TransferWise may or not be the next big thing, but as far as I can see their appeal is limited both in terms of who needs it, can use it, and the time it will take for them to be completely outflanked by superior services.

The VentureBeat press release:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/18/transferwise-undercuts-the-banks-with-crowdsourced-currency-exchange/

says “Banking is broken”; this is true, but what is needed to replace it is not ‘the AOL of banking transfers’; what is required is the open Internet of banking transfers, and that means Bitcoin.

Back before the internet permeated every home, AOL was the main way millions got online and used email. It was the consumer method of getting online. Anyone who knew anything about how the net really worked understood that AOL was garbage, and not the true internet. Similarly, anyone who had a friend that needed to get their contacts list out of AOL Messenger knew what a jail and walled garden it was. TransferWise is the AOL of money transfers. and I predict that it will end up just like AOL, even if it becomes massively popular for a short time.

TransferWise suffers from several problems. First, it is under complete control of the State. Look at its boast of full integration with the UK regulatory bodies. This means that all transactions are subject to complete surveillance and control.  Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Beresford keeps referring to the ever elusive, imaginary ‘we’ in his piece, which is a typical Grauniad screed against liberty and the spirit of man.

There is no ‘we’. Man is an individual, he is not the same as a cell in algae, or a telepathic race of aliens who share consciousness. Beresford and his ilk have no right to co-opt people into his sick collective by force. His position is nothing less than advocating slavery.

The so called overclass is able to be an overclass because people Beresford cannot think. They cannot use reason to find the true nature of anything outside themselves, and even of themselves. They cannot understand economics, which includes the true nature of money. If they could, the superclass would not cease to exist, but instead, would be proportionally and symbiotically buffered by the billions of consumers all asserting their natural rights equally.

Ideas like this, to the economic illiterates and the people who do not know what rights are, are simply incomprehensible. They do not have the knowledge or language to understand these ideas, and make no mistake, this lack of comprehension has been deliberately nurtured by government schools. This brainwashing is used to keep people in their place; what is so appalling is that the truth of how everything really works is there and has always been there for the taking in libraries and now on the internet at near zero cost. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a great deal of deeply seated confusion about corporations, their origins and true purpose. People who are intelligent and well read in the field of the philosophy of liberty sometimes fall short when it comes to understanding what a corporation is, why people use them and what the true nature of them are. On the one hand, they are for voluntary association, and yet on the other, they rail against corporations. This is illogical.

As it is with anything complex, clear thinking is needed when you try to think about corporations. Lets begin by taking apart the myth that they exist as creatures of the State.

There is no reason that in a free society without a State that a group of people cannot band together to work on a project under rules that they select for themselves. They pool their risk, and (for example) decide that they do not want to put all their capital on the line should something go wrong and face a court, however founded, deciding that they are liable. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at this:

http://youtu.be/McNo62gpw6M

Stephan is a great thinker, but it seems that what he cannot do is empathise with other people.

While he is sipping coffee in his house in Canada, Hillary Clinton and Obama are at this moment concocting another lie / pretext to unleash mass murder on people, namely Iran:

http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/12/the_very_scary_iranian_terror_plot/singleton/

Canada, which he funds with his taxes by his own admission, will no doubt be a part of this criminal act.

Should Ron Paul become president before they are able to launch this mass murder, he will be able to prevent it.

For this reason alone, Ron Paul should be supported. Its all very well sitting in the safety of your own home in the empire, and paying taxes to support it, complaining that Ron Paul doesn’t want to dismantle the state, while your money is being used to kill Iranian children. Read the rest of this entry »

The responses to Bitcoin from different camps that encounter it have been fascinating to read. Bitcoin, like the Internet, is a mirror reflecting the philosophy of the person who is talking about it.

Libertarians see it as a way out.
Statists see it as a way of receiving the blessings of the state.

and so on…

One of the many interesting sets of thoughts swirling around Bitcoin is the idea that somehow, the State must be involved in Bitcoin, and there are people out there who are keen to try and shoehorn any legislation or rule that is out there to fit the Bitcoin case.

Take a look at this:

FinCEN Brings KYC Requirements To Bitcoin?

The U.S. Department of the Treasury (“FinCEN”) issued a Final Rule making non-bank providers of pre-paid financial instruments subject to comprehensive Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) regulations similar to depository institutions.

