Archive for the 'Justice' Category

Using the proliferation of cameras to identify provocateurs

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

[…]

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

Police Undercover Snatch Squads and Agents Provocateurs

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The unintelligent, inexperienced and completely deluded students are out again in force, to be kettled, sheared, abused and used as fodder to provide the police with much needed overtime money.

What is interesting here is that we may be seeing the seed of the idea that all the video cameras that everyone has by default could be used for something useful, active and defensive, instead of just a child’s toy.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

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

[…]

Now look at this video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011:

If these people had any sense, they would have already set up this web service as I described in 2009.

Using Augmented Reality ID:

They could check each ‘protestor’ against the online database of Agent Provocateurs and police officers to make sure that they had not been infiltrated.

Of course, anyone who is that smart is not interested in demonstrating in the first place, but we will leave that aside for now.

The point is, these young and very foolish people are behaving as if it is 1960 and not the end of 2011. As I have said before, again and again, the age of demonstrations is over. The shape of them, how they play out, move, surge and flow is well understood. There can be no surprises with them. Nothing comes of them, no matter how large they are, as we saw with the StopWar demonstrations before the destruction of Iraq.

The problem these people have is that if they were intelligent enough to know this, they would not be demonstrating, and would be well on the way to formulating a strategy that would actually give them what they want. Their problem, clearly, is a toxic mix of a lack of intelligence and experience.

They do not know exactly what they hope to achieve with these acts, they have no discrete goals or deliverables, they have no means of creating a new strategy because they lack the mental capacity to formulate one; in other words, they are a completely lost cause.

One thing that is coming out of this is interesting however.

Because everyone has a camera at these demonstrations, it might come to pass that the light bulb switches on over the head of some computer science student as she realises that it should be possible to create what I describe in the post above.

There are literally dozens of cameras in this clip; surely someone somewhere must be thinking that there is a use that can be put to the footage to help weed out the provocateurs. Who knows?

What we can say with a high level of certainty is that these students are going to achieve nothing by marching in the street. Everything they are planning, even if it is not known about in advance by surveillance is easily counter-able because marching and demonstrating is a ‘dead tactic’ that the State has a perfect understanding of.

All of this is a complete distraction of course; even this very post has distracted me from doing something else productive. Unless by chance it spurs the creation of the system I have been writing about.

Once again, demonstrations are ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1152

they divert energy from useful acts and thinking, and prevent or delay permanent solutions from emerging. You should not participate in them; instead, you should be working only on things that have discreet goals and that has metrics that you can measure directly so that you can know if you are being successful or not.

Anonymous, the Matrix and Justice

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

It appears that Anonymous is not releasing its mothelode containing 4GB of News of the World emails, because it may ‘prejudice the case’.

This is an error.

Seeking justice from a court that is run by the State is not rational in this case, and here is why.

Lets say that News International is found guilty of a crime and then is fined 500,000 pounds, or 5,000,000 or 50,000,000… so what?

What if both the Murdocks are sacked; once again so what?

News International continues to promote and lie on behalf of the bogus war on terror, the bogus war on drugs, democracy, lies in general, the erosion of liberty and it continues its unequivocal unquestioning support for the regime(s). A small fine is the most you can expect from any judgement a court might hand down, and of course, this is reasonable. Just because they have done some bad things, that doesn’t give a court the right to completely annihilate their business.

Justice in this case would be a total and completely effective boycott of News International by properly informed public. It would destroy them comprehensively and utterly, based on nothing more than their own words, as contained in the email motherlode.

No court in any country that wants to preserve its patina of ‘fairness’ can ever deliver this deathblow result, which would be real justice. Consider what happened to the jewellers Ratner’s who were almost put out of business overnight thanks to the honest words of its head in a single speech. That was all it took.

Anonymous has in its hands, a weapon that could be millions of times more powerful than the single utterance of the boss of Ratner’s. The News of the World has been listening in to the voicemails of thousands of people, now their communications are going to be probed. This is true, like for like justice. See Retributive Justice.

Libertarians understand that the State should not be the sole dispenser of justice, and that justice is a service, just like any other. The same people that murder men in other countries protect themselves with the courts that they effectively own. This is why Tony Bliar will never be brought before a British court to answer for mass murder, even though he is guilty of that crime as an accomplice and instigator.

Seeking justice from inside the matrix on its terms and inside its controls cannot, by definition, be real justice; it can only be a simulation of justice.

Anonymous can do whatever they like with the docs they have obtained. They took the risk to get them, and its up to them how they want to dispose of them, wether that is doling them out piecemeal, deleting them or releasing them in their entirety.

What they must understand is that they have the power to dispense justice themselves, by releasing the docs. The question that immediately comes to mind is are they being influenced by the media outlets they are working with:

We’re currently working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet Reply

who knows?

One thing is for sure; working with newspapers is retarding their movement, which is the job of the Mainstream Media gatekeepers like the Guardian.

For the record, justice does not mean violence. The State and its fear soaked control addicts conflate justice dispensed outside of its courts with violence to frighten people away from the idea that justice is a service. Justice does not mean hanging or imprisonment or other violence, it means (in general) an equitable settlement of partie’s claims, based on the facts of a grievance, that is mutually satisfactory.

If the Anons wants justice, they should let everyone make up their own minds wether or not News International is a fit company to receive their money. The only way to do that is to release the documents in full.

Consider this. There must be information in that 4GB motherlode that might be useful to a victim of the State, that has no meaning to you as you gate-keep the gigabytes of information.

Imagine that some poor person without the connections or resources to fight the oligarchy / State has been suffering under their heel; lets say someone powerful wants his land or his house, and has framed him up to steal it from him. The evidence of this might be in a motherlode of files that you are poring over, that you might miss because it doesn’t seem important; but it is important to that man who is being victimised.

An even more germane example would be evidence that the News of the World has run a smear campaign against a person or company; the evidence is in there waiting to be released to vindicate the vilified person. Even more interesting would be an expose of all the PR companies that have been feeding stories to the News of the World. We all know that Facebook has been caught running a PR campaign against Google, can you even begin to imagine the number of emails from PR companies that must be in that motherlode, and how they will completely expose the way newspapers simply churn out stories that are fed to them? That would be a real public service, and no one would ever read a newspaper with the same eyes ever again. The spell of churnalism would be broken forever, and everyone reading a newspaper story would immediately, instinctively put up a barrier between them and the print that keeps the story from entering their consciousness uncritically. From then on, the first thing everyone reading a story would ask before and after reading it would be, “Now, I wonder who is paying for this story”. It would constitute an unprecedented healthy scepticism that would spread throughout the world.

All this from the release of a single tarball.

That is justice.
That is moving forward and never going back.
That is progress.
That is solving problems.

Everyone needs to have access to everything for the dam holding back justice to be broken.

Finally, some who agree with the stance that Anonymous takes on things still believe that democracy is a good thing. They claim that the Norwegian president saying that the answer to violence is more democracy is correct. This is patently false. Democracy itself is violence:

The answer to violence is to say “NO” to violence.

That means “NO” to all violence and coercion, no matter where it comes from.

Democracy is violence and coercion. You cannot be against violence and for the violence of the State at the same time. If you are for the State, and for democracy, then you are for all the bad things that come out it, its violence and all the bad stuff that you quite rightly want to see and end of. You cannot, or at least, should not, hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. Unless you are a quantum physicist.

This is a difficult concept to understand at first, but once you grasp it, it becomes clear that the answer to violence can never be more violence, especially the unprecedented mechanised industrial scale violence of democracy and the State, which is more violent than any mafia gang or any organised entity in the history of the worl.

It will be interesting to see what happens to that 4GB file, especially when Topiary, who has apparently just been arrested, is made the next victim of the standard and insidious mainstream media character assassination that is done to everyone like that. You need only look at what happened to Julian Assange for a good example of how mainstream media deliberately sets out to poison the perception of people, and of course, evidence of a coordinated PR effort to smear Assange could very well be in that motherlode.

Think about it!

19,785,621 seconds

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

THe title of this blog post is the number of seconds it took for the hive mind of Anonymous to reach the next iteration that we wrote about in December 2010. Here is the tweet posted around the time of the light bulb moment:

If @LulzSec called for a #Paypal boycott it would make way more damage than any LOIC attack could ever do. Is that a felony? #AntiSecless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet Reply

What is so exiting about this is that 229 days (or 329,760 minutes or 5496 hours) is not very long for an iteration, and if the time between iterations is getting shorter and shorter, it will not be long (since Anons are highly intelligent) before they come to the Final Boss of of this game: The idea of the State itself.

