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.

Internet users could face disconnection for illegal downloads

Sarah Knapton
The Guardian, Tuesday February 12 2008

Internet users who illegally download music and films could lose their access to the web under legislation aimed at cracking down on those who flout piracy laws. Powers being drafted by the government will compel internet service providers to take action against customers who access pirated material.

The Department of Media, Culture and Sport will recommend the plan in a green paper on the creative industries to be published this month, a source with knowledge of the paper said. Under the new sanctions users will face a “three strikes” regime. A warning email will be sent for the first offence, followed by suspension from the service and finally termination of the internet contract.

Shouldnt that be, “download and you are run out”, or “share music and its LBW” as in cricket? Three Strikes laws like this insane RIAA driven drivel come from the USA and have no place in civilized societies.

These laws, as we all know, are actually drafted by the MPAA and the RIAA, not by British legislators, who are as computer literate as an apple. Collectively.

A draft copy of the green paper said the government “will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file-sharing,” although it has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between the ISPs, the Times reported.

The government has come under increasing pressure from the music and film industries to penalise users who download pirated files. Although piracy is illegal, prosecutions are rare.

Like we keep saying about the Guardian; they always take the side of The Man in these issues. Any newspaper that seeks to be taken seriously would never repeat this twaddle unchallenged, but this is exactly what we expect from these idiots, and this ‘report’ is 100% in character; i.e. not journalism, but simple, unthinking regurgitation.

For the record, there is no such thing as a ‘pirated file’. This is the irrational language of the RIAA. ‘Piracy’ is the act of making a copy of someone else’s work and then SELLING IT FOR MONEY. That is what piracy is; it is nothing more than that. File sharing is not piracy. Copying files between computers is not piracy. The Guardian claims that everyone who does not believe this is wrong. This is no surprise. They are an old media dinosaur struggling to make sense of and to fit in with the modern world…the real world. If I were them, I would start by never regurgitating a government PR piece unchallenged in the way that they have opened their mouths, accepted the vomit from HMGs stomach, swished it around and then spat it onto the page, brown chunks and all.

The UK’s four largest internet providers – BT, Tiscali, Orange and Virgin Media – are already in talks with studios on a joint voluntary agreement to share information on web violators.

There is no such thing as a ‘web violator’, any more than there are ‘newspaper violators’. Substitution. TRY IT! And as for ISPs sharing information’ that phrase is a euphemism for violating the privacy of customers…’customer violators’ if you will.

But under the legislation they could be forced to cut off customers. ISPs which fail to enforce the rules could face prosecution, and suspected customers handed over to the courts. It remains unclear who would be responsible for arbitration in disputed allegations, for example when customers claim that other users have “piggy-backed” on their wireless internet access.

This is bullshit, and the ISPs know it.

In order to bring a prosecution against an ISP, the person or party bringing the claim has to prove that the user is doing something illegal. Lets consider a Bittorrent user torrenting a file. The entity bringing the prosecution has to prove that the person who ‘owns’ the IP address was downloading a so called ‘pirated file’. Then they have to prove that the owner of the IP was the one who torrented it. With Bittorrent it is easy to see the IPs of seeds and peers, so the entity bringing the claim does not need help from the ISP to identify who is copying a file, and this legislation is not needed.

In the case of FTP, DCC on IRC and other types of sharing there is no way to identify who is sharing without getting logs from ISPs. That means either ISPs policing their traffic in real time or keeping extensive traffic logs. Traffic logs do not contain any part of the actual files that were transferred, so anyone naming a file ‘Pirates_of_the_Carrabean_at_Worlds_End.rar’ could claim that what was ftp’d was something actually totally unrelated to the title; photos of a party themed on that movie for example. The principle is that you have to have PROOF that someone has committed a ‘crime’ before you prosecute them or start snooping into their private communications. This is where the legislators completely fail.

A spokesman for the Department of Media, Culture and Sport said: “There are still meetings going on and consultation to take place, so nothing is finalised. The strategy document is to be released within the next couple of weeks.”

Yet another consultation, where no one has seen the proposals in advance, and the initial document is being written by industry. Its called ‘a sham’.

The green paper is also expected to call for a £200m national film centre, as well as 19 other schemes intended to turn Britain into the “world’s creative hub”. Other pledges include the launching of a global arts conference, dubbed the “World Creative Economy Forum” modelled on Davos, the creation of a new college of digital media and the protection of live music venues such as the Astoria and the Hammersmith Apollo in London.

Now here is where we get into the Neu Labor Soviet Diktat fantasy world. They want to make Britain the “world’s creative hub”, but do everything to stifle people freely interacting on the web, by encumbering ISPs (driving up the cost of getting and staying connected, diverting energies and monies that should be spent in improving the networks to pointless surveillance systems) enacting legislation that makes people look over their shoulders etc etc, the very OPPOSITE of what you need to be doing to attract the most creative and talented people.

What a total bunch of pathetic puppets and nincompoops.

If you want to support the new economy of the 21st century this is how you do it. You support those people who are changing the world for the better, not the buggy whip salesmen. The guardian should, of course, know that the Swedish Parliament supports file sharing, and has refused to be a puppet of the USA. That context is crucial in this story, and of course, there is none of it in this shabby article.

The government is also expected to reveal plans for a new creative festivals season, a new film centre on London’s South Bank and a permanent home for London fashion week.

And of course, all the ‘non dom’ designers will not come here to create their haut couture, preferring countries that actually support entrepreneurial people by getting out of their way and not trying to steal every penny they create.

They think creativity and economies can be created by pronouncement, that all they need to do is swill back beer and curry and greasey chicken shawarma, puke it into the mouths of the gyroscopists at rags like the guardian and then, by magic, their bile soaked pronouncements…make it so. The film industry needs, more than anything, tax breaks. That is one of the main considerations when people shoot film…or at least, it used to be, because now with synthetic scenemaking, you can be anywhere and appear to be shooting somewhere else. But I digress. Sort of. Opening a film centre does not mean you will get a revived film industry where people shoot, edit, score and most importantly, finance films from England. That is what film making is about, not opening ‘centres’.

Under plans to be announced by Gordon Brown and the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, children will be given the right to “five hours of culture a week” encouraging them to visit galleries and museums, attend the theatre, or study a musical instrument.

And some 1,000 creative apprenticeships for young people are also being proposed, which will be managed by a new Skills Academy.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/piracy.politics

And there you have it.

No only do these people have no idea of what a right is, they do not know how to preserve and support culture. That is why they are stupidly driving away the very people who create the culture they falsely claim that they support. In fact, these people loathe culture with the same hate that communists hate religion. Did you know that ballet is not considered valuable by these monsters because they say it is ‘not a sport’? This is a verbatim quote from a teacher at one of London’s most prestigious schools, repeated to me personally during a conversation about how ballet schools and their staff are struggling to survive.

Finally, look at who is in charge of this; the scumbag Andy “Nazi” Burnham, ex-excuse maker for the ID car debacle. This man, who thinks that its OK to enslave people, is now charged with giving children, “The right to culture”.

If it wasn’t so sick it would be hilarious.

EU plans to require biometrics of all non-European visitors

By Stephen Castle
Sunday, February 10, 2008

BRUSSELS: All non-Europeans would need to submit biometric data before crossing Europe’s frontiers under sweeping European Union proposals to combat illegal migration, terrorism and organized crime that are to be outlined this week.

The only reason why this is being opened as a possibility is USVISIT.

And yet, the EU appears to be furious that the Great Satan wants more passenger data.

The plans – arguably the biggest shake-up of border management in Europe since the creation of an internal travel zone – would apply to citizens of the United States and all other countries that now enjoy visa-free status.

They would, however, allow EU citizens and “low risk” frequent travelers from outside the bloc to pass through automated, fast-track frontier checkpoints without coming into contact with border guards. Voluntary programs for prescreening such visitors, who would register fingerprints and other data, would be stepped up.

‘Voluntary’. A page right out of Tony Bliar and his venal musical chairs Home Secretaries and their ID Card farce.

The proposals, contained in draft documents examined by the International Herald Tribune and scheduled to go to the European Commission on Wednesday, were designed to bring the EU visa regime into line with a new era in which passports include biometric data.

No debate, no consultation, no warning, no rationale, just ‘this is the way it is going to be’. Pure dictatorship, pure fascism. Who has designed this system, why is it being put in place after centuries of people moving without problems and decades of free travel without Fascist measures?

The commission, the EU executive, argues that migratory pressure, organized crime and terrorism are obvious challenges to the Union and that the bloc’s border and visa policy needs to be brought up to date.

This is not a rationale, this is a complete lie.

for decades, ‘terrorism’ has been going on in europe, and in the case of Italy, the home of Fascism and Franco Frattini, the terrorism was callously engineered by the Italian government to…terrorize the good people of Italy. Terror is no pretext to abuse the people of europe in this way. Migratory pressure can be controlled by the ID cards that all EU citizens are already compelled to carry. These measures will not stop people coming to Italy in boats or walking into europe. It will only impact the law abiding and good people; in fact, this plan is a clever scheme by equipment vendors to create a market for themselves where millions of people will be forced to consume their services through contract with governments. Organized crime? Italy is the world capitol for organized crime, and yet, you could not have a more beautiful and well ordered country, where the people have a high standard of living, a high ‘index of happiness’ as do many counties of europe. This simply is not needed, and when they say that, “visa policy needs to be brought up to date” this code for, “we have to keep up with the americans”.

It also wants a new European Border Surveillance System to be created, to use satellites and unmanned aircraft to help track the movements of suspected illegal migrants.

All of this will cost money, contractors will make a fortune on it, it will not stop illegal working, or ‘terrorism’

If approved by the commission this week, the measures would need the approval of all EU states.

The United States routinely requires European citizens to submit fingerprints when crossing its borders and the commission’s document notes that America plans to introduce an electronic travel-authorization system for people from countries like Britain, France and Germany that are in its Visa Waiver Program.

And it is all pure evil, and we and many smart people have been saying so for years.

The commission’s proposals cover the Schengen zone, Europe’s internal free-travel area named after the village in Luxembourg near where the original agreement between five countries was signed on June 14, 1985. Twenty-four countries are now members.

