is our right.If you disagree with what David Irving has said then I challenge you to dabate this issue with him, i.e. a confrontation of evidence provided by both side with an independent ‘judge’. Somehow however I think you have not got the guts for that.The free world condems your thought police and your repressive thought laws.

http://www.petitiononline.com/DavidI/petition.html

The pathetic Guardian is baying for some Egyptian Bloggers to be freed from gaol and for everyone to write to the Egyptian Government to make it happen; a ‘lights on’ commenter pointed out that David Irving was in jail just for thinking wrong thoughts, and that everyone should support him also, to the usual scripted written and unwritten howls of ‘he should burn in hell’.

It does’nt work like that. Either all are free to write or none are free. You cannot selectively support freedom of speech. Of course, The Guardian considers brown skinned people, the chinese, South Americans en masse etc as a sort of pet that needs to be protected, wheras Irving is a ‘full human being’ who really ‘should know better’. That is their nature.

They should be pressing for the absurd laws in the UK to be put down. They should be pressing for David Irving to be released immediately. Better that they should solve their own problems before they tell other people how to live.

Lead by example should be the motto, but Britian can scarcely do this anymore as it turns, at the hands of a very criminal few, into the very sort of country people died to prevent it becoming.

http://ochremedia.com/WWIIToons/index.php

A selection of clips from WW2 era cartoons; I would love to see them all complete.