When they come to the conclusion that the State is not needed, is the source of all the evils they are railing against, that it is a new cancer and not at all inevitable, Murray Rothbard will spell everything out for them in a tome that is not TL;DR, and which will simply blow their minds.

PayPal’s ridiculous regulations are a product of the State. If if were not for the State, they would not be doing what they are doing, i.e. blocking access to accounts, closing accounts at the behest of the state, restricting the flow of your money etc etc.

If you look behind the curtain at everything that is going wrong, from the insane wars, to the restrictions on free speech, DRM, the ban on vitamins, the RIAA/MPAA, Domain seizures, your money becoming worthless, widespread poverty, the ‘War on Drugs’, the patent trolling, the endemic corruption, the bank bailouts… EVERYTHING – the State is the direct cause of it.

People who are clear thinking are not wedded to any particular idea out of habit. They hold their ideas because they are arrived at by reason, and if by reason they must abandon wrong ideas, they do so immediately.

The idea of the State is a habit, a bad one, like heroin, and anyone who refuses to accept the State as the Final Boss is a brainwashed, drug addled addict.

It looks like the tipping point has been reached. Anonymous and its legion are moving inexorably towards the locus of Libertarianism. They are quickly shedding all operations that are ineffective or that involve disrupting other people’s property (like LOIC). Closing your PayPal account and switching to another service is an incredibly powerful act. By moving to another service, you can ensure that the flow of information (money) is not interrupted. The question then becomes, which service to switch to?

If you switch to any service that is regulated by our enemy, the State, you will be moving from one frying pan into another. What is needed is a way to move information (money) that does not involve a third party. A middlemanless system that is controlled by the masses for the masses.

That means Bitcoin.

The next obvious iteration is to get millions of people to move to Bitcoin as the main way they transact with money on the internet. That means dumping credit cards, PayPal and any other payment system that is regulated by the State.

Even if the number of places where you can buy things with Bitcoin is small now, if millions of new challengers appear holding it and eager to spend it, I guarantee you that Bitcoin will be integrated into every e-commerce package out there in less than a month. This will dramatically bootstrap the Bitcoin economy, decimate PayPal and the credit cards and bring forward the date of the inevitable demise of the State.

Remember; the taint of the State is the root problem. Apply this simple test to anything that you can think of that chafes at your sense of decency and liberty.

“Is there a law or regulation that makes this bad thing happen?”

If the answer is yes, then the State is behind it.

Try it. You will be amazed at how everything bad you can think of can be traced back to and is a direct result of the existence of the State.

The inevitable next question is “what are we to do without a State to tell us what to do?”. Murray Rothbard and the Libertarians have the answer, and this answer is not based on theory alone; it is based only on provable facts.

A critical mass of non violent change is coming where the State will simply cease to exist, just like it did in East Germany. This time it will be different however. There will be no West Germany to fill the void. There will be nothing; nothing but the good will and power of collective non violent voluntarism and the unprecedented prosperity that will follow as day follows night.

One last thing.

Some people say, “this is how you do it, keep it legal and legit”. This is wrong, ‘in the matrix’ thinking.

If you restrict yourself only to what is legal, then you will most certainly fail.

If they outlaw Bitcoin, or any of the other 17 alternatives to PayPal, and remove your ability to change services and stay ‘legal and legit’ how will your boycott end? It will end in total failure.

Your strategy should not be based on doing what is or is not legal, because the State, the enemy, decides unilaterally what is or is not legal. Constraining yourself in this way is thinking inside the box created for you by the State. It will not work.

Your strategy must be based only on what is moral and what is effective. That means refraining from doing anything that is immoral and only doing things that are effective.

If they make payment systems other than PayPal illegal, that is an attack on your liberty that you can respond to without committing an immoral act; in the same way that smoking marijuana, despite it being illegal, is responding to an outrageous infringement of your liberty without committing an immoral act. You simply refuse to obey, en masse.

What has changed is that everyone is connected to everyone else, and withering, debilitating, concentrated, tsunami death blow boycotts can strike with incredible ferocity if the conditions are correct.

Just wait for the critical mass condition to arrive, when the penny drops and the State dies… I imagine that it will be like the change of weather on a day where it has been raining and all of a sudden, the rain stops and beautiful sunshine burst into the day.

The green rain of the State will be stopped!

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

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

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

They have a few more cycles to go however.

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

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

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

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

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

Dear us citizens,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Think For Yourself, Question Authority” -Timothy Leary

Reject authority, end the State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For great justice.

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

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

Enforce RICO Laws

RICO Laws are illegitimate:

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

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

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

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

Break Up the Big Banks

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

End the Fed

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

Break Up the Mainstream Media / encourage citizen journalists

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

End Closed Door Lobbying

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

Increase Government Transparency

See above.

End Corporate Personhood

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

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

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

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

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

Amend Campaign Finance

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

Verify All Votes

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

Investigate War Profiteers

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

Investigate War Crimes

Rubbish. End the State.

End the Wars

End the cause of war; the State.

Restore Civil Liberties

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

Uphold the Constitution

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

Clean Air, Water & Food

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

Reduce Healthcare Costs, Profiteering

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

Make Healthcare a Human Right

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

Improve Education For All, Reduce Costs

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

Reform Prison System

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

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

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

Immigration Reform

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

Rebuild Infrastructure

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

Protect Internet Freedom

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

Empower States’ Rights

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

End Corporate Welfare

End the State that steals money to give it.

Fair taxes for everyone!

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

Enforce corporate responsibility

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

Force corporations to apply local labor laws in their global operations

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

Strengthen environmental laws and force corporations to clean up their act

More calls for violence.

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

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

Reinstate Habeus Corpus

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

Allow felons who have paid their debt to restore voting rights

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

Stop prison labor from competing with local businesses

End the State, and its prison industrial complex.

Additional objectives
End lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS

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

Abolish the “Patriot Act”

Abolish the State that enacted it.

Abolish the lobbying system (no paid lobbyists)

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

Close Guantánamo

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

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

This is pure in the matrix thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

Enshrine gender equality in the constitution

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

End corporate money in the election process

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

“Reduce non-emergency military funding”

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

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

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

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

Finding time for morality and ethics

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Every once in a while, you come across something that is so infuriating that you are compelled to try and set it right.

The other day, I came across a man’s plea to a government to tax all its people so that the ‘creative’ among their population can be ‘fairly remunerated’ with the collected monies.

Obviously, to a Libertarian, this is anathema.

It is a call for theft through violence on behalf of a special interest group. It is entirely illegitimate, unethical and immoral. I sent an email to try to start the process of showing this man that stealing is immoral.

Part of this man’s plea for theft included the claim that the state has the ‘right’ to tax one group to redistribute money to another. I pointed out in the email that states do not have rights, only man has rights. This error of attributing rights to states was fobbed off in his reply as ‘a figure of speech’, and that he, “would say that ‘persons have rights'”.

Finally his reply ended by saying that he thinks taxes are legitimate, and that the money can be spent in good ways or bad ways.

He then ended by saying, “I don’t have time to think about this”.

What?

This is like a ship owner, upon being told that his boat is being used to smuggle human beings without his knowledge, saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.

It is like a man committed to non violence who unwittingly is supplying tools and supplies to torturers saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.

This sort of attitude is completely unacceptable to decent people.

By all means, if you agree with paying taxes, you can do so voluntarily; but to call for a nation to forcibly steal money from its entire population, simply because you believe it would be a good idea is beyond passive support for the regime – it is initiating a new form of theft on a massive scale, and famous people (like this man is) have the power to make these bad laws come into force by virtue of their reputations. These people are actually dangerous.

If you are informed that what you are proposing is in fact immoral, you are duty bound as a human being to think about it and to be absolutely sure that you are not doing evil. You cannot blithely say that you ‘do not have time’ to consider the ethics of what you are doing, when two hundred million people could be violated.

The attitude displayed by this man is quite frankly, disgusting.