It is unclear whether Britain and Ireland, which along with Cyprus are not members of Schengen, would opt into the program.

Each year more than 300 million travelers cross EU borders, but there is no obligation for countries inside the Schengen free-travel zone to keep a record of entries and exits of non-European third-country nationals in a dedicated database. Moreover, if the visitor leaves from another Schengen country, it is often impossible to determine whether or not the visitor overstayed his or her visa.

And that is the way it should be. Everything has been working without these measures, and these measures will not be effective, because, A) Terrorism is a false pretext, B) only law abiding people use passports, C) organized crime will not be impacted in any way.

The proposals, drafted by the European commissioner for justice and home affairs, Franco Frattini, suggest that non-Europeans on a short-stay visa would be checked against a Visa Information System that is already under construction and should be operational in 2012.

Fratinni the Fascist, strikes again. This evil bastard is, “…responsible for Freedom, Security and Justice.” What a joke. This evil man has consistently been for the erasure of freedom, measures that do not improve security, and that are unjust. He wants to censor the internet. Lets leave it right there. This is a very bad man.

Frattini also is calling for a new database to be set up to store information on the time and place of entry and exit of non-European nationals, using biometric identifiers. Once a person’s visa expired, an alert would go out to all national authorities that the visitor had overstayed his or her allotted time.

Fratinni is an imbecile. This database he is proposing will not catch a single illegal worker that does not use a passport, and these people number in the millions. Perhaps next he will advocate the re-opening of the concentration camps to store all the undesirables; by making this database, he will be putting in place the infrastructure to make it easy to do, just like his predecessors and inspiration the Nazis did. How can such a beautiful country produce such an ugly man?

Travelers from countries with a visa requirement would need to provide biometric data at European consulates before leaving their home country. Those arriving from nations not requiring visas, like the United States, would also need to submit fingerprints and a digitalized facial image.

Border control that is proportionate is what is required. There is nothing wrong with border controls as long as they are reasonable and do not interfere with the flow and freedom of people. For decades air travel has been a great boon to everyone. If there is a problem of too many travelers, this cannot be solved by fingerprinting everyone over the top Security Theatre and launching spy planes and surveillance drones.

But the European Union would try to make the system more user-friendly for Europeans and some categories of bona fide visitors by granting them the status of “registered traveler.” They would be able to have their biometric travel documents scanned and checked by machines.

Once again, none of this will stop illegal migration, illegal working, ‘people trafficking’, terrorism, organized crime or any of the things Fratelli claims he wants to stop. These are measures that will only work on the harassed law abiding public.

All Europeans should be able to use such a system when EU countries complete the task of issuing passports with two biometric identifiers, by 2019 at the latest. The 27 EU countries started issuing passports with a digitalized facial image in August 2006 and, in June 2009, will add the holder’s fingerprints. European residence permits will also contain the same identifiers.

All nonsense, and all measures designed to increase the cost of issuing and maintaining passports; this is the real reason why these measures are being proposed; vendors will have the opportunity to roll out several layers on top of the existing passports, each one being worth billions of euros.

Think about it, RFID chips mean the chips themselves manufactured in the tens of millions, the readers on a scale of tens of thousands, then there are the maintenance contracts. The same goes for fingerprinting; readers will need to be rolled out in the tens of thousands. Digital photograpy, whole new generations of equipment. Then the databases and associate software and hardware it will be run on. It is a contractors wet dream. Fratelli and the unelected, unaccountable EU commission are the people who are going to dish out this candy.

Non-Europeans could gain the same, fast-track status providing they have not overstayed previous visas, have proof of sufficient funds to pay for their stay in Europe and hold a biometric passport.

And of course, the illegals, who have no money, always overstay the visas they never apply for, will go around this system.

All non-European nationals would be asked to make an electronic application, supplying key data, before their arrival, allowing them to be checked against anti-terror databases in advance.

Migrants on foot? How many times do we have to repeat it?

The draft documents also highlight weaknesses in Europe’s efforts to guard its borders. One paper points out that, in the eight EU countries with external borders in the Mediterranean Sea and southern Atlantic, frontier surveillance is carried out by about 50 authorities from 30 institutions, sometimes with competing competencies and systems.

and nothing that Fratelli is offering will make it better. And he knows it.

The plans foresee increased use of satellites and unmanned surveillance aircraft to monitor unauthorized movements, and a computerized communication network to share information.

‘computerized’

Just like Buck Rogers!

Frattini also wants to see a bigger role for the agency that coordinates cooperation over external borders, known as Frontex. Although the agency has been criticized in some southern European nations for failing to match the scale of the challenge over illegal migration, the commission argues that it has achieved impressive results.

In 2006 and 2007 more than 53,000 people were apprehended or denied entry at a frontier and at least 2,900 false travel documents were seized. In addition, 58 people suspected of links to illegal trafficking have been arrested.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/10/europe/union.php?page=2

In other words, it has been just about as effective as USVISIT; billions spent to capture a handful of passports, and under one hundred criminals.

Pathetic.

Sadly we cannot expect anyone in Europe to take a common sense stance, put their foot down and say, “this is impossibly stupid”.

An ugly future, built by ugly people.

Crime fears as cheap PCs head for Africa

Initiatives such as the OLPC and Classmate could mean an explosion in botnets in the developing world, warn security experts

Pete Warren
The Guardian,

One Laptop Per Child project, Nigeria

The OLPC could have the unwanted side effect of fuelling cybercrime in Africa

What if the plans to spread low-cost One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate computers to the developing world work? What if in a few years there are hundreds of millions of them out there? Many might applaud. But among computer security experts, there’s growing concern that those scheme could inadvertently lead to a huge increase in computer crime.

Because of course, only europeans can maintain and update software, wheras the ‘darkies’ cannot.

Initiatives such as the OLPC and the Classmate are intended to help bridge the digital divide. But security experts warn that there could be an unforeseen negative effect.

“There is the possibility of creating the largest botnet in the world,” says Yuval Ben-Ithak of Finjan, a computer security company. This view is borne out by a recent report by F-Secure identifying Africa as one of the emerging cybercrime threats.

When they say, “this view is borne out”, what it really means is that someone else repeated the same lines. There is no proof, no proof of concept, no study, nothing. Just a bunch of fear mongering twaddle of the type the Guardian loves to peddle.

Phenomenal takeup

“Within the past few years, internet take-up in emerging markets has been phenomenal,” says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. “The trend is expected to continue and spread into areas such as Africa, India and central America. People are developing sophisticated computer skills. But,” he adds, “they have limited opportunities to profit from them legally. There will be a delay before legal systems catch up with developments in the IT sector. Computer criminals may also be able to escape the law more easily in countries which are undergoing serious political and security problems.”

The case of Onel de Guzman, the student who wrote the 2000 Love Bug virus and who escaped prosecution because the Philippines, his home, had no offence with which to prosecute him, is a case in point.

No, it is not, because this story WAS about ‘Africans’ fueling ‘cybercrime’. Phillipinos, ‘Africans’ what’s the difference? “They are all foreigners innit!”

But Ivan Krstic, OLPC’s director of security hardware, points to the choice of Linux as the operating system for the computers. “You cannot have one program loading from the internet that can then go to your [email] address book and then send out a spam message to everyone,” Krstic explains. “The program can only work in its own area and has no functionality beyond that.

“For anything to be able to achieve that overall control, the attack would have to be written to the system kernel, and those are the hardest attacks to launch. Those vulnerabilities do exist, but they are patched very quickly. It would be difficult to get them to run bots.” However, there is an option to run Windows XP on the machine – which means, concedes Krstic, “they can be attacked. All of the connotations of Windows security apply.”

And FINALLY we have some common sense in writing.

OLPC will not be used to create huge botnets because it is running Linux. Botnets normally run on winblows, the OS so beloved by and the meat and potatoes of the computer illiterate fear-monger journalist.

Don’t install winblows, and there is no problem from botnets.

Next?

The Windows-based Intel Classmate also includes a nod at security. Countries buying it can opt for antivirus software, included for a higher price, but must negotiate that with AV companies themselves; and a hardware setting disables the laptop if it is not connected to an antivirus monitoring network for a certain period of time. This is to safeguard the machine from becoming part of a botnet, which can disable antivirus checking.

And there you have the whole security and journalist fear-mongering industry in a nutshell. It is all about selling software, and inducing people to buy it through fear.

In case you did not know, this is the Intel Classmate:

The Classmate PC powered by Intel for emerging markets worldwide

The World Ahead Program from Intel Corporation aims to enhance lives by accelerating access to uncompromised technology for everyone, anywhere in the world. Focused on people in the world’s developing communities, it integrates and extends Intel’s efforts to advance progress in four areas: accessibility, connectivity, education, and content.

It runs Winblows (requiring 2gig flash), or Mandriva (requiring 1gig flash [no surprise there ay?]).

The bigger problem in the long term may be the developing world’s choice of operating system. “Most of the machines we are shipping have Windows on them. That’s the operating system most countries want,” says Intel.

And do you wonder why? All these people, these government ministers are more computer illiterate than Guardian journalists, and they read the Guardian and take their lead from them and the other newspapers. They are also under massive bribery pressure to accept winblows:

Dear Steve,

Hi, this is François, from Mandriva.

I’m sure we are way too small for you to have heard of us. You know, we are one of these Linux company who is working hard to make its place in the market. We publish a Linux Distro, called Mandriva Linux. Mandriva Linux 2008, our last edition, has a pretty good review and we’re proud of it. You should try it, I’m sure you’d like it. We also happen to be one of the Linux companies that did not sign an agreement with your company (nobody’s perfect).

We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines. We had a good deal to respond to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, especially the fact that it was open, and that we could customize it for their country and so on.

Then, your people get in the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. Your team fought and fought again the deal, but still the customer was happy with the CMPC and Mandriva.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”

Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done to these guys to make them change their mind like this? It’s quite clear to me, and it will be to everyone. How do you call what you just did Steve? There is various names for it, I’m sure you know them. […]

http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

So to claim that, “That’s the operating system most countries want” is just disingenuous. These government people do not know anything about operating systems; they just want the best possible deal, whatever it is, and if you offer them a PC running Linux, and explain why it is so good, they will accept it, just like the Nigerian government did.