Why this particular rule, and not the first amendment of the constitution? Cryptography, it has been argued, correctly, is a form of speech that falls under the first amendment protections guaranteeing your right to write whatever you want.

Bitcoin is made up of cryptographic signatures that can be printed out as text. This means that they are clearly protected speech and not financial instruments.

Why should FinCEN have anything to do with Bitcoin at all? If FinCEN applies to Bitcoin, should it also not apply to Baseball cards?

Baseball cards or comics or YuGiOh cards could be used as money because someone somewhere values them.

They could be stored in a vault and then certificates issues against them that could be traded automatically at online exchanges.

Does that mean that these certificates are money? Does that mean that FinCEN rules should apply to them?

Of course it doesn’t. Applying FinCEN rules to Bitcoin, quite apart from the immorality of these regulations, is improper and ridiculous.

The regulations affecting “stored value” now use the term “prepaid access” which is more broad and technology-neutral. Though FinCEN has not formally asserted that Bitcoin would fall under prepaid access regulations, earlier contact with the agency referred to bitcoins as a form of stored-value. If correct, then Bitcoin sales to U.S. customers would likely be a regulated activity per this Final Rule.

The new regulations become effective on September 27, 2011, 60 days after its July 29, 2011 date of publication in the Federal Register.

This is absurd. Who made contact with FinCEN, and where is the written record of this contact? Who did the contactor represent, and whoever she was, she did not represent ‘Bitcoin’ or any of its users, but was acting on her own. The details of that contact are something that would be interesting to read.

To comply with the Final Rule, providers of prepaid access must register with FinCEN. Because bitcoins are decentralized, it is uncertain who a provider would be. Might every exchanger be considered a provider, for instance?

This is all springing from a false assumption, that Bitcoin is a store of value that FinCEN has jurisdiction over. It is not.

Also under the Final Rule, sellers of prepaid access must collect personal information from customers, maintain transaction records, file suspicious activity reports and comply with other requirements of money service businesses (MSB). Last month FinCEN issued a ruling that was intended to clarify the definition of an MSB and includes the possibility that even businesses outside the U.S. conducting money transfer over the Internet could still be classified as U.S. MSBs. Additionally, the definition no longer requires that an MSB be a business — any individual who receives funds in exchange for a stored value might be considered an MSB.

This is of course, absolutely absurd. Even if you concede that FinCEN has jurisdiction over U.S. companies and persons that deal in Bitcoin, to assert that people and companies outside the USA would need to register with FinCEN betrays a complete lack of understanding of the concept of jurisdiction.

Its like those very sad webmasters in the UK who put up DMCA takedown notification pages on their sites. The DMCA does not apply anywhere in the world other than in the United States of America, and no webmaster, publisher, company or person is required to obey its strictures who is not based in or who does not have servers in the USA.

If FinCEN actually tries to attack Bitcoin, and then tried to demand that entities outside the USA register with it, they should be met with this type of response.

Though the ruling has exemptions to not impact the typical prepaid debit card found at grocery stores, for example, the exemptions would likely not apply to Bitcoin. These exemptions give a pass to providers and sellers when the following conditions are met:

• The funds cannot be transmitted internationally.
• Funds cannot be transferred from one user to another.
• No additional funds can be loaded except from a depository source (e.g., from a bank).

There is no way to limit where bitcoins can be spent and the value is easily transferred from one person to another so Bitcoin will not likely be considered exempt from the AML regulations.

Bitcoin, being a form of speech, should not be regulated by anyone. In the same way that you have protections against fraud (someone misrepresenting some reproduction Baseball cards to you as genuine, or someone stealing your YuGiOh cards) you have those same protections with Bitcoin. If someone defrauds you or breaches a contract they have with you, take them to court or arbitration.

The state is not needed to control Bitcoin, police it, regulate it or have anything whatsoever to do with it. It has, like the internet, grown in popularity all by itself, will grow in utility just like the internet has by virtue of people adopting it and using it, and any interference in it is illegitimate on its face.

Following these regulations will be a serious burden to sellers. For instance, compliance requirements as specified in an article by Perkins Coie LLP include:

Identifying information includes the customer’s name, date of birth, address and identification number. Sellers must retain this information for five years from the date of sale.