It seems that there is alot of work still to be done to educate people about the true nature of the state; there are still people out there who are fast asleep, or at the least, so focused on what they are doing that if the whole world ended as a result of their passive action or inaction they would shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t have time to think about this”.

The fact of the matter is, you must find time to think about this, now more than ever, because the world is actually changing at a rapid pace, towards a worst possible case dystopia scenario.

Having said all of this, its important to bear in mind that only five percent of the population was actively involved in the American Revolution. The rest of the people just went along with what was going on, probably because they ‘didn’t have time to think about tyranny’. We do not have to wake up everyone in order to be successful.

Today, many millions of people are awake, world-wide, and are actively repelling the advances of the criminal, mass murdering thieving state.

Thinking purely tactically, we only need to wake up the people who are capable of being woken up, the rest will simply follow along; and judging by their subhuman response to a direct threat, we could, if we were violent, even destroy them without them lifting a finger in response.

Luckily for them Libertarians are not violent, because we are going to win, and there is no doubt about this.

There are however, many people who are violent, and who are willing to destroy to preserve their ability to steal from you.

These deluded, misguided and violent people are surely to become the first great challenge of any newly emerged free society; how are we, the free people, to deal with the violent socialists and statists who want to restore a system of organised criminal theft and mob rule for themselves and their clients through violence?

It will mean putting to the test the very idea of having a free and purely voluntary society, where everyone voluntarily pays others (or does it themselves) to protect their property from the violent socialists.

It will almost certainly end in people being killed. This will be entirely the fault of the socialists and their brain dead followers who are hell bent on controlling other people, invading their property and stealing from them. They will not listen to reason, understand only force, and even those violent types who have the intellectual capacity to come to the correct conclusion, “don’t have time to think about it”.

Libertarians have the truth on their side, and the truth always triumphs over lies.

An army of non violent volunteers, backed by people with an economic interest in bolstering them will present an unstoppable defensive force for the preservation of Liberty in any future battle between the violent statists and free people.

As time wears on, and prosperity spreads like wildfire, the idea of statism and violence will become completely discredited, to the point that the people who try and rally troops for initiating violence will find that their prospective thieves and killers saying…

“I don’t have time to think about this”

Bank Run 2010, Eric Cantona forces the tipping point

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

As we wrote recently, there is going to be a massive, Europe-wide bank run on December 7th.

This is entirely a good thing, and it is precisely the sort of action that BLOGDIAL has advocated for years; we have been saying over and over that demonstrating in the streets is completely pointless, and we were and are completely right.

This call for a bank run has people in ‘authority’ very worried:

Valérie Ohannesian, of the French Banking Federation, said she thought that the appeal was “stupid in every sense” and a charter for thieves and money-launderers.

“My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic,” she told the Observer. “One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought.”

Grauniad article on the bankrun and Cantona

If that is all they can come up with, they must be shitting their knickers.

For a start, everyone now knows that ‘money laundering’ laws are not there to catch ‘criminals’ but are instead for the ordinary people who are trying to protect their money from the ravaging, rapacious state.

She goes on to very stupidly mock the idea with the fact that Cantona would need ‘several suitcases’ to withdraw his money. Of course, he would not need suitcases to withdraw his wealth if the money in his account was worth anything in the first place.

The hollow sound of desperation in print.

As we posted before, this bankrun is an entirely good thing, but what has to happen is a complete exposure and defining of the problem, before it can be fixed.

It seems that the people behind this bankrun are highly intelligent, media savvy people; lets go through this statement from the Bankrun 2010 site.

Dear media,

For a short time, the international press reported the call for a bankrun that we launched on Facebook to invite all those who wish to follow us to withdraw their money from their accounts on the 7th of December, 2010.

Since the publication of our call, people around the world mobilized to translate the text into their language to recreate the event in their country, to promote our initiative by all possible means and invite their contacts to do the same. Our call has met with a success that we did not dare to hope for. We are very happy about it and thanks to the personal investment of all those who, like us, want to enjoy a healthy banking system, equitable, affordable and accountable, we hope that over the weeks we can convince enough people in the world to finally be heard by our respective Governments.

Good. There is only one problem however; a healthy banking system cannot be equitable; a bank exists to hold your money for you and to facilitate transfers for you and to do other services that you require of it, in return for fees. What those fees are is a matter of negotiation, since you are entering into a private contract with a company or an individual.

This is why it is not smart to ask for an ‘equitable’ or an ‘affordable’ banking system; market forces produce the best possible banks, and therefore, banking should be left completely up to those forces, in the same way that the operation of self storage units are left to the market.

The problem with banking is not deregulation, it is regulation and interference from the state.

For clarification purposes, we do not speak on behalf of any political party or from any labour union or religion. Our action is a civic involvement that keeps its distance from any form of hate or conspiracy theories that could be made on behalf of our movement, by others during their interventions on any areas of discussion, which is beyond our control. We only speak for ourselves and for no other organisations. We do not seek to harm anyone in particular. It’s towards a corrupt, criminal and deadly system that we decided to oppose, as far as our ability our determination and respect for the law are concerned.

Very good.

Why have we launched this action?
First of all, we wanted to raise public awareness on the functioning of the monetary system.
The overwhelming majority of holders of a bank accounts, savings accounts or even a pension plan, are unaware the way money is created or what the banks are doing with the money that ‘they are given. They know nothing about the principle of money as debt. They do not know the reality behind words like “asset bubbles”, “Treasury bills”, “Hedge Funds” or “securitization”. Hence the media in general make little effort to inform in an objective, transparent and accessible way to all. The only thing the public really understands is that most major financial crimes and insider trading remain mostly unpunished, but they are the first to pay the consequences.

True. People are almost completely ignorant of what money is, how banks work and what the current role of the state and central banks is. They cannot define inflation, do not understand that it is deliberately caused, do not understand that the money in their accounts (so much as it even belongs to them) is worthless and that this is all by design.

Not only do we deplore how many questions posed by ordinary citizens on the economic situation remain without clear answers in your columns,

There are highly intelligent commenters who regularly destroy the nonsense some ‘journalists’ peddle about all of this. We are past the tipping point; its GAME OVER for this immoral system.

We do not need journalists anymore; what we do need is a free internet, millions of awakened people and one or two very famous people to stand up and push the snowball down the hill.

It has finally happened.

but we also regret your lack of zeal in denouncing the measures that have allowed the global economic situation get to the point where it is today: a situation that has bought our heads of states and Governments to their knees before the rating agencies, trembling with fear at the idea that our currencies are deteriorating.

Our politicians can’t meet both the interests of financial markets and those of its citizens. So, it is time to remind them who they were elected to serve.

Strikes and demonstrations are no longer useful because whatever we do, we are not heard. And whatever they do, we are not consulted. So we decided to hit the system at its core – THE BANKING SYSTEM

MY EMPHASIS!!!!……

At long last, they are beginning to understand!

For YEARS we have been saying this; demonstrations DO NOT WORK, and you are an ignorant PART OF THE PROBLEM if you call for them, or a GATEKEEPER in service of the STATE and THE WAR MACHINE.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

This is true about everything, including demonstrating to stop war or to make government do what you want it to do. You cannot keep calling for demonstrations and expecting the bad things to stop, when it fails to work; doing so is irrational and stupid. Demonstrations and violence are failure tactics, and the idiotic students who smashed Tory HQ are completely wrong in every way you can be wrong.

Think about it; 50,000 students, all of one mind are an army and huge potential financial force that could make a huge change; on the most basic level, that many people could buy a full page advertisement in a national newspaper once a month for ONE POUND EACH.

That would be far more effective in getting a message across, rather than marching in the streets like animatronic showroom dummies.

But enough of that…

Are we aware of the economic consequences that would result from the success of our action?

We are especially aware of the consequences that the deregulated and uncontrollable global financial system will have on our jobs, our health, our education, our pensions, our industries, our environment, our future, our dignity, the dignity of the citizens of countries that the system has enslaved by debt that they will never be able to repay to better appropriate their resources. This is the fate that awaits people if we in the West do not take ourselves in hand.

We are aware of the role this system plays in the prosperity of industrial empires whose interests depend on armed conflicts, diseases, food shortages and poverty prevailing in the countries that provide labour and natural resources at minimal cost. We are aware that this system will never have anything to gain from a world of peace and prosperity and that continuing to entrust our hard and honestly earned money to this sick system, we make ourselves accomplices of its thefts, for its crimes, its wars and the misery war generates.

