Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer interviews Scott Ritter.
The former U.N. weapons inspector, who was scorned for saying there were no WMD in Iraq, speaks with Robert Scheer about American ignorance, the lies that led us to war, Iran’s nuclear program and more.
Special thanks to the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Public Library for hosting the event.
Tony Blair is facing fresh criticism over identity cards after saying police would be able to use the national database to check fingerprints found at crime scenes.
The Prime Minister was accused of “changing his tune” on ID cards after using the argument to reassure opponents of the controversial scheme. The Government insisted there was nothing new in his comments and that the police provision was set out explicitly in legislation passed by Parliament.
But the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said they never realised police would be allowed to go on “fishing expeditions”.
So they voted on it without understanding what it was they were voting for.
This is why all countries need a constitution. The legislature is so ignorant, so over worked, so stupid that they cannot be trusted to write anything but the most mundane pieces of law.
Everyone has been saying this for ages. ‘Frances Stonor Saunders‘ laid out the true nature of the ID card scheme clearly and succinctly, and her piece was read by millions of people.
How could they possibly not understand exactly what this bad idea really means?
What is encouraging is this; as everyone starts to understand what this system will really do, it will cause an explosion of pure outrage. It might take a demonstration of how evil it is for this outrage to be manifested, but make no mistake, it will happen, and this scheme will be totally dismantled.
After this happens, people will be made aware of how precious their privacy is, and they will protect it with more vigor and attention. Its like having your car broken into; once it happens, you think differently about parking your car and what you leave in it. You are suddenly made aware of the true reality, and this permanently changes your outlook forever. The ID card scheme will do and is doing this to the British population.
The next ‘revelation’ people will make is that the card itself is meaningless. You become the card with this biometric ID scheme. The police or anyone anywhere can id you by your fingerprint. You don’t have your card on you? No problem, put your thumb on the scanner please sir. And that will not be a request.
Police will have hand held scanners as I wrote about in January 2004. You will not have to carry your card to be identified. In fact, if you go to a public place and leave your prints, someone with access (i.e. anyone with some money) will be able to access the NIR and find out you were there.
It is clear that these MPs do not know what they are talking about, because they keep talking about the cards and not the NIR which is the true evil in this idea.
The next round of articles will centre on the NIR and how it is a grave threat, and how they ‘didn’t understand what it really meant’ when they voted for it.
Just you watch.
The National Home Education Research Institute, a non-profit research group, recently completed a comprehensive study of how former homeschoolers are faring in their adult lives. Of the 7,306 participants, 5,254 had been homeschooled for at least seven years.
Some findings:
- 74.2 percent had attained some college courses or higher in their education. In the general U.S. population in the same age range, the number is 46.2 percent.
- 71 percent of the former homeschoolers are participating in an ongoing community activity, compared to 39 percent of all U.S. adults.
- 55 percent say they would homeschool their own children.
Lots more at the link.
Homeschooled kids are coming of age and putting the world on notice that there really is “no place like home (school)”.
Snarfed from:
http://lpcolorado.blogs.com/lpcolorado/2007/02/9_news_covers_h.html
Like I said before; if everyone is educated in a monolithic system, the entire population is uniform and easily programmed. It also makes it easy for a diseased philosophy to spread like the plague through a society.
The ease of programming a society is proportional to the square of the number of different philosophies in that society; so, if you have one philosophy in a country, the ease of programming its population is 1. 1f you have two concurrent philosophies in a society, it is 2 times harder than if the society was homogenous. In a society with hundreds of different philosophies and cultures, then it is 100s of times as hard to get a message across it cannot actually be done as we can see all across Europe in the recent…philosophical differences we have been experiencing.
Home schooling produces a population of people who are not brainwashed, who are better citizens, better thinkers and better human beings. That is why in the above study, 71% of former home schoolers participate in ongoing community activity, i.e. they are not selfish, self centered, greed oriented people. They are protected from brainwashing – immunized from the group think diseases that sweep through the masses like the black death.
The american system of education is a total success in that it takes people from different backgrounds and then turns them into americans. This is how the american government is able to get a single message across to everyone in that country where the population is sourced from every corner of the globe. That is how successive american governments have been able to get away with the sad things they have been doing for decades…but I digress.
You cannot argue with the facts. The numbers make it absolutely clear; home schooling is better for everyone. Better for the individual, better for the family, better for the country, for human culture and ultimately better for the entire world.
I wrote about the German Police enforcing Nazi Laws on home schoolers a month ago.
Now it seems that the rest of the world is catching up, and are rightfully horrified. My emphasis:
Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.