These excuses are echoes of the ones we used to hear not so long ago, “Linux is not ready for the desktop” is the one that you have to strain to hear the most, as it has faded to almost nothing.

It adds that teachers will receive training from Intel to monitor the network and will be able to see if changes have been made to the machines: “Some schools using the computers will have a teacher who is responsible for security on their networks, others will have an IT person.” As a last resort the Classmate, like the OLPC XO, can be wiped clean and restored to its factory settings.

So in fact, there is no problem at all.

But while Windows has its problems, Linux may not offer much better protection, says Guillaume Lovet, a botnet expert for Fortinet. “The first botnets were Stacheldraht, Trinoo and TFN, and were built in Linux,” says Lovet. He also dismisses claims that the low bandwidth and internet use in parts of the developing world – the World Economic Forum’s 2007 Africa Competitiveness Report estimated that African internet use was just 3.4% of the world total – would act as a brake on the development of botnets.

Whoa!

What these journalists never do is challenge assertions made in their pieces. Lets find out EXACTLY what that last blockquothed text really means:

============================

The “stacheldraht” distributed denial of service attack tool

============================

David Dittrich
University of Washington
Copyright 1999. All rights reserved.
December 31, 1999

Introduction
————

The following is an analysis of “stacheldraht”, a distributed denial of service attack tool, based on source code from the “Tribe Flood Network” distributed denial of service attack tool. [Note that throughout this analysis, actual nicks, site names, and IP addresses have been sanitized.]

Stacheldraht (German for “barbed wire”) combines features of the “trinoo” distributed denial of service tool, with those of the original TFN, and adds encryption of communication between the attacker and stacheldraht masters and automated update of the agents.

For more information on trinoo and TFN, see:

http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/trinoo.analysis
http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/tfn.analysis

In late June and early July of 1999, one or more groups were installing and testing trinoo networks and waging medium to large scale denial of service attacks employing networks of over 2000 compromised systems. These attacks involved, and were aimed at, systems around the globe.

In late August/early September of 1999, focus began to shift from trinoo to TFN, presumed to be the original code by Mixter. Then in late September/early October, a program that looked a lot like the TFN agent, known as “stacheldraht”, began to show up on systems in Europe and the United States.

These attacks prompted CERT to release Incident Note 99-04:

http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-04.html

Like trinoo, stacheldraht is made up of master (handler) and daemon, or “bcast” (agent) programs. The handler/agent terminology was developed at the CERT Distributed System Intruder Tools workshop held in November 1999, and will be used in this analysis instead of the stacheldraht specific terms. It is highly recommended that the CERT workshop report be read as well. See:

http://www.cert.org/reports/dsit_workshop.pdf

There is some competition to stacheldraht in the form of Mixter’s new version of TFN — Tribe Flood Network 2000, or TFN2K — released on December 21, 1999. For more on TFN2K, See:

http://packetstorm.securify.com/distributed/
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-99-17-denial-of-service-tools.html

Along with trinoo’s handler/agent features, stacheldraht also shares TFN’s features of distributed network denial of service by way of ICMP flood, SYN flood, UDP flood, and “Smurf” style attacks. Unlike the original TFN and TFN2K, the analyzed stacheldraht code does not contain the “on demand” root shell bound to a TCP port (it may be based on earlier TFN code than was made public by Mixter in mid-1999).

One of the weaknesses of TFN was that the attacker’s connection to the master(s) that control the network was in clear-text form, and was subject to standard TCP attacks (session hijacking, RST sniping, etc.) Stacheldraht deals with this by adding an encrypting “telnet alike” (stacheldraht term) client.

Stacheldraht agents were originally found in binary form on a number of Solaris 2.x systems, which were identified as having been compromised by exploitation of buffer overrun bugs in the RPC services “statd”, “cmsd” and “ttdbserverd”. They have been witnessed “in the wild” as late as the writing of this analysis.

After publishing analyses of trinoo and Tribe Flood Network on Bugtraq in December 1999, an incident investigator at another institution provided stacheldraht source code that was obtained from a file cache in a stolen account. (I would like to thank this investigator, and also thank the folks at SecurityFocus for providing the open forum that allowed this to occur.) This analysis was done using this captured source code (labelled version 1.1, with source file modification dates ranging from 8/15/1999 to 10/17/1999).

The Makefiles contain rules for Linux and Solaris, with the default being Linux (even though it appears that the code does not work very reliably on Linux). For the purposes of this analysis, all programs were compiled and run on Red Hat Linux 6.0 systems. As far as I am aware, the agent has been witnessed “in the wild” only on Solaris 2.x systems.

[…]

http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/stacheldraht.analysis

Stacheldraht was only seen in the wild on Solaris 2.x systems so saying, “The first botnets were Stacheldraht, Trinoo and TFN, and were built in Linux,” doesnt really apply to OLPC, and futthermore, all of the above happened in 1999. The question to ask here is, “have there been any botnets running on Linux since 1999?”. Journalists would no doubt add that seven years in internet time is an eternity, but we wont sink that low here.

“It doesn’t take any bandwidth to control or make a botnet,” Lovet says. “Aggregated bandwidth is what is important, and that would still be massive. You could still build a huge cyber-weapon with only a thousand of these machines.”

‘Huge cyber-weapon’….this is the language of fear-mongering. Its good in science fiction, but inappropriate in a newspaper, in an article about OLPC, an entirely noble and beneficial effort, which will transform the lives and brains of millions of people.

Of course, there are those in the west whose worst nightmare is a third world population weaned on logic, able to programme and organize, immune to stupidity and because of all that, free. No more Kwashiorkor bellied pickininnies to plaster in their papers and opine about. A REAL tragedy.

That leads us to the subtext of this article. OLPC will breed the next generation of 419 scammers, all fluent in Python and UNIX, which is the very backbone of the internets. It would sound like this coming out of their mouths:

“We are breeding a whole new generation of internet cybercriminals by providing OLPC to so many people” an expert from G-Secure said, “this army of highly skilled black hats will dominate any future internet if we do not take preventative measures now.”

Heh…’Black Hats’!!!!

For the botnet herders – the people who create and control botnets – there would also be kudos in staking a claim in a new area. “We have seen botnets involved in landgrab exercises in the past,” says Greg Day, a security analyst for McAfee.

McAfee, another anti-virus vendor. You have heard the rumor that Anti-Virus companies fund the creation of viruses so that they can keep the fear level up and artificially sustain their vampiric subscription business model right? Nah, its just a ‘conspiracy theory’.

Just as alarming for Mark Sunner, chief technology officer of Messagelabs, which monitors email traffic on behalf of the government, is that the machines could be used as a recruiting ground for criminals.

Its alarming is it? Just what EXACTLY is the scenario that is ‘alarming’ in this case? Perhaps when this man says ‘recruiting’ he is referring to recruiting the newly trained up Python programmers who are willing and able to be turned to… the Dark Side. ROTFL!

Herd goats, or bots?

“You can imagine a whole swathe of internet boiler-rooms being created among people who can make more money from internet crime than herding goats,” says Sunner, who points to the fact that Africa already has the highly technologically literate Nigerian 419 group, one of the oldest cyber-crime organisations.

and BANG there it is, said out loud. These people are more inclined to be criminals than the millions of children with laptops in the west. Of course, this came from the mouth of a Government contractor, the types that know all about criminality from the inside.

As for the subheading, what do YOU make of it?

The latter are very dangerous, says a former head of the UK’s now disbanded West African Organised Crime Unit. “They are organised like a business. They are already building most of the bogus bank sites on the web. If you ship computers to Nigeria then a lot of them will inevitably make their way to 419. I mentioned this to someone who is still monitoring 419 and they said ‘you might as well shut down the internet and go back to pen and ink’.”

Which is exactly what they want for these people, to shut down THEIR internets and cut them off from the rest of the world. Note that this ‘alarming’ situation is so bad that the ‘West African Organised Crime Unit’ is now closed down, and that they talk about bogus bank sites, not sophisticated botnets. This article is a hodge podge of nonsense, a fear bouillabaisse for the computer illiterate cuisine eaters that dirty their hands on that shitty paper. And let us not forget that 419 only works because there are gullible, greedy westerners who fall for it day after day. 419 is social engineering, not software engineering Unsurprisingly, these nincompoops cannot make the distinction; its all ‘cybercrime’ to them.

Sunner, meanwhile, notes the dangers that the machines represent to Africa’s own emerging internet infrastructure. “There are a lot of viruses are already heading for Africa and China and the consequences of spam can be terrible if you do not have much bandwidth,” he says.

As this very article says, in the only part of it that is sensible, OLPC cannot be used to send out spam because:

“You cannot have one program loading from the internet that can then go to your [email] address book and then send out a spam message to everyone,”

so OLPC cannot be used as a zombie machine to send out spam. Insert joke here about how Zombies come from the west indies in any case, not west africa.

Both Intel and OLPC point out that the laptops will often only have intermittent connectivity. That might lower the risk of getting infected – or the chances of getting security upgrades.

Bullshit. OLPC and Intel Classmate are not gong to get ‘infected’ by anything as long as they are running Linux. If they do, it can be fixed quickly. The risk mentioned here is extremely low, and the fixes easy to roll out. This is a non issue, full stop. The long term effect of OLPC will be to educate millions of people around the world, and any problems along the way will be temporary.

But the bleak picture may be avoidable, says Rolf Roessing, a security expert for KPMG. “If we are to bring IT to Africa then it will not work unless we bring security with it. Computer security in the west grew because of a loss of innocence and there are still weaknesses in the developed world because of a lack of awareness. If you bring IT to developing countries then you have to develop awareness, too.”

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/07/olpc.security

The picture is not at all ‘bleak’; bad journalism as in this article is the most bleak part of this story.

OLPC is going to change the world, in a good way, and there is nothing that negative spinning, fear-mongering journalists and ‘no darkie computer programmers’ racists can do about it. Both of the latter groups, and the ‘security’ companies are on the wrong side of history. The internet is going to reach everywhere, it will be beneficial. Deal with it.