Beautiful; they can actually see!

The only problem here, is that they are talking about deregulation being a problem when it is not. If these people were able to form their own bank, and run it however they please, they would be an international force unparalleled in its size and transparency, as everyone moved all their money to it en masse.

The reason why they cannot have their bank is because the state regulates banking so that the war machine can be run. They stop anyone honest from running a bank, and they use legal tender laws to prevent honest money from emerging. Once again, the problem is not deregulation, but regulation by the state.

There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. What is wrong is the wealthy using the state to murder people with its war machine. This is called Crony Capitalism, which is very different from Capitalism.

What do we want?
We, the citizens of the 21st century, heirs of generations who have sacrificed so that we may live free and dignified, demand the creation of a CITIZENS BANK- serving citizens, a bank that would put our money away from speculative fever, free of all financial bubbles designed to burst one day, free of operations that transform our loans & assets and use our debt to buy other assets.

This is a very good idea. The only thing stopping you from creating this bank is the state. Remove the state’s ability to regulate banks and then you can have your ‘Citizens Bank’, and you will be able to run it in any way that you like.

We want banks that lend only the wealth they have. Banks that help small and medium enterprises to relocate jobs, & bank lending at zero rate. (*) Banks that support projects that benefit citizens rather than the “market”. Banks where we can deposit our money, which will then create a peaceful conscience within ourselves. Banks we will not have to be worry about. Banks whose success will sound the death knell of the merchants of death, disease and slavery. On the ruins of the old system, we want to build a banking system that will no longer sacrifice more human dignity on the altar of profit.

This is error.

You want ‘banks’ that only lend the money they have; NO, you must make your own bank that does that; you cannot force people to run their businesses to serve you. Your only recourse, as it should be, is to remove your money from banks that are evil and to put them into an honest bank. You cannot on the one hand, say that you want a world free of violence, and then at the same time, call for the state to do your bidding via violence on others. Start your own bank, and if the state tries to stop you, confront them. You can be sure that the existing banks will be pushing for the violent suppression of you and this bank run right now; that is all they have left to fight with; the apparatus of the police state.

You will be able to set your own interest rates, lending requirements and ultimate purpose. There is a desperate need for such a bank, and you have a captive population of over one hundred million to start with.

I’m afraid that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. You are in the trouble you are in now because you trusted the existing banks and the state to take care of you, and like the predators they are, they fed on you. You will never be able to not worry about banking.

As for the ‘altar of profit’ this is just total nonsense; there is nothing wrong with profit, and you are conflating profit with Crony Capitalism and its evil practitioners. Profit, price signalling and all the other elements of real economics are essential to bringing into existence the prosperity, freedom, peace and the kind of bank that you want to be able to use. You cannot deny the laws of nature, and economics is governed by rules that are as firmly set as the laws that cover physics. Learn these rules, and you will make a bank that is more likely to be a long term benefit.

Finally, the old system must be swept away completely. There is absolutely no reason why a new, clean, moral bank should be set up on the ‘ruins of the old system’. If your plan is that you are going to start with a bad foundation, you might as well not even begin.

Dutch lawmakers have already considered laws to outlaw calls for bank runs. The state and its Crony Capitalist masters are going to use everything they can to destroy you so that they can continue with their insanity.

It is only through peaceful voluntarism that you will ever get a lasting solution to this problem. Forcing banks to obey you by using the state makes the state more powerful, and it is the state that is the true enemy.

We, the people have finally been awakened by poverty and despair afflicting the most vulnerable among us – pensioners, welfare recipients or working poor – and is now threatening what remains of the middle class & entrepreneurs. Even these are exploited as milking cows, and we now simply want the cancellation of the public debts generated by the sick system that we no longer want.

Once again, this is true; this debt belongs only to the people who authorised it; you cannot be made liable to a debt incurred by a third party, without your written consent, and NO, voting in an election does not constitute consent to be made a debtor.

We do not want our taxes, our efforts, our resources to continue to feed this bottomless pit.

Oops, its not ‘your money’ once you have payed it to the state; this is a common error that people make; they believe that the state, “works for them”, and that, “its our money”. It is not. You have no claim whatsoever over that money once you pay it. Its gone, toast, spent.

If you want your money to be used for good purposes only, you have to stop paying it to the state. Period. And I and others predict that that is the next psychological breakthrough that these people are going to make, very soon!

We want to regain the power to coin money and free ourselves from the guidelines imposed on us by the European Union, which was built against the consent of the majority of people consulted by referendum, not to mention those whose country of origin have no organized popular consultation.

This is absolutely key to the entire problem; without the power to decide what money is best for you, you are nothing more than a slave to the European Central Bank, the Private Federal Reserve and all other central banks, who steal money via the inflation tax.

Everyone who understands money knows that the best money is gold and silver coins, held and used directly by the people who transact with money.

Gold and silver money cannot be inflated, controlled or used against you by a central bank, and of course, central banks themselves should be abolished, and would be if this Citizens Bank took off; there would be no need for central banks if every country had its own Citizens Bank, working in cooperation with other similar banks around the world, only for the benefit and convenience of the depositors.

This is why its crucial to:

  • remove the power to make money from the state
  • remove the power to regulate banking from the state

Without these two in place, it will be impossible to get to the place that the stopbankque organisers want.

(*) What the Islamic banks to successfully achieve by refusing usury for religious reasons, we can do for civic reasons.

Oops, ‘Islam was right’?! Don’t tell Geert Wilders!

To conclude
We draw your attention to the fact that even if we manage to relocate jobs, advanced technologies and machines have replaced human labour in a growing number of areas. They can produce more, faster, cheaper, and for these reasons, they create fear to those who wonder how they will earn their living tomorrow. This is unfortunate because since the invention of the wheel, technology is meant to improve the living conditions of mankind. If progress was meant to serve citizens rather than serve the market, we could make a quantum leap in technology development today paralyzed by special interest groups that are the primary beneficiaries of this system.

This is completely wrong; technology does not put people out of jobs, this is The Luddite Fallacy.

Progress serves citizens though their freedom to choose one service over another. Sadly, Europeans are still steeped in the sticky, hallucinogenic treacle of socialist thinking. They want the state to continue its tyranny unabated, only with them at the helm. Sorry guys NO $A£€!

We already have the knowledge to free humanity of its needs in fossil and nuclear fuels and to produce and deliver drinking water throughout the planet at a lower cost, to produce fruits and vegetables, from ice fields to the desert. Poverty only exists on our planet because of the lack of political will of industrialized countries, subject to market forces. Pollution and waste of resources are the sad consequences of this obsolete system which we must put an end to.

Sigh…You cant have it all it seems… Market forces are the only way to eradicate poverty. The state, and ‘political will’ will NEVER do it, and if they try, it will mean giving up the very rights that the stopbankque people are calling for.

As for pollution, we know about that don’t we?

We, the inheritors of chaos, we have a world to rebuild. A world where work is no longer seen as slavery, and lack of work as a tragedy because we have been able to rethink how mankind of tomorrow will ensure its survival, education, well-being and old age.

In order for work not to be slavery, you need to be able to keep the fruits of your labour, that you voluntarily contract for. If the state takes even a penny of it by force, you are reduced to the level of a slave. Everything they do with your money after that, is insult added to injury.

We invite all those who want to follow us on this path – including you, dear journalists – to overcome their fears of the unknown and to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the system that will replace the current one, which with or without us, will eventually collapse when it has taken everything from us. We prefer not to wait until it arrives, or even worse, if in order to save the economy a new war would be declared.

We thank the footballer Eric Cantona for having instilled the idea that we have taken literally. The die is cast. Time will tell whether we were right. (07/11/2010)

http://www.bankrun2010.com/

Don’t hold your breath for the journalists to come on board; they are in the pay of the newspapers that are owned by the same people or colleagues of the people who own the war machine; why do you think these evil scribblers are for war with Iran? They are for war because they are being told to write pro war pieces. They cannot be relied upon or trusted – thankfully we do not need them. We have the internet, we have myriad ways of spreading information that does not include their channels. These new channels are being put to good use, finally, now all that remains is to formulate a plan and then execute it.