On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from “school phobia.”
Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.
Last March, a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12 was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union. The Soviets persecuted them because they were Baptists. An initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the German authorities. A court ruled that the Baptists showed “a stubborn contempt both for the state’s educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school.”
All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that “the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with.” The home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches, either. These maintain that home-schoolers “isolate themselves from the world” and that “freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school.” Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.
Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of “neo-Marxist activists,” has been threatened with prosecution for “Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung” (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities’ reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany, schools have become vehicles of indoctrination, where children are brought up to unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life. It is no coincidence that people who have escaped Soviet indoctrination discern what the government is doing in the schools and are sufficiently concerned to want to protect their children from it.
What is worrying is that most “free-born” Germans accept this assault on their freedom as normal and eye parents who opt out of the state system with suspicion.
The situation is hardly better at the European level. Last September, the European Court of Human Rights supported Hitler’s 1938 schooling bill. The Strasburg-based court, whose verdicts apply in the entire European Union, ruled that the right to education “by its very nature calls for regulation by the State.” It upheld the finding of German courts: “Schools represent society, and it is in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents’ right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience.”
While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.
Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are “customary international law” and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.[…]
Wow.
As you can see, there are many people who understand perfectly that the right to educate your child is fundamental to your freedom and to the health of ‘society’. A society full of people educated out of a single system is one where everyone is not compliant like sheep, one where a totalitarian government cannot easily take hold, because everyone thinks differently on a fundamental level.
This is directly analogous to the times in the UK where there were only two television channels being watched by millions of people. It was easy to get a single message across to everyone simultaneously, and to herd thought in this way. Now, with many different outlets for thought, it is much harder to steer opinion. The Muslims watch their news on The Islam Channel which has a distinctly different take on reality and what is and is not news.
By eliminating home schooling on a wide scale, you make it much harder for a group of outsiders to exist and to have any sort of voice, and as we know, in the age of the internets, it takes a very small number of outsiders to completely change everything.
German schools are used, overtly, to control and shape society keep everyone in thrall. That is why the Germans (and the populations of Belgium, Italy and other EU states for that matter) accept ID cards without question. That is why they have no understanding of human rights. I have been saying this since 1995, when I wrote a lightweight analysis of the German Constitution, which gives rights and then takes them away with the same breath.
Now these Nazis are breathing down our necks via the EU and the UN. We won’t have it.
The philosophies that are injected into the minds of children in the state sector are simply horrifying. Completely artificial concepts like ‘Hate Speech’ are taking hold in the previously (more) free thinking west because the teachers are drilling this drivel into the young, who take it on faith that indeed there is such a thing as ‘Hate Speech’.
The same goes for all of the other lies and molten lead doublethink that gets poured into the minds of young students – and it doesn’t just happen in the classroom. Schools that are requiring students to be fingerprinted to get books out of the library or to eat lunch are softening up the students to accept this method of criminal control, this violation, as normal and acceptable. The indoctrination runs across the most innocent of actions and activities, and we have the absolute right to say ‘no’ to it and to educate our children to our own standards and in our own philosophies, whatever they may be.
Someone Clever Said:
Mr. Porter,
Interesting piece on WTC 7. We’re all hoping it is only a bit of doctored footage.
If it is not, please do let us know what is about to happen in or around Iran. And be so kind as to give us more than 20 minutes notice.
A classic comment from The Editors Blog where a totally retarded liar and propagandist tries to wiggle out of the complete fiasco of the ‘documentary’ and subsequent ‘911’ lost footage scandal.
We and many others have said for years that BBQ is a totally controlled, propaganda pumping, palace of prostitutes, and now the whole world knows it.
Their imbecilic staff don’t even have the self preservation common sense to simply say, “we messed up”, which would be far more believable than the ‘daddy knows best’, ‘there there’ pat on the head tone that scumbag Richard Porter takes.
They all have this attitude, from Dimbumblebee down; snot nosed, supercilious and condescending. Listen to the slimy Guy Smith slither around as Alex Jones questions him about his odious piece of shit ‘documentary’. This is what your license fee goes for; the salaries of liars and bastards who spit in your face as they collude in dismantling this great country.
It is completely impossible that they have lost the original tapes. Broadcasting industry standards make it impossible. This is why:
“I’m an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would “misplace” any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day. Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels – constantly – in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something. They don’t just have one copy… they have several. It’s standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long.”
What they are claiming is simply impossible. It is a lie.
As can be seen from above, private agencies will also have copies of that days footage. The totally insulting line of Porters:
So if someone has got a recording of our output, I’d love to get hold of it.