IT is already in Africa, and the last thing that the people who live in the sovereign countries on that continent need is to copy the ‘security’ model of broken monopoly OS, fear-mongering, security company subscription. Thankfully, the Pandora’s box is already open. Linux has a strong foothold, and it will completely dominate the desktop in all of the target countries. This will happen not only because it makes sense, but because the absurd anti copying policies of Micro$oft will drive people to install other operating systems that can be freely and easily copied without any pain or risk of the customer coming back to say, “my computer is broken”. Additionally, the users of OLPC 15 years from now, having grown up with open systems will reflexively reject any OS that tries to lock them down with DRM, false security models and bullshit.

Computer security grew in the west not because of a ‘loss of innocence’ but because of a lack of computer literacy and the winblows monopoly. Now that those things are breaking, despite the efforts of scumbags on every side, as people dump windows and move to linux we will see fewer problems and a more healthy working environment.

The question you want to ask yourself is this; do you want to be a part of what made the magic happen, or do you want to be aligned with the enemy?

This article smells very bad. Lets take a sniff…

Al-Qaeda group’s encryption software stronger, security firm confirms

By Ellen Messmer
Network World
02/01/08

Shame on you for propagating this nonsense.

Al-Qaeda support group Al-Ekhlaas has improved the encryption software it now provides to its online members, according to one security researcher who examined the software, known as “Mujahideen Secrets 2.”

Al-Qaeda support group, also known as ‘NSA’.

Anyone who is smart enough to know how to write an encryption algorithm and a package to deliver its functionality, and who is responsible for keeping people secure, knows that it is far better to use an off the shelf set of tools rather than build your own application and algorithm from scratch.

If ‘Al-Qaeda’ was real, and someone in their group knew about encryption, all they would need to do is settle on standard tools to keep their communications secure; they would never risk, or waste time trying to create from scratch, using their own proprietary system.

Mujahideen Secrets 2 has added the ability to encrypt chat communications, which the first version lacked, says Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing. Henry says he got the software through a contact in the intelligence community.

OH REALLY??!?!? a contact in the ‘intelligence community’???!!!!

It is OBVIOUS to even the most casual observer that the way to infiltrate a group like this, that is paranoid about security, would be to infiltrate them and then provide them with a ‘secure’ way of chatting that logs all of their communications. You could do this even if the clients were secure; all you would need to do is control the chat server.

I assure you that all of the people, even those that are casually interested in cryptography understand this. They would immediately recommend open source publicly available tools to do this job. For example, if you want to have one to one encrypted chat, you use Adium. If you want encrypted email, you use GNU Privacy Guard. If you want to shred files, manage keys, recipient keys, encrypt attachments and files there is no better tool than Enigmail. Any tool that is not peer reviewed cannot be trusted. This tool, by its very nature, is untrustworthy; this whole story doesn’t sound right.

The home-grown Mujahideen Secrets 2 encryption software, based on open source RSA code, can encrypt binary files so they can be posted on ASCII-text-based bulletin boards and Web sites.

‘Pics or it didn’t happen’. Without looking at the source of this programme, it is impossible to say how good this software is, and once again, there are other, better more secure tools to do this.

Lets think about the sentence above. If you are going to post an encrypted binary on an ascii bulletin board, you need to encrypt it to the members of that board, using the private key of each member. If you cannot control who is on your board, i.e. you have a single infiltrator, your enemy will have access to the file and the list of recipients. The whole point of posting files on a board is to distribute them widely, and so you do not want to encrypt them in this way; if you want to send encrypted binaries to multiple people, you send the file by email, encrypting the file for each recipient individually. Once they get on your board in the scenario provided by this ‘journalist’, your enemy can get a hold of the file, at any time after it was posted, and then list the keys needed to decrypt the file, giving a list of all the nicknames of the recipients of the file. Sending

“They have improved the operation of the graphical user interface and it will now encrypt chat communications,” says Henry, who adds that the Arabic translation suggests the software is encouraged for use by Al-Ekhlaas members to evade U.S. government efforts at surveillance.

This sentence is the exact OPPOSITE of what the truth is; it is software encouraged by U.S. government to aid its efforts at surveillance of Al-Ekhlaas.

Tampa-based ISP NOC4Hosts and Rochester, Minn.,-based SiteGenesis in January found out their operations were being used to host the Al-Ekhlaas Web sites where Mujahideen Secrets 2 can be found. Both hosting firms pulled the plug on the Web sites after receiving specific technical information about the content.

From whom?

This week another Web hosting company, CrystalTech Web Hosting in Phoenix, shut down sites linked to the Al Qaeda-link support group.

Once again, these people could, if they were real, host their websites anywhere in the world. They would not host thier sites in Minnesota or Pheonix. This is just utter nonsense of the first order, and those sites were most probably ‘honey pots’ set up to get this Back Orifice ‘Jihad Edition’ into the hands of dweebs that want to help the CIA operaton ‘Al-Qaeda’ who they will then use as patsies to carry out false flag attacks, all under the guise of ‘Radical Islamo Facscism’.

“As soon as we found out, we brought the IP sites down,” says Bob Cichon, president of CrystalTech Web hosting, who blamed a reseller for it happening. “We’re a very large host and it’s hard to track everything.”

Its not your fault Bob.

In its analysis of Mujahideen Secrets 2, Secure Computing has noticed that the software appears to violate copyright law.

“Typically with open source, they still require a copyright notification,” Henry says. “There’s no copyright notification whatsoever here.”

So, the latest supercrime of Radical Islamo Facscists is not blowing up buildings and making them fall in defiance of the laws of physics, NO, we can prosecute them for violating the GPL.

Another notable thing is that the public-key signature in Mujahideen Secrets 2 leaves a tell-tale sign that the Al-Ekhlaas home-rolled software produced it. The encryption itself is strong at up to a 2,048-bit key length, and like the previous version, provides e-mail and file encryption using public-key certificates.

All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020108-al-qaeda-encryption.html

Once again, if any of this is even true, there are only a handful of people who are capable of understanding how to best fulfill the requirements of encrypting chat and instant messaging, and then the subset of people who can actually pull this off in a software client is even smaller. No one in their right mind would do this in a ‘home-rolled’ package…unless your home is the NSA.

Everything that this journalist claims could be done with off the shelf packages, and in fact, it would be safer to do it with off the shelf packages.

Lets say that the above report is true, and these packages are out there. The only way you can know that the package has not been tampered with is if you can check the signature against it. GPG does this so that you know that you are getting an un-tampered with binary or source. Publicly available tools give you a high level of confidence that your communications will not be susceptible to a ‘man in the middle attack‘. By settling on those tools, rather than rolling your own, you get a higher level of trust. And everyone who understands how this works knows that.

Rolling out your own tools, from whatever angle you look at it, is insane. It is clear that this whole story is a glimpse into some secret operation to recruit patsie jihadies. In that respect, it is fascinating.

What will be even more interesting is to read a report from a trusted peer, who would, amongst other things, run a packet sniffer to see if and where this sneaky piece of infiltration-ware phones home.

Is this a warm up article for another attempt to crack down on freely available encryption tools?

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.

This year computer users will be more exposed to cybercriminals than ever before. It’s not just because online crime is so attractive to identity theft gangs but, ironically, because the computer security industry that is supposed to protect users has deteriorated – from one which shared everything about newly discovered weaknesses to what some within it now call a “protection racket”.

It may sound alarmist,

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/computersecurity

SNIP!

Yes, it IS alarmist, and yet another example of computer illiteracy at The Guardian.

The fact of the matter is that you can…anyone can… download and install Ubuntu and be free of this ‘problem’.

The fact of the matter is that writers like Sean Hargrave are a part of this ‘protection racket’ because they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge and spread the information that there are perfect alternatives to Winblows; i.e. Ubuntu, which Dell are now delivering on their machines pre-installed. By stopping people from dumping Windows, Hargrave is protecting the Windows monopoly and monoculture which is the source of all these problems, and many others.

There is no longer any excuse not to run Linux instead of Windows. It outperforms Windows in every way, and has everything you need that you find on Windows (office suite) but for FREE. Its user interface is now more sophisticated than Aero on Vista, and since you can buy it pre-installed, that problem is gone also.

The reason why The Guardian doesn’t like linux is because they are an old economy newspaper. They are against the free music, free publishing, and free software movements, and every time they have an article about anything to do with any of the aforementioned subjects, they always take the stand of ‘the man’.

The answer to this is not fear-mongering articles with pictures of devils menacing the lone Guardian believer in his C0₂ neutral hovel. The answer is ‘go open source’; then the secrecy that unscrupulous companies use to gain commercial advantage is erased and everyone benefits…unless you are in the pockets of the people who sell the crappy products that you are complaining about.

And then there is the ‘problem’ of having nothing to fearmonger about once Windows is dead. But then people like this always find something to try and scare everyone about.

I think we need a new category: ‘fear-mongering’.

One of the most important qualities a human being can posses is empathy:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) – Cite This Source – Share This
em·pa·thy [em-puh-thee] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

A human being that lives without a capacity for empathy is able to remorselessly torture dismember and kill other humans, in the way that mass murderers and serial killers do.

Ron Paul keeps asking the ‘Republican’ candidates running against him to imagine what it would be like if america was invaded by the Chinese, in a vain attempt to make them understand the true source of the bitter hatred that exists against america. He tries to get them to imagine that the Chinese occupy america with troops for the best of good reasons, and that they, in their occupation, say to all americans, “you must adopt our system of government and way of life because its for your own good”.

Any human being with an intact capacity for empathy with other people would shudder at the thought of invading another person’s country and telling them how to live. That Ron Paul even has to bring this example up is astonishing, (though hardly surprising given the low quality of his competitors).

They would also instantly understand the Iraq Freedom Fighters and their struggle to evict the invading american crusaders. Anyone with imagination problems should see the film ‘Red Dawn’ if they want a vivid example of how the americans would respond to a successful invasion of their country.

Americans resisting a colonizing army on american soil would blow up enemy vehicles with IEDs, snipe enemy soldiers with hunting rifles, blow up bridges, assassinate enemy officers, execute collaborators (puppet government traitors, ‘Quislings‘), take to the hills and then film it all, edit it into stirring calls to arms with amazing music and distribute it on DVDRs and over the internets to all loyal and patriotic americans.