This means:

  1. setting up a bank that is outside the control of the state
  2. buying gold en masse with all the worthless paper money that has been withdrawn from the system
  3. depositing that gold in the new bank

The honest money that you require already exists; GOLD.
The forms of banking you require already exist 100% RESERVE BANKING

Like we told you, someone is already doing it.

First things first; DESTROY the system through peaceful disobedience, starting with the money!

Honey, there is no spoon!

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing – what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/lira7.1.1.html

Can you smell that?

Its the smell of someone waking up. Its the smell of fresh air after years of living in the city.

Can you feel it?

Its the feeling you get when you realise that there is no noise, after living in a large city for years. You are actually ALIVE.

If you have ever had a ‘eureka moment‘, where something that made no sense, or was clouded over in complexity, suddenly becomes crystal clear, and you feel a tingling on your neck, and you say…. YES!

The eureka moment here, the smell in this case, the feeling here is the understanding that all along, the ‘crooks’ and ‘criminals’ were in fact right in almost every way.

And by ‘crooks’ I mean the people who didn’t hurt anyone or steal from anyone and who disobeyed every rule out there, and got away with it.

The people in the story linked above are the form fillers, the dutiful, brainwashed good people who believe all the big lies and who paid through the nose in every way.

My sincere hope is that all of these people finally wake up and stop being so insufferably STUPID, all at the same time.

We will then, finally, see the end of the police state, just like the East Germans saw the end of theirs; only this time, there will be no wall to cross anywhere but in the minds of the people who have been shaken from their hypnotic trance.

You know who I am talking about, the robotic, brainwashed, simpletons who think that restaurants must be licensed, that the state should be negotiated with when it comes to the ‘rights’ that they ‘give’ you – the irrational people whose thoughts are wildly incoherent, who get from A to E, again avoiding C, D, and B… you know who I mean… THE PROBLEM!

When these people, these intransigent folk who have based their lives on lies for decades and who simply refuse to accept the truth because it hurts too much, right up until the moment that they are being hauled away to the camps, as they wake up and get really really angry there will be no turning back.

You think its bad now, wait until the dollar collapse happens. The people who were manning the controls of the machine will live in fear of their lives.

And that is an entirely good thing.

You Might Be a Fascist

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

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

by Russell Madden

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

    You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

You might be a fascist if you …

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

Originally seen here.

Pilger is wrong: prosecuting Blair is pointless

Friday, August 6th, 2010

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

Lets do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this, except the Wikileaks exposé is irrelevant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damian Green employs the Nuremberg Defense

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Today, we read an irrational nauseating and completely wrong headed Defense of what amounts to ID Cards through the back door, delivered uncritically by the incorrectly named ‘Liberty Central’, which is in fact, Fail Central when it comes to your rights and defending them:

ID cards: gone for good
Scrapping the costly ID card scheme will be just the first act of this coalition to stop the state stealing people’s liberty

The title of this piece is false. ID Cards are not ‘gone for good’, since foreigners are still compelled to hand over their fingerprints and be registered in an NIR Lite®.

When the second reading of the Identity Documents bill takes place in the House of Commons later today, the coalition government will meet its commitment to scrap the ID card scheme. This bill is the first step the government will take to reduce control by the state and hand power pack to the people. It is not the job of government to collect and store vast amounts of biographical and biometric data belonging to innocent people.

We agree with this entirely.

It is not the job or proper role of government to do this to innocent people, no matter where they come from or who they are. That is the qualification missing from this correct statement.

People do not want the state keeping information on its citizens for some ill-defined and unproven benefit. Fewer than 15,000 people have bought an ID card since last November – and around 3,000 of those were issued free to workers at Manchester and London City airports.

When has what people want had anything to do with the proper role of government, or what it decides to do or not do? This is window dressing, and as for ‘ill-defined and unproven benefit’, you, Damien Green, fall into this trap yourself in this very article.

Many claims have been made in recent years for supposed benefits of the identity card scheme – from tackling terrorism and fighting organised crime to preventing identity fraud. I don’t believe these have, or ever would have, materialised. This is incredible given that the scheme, while delivering no increase in public protection, would also erode hardwon rights and freedoms and requires huge spending.

We have been talking about this for years. All the claims made for ID Cards were completely disproven by us and many other people. Which makes what Mr. Green says later quite astonishing.

The estimated spend of £835m in costs over ten years on the scheme is a significant amount of money, not “diddly squat” as Alan Johnson, the former home secretary, has publicly stated.

What do you expect from a communist post man? In any case, what the liars in New Labour said is now irrelevant. The bills have been put on the table and they need to be paid and repealed.

This huge sum would have been extracted from all of us one way or the other – either because we would have been forced to buy the wretched cards or through taxation.

And the issue of money is an entirely separate issue from the basic immorality of the project.

With the introduction of the Identity Documents bill, the coalition government has acted swiftly to turn back the increasing tide of government bureaucracy. We want to dismantle the scheme at minimum cost to the public and see early destruction of the personal data held on the national identity register and of the register itself.

You may be turning back the tide, but the country is still flooded up to the neck in laws that violate the rights of everyone who lives in Britain. Until you have drained all the leech filled waters completely, you cannot make any claim that the work is finished.

Now we come to the nasty, ridiculous, irrational, illogical, xenophobic clap trap…

Some campaigners have criticised our decision to continue issuing biometric residence permits while scrapping the ID card for UK citizens. This is misguided because the documents are very different.

No, they are not different at all in nature. Foreigners will be compelled to hand over their fingerprints and be registered on an NIR Lite® which will be subject to all the same vulnerabilities as the full NIR. It is discriminatory and xenophobic since it targets only one group of people – foreigners. It is illogical because anyone who does not look the part will be subject to investigation as we have detailed over and over instantly legitimising the need for a National ID Card of the type you are rejecting. It will create confusion, suspicion, division, disharmony and hatred; the complete opposite of what any mandated interfacing with the state should produce.

These biometric residents permits offer no advantages over the traditional ones, just as biometric ID Cards do not offer any benefits to anyone. If they are going to be brought in, as was the case with ID Cards, Damien Green needs to explain in detail, with evidence to back up his claims, how these residence permits are going to deliver the benefits he lists. I note that he does not do this in this article, because he knows full well that this system is being kept on solely to placate the vendors who are having their NIR related contracts cancelled.

We are required by European Union law to provide biometric residence permits to non-EU foreign nationals.

This is the Nuremberg Defense. “I was only following orders”. All the people who committed serious crimes and who used this defense were hanged.

If something is immoral, you have no option as a moral and ethical person but to reject and refuse to impliment it. You cannot lay the blame elsewhere for your crimes of violation. If you are acting as a public servant, you cannot engage in acts of violence against anyone on behalf of your masters, under the same principle that covers your behaviour in the Nuremberg Defense.

This excuse simply does not hold water, and there are any number of EU laws that could be enacted that are offensive to liberty that I could list, where I might say, “if X law was passed would you be obliged to obey it?”. The UK opted out of the parts of the Shengen Agreement that were not to its liking. There is no reason whatsoever that this too should not be immediately stopped.

They are issued under entirely different legislation.

This is the sort of argument a child makes. Whatever the legislation is, you should not be implementing it, period.

They are not “ID cards for foreign nationals”, as the previous government called them.

That is exactly and precisely what they are. As we describe, anyone who does not look the part will be made to identify themselves against the National Biometric Identity Service (NBIS) system, to which the police will have access so that people can be fingerprinted in the street, like criminals.

This is completely indefensible.

The biometric data is not kept on the national identity register

No, it is kept on the NBIS database, which is for all intents and purposes, identical to the NIR. To use these words as as a balm to reassure the public that the danger is really over is pathetic, childish and shows that Damien Green is falling into the same traps that New Labour fell into when they were trying to sell the snake oil of ID Cards. They start by using childish thinking, illogic, diversions, mischaracterisations and end up lying through their teeth to save face.

, and there is no legal obligation for foreign nationals to carry their permit with them,

This is a New Labour style misrepresentation and fact omission. Everyone and their dog now knows that in a biometric system with a central database, your fingerprints are the card. Once you give over your fingerprints, they can be checked anywhere at any time, instantly. You do not need a physical card; this is the sinister nature of biometric identity systems, and it is why the NIR had to be destroyed. The NBIS is no different, and anyone who says so is either:

  1. Computer illiterate
  2. A liar

so no one should ever be stopped and asked to produce the card.