The records must be easily accessible and retrievable upon request from FinCEN, law enforcement or judicial order.

The bigger impact of following AML may not necessarily be the cost of compliance but instead will be the likely result — to effectively de-anonymize Bitcoin.

Following these regulations is unthinkable. Even if you accepted that these regulations were in some mysterious way beneficial, it would not and could not stop people from trading Bitcoins client to client, without identifying themselves to a parasitic third party.

When Bitcoin usage reaches critical mass, there will be trillions of transactions happening on a daily basis. The people who serve as enter and exit points for it would be recording meaningless details that would serve no use whatsoever after the first purchase of Bitcoins.

Bitcoin is not anonymous, despite what people think. There are services out there however, that can make it completely anonymous, and these will be improved and will multiply in number as the precise nature and level of anonymity in bitcoin becomes well understood by everyone. In the same way that The Anonymizer, Hide My Ass and the many proxy services that have come into being to cater for those who want anonymity, its a safe bet that the same entrepreneurs will apply their knowledge to the problem of making Bitcoin completely untraceable.

As for the cost of compliance, only US companies will be forced to pass the expense of these ridiculous regulations on to their customers. It will mean that customers, who see high prices due to regulation as damage and route around it, will choose exchanges outside the USA, simply because it is cheaper. This will create another tier of middle man in America; businesses that will take your money and then interface with foreign exchanges for you, rather like the Dorian Grey services we have written about.

Ironically, these new regulations may drive even faster Bitcoin adoption. These restrictions may cause many retailers to discontinue offering the prepaid cards that can be used at ATMs internationally. Since global redemption of stored value is a service that is legal to offer, is in huge demand and is something that Bitcoin does well — using digital currency might become the more popular alternative.

Unintended consequences!

And of course, as Bitcoin passes critical mass, it will become absolutely impossible to clamp down on the international flow of ‘money’, since Bitcoin is a peer to peer system.

When the global economy becomes dependent on Bitcoin, as it does now on SSL, no politician will dare raise a finger to control (damage) it, just as it is now completely unthinkable to regulate the cryptography behind SSL, as the French tried to do and which Dominic Strauss-Khan put pay to.

A more immediate consequence will likely be the employment of lawyers to specifically consider how this Final Rule affects Bitcoin.

http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/8412471372/fincen-prepaid-access-final-rule

Maybe so. Certainly there are people out there who are desperate to interface with the State when it comes to Bitcoin.

One way or another, the State is not going to control Bitcoin. Either because it is not in their financial interest to do so because it is a world-wide phenomenon, or because they cannot possibly stop the hundreds of millions of people who are going to be using it.

There are 2,095,006,005 people on the internet. That is 30.2% of all the people on earth and an increase of 480.4% in ten years.

If only ten percent of all people use Bitcoin. No. Lets say five percent. That is 104,750,300 future users of Bitcoin. There is no reason why this number cannot not be achieved, and of course we are working only with today’s assumptions; there is no knowing what new innovations related to the block chain that are around the corner. Or innovations in the shape of client that people will be using. Imagine new versions of Google Chrome or Firefox that are not only browsers, but Bitcoin clients.

Every browser, doubles as a Bitcoin client.

Think about that for a moment. An HTML5 Bitcoin client, with an interface designed by Google or Mozilla. Easy to use and absolutely everywhere; on every computer in the world, by default.

One thing is for sure, there is no going back.

People have complained that ‘the next Google’ could not come out of Britain, because Britain is toxic to business.

If Bitcoin is going to be the biggest revolution since the internet itself, and the British establishment are desperate to entice companies to set up here and take root, then any regulation on Bitcoin (or for that matter, Internet Business which is serious business) is, to put it lightly, not a good idea. In fact, the smart thing to do would be to draw an arbitrary area on the map in London, and declare that area an Internet Free Trade Zone, where there are no restrictions, taxes or regulations, for a period of 150 years.

This would instantly attract every Internet business on the planet to the UK. There would be an unprecedented inflow of brains and money into London, making it the ‘Internet Capital of the World’.

Or, you could regulate Bitcoin, and be an also-ran gaggle of losers, while Hong Kong, Dubai and other jurisdictions suck up all the brains, money, skills and entrepreneurs.