This is EXACTLY what the Iraqis are doing; they are doing what the americans would do if their country were occupied by a foreign power. The Iraqis said time and time again that there were no WMDs in their country, and that the pressure being put upon them was unfair, unwarranted, immoral and motivated by the lust for oil. They were invaded anyway. Imagine if that happened to YOUR country? You would not just sit down and do nothing, you would do what the Freedom Fighters are doing, you would fight back with everything at your disposal. There was no justification for this attack, they knew it, even if everyone everywhere else did not. The pain they must feel at this injustice must be almost beyond understanding; its such an outrage though it should be easy for anyone to feel just a small part of it.

Anyone who does not understand this does not have an intact sense of empathy. He must, by definition, think that Iraqis are inferior to americans, and that they have less rights to self determination than americans do.

That is what the Fred Thompsons of this world cannot do. The Giuliani’s of this world are just insane warmongers, as an insane person, we cannot expect rational thought from his mind or reason to emanate from his mouth. Mitt Romney is a reanimated Richard Nixon. Mike Huckabee is the most terrifying prospect out of the bunch. I believe that he would be a worse president than ‘W’. And that is saying something.

Speaking of Mike Huckabee, I was curious to see wether or not he had ever travelled outside the USA; he seems to be an unexposed, parochial ‘never been out of the usa’ type of man. To find out, I used the googles, and stumbled upon one of his more outrageous and insane policies; he wants to stop americans with dual nationality from using their other passports, and he wants to forbid dual citizens from voting in the elections of other countries.

I’m not making this up:

Now, in the midst of a Republican nomination battle in which many voters seem strongly opposed to illegal immigration, Governor Huckabee has veered to the other extreme, and proposes to crack down on legal immigrants, as well as native-born Americans. Item 8 of his “[1]Secure American Plan” promises to:

Impose civil and/or criminal penalties on American citizens who illegitimately use their dual status (e.g., using a foreign passport, voting in elections in both a foreign country and the U.S.).

Let’s consider the second item first: a few countries (such as Italy) which recognize dual citizenship allow non-resident nationals to vote in their elections. Indeed, the Italian parliament even has [2]several seats which are elected by Italian citizens living abroad. It seems obvious that encouraging American citizens who can vote in foreign elections to do so would be in the strategic interests of the United States. A person who resides in America, and who is a citizen of both of the United States and Italy, is probably going to be a stronger supporter of Italo-American friendship than is an Italian-only citizen living in Italy.

[…]

Like I said before, this man is not qualified to be the president. This becomes more and more clear as you dig deeper and deeper into his insane ‘policies’ and his ‘Islamo Fascist’ war forever speak. Even the green Obama would be a better candidate than Huckabee; at least he will have SOME understanding of cultures other than america’s, and that is what is sorely needed in the White House.

After reading this dual citizen nonsense I didn’t bother to try and find out if that bumpkin had ever left the usa or if he even has a passport.

Some of the panelists on the recent ABC News Republican Debate From New Hampshire talked about fingerprinting all foreigners and giving them tamper proof ID cards, and being able to push a button and check someone out at ‘Homeland Security’ and employers being able to see if someone is employable upon presentation of a secure card. None of these people of course, say the words that we have been saying for ages; if you give one group of people ID cards, then EVERYBODY has to have them or the system cannot work. If an employer is required to check if you are legally entitled to work in the USA, then ALL workers must be verified in this way, and EVERYONE must be ‘in the system’ for it to work. That means a National ID card for all americans. Period. If any of them say otherwise, then they are LIARS and should not be in office or they do not understand the implications of what they are proposing and they should not be in office. Either way, anyone who proposes identity management as a solution to social problems is an enemy of Liberty. Full stop.

Karen Selick

An open letter to Rob Nicholson, Canada's Minister of Justice

Dear Mr. Nicholson,

On January 21, 2008, an extradition hearing will begin in Vancouver for Marc Emery, Canada’s pre-eminent activist for the legalization of marijuana. Marc has been charged in the U.S. with conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana, and conspiring to launder money. If convicted under U.S. law, he faces possible life imprisonment without parole.

Should Marc be extradited to the U.S.? The Canadian court will almost certainly say yes. It has little choice under the Extradition Act. Marc
openly admits selling marijuana seeds over the Internet to customers around the world, including the United States, for years. His conduct would have been grounds for criminal charges here, although Canadian authorities never chose to charge him. But that’s enough under the Act to make it mandatory for the judge to commit him for surrender to U.S. authorities.

That’s where you come in, Mr. Justice Minister. Once the court has ruled, the Extradition Act gives you discretion to refuse to surrender Marc if it “would be unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances.”
Here are some of the circumstances you might consider relevant.

From 1999 until he was arrested in 2005, Marc declared on his income tax return that his occupation was “marijuana seed vendor.” He paid $578,000 in income taxes into federal and B.C. government coffers. He gave Canada Revenue Agency access to his bank statements and explained all his cash flows to them. The CRA graciously accepted his money without ever taking any action to put a stop to all this criminal activity.

If you believe that all Canadians benefit from taxes being collected and governments spending that tax money (I don’t, but most Canadians do), then logically you will have to concede that Marc has been a huge benefactor to the Canadian people.

As for the money laundering charge, maybe all Canadians should face U.S. indictments for having conspired with Marc to transform Americans’ outlays on recreational drugs into Canadian outlays on health care, roads, schools, etc.

Marc has helped Canadians in other ways, too. When Canada was compelled in 2000 to legalize medical marijuana by the R. v. Parker decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, confusion reigned. Although the court had said that individuals suffering the daily pain of illnesses such as epilepsy, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS could use marijuana with their doctors’ approval, there was nowhere they could legally acquire it.

Authorized users who asked Health Canada how to get their marijuana were given the suggestion that they purchase it online from Marc Emery.
For eight years, Marc sent every federal Member of Parliament a free subscription to his magazine Cannabis Culture. Every issue included a copy
of his seed catalogue. Every single MP and all of their office staff turned a blind eye to his activities, just as Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada had done.

The prohibition against selling marijuana seeds in Canada went unenforced for years, but the benefits of those seed sales were accepted unhesitatingly by Canadian authorities. It would be the height of hypocrisy and injustice for this country to now hand over its benefactor to a foreign government for a prosecution it declined to pursue itself.

But there’s more. Go to any internet search engine and enter “marijuana seeds.” You’ll find many seed vendors still operating without prosecution in
British Columbia and other Canadian provinces. Why is the U.S. government not seeking the extradition of these vendors? Why just Marc and his two employees Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams?

I think the answer is obvious. The so-called “BC3” have taken a principled, public stand against the U.S. government’s war on drugs. Marc in particular is a highly effective spokesman for his cause. He was never in this business primarily for financial gain, and generally kept only enough of his marijuana seed profits to live on. Instead, he has donated over $4-million and countless hours to fund court challenges, establish compassion clubs for medical marijuana users, pay medical bills for activists, sponsor conferences and protests, fund ballot initiatives, fund political campaigns and so on. For over a decade, he has been a huge thorn in the side of politicians and bureaucrats who disagree with him on the political issue of legalizing marijuana.

The Extradition Act requires you, Mr. Justice Minister, to refuse to surrender a person if the request for extradition is “made for the purpose
of prosecuting or punishing the person by reason of their…political opinion….” Please consider Marc’s long history of idealistic activism and
tell the U.S. government that you won’t let them haul this politically motivated Canadian hero off to one of their jails.

Karen Selick is a lawyer in Belleville, Ontario. kas@karenselick.com

[…]

National Post

The year starts off with a bang and a puff of smoke.

New Jersey has a thing for Eggs…only this time, its Eggs that have been fertilized and that are growing into human beings:

N.J. Orders HIV Testing For Pregnant Women
Some Groups Call Law Unneeded and Intrusive

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 28, 2007; A03

NEW YORK, Dec. 27 — New Jersey this week launched one of the most ambitious efforts in the country to control mother-to-child transmission of HIV, making screening tests mandatory for all pregnant women in the state beginning next year.

A bill signed into law Wednesday by the Senate president, Richard J. Codey, in his capacity as acting governor, requires two tests for pregnant women, at the beginning of the pregnancy and again in the third trimester, unless the mother objects. If the mother objects, the objection will be noted and the newborn will then be tested for HIV, with the only exception being on religious grounds. Newborns will also be tested if the woman tests positive.

Just four other states have mandated testing for pregnant women, and three more– including New York — require screening of newborns. But New Jersey’s law appears to go further by requiring both.

The mandatory screening has raised privacy concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the state’s chapter of the National Organization for Women both questioned whether the mandated tests violate a woman’s right to privacy and the right to make her own medical decisions.

Riki E. Jacobs, executive director of the Hyacinth AIDS Foundation, a New Jersey nonprofit helping people living with AIDS, said the law is unnecessary and comes when the state should be focused on expanding care for pregnant women. “I am adamantly opposed to this bill. New Jersey already reduced the perinatal rate of transmission with mandatory counseling of pregnant women,” she said. “The issue is getting those women who are not in prenatal care in for services and testing.

“I definitely think it is an invasion of privacy,” Jacobs said. She said women choose to test their babies in 98 percent of cases, so the new law’s mandatory provisions for testing children are not needed: “The fact that we assume women won’t choose to test is ludicrous and wrong.”

But in the end, lawmakers decided that the risk of exposing children to the infection outweighed those concerns.

While men represent the majority of new HIV and AIDS cases in the United States, women now account for an increasing share, from just 8 percent of new diagnoses in 1985 to 27 percent in 2005, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Of the estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States in 2005, about 300,000 were women, and the vast majority of them were between 25 and 44 years old.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other groups, has been recommending that HIV screening become a routine part of prenatal tests. The CDC recommended HIV tests become a routine part of the battery of prenatal tests, and that there be no separate written consent required.

Mother-to-child transmission of the disease — during pregnancies and through breast-feeding — peaked in the United States in 1992, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which reported that the number of cases since then has dropped “dramatically” because of early detection and the increased use of antiretroviral therapy, which lowers the risk of transmission to less than 2 percent.