Firstly, we all know that the anti terror laws have been abused beyond imagination and all reason. No one SHOULD have been abused under these laws, but they WERE and CONTINUE TO BE abused.

If this requirement for foreigners remains, then reflexive xenophobic forces WILL come into play and people WILL be abused. That is an absolute fact. And whilst no one will be asked for their card, they will be forced to put their finger on a scanner to be identified.

First, this will happen to brown people. Then, there will be yet another toothless outcry of racial profiling from the usual suspects, and then to make up the numbers, ‘white’ indigenous people will be targeted at random for street fingerprinting and fingerprinting down at the police station, so that the police can demonstrate that they are not using racial profiling, and being in the new Orwellian doublethink of the day, ‘fair’.

Think about it carefully. If they need to prove that they are not racially profiling, they will need to fingerprint (at any place and any time) the indigenous British, and then record their details along with the fingerprint that they took for the purpose of gathering statistics. That data is going to have to be stored somewhere.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

ID Cards for foreigners will by their very existence, bring into being ID Cards and an NIR for the entire population.

We must also bear in mind that it only takes an act of Parliament to make the carrying of foreigner ID Cards compulsory. The word of one decent, if slightly confused man in a single article in a Marxist newspaper is no Defense against the future abuses of a rogue Parliament and the totalitarian beasts who man it.

Unlike the identity card for British citizens, this card serves a purpose by helping foreign nationals easily prove they have a right to live and work freely in the UK.

This is a claim that biometric resident permits have a utility greater than the residence permits that were being issued previously. Damien Green has not said how this is so, but I can tell you that proving you have a right to “live and work freely in the UK” means that you will, at a minimum, be required to produce your foreigner ID Card to a potential employer.

Any employer who does not ask for this card, could open himself up to prosecution. Any person who does not look or sound the part will be asked for this card. If an employer asks a person who does not look the part but who is British, could find himself being prosecuted for discrimination.

Once again, the only way a system like this can work is if everybody has a card showing their status; a National ID Card, which the coalition have conceded is unacceptable to decent people living in a free country.

What they must now admit is that the foreigner ID Card is also unacceptable for the same reasons, and more, since it will create the need for the very thing they have railed against so eloquently.

This government wants to bring to an end the practice of the state gathering data for the sake of it. It is imperative the government is held accountable to the people it represents and does not abuse its position in key areas of personal freedom and liberty.

If that is the case, then they should not be gathering the fingerprints of anyone, since doing so serves no purpose but to line the pockets of IBM.

This government represents not only the indigenous people of Britain, but of all people who enter this island legally for whatever reason. By mandating that foreigners are to be fingerprinted, this coalition government aligns itself with the worst abuses of places like Dubai, where workers are routinely abused.

The coalition is setting up a system of second class persons, just as the Apartheid government did, through its system of pass laws. This is anathema to all moral people.

The Identity Documents bill is a major step on that road. Making the repeal of ID cards bill the first to be brought before parliament by the new government demonstrates how serious we are about creating a free society and reducing expenditure.

This is simply not true.

In a free society, you do not fingerprint and catalogue one section of the public, whilst leaving the remainder at liberty. Liberty is for all, no exceptions, no compromises and no excuses.

Cancelling the ID cards scheme and abolishing the national identity register is a major step in dismantling the surveillance state, but this bill is just the first step. It will be followed by a series of reforms to restore British freedom to our citizens.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jun/09/id-cards-damian-green

The British are not YOUR citizens. Someone who believes in liberty would never use the possessive pronoun to describe human beings; you, Damien Green are THE SERVANT, not the OWNER or THE MASTER.

You have NO RIGHT to fingerprint ANYBODY, British Citizen or not.

You are NOT making the first step unless the NBIS is abandoned permanently; in fact, yo are TRIPPING YOURSELF UP with this absurd and illogical retention of an immoral and inhuman Apartheid system, that is sure to grow like a cancer that will impede the recovery of the healthy liberties of Britain.

Vince Cable, destroyer of prosperity

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

Simon Heffer sounds like a member of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, with his recent piece on the completely mad, anti growth, anti freedom, anti prosperity antics of Vince Cable, LibDem fail artiste extraordinare:

One of the worst features of Leftists – such as Vince Cable, the Business Secretary and inventor of the idiotic proposal to raise capital gains tax (CGT) – is that they believe people with assets exist purely to be taxed. Furthermore, they seem to believe that the so-called rich (in other words, anyone who has been putting money away regularly for his or her retirement) will not only not mind this happening, but will be in some way grateful to have their guilt at being “rich” assuaged by being kicked in this way. They could not be more wrong.

The whole principle of CGT – even at the existing level of 18 per cent – is unacceptable. Most people who make a capital gain these days do so using money they have earned, and which has already been taxed. They have often made capital gains by investing in the stock market, and therefore putting their money to the service of helping another enterprise to grow, and to create prosperity. Unless we create prosperity, other people won’t have jobs, but will instead have to throw themselves on the mercy of the state; and if they don’t have jobs, they don’t pay income tax, which means a shrinking pool of those in work must fund everything society deems it needs: hospitals, schools, pensions and the rest. More to the point, encouraging people to save for their long-term future is entirely sensible because of the burdens it removes from the state. So why decide to punish such positive behaviour?

Excessively taxing people’s thrift, enterprise and hard work is not only morally offensive: it is also bad for the financial health of our country, and for our ability to raise our standards of living for the future. When Labour introduced its 50 per cent tax band, it barely went through the motions of pretending that it was for any reason other than spite, and to appeal to those who enjoy the politics of envy. Dave, I hope, has recognised this, in his remarks to this newspaper last weekend about scrapping the rate if it raised no money. But would the Lib Dems let him do that? Indeed, given his obsession with the sentiments of focus groups comprising largely Labour voters, would he really want to do it himself?

I know we have a hideous deficit that we have to reduce, and shocking levels of debt that must be repaid. There are ways to do that, however, other than by yet again picking the pockets of middle-class people whose only aim in life has been to provide for themselves and their families, and to avoid asking for help from the state. The £6 billion cut in spending this week doesn’t even make a dent in it. The Tories never wanted to sack the socially unproductive members of Gordon Brown’s client state, who cost billions to employ and have jobs purely to encourage them to vote Labour. With the Lib Dems now holding the whip hand, the chance of rebalancing our economy by shifting resources from the public to the private sector appears to be a non-starter.

Yet it is, however much the coalition refuses to admit it, the only way to get us back on track.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/7779988/Capital-gains-tax-and-the-politics-of-envy.html

Now go and read this absolutely wonderful essay by Lew Rockwell, which lays out beautifully why Vince Cable and his thieving bedfellows Ed Milliband and all the New Labour prosperity destroyers have got it all wrong:

I’m sure that you have had this experience before, or something similar to it. You are sitting at lunch in a nice restaurant or perhaps a hotel. Waiters are coming and going. The food is fantastic. The conversation about all things is going well. You talk about the weather, music, movies, health, trivialities in the news, kids, and so on. But then the topic turns to economics, and things change.

You are not the aggressive type so you don’t proclaim the merits of the free market immediately. You wait and let the others talk. Their biases against business appear right away in the repetition of the media’s latest calumny against the market, such as that gas station owners are causing inflation by jacking up prices to pad their pockets at our expense, or that Wal-Mart is, of course, the worst possible thing that can ever happen to a community.

You begin to offer a corrective, pointing out the other side. Then the truth emerges in the form of a naïve if definitive announcement from one person: “Well, I suppose I’m really a socialist at heart.” Others nod in agreement.

On one hand there is nothing to say, really. You are surrounded by the blessings of capitalism. The buffet table, which you and your lunch partners only had to walk in a building to find, has a greater variety of food at a cheaper price than that which was available to any living person – king, lord, duke, plutocrat, or pope – in almost all of the history of the world. Not even fifty years ago would this have been imaginable.

All of history has been defined by the struggle for food. And yet that struggle has been abolished, not just for the rich but for everyone living in developed economies. The ancients, peering into this scene, might have assumed it to be Elysium. Medieval man conjured up such scenes only in visions of Utopia. Even in the late 19th century, the most gilded palace of the richest industrialist required a vast staff and immense trouble to come anywhere near approximating it.