Simply beggars belief. So we are supposed to supply you with the footage? IF someone has a recording of it? Surely he must know at least what that CNN guy knows about what happens to live footage of a big event – if he does not, he should be SACKED.
Note his tone, like the details don’t matter, as if he doesn’t really work there, and has no special knowledge of the workings of the BBQ…and he is one of the editors.
This really is astonishing, not that they are lying but that they are lying so badly.
and finally, a taste of what is spreading all over the internets:
I’m not a conspiracy nut. But this footage of your reports of WTC7 collapsing a full 20 minutes prior and repeatedly discussing it’s collapse is highly suspicious.
If you were talking about a building that never did collapse, well then you’d just look imcompitent. But as we all know, building 7 did, in a feat that suspended all laws of physics and logic, collapse spontaneously due to fires on floors 7 " 12.
You can’t possibly expect us to believe this. Let’s look at all the pieces here.
1. BBC reports for 20 solid minutes that WTC7 has collapsed when even in the live shot it stands as sturdy as the day it was built.
2. The idea that WTC7 would collapse spontaneously due to minor fires and minimal damage to the north face is laughable and an insult to intelligence. But it did, approximately 5 minutes AFTER BBC’s report….or at least 5 minutes after Jane Standley’s live shot was disconnected.
3. BBC loses all of it’s 9/11 footage so this cannot be reviewed or explained. My nephew still has all his VHS tapes from that day. He recorded almost every news station for 24 hours straight. He’s 19 now. He was 13 when it happened.
So, a 13 year old can be more responsible with his VHS tapes than one of the largest news organizations?4. The archive footage is mysteriously pulled off of youtube and google video repeatedly and without provocation or explanation.
5. BBC’s response is, ‘there is no conspiracy. it was a mistake.’
Grant us logical thinkers at least one thing. This is highly suspicious. The BBC needs to reveal what source they drew the conclusion that WTC7 had collapsed.
Oh, and the ez-out phrases like ‘it appears’ and ‘we’re receiving reports that..’ were not used throughout this footage.
Especially when the anchor starts talking about the (lack of) body count since there was so much time to evacuate since the collapse of WTC1-2.
The BBC needs to reveal what source they drew the conclusion that WTC7 had collapsed. I do not necessarily think the BBC is a witting participant in some 9/11 conspiracy, but it’s definitely looking like you were a pawn. Revealing who/where the BBC received the information that WTC7 had collapsed would be a good start in clearing your name.
Its over BBQ; you have LOST!
02 February 2007
The mysterious lights in the sky over Archway
DOZENS of mysterious lights were spotted hovering in the sky above Archway – spreading panic among residents below.
Unidentified flying orange objects stopped traffic and left residents staring skyward in disbelief at around 5.30pm on Thursday.
Islington police received four calls within a matter of minutes.
Witness Alix McAlister, 34, a market stall trader from Bredgar Road, Archway, said: “I just picked up my son from nursery in Bredgar Road. I had just come out of the door when I noticed what was going on in the sky.
“There were a group of them – 10 to 15 of them moving together. My first impression was that they reminded me of a squadron of aeroplanes in formation. But they didn’t have a proper formation and they were all moving at the same speed.
“I thought for a while that something was happening in the centre of London. Bombs and planes crossed my mind. But I realised very quickly that they didn’t look like any aircraft I’d seen before.
“They were coming from the north and moving south. And then they kind of stopped and they were hovering. There was no sound. They seemed to fade away and I saw more coming and then they stopped. It lasted about 10 minutes.”
Islington police informed Contact International UFO Research about the sightings. Soon after another witness contacted the Oxford-based organisation, which is devoted to solving the mystery of UFOs, and described what he saw.
A spokesman for Contact International said: “He told me he was picking his daughter up from school and he saw many people looking up in the air. Traffic had stopped and people were staring.
“He said he saw between 12 and 15 orange lights travelling across the sky. Then they would stop and then they went upwards.
[…]
hmmmmmm!
don’t go out without your binocs and cameras for the next few months chaps and chapettes!
Visa Denied: How Anti-Arab Visa Policies Destroy US Exports, Jobs and Higher Education In the aftermath of 9/11 US visa processing in the Arab world has ground to a halt. US consulates formerly striving to outsource key visa processes to travel agencies before the terror attacks are now paralyzed and fearful. Under funded and insufficient security review processes leave Arab executives, prospective students, and vacation travelers in limbo for years or looking for alternative destinations. Shabby treatment of those who successfully run the visa gauntlet leaves many vowing never to return to the US. How much has it cost? The damage assessment is now in:
- Total US manufacturing jobs sustained by Arab market demand reached 215,000 in the year 2005, but could have been 420,000 with more effective and non-discriminatory US visa policies.