The majority of those new cases that still occur are mostly among black Americans, reflecting the changed demographic of the epidemic since it was first identified.

According to the CDC, 100 to 200 children a year are infected by their mothers. As of 2005, the last year for which figures are available, there were 6,051 people in the United States living with HIV/AIDS who had been infected perinatally — during pregnancy or breast-feeding.

Of those, 66 percent were black and 20 percent identified as Hispanic.

In New Jersey, a June report by the state’s health department reported 78 percent of those with HIV and AIDS were members of minority groups. That report also found that New Jersey has a significant female population living with the disease, 37 percent of the total.

In signing the bill at a local hospital, Codey said, “We can significantly reduce the number of infections to newborns and help break down the stigma associated with the disease.”

He added: “For newborns, early detection can be the ultimate lifesaving measure.”

New Jersey records about 115,000 births each year. While there were no recorded mother-to-child transmissions this year, as of the June report, there were two children born infected in 2006 and seven born infected in 2005, according to the health department.

[…]

Washington Post

The state has no business mandating that anyone be tested for any disease.

What we need is a simple chart that can instantly show how a law like this is wrong to even the thickest of the lowest common denominator.

Hmmmmmmm!

And of course, all these HIV testing kits need to be paid for and replenished. I smell another scam!

German communist in hot water after dining out on lobster

By the time she had realised her mistake – that as one of Germany’s top communists she should probably not be seen eating lobster – it was too late.There was no time to switch from the €22 (£16) “rich man’s dish” to a more modest platter of kippers, because Sahra Wagenknecht had already been caught on camera in the act of betraying her own political ideals.

£16 for lobster! That’s a pretty cheap restaurant… or it’s selling that awful North American ‘lobster’. Which maybe explains why she didn’t want to be seen eating it.

Anyway, I can find no diktat by Marx or Engels stating that no communist shall eat lobster. So how is this woman “betraying her own political ideals”? Should all communists wear hair shirts and practise self-flagellation? This woman is an MEP, part of the gravy train on a basic salary of 7000 euros per month. Look at her website, she wears designer clothes and has an expensive haircut (apparently to mimic Rosa Luxemburg). It’s all just image management, as pointed out…

These are sensitive times, with studies showing that inequality in Germany is growing. Shows of wealth by politicians and reports of hefty bonuses for managers regularly make for negative headlines.

So it’s OK to earn 84,000 euros p.a., but not to eat a cheap lobster in public.

“I don’t do anything that I say others shouldn’t do,” she told the daily TAZ. “On the contrary, I’m fighting for a society in which everyone can afford to eat lobster.”

Bravo! Let them eat lobster!

Anyway, this reminded me that over the weekend I saw 4 or 5 people from YAFA demonstrating outside a restaurant in York to stop the sale of foie gras. York City Council, bleatingly led by this vegevangelist passed a motion discouraging the sale of foie gras in the city. With no power to ban any sale, the coucil has banned foie gras on its own premises.

I would have stopped to talk to them, but was laughing too heartily to speak. I like foie gras, and don’t want some lily-livered nincompoop who has most likely never tased the delicious incomparable richness of a good foie gras stopping me from eating it should I choose to do so.

These campaigns have already robbed us of freely available veal – although where we would get milk from if we didn’t take calves away from their mothers I don’t know. (And lamb, of course, is no problem, is it?). There appears to be selective moralising going on – when was the last time you saw anyone protesting about battery chickens, of which there are over 20 million in the UK, requiring the slaughter of 20-30 million cock chicks? Not sexy enough… or too ‘old school’ vegan, perhaps?

Paul Blanchard is “Managing Partner of the PR and marketing company Right Angles.”

Paul, some advice.

BBQ is at it yet again, with another ‘story’ by a ‘professional lying paid pro-id scumbag’ using PR scripted false logic to prop up the dying and decomposing corpse of the ID card scheme:

ID sites ‘aid underage drinkers’
By Chris Page
BBC Radio Five Live Report

Underage drinkers are making use of websites which churn out false driving documents and proof-of-age cards for as little as £10 each, the BBC has found.

Oh really? The BBC has ‘found’ this?

A simple search reveals a huge number of websites selling “100% convincing” fake IDs “guaranteed to fool anyone”.

And these printers have the absolute right to print whatever they like, and they have the absolute right to sell it to whomever they like. You, on the other hand, have no moral right to steal money from license payers and then publish propaganda on the behalf of PR companies and the government.

The sites carry legal disclaimers stating the cards are “novelty” products, not copies of official IDs. But youth workers told Radio Five Live Report they believe the cards are being marketed to underage drinkers.

That is a lie. ‘Fake’ IDs have been commercially available for decades all over the world. They exist for a reason and as a direct consequence of the insane and illiberal laws that try and micro manage everyone’s lives.

The very idea that there can be a ‘fake’ id is fallacious. There are many false assumptions wrapped up in the phrase ‘fake id’; the first is that a card can contain or represent your identity, that is false. Secondly there is the false idea that only an authority like the government can issue a ‘real’ ID and that all other issuers are somehow illegitimate.

Your identity cannot be reduced to a card. No matter who prints it, all of these cards have the same semantic value. A card issued by a government is no more legitimate than any other card produced by any other person.

By deliberately failing to say this, this reporter is re-enforcing the false paradigms of popular ID mythology; that a piece of paper or plastic legitimizes you and can represent you in any way. This is the big (and subtle) lie of this article and all articles like it.

Rigorous checks

Mike Davis, who owns a convenience store in Polzeath in Cornwall, seized 100 fake IDs in just six weeks during the school holidays. “I tell parents I’ve taken a fake ID from their child and they don’t know they’re available on the internet,” he said.

You have no right to seize or confiscate anything from anyone. You are not a police man Mr. Davis; in fact, you are a thief. You stole the property of those people who tried to buy alcohol from you, when all you were legally required to do is to refuse to serve them. People like Mr. Davis are part of the problem. They think it is their right to police the behavior of others; they are a major cause of the decline of Britain.

There is no reason why alcohol should not be sold to anyone who has the money to pay for it. Parents should be able to send their children out to the store to buy a quarter of whiskey if needed. They were able to do this for generations, and there is no difference between the people of today and the people of the past. The idea that alcohol is dangerous and to be feared is what causes the uniquely British form of rowdy alcoholism that plagues this country, evidenced by the innumerable splotches of curry colored vomit that you can find in the streets and doorsteps of every city on a Saturday or Sunday morning. All of them produced by people who are old enough to drink as defined by bad law. The French attitude to alcohol is far more sensible; drinking is just another part of life, not a big deal. But I digress.

But the websites appear to be well known to many young people under the legal drinking age.

Citation? Only BBQ can get away with this sort of lying, and then of course, they say that Bloggers are ‘not real journalists’!

After midnight in Belfast City Centre, one 17 year old said he had been spent several hours drinking in a bar after gaining admission with a fake student card.

This is just before he was about to be shipped out to Afghanistan to murder on behalf of a government that will forbid him to get drunk, but which will put a rifle in his hands to kill.

Plenty of others said they had just turned 18, but had been getting into nightclubs and bars for several years. In Liverpool, it was a similar story.

…and so what? So what if some teenagers have a beer or two? Its not the end of the world, and it certainly is not enough of a pretext to bring in universal compulsory biometric ID cards backed by a central database.

Which is what this low life scumbag article is all about.

“What else are you supposed to do at that age?” said one teenage drinker who started using fake ID when he was 15.

Hmmmm! “What a question”. They always pick the thickest, least representative voice to make some cheap point. This garbage is meaningless, in every way that something can be meaningless.

In both cities, most late night venues seemed to examine ID rigorously. But some clubs reportedly have a reputation as being an easy place for under-18s to have a drink. Door staff at these venues do not seem to be inspecting ID closely, despite many of their customers looking as if they could have been under 18.

They have such a struggle to stay in business with the swingeing taxes, absurd opening regulations, draconian smoking bans etc., they had better let in any and every punter because every penny counts. Just think about it; the immoral smoking ban has caused pubs to install outdoor heating so that the pub can extend its activities outside. These units use up an enormous amount of energy, the majority of which is wasted. The electricity and gas bills for this ‘outdoor heating’ must be a large burden for these beleaguered drinking houses. I feel their pain, and understand perfectly why they are doing what they are doing. In the final analysis, they will be driven out of business by government, who will no doubt in the future launch ‘incentives’ to, “restore the unique pub culture that once thrived in Britain”.

Strict laws

If licensed premises are caught serving under-18s, they face heavy penalties – including losing their license and fines of up to £5,000. The British Beer and Pub Association recommends that its members ask for ID if the customer looks 21 or under. It says that the licensed trade is turning away a million young people a year for being underage or having no ID.

One million people a year, who would be buying, say three pints each at three pounds each, that £9,000,000. And don’t forget the crisps. At one pound per bag.

“In the vast majority of bars and clubs, it’s impossible to get a drink if you’re under 18,” says Paul Smith, chief executive of the Bars, Entertainment and Dance Association.

Is it easier to buy a gun or a drink in the UK?

I wonder.

Five Live Report ordered a fake “driving permit” online and showed it to Inspector David Connery, the head of crime prevention at the Police Service of Northern Ireland. “It really worries me these fakes are out there,” he said, pointing out anyone found using one faces getting a criminal record.

Of course, that is absurd. Many companies produce ID cards that are no more ‘fake’ than the ones you can buy or make yourself with a laminating kit.

In the absence of bad laws that try to conrtol human nature and urges, the rationale behind ID cards disappears and these dirty lying articles disappear with them.

“The more discerning doorman will know it’s false – but on a busy night it could easily fool people. “If you are caught using a false ID getting into licensed premises you will be reported.”

You are in violation!

He also warns anyone “lending” their own genuine ID to underage drinkers could be charged with aiding and abetting an offence.

I think we can safely say that no one is paying attention to these bad laws, just as in the days of prohibition, the majority of people simply broke the law. And we know what the result of THAT was.