We owe this scene to capitalism. To put it differently, we owe this scene to centuries of capital accumulation at the hands of free people who have put capital to work on behalf of economic innovations, at once competing with others for profit and cooperating with millions upon millions of people in an ever-expanding global network of the division of labor. The savings, investments, risks, and work of hundreds of years and uncountable numbers of free people have gone into making this scene possible, thanks to the ever-remarkable capacity for a society developing under conditions of liberty to achieve the highest aspirations of the society’s members.

And yet, sitting on the other side of the table are well-educated people who imagine that the way to end the world’s woes is through socialism. Now, people’s definitions of socialism differ, and these persons would probably be quick to say that they do not mean the Soviet Union or anything like that. That was socialism in name only, I would be told. And yet, if socialism does mean anything at all today, it imagines that there can be some social improvement resulting from the political movement to take capital out of private hands and put it into the hands of the state. Other tendencies of socialism include the desire to see labor organized along class lines and given some sort of coercive power over how their employers’ property is used. It might be as simple as the desire to put a cap on the salaries of CEOs, or it could be as extreme as the desire to abolish all private property, money, and even marriage.

Whatever the specifics of the case in question, socialism always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and replacing that capacity for decision making with an overarching plan by the state. Taken far enough, this mode of thought won’t just spell an end to opulent lunches. It will mean the end of what we all know as civilization itself. It would plunge us back to a primitive state of existence, living off hunting and gathering in a world with little art, music, leisure, or charity. Nor is any form of socialism capable of providing for the needs of the world’s six billion people, so the population would shrink dramatically and quickly and in a manner that would make every human horror ever known seem mild by comparison. Nor is it possible to divorce socialism from totalitarianism, because if you are serious about ending private ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending freedom and creativity too. You will have to make the whole of society, or what is left of it, into a prison.

In short, the wish for socialism is a wish for unparalleled human evil. If we really understood this, no one would express casual support for it in polite company. It would be like saying, you know, there is really something to be said for malaria and typhoid and dropping atom bombs on millions of innocents.

Do the people sitting across the table really wish for this? Certainly not. So what has gone wrong here? Why can these people not see what is obvious? Why can’t people sitting amidst market-created plenty, enjoying all the fruits of capitalism every minute of life, not see the merit of the market but rather wish for something that is a proven disaster?

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/love-capitalism.html

Jealousy politics is a very ugly, anti human impulse that has ravaged Britain. You see it everywhere, in the towns where slit eyed, shorn headed, shell suited ‘yoofs’ wander around looking for violence. Where young girls with dirty, oily hair slicked back into a single pony tail, sporting tattoos and multiple piercings push prams around with cigarettes in their hands arguing at the top of their lungs with hoarse voices . You see it in the streets ruined by foul architecture, CCTV everywhere… if you live in the UK, you know exactly what it looks and feels like. Its all completely wrong, hideous and sad at the same time, and the older you are, the more you have to mourn.

Lew Rockwell is right; everything you love comes from capitalism, and in particular, everything you love in the UK came from capitalism. The super abundant wealth, unprecedented in the history of the world is what made everything in Britain possible, and she has been living off of the momentum of the market for over half a century. It is only now that the momentum is finally running out. People are leaving the sinking ship as fast as they possibly can, and even the political class understands on some gut level that the engine is about to grind to a halt; hence the ‘triage team’ mentality of this coalition government.

Britain is not going anywhere unless this government gets out of the way. Already people are taking evasive manoeuvres to avoid having their money stolen. This will distort the housing market, and every other market where this foul, loathsome and entirely illegitimate ‘Capital Gains’ tax touches.

The most sickening thing about this is that the British already know how to run a successful economy. They did it in Hong Kong. The form of a successful economy is well understood. The architects of it are the British. The question now is, why will they not just implement it and be done with this insanity?

And for all of you who stumble across BLOGDIAL for the first time and who reflexively bristle at the idea that capitalism is actually good thanks to efficient brainwashing, here is a reading list for you:

Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

Irwin Schiff – How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t

Those two books, the latter one being free to read online, will properly define for you what capitalism is, so that when that word is used you will understand exactly what it is referring to. It will also reveal to you wether or not the writer who is using that word understands what the word means; so many people misuse it out of either brainwashing or ignorance its meaning is badly distorted in the majority of pieces where it is printed.

The risks associated with Liberty

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Rand Paul has won the Republican nomination in the race for the Senate seat in Kentucky, and since this has happened, all the mainstream media are being prompted to pour over what ‘Libertarian’ actually means (even though Rand Paul says he is not a Libertarian) in practice, and they are finding that it is to say the least not to their taste.

In particular, they have discovered the part of Libertarianism that, quite logically, extends the idea of property rights to the subject of restaurant owners excluding people from their establishments for what many feel are not good reasons.

The fact of this matter is simple; either people have property rights or they do not. If the government can mandate that a restaurant must accept me as a client, then the owner of that restaurant does not have property rights in his establishment; the state is the owner of that place because ultimately, they are able to force the owner to serve people he would rather not serve. They are also making the owner into their servant, by forcing him to work for someone he would rather not work for (the act of cooking).

If the state can do this to restaurant owners, then they can do the same thing to any person, for any reason, including you. This is the reason why we must accept the risk that there are people in the world who discriminate, and accept that we have to share the world with them. We cannot gang up against them and force them to believe what we believe; doing that is immoral, and there are no two ways about that.

The possibility of discrimination is one of the risks of living in a space where people are at liberty to live as they see fit and exercise control over their property. You are going to get some people who discriminate, who hold and publish opinions that we find objectionable and who we would not care to associate with. We cannot eliminate risk from the world, and we cannot eliminate behaviours that we do not like. We are obliged to live with these people just as they are obliged to live with us. As long as they do not use violence against us, or gang together to coerce us, there is no problem whatsoever with restauranteurs, who are to our minds, savage, behaving like savages.

Sadly, people in the mainstream believe many contradictory ideas simultaneously. They believe that censorship is wrong, but that there should be such a thing as ‘hate speech’. They believe that they should have the right to Home Educate without being licensed because bad home Educators are practically non existent, but restauranteurs should be licensed, because “someone might be poisoned”. Similarly, these people believe that the property rights of others should be nullified, whilst their property rights are enshrined and protected. This is illogical and irrational thinking.

People in the mainstream of thought are outraged that artists are forbidden from drawing depictions of religious figures, but at the same time, will not support other people who espouse ideas or draw pictures that they find distasteful.

Libertarians do not suffer from this contradictory thinking. Libertarians understand rights correctly; you cannot use the government to enforce your beliefs or ideas; it is immoral and coercive. Banning Facebook because it hosts ideas you do not like is exactly the same as putting someone in gaol because you do not like his view of history. Supporting restauranteurs’ right to ban people from bringing handguns into their premises (or even more likely banning smokers) means you must support the right of restauranteurs to ban anything or any person for any reason. You cannot pick and choose what rights restauranteurs should have based on your own personal prejudices and personal circumstances.

There is a distinction between the state and the private sphere that is not properly understood by ‘normal’ thinkers. If we are to take the premise of democracy and representative government at face value, then anyone who votes or pays taxes or who is a member of ‘society’ has, by default, the same rights to services and to serve as any other member of society. That means that as equal stakeholders in society, the state cannot discriminate against a person for any reason whatsoever, as each person is an equal participant in the collective. The state, with its monopoly on coercion and violence has an obligation to treat all people equally that private people and the businesses they own and control do not. This is the key difference between the realm of the state and the world of private property. Private people do not have the right to use violence to extract monies from individuals, and neither does the public have a quotal share in the property of private people. Private people are also under no obligation to be in service to anyone; any other position than this is to condone slavery. The state, on the other hand, has the power (but not the right) to use violence, has an explicit obligation to serve the electorate, and the public has a quotal share in it and by its own rules, has ‘rights’ granted by it. The two could not be more different, and it is crucial, if you are to understand why restauranteurs have the right to exclude types of potential patron, that you have a clear delineation in your mind separating the state and private spheres.