- Arab business and tourist travelers remained at half their 2001 levels, creating five year travel related service losses of $1.775 billion and 4,126 potential service jobs.
- In 2005
Arab student enrollment in the US higher education system reached only 66% of the 2001 level. The US higher education system lost $1.989 billion in revenue and 9,000 education and support service jobs.The 200 page Visa Denied report quantifies the damage done to US exporters, travel related service industries and the higher education system. Visa Denied recommends steps to correct and realign a severely degraded system to the true opportunity cost of flawed and sometimes discriminatory policies. Visa Denied traces a path from freewheeling days of outsourced national security of the State Department “Visa Express” system exploited by 9/11 hijackers toward the secure, efficient, and color blind visa policy American stakeholders expect and deserve.
Table of Contents and Free Chapters
(All 11.3 MB PDF)1.0 Executive Summary (.1 MB PDF)
2.0 Free Travel and Free Trade: The US National Interest (1.4 MB PDF)
3.0 The Trade Consequences of US Visa Barriers (6.4 MB PDF)
Affected Industries
Key US State Stakeholders
4.0 Turning Away the World’s Highest-Spending Tourists (.4 MB PDF)5.0 Cutting America’s Link to Tomorrow’s Leaders (1.3 MB PDF)
Fixing the Fulbright
6.0 Country-Level Damage Assessment
United Arab Emirates
The Dubai Ports World Debacle
Politics vs. National Security Concerns
DPW Analysis and Lessons Learned
Saudi Arabia
2005: A Year of Missed Opportunities
Egypt
Kuwait
Algeria
Qatar
Iraq 7.0 Conclusions: Restoring Visitors and Trade
Appendix – Opportunity Cost Methodology
Travel and Tourism
Arab Students
Arab Market Imports from the US
[…]
And there you have it.
What this report had better say, is that this 100,000,000,000 dollars is just the beginning and that all of that money was spent in other countries. This money is not sitting in the pockets of people waiting to spend it on america and its products and services, it is GONE, and will continue to evaporate, and the effects of this will last generations; more than the number of generations that The Lord Of Darkness predicts the bogus war on turrr is set to last.
What this article also doesn’t go into is the effect of the loss of influence on the world caused by people never getting to see the inside of the USA, and of course, the rise in influence of other countries as students come back thinking like Germans, Russians, Chinese etc etc.
It’s a new category don’t cha know!
…and that link should point to one of the articles predicting people abandoning the good ‘ol usa as a place to visit, and of course, my google fu is fucked up today and i cant find one….bleh!
Compulsory ID cards are nothing new in the UK. They were issued to all British civilians during World War II. That is until one ordinary man said no.
Clarence Willcock, a 54-year-old dry cleaner from suburban north London, must rank as one of the unlikeliest Davids ever to take on a Goliath.
Mr Willcock was stopped on December 7 1950 while driving his car along Ballard’s Lane by uniformed police constable Harold Muckle, who demanded to see the motorist’s identity card.
Mr Willcock refused. Pc Muckle told him to produce the compulsory card at the local station with 48 hours. “I will not produce it at any police station,” Mr Willcock replied.
With this act of defiance, Mr Willcock brought crashing down a giant bureaucracy which had, since the outbreak of World War II in 1939, forced an identity card on every civilian in the UK – man, woman and child.
When Willcock v Muckle eventually reached the High Court in 1951, Lord Chief Justice Goddard said the continuation of the wartime ID card scheme was an “annoyance” to much of the public and “tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers”. […]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3129302.stm
[…]
A BLOGDIAL post from April 24th 2004
And I add today, from the same article:
“Let us have the credit for ‘setting the people free’,” wrote one Treasury minister in 1952, though he was really gleefully looking forward to “the consequential staff economies”.
The demise of the system was forecast while the fight against Hitler was still fierce. In October 1944, Registrar General Sir Earnest Holderness said that he did “not believe that public opinion will stand for the retention of [national registration] in its present form”.
Sir Ernest reasoned that once law-abiding citizens no longer needed to provide details of their address to ensure their ration allowances, they would not bother to keep their ID cards up to date merely because the government asked them to.
And what, my dear friends, is the difference between the British of 1952 and the British of 2006? Just what is it that they have been putting in the water that has turned a population of real people into sheeple?
How did they do it?
How much lower can they all sink before they are literally turned into cattle?
Everything says “this should not be happening” but it is, and…I can’t wake up!