The BBC contacted several fake ID firms for an interview, but none responded. The site which comes out on top when you search for fake ID through leading internet search engines carries a warning addressed to the press. “We discourage the attempted use of our cards for the purposes of misrepresentation, both here and in the documentation supplied with our delivered fake ID products,” it states.

Bollocks. Why should they respond to a bunch of habitual liars who are out to misrepresent them and destroy their legitimate businesses? They say that they are producing ‘fakes’ in line with your own fallacious logic, so what more do you want? Of course, they want them out of business and state issued mandatory ID cards to be brutally enforced.

But youth workers and publicans say they are in no doubt that the fake cards are marketed to underage drinkers.

This is just hearsay, and totally irrelevant to the true thrust of this absurd piece of paid for trash ‘journalism’.

They argue that the firms selling the cards are immoral and endangering people’s licenses and livelihoods.

This is a perfect example of ‘in the box’, ‘night is day’ thinking.

Everyone has the right to print whatever they like. Everyone has the right to sell what they print. It is immoral to try and prevent people from printing what they like and selling what they print to whomever they wish. Publicans should not need a license to sell alcohol. The regulation of pubs is what is endangering peoples livelihoods, not the selling of food and drink, which is the very purpose of a pub.

Bill McComb, who runs several alcohol and drugs awareness programmes in Ballymurphy in West Belfast, says: “The companies know that young people are using these cards for an illegal purpose.”

And so? Once again, this is an assertion, not a fact, and even if it were a fact, this is not the point. The point is that the laws controlling alcohol in the UK are immoral, and they are being used as a another pretext in the arsenal of bullshit that is being trotted out to boost the case for total control everyone through the introduction of a totalitarian ID card.

A final point of interest; when you surf to the BBQ page where this rubbish lives, you will notice how it is formatted so that it is almost free of paragraphs. This article is designed for the lowest common denominator. Each lying thought is a single sentence on its own, so that the thickest most asleep reader can easily swallow the fallacies being rammed down their throats.

Five Live Report: The Faking Game will be broadcast at 1930 GMT on Sunday, 16 December. Or download the podcast from the Five Live Report website.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7144972.stm

We will give that one a miss, thanks.

Bastards.

In modern Britain, you are better off being a car than a human being.

These two stories from The Times tell us why. Firstly, there is the story of who is to carve up the human cattle pie, and who is going to be the loser:

BT loses deal for high-tech borders
Dominic O’Connell

AN American defence company has pipped BT to a sensitive IT contract that will bring high-tech methods to policing Britain’s borders.

Raytheon is expected to be named as the winner of the £500m Eborders contract in the next few weeks.

The aim of the project is for IT systems to be installed that will prevent illegal migrants or any other undesirables from entering the UK by stopping them at their port of departure.

Raytheon leads a consortium called Trusted Borders, which includes Accenture, Detica and Serco. It beat competition from Emblem Group, a consortium led by BT that included Lockheed Martin, Logica CMG and Hewlett-Packard.

The Eborders system will link the databases of government departments to those of transport providers to allow the speedy identification of passengers the government would want to exclude.

It is part of the wider strategy that includes biometric passports and visas and the controversial identity-card scheme.

Meanwhile, two defence contractors, BAE Systems and Thales, are understood to have made the Home Office’s long list for a “roster” of companies that will provide the ID-card system.

The list is also said to include Fujitsu, Accenture, EDS, North-rop Grumman, IBM, CSC and Steria. The Home Office is expected to choose just five contractors to make up the roster by the new year.

The ID-cards programme, which has been opposed by the Conservative party and civil liberty campaigners, is expected to be worth between £5 billion and £7 billion.

The first cards, which will use biometric data to provide identification, will be issued in 2009.

The Times

First of all, the e-borders plan and how it is being rolled out is bogus, and built on the wrong principles and technology.
Secondly, Raytheon should not be in charge of Fortress UK®; it is an american military contractor. This sort of thing should always be done ‘in house’ if it is to be done at all, but then again, we know that the British, despite being full to overflowing with the greatest geniuses on the planet cannot organize any large scale government IT project. We wrote about how an american company has the contract to run the UK police fingerprint database (I cant find the URL). Is there going to be any part of HMG left that is run by the British? And the worst part of it is, the money for all of this comes out of your pockets and is then siphoned abroad.

And here is the reason why it is better to be a car in the UK than a human being:

Attack of the clones
A surge in car cloning where criminals copy numberplates is cheating secondhand buyers and landing law-abiding drivers with fines for offences they did not commit

When Mike McLellan, a businessman from Manchester, pulled up in a residential cul-de-sac in the city, he couldn’t help noticing the silver Vauxhall Astra alongside his looked similar. Nothing unusual in that, it’s one of the bestselling vehicles in Britain and silver is one of the most popular colours.

But his interest turned to astonishment when he saw the numberplate was identical. For a second, McLellan, 58, thought he was seeing double. After several confused double takes, he realised he had become a victim of car cloning, the vehicle equivalent of identity theft. He called the police, expecting them to be shocked at his discovery. Their response? “It happens all the time.”

There are up to 100,000 cloned cars on British roads – 10 times previous estimates – according to police officers on a national working group set up to tackle the problem. Cloners use plates stolen from an identical model or copy them. The cloned car will then pass a superficial police check that matches the numberplate with vehicle type and colour.

Armed with their duplicate plates criminals can dodge speeding fines, drive away from petrol forecourts knowing they can’t be traced using CCTV images, escape congestion charges and parking fines, and hide their true identity from police numberplate-recognition cameras. And the offences aren’t all traffic-related.

[…]

The Times

Awesome.

If you are a car in the UK, you CAN change your identity and be anonymous on the street.

If you are a human being in the UK, you CANNOT change your identity and be anonymous.

Why?

Because you cannot replace your face and your fingerprints in the way that a car can have its plates swapped in five minutes. Cars on the streets of the UK with swapped plates can go as they please and no one knows who the driver is or who the car belongs to. Those cars have the true freedom of the road. They cannot be tracked, traced, ticketed, speed trapped, Congeston charged or abused in any way.

That is what it used to be like in the UK for human beings.

You used to be able to walk about freely without being watched. You could not be tracked, traced, surveilled or monitored in any way. You were a private person, going about your own business, and enjoying the liberty of one of the greatest, if not THE greatest countries on earth.

And now….It’s gone.

Whilst looking through the Blarchive for the post about who has the contract for the police fingerprint database, I came across this:

POLICE DATA SNOOPED

Two girlfrinds of Yardie criminals yesterday admitted snopping on the police database.

Civilian workers Davina Kirwan and Sunshes Pike-Williams, both 21, made hundreds of unauthorized checks on their boyfriends and other criminals while employed at Stoke Newington police Station in North London, Southwarrk Crown Court heard.

They also admitted entering false information on to the system.

Kirwan, of Leytonstone, East London, and Pike-Williams, of Ealing, West London, risk being jailed next month.

[…]

Metro Magazinesee also:
BBC News
The Times
Evening Standard

I TOLD YOU!!!!

Two people working inside the police, corrupting and passing information from the police database for their criminal boyfriends.

Now.

If its YOU on the database, and someone who doesnt like you is paying a dudette with access to put convictions on your record, you are literally FUCKED, because its impossible for anyone but criminals to remove information from these records!

Add this to the ultimate poison of a unique number tied to you for life, and you start to see what a nightmare we will be living in if ID cards become a reality.

Someone, some gangsters moll will be able to attribute false crimes to you and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Now, the police have rigorus checks in place to keep criminals and their associates of criminals out of the reach of terminals, but these systems simply do not work.

I have personally seen the forms that the police require to be filled out even for the most trivial of jobs earning 15,000pa. You have to list:

• Name, Address
• Husbands / partners name / address
• Fathers name / address
• Siblings name / address
• Name and address of dependents
• Name and address of “other significant persons”
• “Have you ever been involved in espionage, terrorism, sabotage, actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”
• “Have you ever been a member of or supported a group or groups involved in any of the above activities”
• “Have you ever had a close association with anyone who, to your knowledge, has ben a member of or given support to any such group or activities”

And THEN there is the medical disclosure form, which asks if you are suffering from just about any illness imaginable, who your doctors are and all sorts of other very private and personal information.

This form runs to 14 pages.

These two persons clearly had to fill out these expansive and invasive forms, and yet, they were the ‘girlfriends of Yardie criminals’! The only way to protect against these sorts of abuses leaking into every area of your life, is to not allow a unique number to be attached to you. In this way, all of the people who want to foul your record will have to work very hard indeed to do a hatchet job on your records, which will be separated by closed systems on different databases, as they should be.

The Blarchive

There are only two links on google for ‘Davina Kirwan Sunshes Pike-Williams’ one is to BLOGDIAL, the other is to BBQ, and I quoth:

Violence and firearms

The court heard how the pair accessed police computer databases and carried out hundreds of checks on different people, vehicles and crime reports.

They pleaded guilty to committing misconduct in a public office.

Det Supt Trevor Smith from the City of London Police specialist crime unit said there was “no direct evidence that they (their boyfriends) have benefited from this”.

“Because of their actions, we had to conduct a long, lengthy and expensive investigation, and we had to review methods and techniques that we were using,” he said.

[…]

I ROTFL.

“No direct benefit”?! So they did these checks just for fun?

Of course, the officer conveniently left out that these two girls admitted entering false information on to the system.

You can expect to see an explosion of snooping abuse if the NIR / ID Card gets rolled out; and it will not be insiders doing it, it will be ordinary people running perfectly legal background checks on you willy nilly.

You were warned. You are being warned. Take heed!

And finally, another blast from the BLOGDIAL past that warmed my heart:

http://www.life.com/Life/lifebooks/mobsters/gallery1/4.html

If you cant beat em…Join me!

Post updated March 26 2009

More true now than it ever was!