As this argument rages on, you will see bad thinking swirling around this subject, grouped by the type of speaker. You will hear the same arguments, smears and nonsense again and again from the violent, statist, anti-Libertarians, and they will look like this:

They will:

  • Conflate the disturbing imagery and injustices of the past with the core idea that man has rights, including unpleasant people who own restaurants.
  • Insist that the state is needed to remove the rights of some people for the good of the whole.
  • Mischaracterise Libertarians as people who are against the rights of ‘minorities’, when the exact opposite is the case.
  • Use an endless stream of straw men to try and stamp a mark of disapproval on Libertarians.

Libertarians are the most pure anti racists out there. The whole of Libertarianism rejects the idea that people have different or separate rights depending on what they look like, what they believe, or who they prefer to have sex with. They are also the most rights conscious and clear thinking. They are the sworn enemies of almost all conventional wisdom and every foul thing that comes from it.

The logic of Libertarianism is unassailable, civilised, and completely embracing of all people; this may be the reason why it is greeted by such hostility by self selecting groups who make a living out of defining themselves by artificial and false distinctions. These groups are on to a good thing, and widespread adoption of Libertarianism would shut them down permanently. They would no longer be in line for special treatment at the expense of others, neither would they be able to exert control over other groups in any way.

As Libertarianism continues to grow, we can expect more of these desperate and flailing attacks. When the mainstream gatekeepers of public opinion start to delve into the writings of Murray Rothbard, they will find much that is offensive to them, and they will try to use what they find there to demonise and discredit Libertarianism.

Unfortunately for them, the very act of exposing these ideas will cause hundreds of millions to embrace them, because Libertarianism makes perfect sense and is in perfect tune with the true nature of man.

When men are living in a state of liberty, people’s feelings are going to be hurt. There are going to be bad people. There are going to be people who discriminate. There are going to be people who offend others with their ideas. All of these things are a price worth paying for liberty, such is the sweetness of that condition.

The Libertarian Party Manifesto: Home Education

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

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

Home Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is quite sensible for all home educators to be obliged to notify local authorities that they are home educating. Local Authorities cannot do their present job if they do not know which children are being home educated. A voluntary system would do little or nothing to address the minority of cases where home education could be of poor quality or non existent.” – Nick Clegg, Leader, The Liberal Democrats.

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

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

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

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

[…]

http://lpuk.org/

Copying is not stealing

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Human progress is based on the copy, the ideas materialized emulation by others in the past, improving competitive creations of others, on the combinations of various ideas with its own original contribution minimal.

ll, before you can view the DVD we had rented at the video library on the corner, we have endured this message Authorities us hammering the message that copying a movie would be robbery as ugly prying her handbag at a little old. This defense simplistic, bordering on immaturity, intellectual property is based on a false intuition and pass a basic, yet critical distinction in this debate: the tangible property are to exclusive use (if someone takes away my phone portal I can not call), while intangibles like music, inventions or ideas in general are not (a copy of a CD does not listen to it).

Basically, the function of property rights is to avoid conflicts that may arise in connection with the use of an asset or resource. According to the liberal principle of ownership, the right to decide on the use of the property belongs exclusively to one who has the fairest claim on it, that is to say who gave him the usefulness first or who has received a legitimate third.

In this framework, intellectual property has no coherence. Go back further in time and observe the man of antiquity occupy a parcel of land and start cultivating difficulty depending on local rainfall, becoming de facto owner of the land. Now let the other side of the country where the peasant has never set foot, someone who has developed an irrigation system. The implicit logic of intellectual property would entitle the latter to prevent our farmers to use irrigation technology development and then claim royalties for each use. But we immediately understand that by doing so, the developer of the irrigation system violates the property rights of peasants by forbidding it to do what he wants on the parcel of land it occupied first. Under what the peasant could not copy and use this irrigation technique on his plot?

Depending on context, copy can be inelegant or even dishonorable. It is embarrassing that we take advantage of us and it is logical to try to avoid that. But there are many legal ways to take advantage of people, from adultery to the false promise through emotional blackmail or despotism to a subordinate. The laws are there to punish crimes, not to impose good manners and protect us from our naivete innocent.

Ultimately, why raise a hue and cry on the ass on the copy? This fact, however much a part of life, we copy the behavior and continuously take the ideas of others without feeling remorse or design the quirky idea that people would feel so abused. Human progress is based on the copy, the ideas materialized emulation by others in the past, improving competitive creations of others, on the combinations of various ideas with its own original contribution minimal.

One can understand the irritation of an artist who sees his music downloaded from Internet or copied several times in succession. But if today we had to pay royalties to the heirs of the inventor of the supermarket, light bulb or the telephone, the artist would defend it or criticize it for the fact enjoy legal privileges at the expense of other competitors and the rest of society? This artist would he think that the legislation should be amended to “protect” against the copy a style of dress, a new architectural structure, a new mathematical formula or a new dance step?

Throughout the last two centuries, the United States, the trend has been to extend the time limits of copyright with the evident intention of artificially prolonged legal monopolies very profitable for certain businesses (14 years, there has been any the life of the author plus 70 years). The patent law is so far from his stated goal that emerged are the companies “trolls” who are solely dedicated to patent “inventions” and get royalties without ever producing anything or, to put it another way, to extort businesses that they produce on the basis of these ideas.

There is no “right to culture” and therefore it is perfectly legitimate that artists employ various modes of exclusion which makes it more difficult to copy – as in his time, kept jealously secret Sistine Chapel partition the Miserere of Allegri, Mozart again until this work of memory. But they have no right to appeal to the state to protect their interests at the expense of consumers’ freedom and taxing the sale of CDs or continuing users as criminals who unload the music made available by d others on the Internet. Not to mention the fact that if we paid for everything that we “copy it” routinely, we would be ruined at the end of the day.

http://www.contrepoints.org/Copier-n-est-pas-voler.html

“Copier n’est pas voler”

French…. so beautiful!

Nick Hogan: A true British hero

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

A former pub landlord yesterday became the first person to be jailed in connection with the smoking ban.

Nick Hogan, 43, was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to pay a fine imposed for flouting the legislation.

Two years ago Hogan, who ran two pubs in Bolton, became the first landlord convicted of breaking the law for allowing his customers to routinely light up in his bars.

A judge fined Hogan, of Chorley, Lancashire, £3,000 and ordered him to pay £7,236 in costs after finding him guilty of four charges under the Health Act 2006.
But the married father-of-two refused to pay the fine and yesterday, after repeatedly being hauled back before the courts, a judge sitting at Bolton Crown Court finally lost patience and jailed him.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254126/Pub-landlord-Nick-Hogan-given-smoking-ban-jail-sentence.html

This man is a TRUE HERO.

That pub is PRIVATE PROPERTY.

If the owner of that PRIVATE PROPERTY allows his patrons to smoke, that is a PRIVATE ARRANGEMENT between him and his customers.

Anyone who does not want to drink beer in a pub where smoking is permitted by its OWNER can GO TO ANOTHER PUB, or THE DEVIL.

This is unambiguous and very simple.

Either there are property rights in Britain or there are not.

If you can smoke in your own house and invite people to your house to smoke, and hire servants to serve them beer, then there is no reason why you should not be able to utilise your own property if it is called a ‘pub’, where people come to your PRIVATE PROPERTY to do what you allow them to do. The fact that people pay you for your beer and services is entirely irrelevant.

If the state can tell you that you cannot invite people to your PRIVATE PROPERTY to smoke, drink and eat, then you do not have the right of property in Britain. PERIOD.

Nick Hogan was simply asserting his property right in the pub that he was the landlord of. No one was forced to drink at his pub. The state has no business WHATSOEVER telling landlords that they MUST forbid smoking in what is their PRIVATE PROPERTY.

Nick Hogan is a HERO for standing up for his rights. The judge was completely arbitrary in gaoling him, simply because he had ‘lost patience’; if the judge had been a more patient man, would Mr. Hogan now be ‘at liberty’?

Absolutely appalling!

One thing is for sure, the incandescent rage that the British people are manifesting is starting to make the edifice glow red hot. Soon it will be white hot, and the structure of this insane, madman run regime will start to crumble like the impenetrable door in this film.

UPDATE:

Donate to Mr Hogan in cash to this address:

Nick’s address is:

HMP & YOI Forest Bank
Agecroft Road
Pendlebury
Manchester
M27 8FB

[…]

And see this post by Old Holborn:

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2010/02/nick-hogan-jailed-over-no-smoking-ban.html

Special Branch

Monday, February 1st, 2010