[…]

The celebration of the ‘body beautiful’ in the 1920s and 1930s is commonly associated with fascist Italy or nazi Germany. Focusing on the physical culture movement, this article argues that the endeavour to build a ‘superman’ was not confined to fascist dictatorships or Britain’s small fascist parties. There is an extensive literature on the ‘superman’ as a political icon and on the role of sport under fascism in Italy and nazi Germany. For Britain, Dan Stone has traced the influence of Nietzschean ideas on intellectuals and eugenicists who, if not fascist, were located at ‘the extremes of Englishness’. By contrast, the physical culture movement which originated in the late nineteenth century has received rather less attention. Joanna Bourke has portrayed the movement as a site of male bonding, uniting men through ‘worship of the gorgeous physique’ and offering techniques to develop male bodies to enhance military prowess, economic success and social harmony.

[…]

From here posted because of this from the Telegraph:

Ministers are designing new towns dedicated to promoting healthy living in a bid to tackle Britain’s obesity epidemic, it has been reported.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said 10 “eco towns” already being planned by the Government to minimise the environmental impact of new housing should be extended to become “fit towns” […]

So still no new ideas from the current set of dunderheads.

By Mariko Sanchanta in TokyoPublished: October 25 2007 01:32 | Last updated: October 25 2007 01:32Millions of visitors to Japan will be required to have their photographs and fingerprints taken from next month as part of new immigration procedures meant to help prevent terrorist attacks.

The move, which includes fingerprinting longtime permanent foreign residents, marks the first time a country other than the US has introduced such procedures. The US adopted similar measures following the September 11 attacks and the UK and European Union are considering introducing comparable requirements.

The new measures have been attacked by human rights groups, which have said the collection of biometric data could play into the hands of Japanese xenophobes and raises privacy issues.

“This will further the perception in Japan that foreigners are terrorists and at the same time rejects the idea that the Japanese could be terrorists as well,” said Makoto Teranaka, secretary-general of Amnesty International Japan. “In fact, all recent terrorist attacks have been conducted by the Japanese,” he said, pointing to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

The new procedures are part of an amendment of Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which contains measures to prevent terrorism. The measures come into force on November 20. In certain instances, Japan will be able to share its biometric data with other governments.

The move has been criticised by many foreigners living in Japan, particularly as the government has said it wants to make Tokyo an international financial centre. It also coincides with the government’s long-running Visit Japan campaign, which aims to increase the number of foreign visitors. Last year, more than 8m people visited the country, up from 5.2m in 2001.

Though Japan invited public comments on the new measure, one could only do so in Japanese.

If a foreigner refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed, he or she will not be permitted to enter the country.

Certain individuals, including “special permanent residents” (which include longtime ethnic Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Brazilian-Japanese residents), people under 16 and diplomats will be exempted from the new procedures.

Financial Times

Fingerprinting tourists and anyone for that matter will not prevent ‘terrorist attacks’.

Like the article says, the people who do ‘terrorist attacks’ (more accurately, mass murder by poison) are JAPANESE not TOURISTS, and even if they fingerprinted all Japanese citizens alive that would not prevent another gas attack.

Some Japanese citizens have a long standing problem with foreigners so maybe this insane measure is a consequence of that; in any case, thats Japan off of my list of places to visit!

Another Post Tipping Point^™ post.

UPDATE!

Amnesty International calls bullshit:

[…]

Amnesty International is calling for the immigration plan to be abandoned.

“Making only foreigners provide this data is discriminatory,” said Sonoko Kawakami of Amnesty’s Japan office.

“They are saying ‘terrorist equals foreigner’. It’s an exclusionary policy that could encourage xenophobia.”

The new system is being introduced as Japan campaigns to attract more tourists.

More than 6.7m foreign visitors came to Japan in 2006, government statistics show. Immigration officials say they are unsure how long tourists can expect to wait in line for the checks to be made.

Britain is set to require non-European foreign nationals to register biometric details when applying for visas from next year.http://www.news.com.au/
[…]

And amazingly, they think that this will HELP bring new visitors to Japan!

‘Second Earth’ found, 20 light years away
Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian
Wednesday April 25 2007Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky “second Earth” circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

WRONG.
The prospects (probability) that we are not alone do not change from day to day, they are the same and have been the same since man first looked up into the night sky.

Reality is not dependent on what we have or have not observed…or what we will admit to having observed. Is this journalist suggesting that this planet did not exist before it was observed? By extension, is he suggesting that intelligent life on other planets does not exist unless we detect it? I am sure that the people on other planets would have something to say about that.

This is illogic pure and simple. It is not science, or scientific thinking. In fact, it is more like false religion than science.

The planet is the most Earth-like ever spotted and is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life.

WRONG.
Water is not an essential ingredient for life. This is dogma. People used to say that the sun is essential for life; we now know that this is not the case. To say that water is essential for life is to fall into the same trap that previous scientists have, and really, there is no excuse for it.

Researchers detected the planet orbiting one of Earth’s nearest stars, a cool red dwarf called Gliese 581, 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra.

Measurements of the planet’s celestial path suggest it is 1½ times the size of our home planet, and orbits close to its sun, with a year of just 13 days. The planet’s orbit brings it 14 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But Gliese 581 burns at only 3,000C, half the temperature of our own sun, making conditions on the planet comfortable for life, with average ground temperatures estimated at 0 to 40C.

FALSE.
Even if Gliese 581 was cold, there is no reason why any planet that orbits it should not be teeming with life. We know that there are forms of life, named ‘Extremophiles‘ that can live in conditions that are incomprehensibly harsh. There is no reason to suppose that life forms like this, or even more hardy than this, are not living throughout the universe. More false reasoning, and very tiresome it is.

Researchers claim the planet is likely to have an atmosphere. The discovery follows a three-year search for habitable planets by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in Chile.

Atmospheres are not required for life, clearly.

“We wouldn’t be surprised if there is life on this planet,” said Stephane Udry, an astronomer on the project at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.

Good!
Will you now concede that you would not be surprised if Alien scientists and explorers are visiting the earth right now?

I wonder!

Two years ago, the same team discovered a giant Neptune-sized planet orbiting Gliese 581. A closer look revealed the latest planetary discovery, along with a third, larger planet that orbits the star every 84 days. The planets have been named after their star, with the most earthlike called Gliese 581c. The team spotted the planet by searching the “habitable zone”.

There is no such thing as ‘the habitable zone’ this is another anthropocentric fantasy.

More trash from The Guardian.

Very easy to trash…typing exercise.

Anxiety ‘haunts primary schools’

Primary school children and their parents are suffering from “deep anxiety” about modern life, according to a study of education in England.

The Cambridge-based Primary Review’s report said the pressure of Sats tests dominated the last two primary years.

Researchers ran 87 discussions with groups of children, parents, teachers and others; 750 people took part.

The government said most children lived in better conditions than 10 years ago and rejected criticism of testing.

“Today’s children, it was generally felt, are being forced to grow up too soon, and the prospects for the society and world they will inherit look increasingly perilous,” the report said.

Climate concerns

Among those quoted in the Primary Review report are children themselves.

Many expressed concern about climate change, global warming and pollution, the gulf between rich and poor, and terrorism.

“The children were no less anxious about those local issues which directly affected their sense of security – traffic, the lack of safe play areas, rubbish, graffiti, gangs of older children, knives, guns,” the report said.

“Some were also worried by the gloomy tenor of ‘what you hear on the news’ or by a generalised fear of strangers, burglars and street violence.”

But the report added: “Where schools had started engaging children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat.”

The children thought the Sats tests were “scary” but felt the results informed people about how they were doing.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7039966.stm

This is an outrageous and vile article.

This is why.

People are anxious about many things, including but not limited to:

• the prospect of unending war
• dangerous vaccines
• violence in schools
• their children being fingerprinted like cattle
• id cards and the database state
• exponential growth of bureaucracy
• swingeing taxes
• the EU impinging on British sovereignty
• immigration from the EU
• the police state
• CCTV watching you 24/7 (would make ANYONE anxious)
• the total erosion of privacy
• mad scientists creating life
• Neu Labour
• Tony Bliar
• Gordon Brown
• Jack Straw
• Jacqui Smith
• John Reid
• David Blunkett
• Charles Clarke

all of this and more combine to make life in Britain so unpleasant that one third of people are desperate to leave the country. And yes, I DO mean ’emigrate’.

Even in the days of Margaret Thatcher, who was disliked in many quarters, her wrongs were not enough to trigger the en masse flight of the British from their own country.

That is how bad it REALLY is.

We read above that that children were consulted. On the one hand, people complain that children are not allowed to be children, but then they use them in consultations when they have no business doing so. Children are consulted about everything as if they were adults; you cannot have it both ways.

As for the fear about climate change, global warming and pollution, the gulf between rich and poor, and terrorism, the BBC is absolutely culpable in spreading the irrational fear of climate change and the global warming hoax. They have damaged children with these absurd bedtime stories and it is they that have pumped this fear into children. The same goes for ‘terrorism’; the BBC is absolutely guilty of spinning and boosting ‘terrorism’ and the fear boosting ideas surrounding it until they have reached a fever pitch. The reality is that ‘the threat of terrorism’ is not bigger now than it was when the IRA was operating, and the chances of you being affected directly by it are astronomically small. The real threat is the loss of our liberty…. But you know this.

The BBC is one of the greatest boosters of anxiety in this country, followed closely by Mad Murdoch’s lie empire and Neu Labour. It is indicative of their unmitigated gall that they put this ‘slow news day’ story on their front page, when they are one of the main culprits.

Anxiety is a state of mind. If everyone is repeatedly shown only the downside of everything then this is what the currency will be. If no one is allowed to see the entire picture and their place in it, they will feel small, marginalized and powerless (which is exactly what BBQ/HMG/NWO desire). This state of mind, on a mass scale, can be engineered for a time, and that is precisely what the BBC has been doing for over a decade. The BBC is a major cause of this anxiety, it is they who are a major factor in the terrorizing and destroying of The British State of Mind®.

Americans, as I have said so many times, have the ability to get out of deep ruts, and this is why Ron Paul has such a great amount of momentum. The spell is breaking in America, thanks the words and deeds of one honest man; people in that beleaguered land are tired of living like grey pieces of clay thrown on the devil’s potters wheel. Even the controlled press, feeling the surge and for whatever reason (not wanting to be on the wrong side of history or pure enlightened self interest) are starting to get behind Congressman Paul.

Could the same thing happen in Britain? That really isn’t the question. The question is, will there be anyone left here to make it happen.