To sum up, Bitcoin is to money as PDFs are to hardback books. Bitcoins are speech, not financial instruments. The State has no business interfering in Bitcoin in any way, and US regulations and laws do not apply to people and companies outside of the continental USA.

Oh dear me.

It looks like the French are facing the New Labour disease of super Orwellian ID Cards to supplant their existing ID Card system.

Did you know that you cannot buy a SIM card in France without presenting State ID? Appalling!

It seems to me that they need to have a little Stonor Saunders injected into their ‘debate’, and Google Translate is more than happy to oblige:

+++++++

Cela a été envoyé à moi.

Ceci a été écrit à l’origine par STONOR SAUNDERS Frances.

Frances Saunders est l’ancien rédacteur en chef des arts du New Statesman, auteur de La Guerre froide culturelle, Diabolical Anglais et Le Diable Courtier et a été attribué William la Royal Historical Society de Gladstone Prix?commémoratif. Elle vit à Londres. Il vaut bien lire et si vous souhaitez, s’il vous plaît le transmettre à autant de personnes que vous le pouvez.

«Vous avez entendu ce que la législation créant cartes d’identité obligatoires franchi une étape cruciale dans la Chambre des communes. Vous pouvez penser que ID cartes ne sont pas de quoi s’inquiéter, puisque nous avons déjà de photos d’identité pour nos passeports et permis de conduire et une carte d’identité ne sera pas différente de que. Qu’est-ce que vous n’avez pas été dit est la pleine portée de cette identité proposée Carte, et ce qu’il signifie pour vous personnellement.

La carte d’identité proposée sera différente de n’importe quelle carte que vous tenez. Il sera être connecté à une base de données appelée le RIN, (National Identity Register), où toutes vos données personnelles seront stockées. Il s’agira notamment de numéro unique qui sera émis pour vous, vos empreintes digitales, un scan de la arrière de votre œil, et votre photo. Votre nom, adresse et date de la naissance sera évidemment aussi y être stockées.

Il y aura des espaces sur cette base de données pour votre religion, le statut de résidence, et de nombreux autres faits privés et personnels à votre sujet. Il est illimité espace pour tous les autres détails de votre vie sur la base de données NIR, qui peut être étendu par le gouvernement avec ou sans d’autres actes de Parlement.

En soi, vous pourriez penser que ce registre est inoffensif, mais vous seriez tort de venir à cette conclusion. Cette nouvelle carte sera utilisée pour vérifier votre identité contre votre entrée dans le registre en temps réel, chaque fois que vous le présenter à «prouver qui vous êtes».

Tout lieu que vend de l’alcool ou des cigarettes, chaque bureau de poste, tous les pharmacie, et chaque banque aura un terminal de carte NIR, (tout comme les lecteurs Chip and Pin qui sont partout maintenant) dans lequel votre carte peut être “glissée” pour vérifier votre identité. Chaque fois que cela arrive, un record est faite à la PIR de l’heure et le lieu que la carte a été présentée. Cela signifie par exemple, qu’il y aura un dossier du gouvernement de chaque fois que vous retirez plus de £ 99 à votre succursale de NatWest, qui maintenant ID demande pour ces transactions. Chaque fois que vous avez à prouver que vous sont plus de 18 ans, votre carte sera glissée, et un enregistrement fait à la PIR. Restaurants et licences hors exigeront que votre carte est glissée de telle sorte que chaque reçu indique qu’ils vendaient de l’alcool à quelqu’un de plus de 18, et que cela a été prouvé par l’accès au NIR, les indemnisant à partir
poursuites.

Les entreprises privées vont avoir accès à la base de données NIR. Si vous voulez postuler pour un emploi, vous devrez présenter votre carte d’un coup. Si vous voulez demander une carte Oyster à Londres Underground, ou un la fidélité des supermarchés carte ou un permis de conduire, vous devrez présenter votre Carte d’identité pour un coup. Va de même pour obtenir une ligne téléphonique ou une téléphone mobile ou d’un compte Internet.

Oyster, DVLA, BT, et de Nectar (par exemple) fonctionnent tous de bases de données très détaillée de leurs propres. Ils seront autorisés à accéder au NIR, comme tous les autres entreprise sera. Cela signifie que chacune de ces entités seront en mesure de enregistrer votre numéro unique dans leur base de données, et placer tous vos déplacements, enregistrements téléphoniques, des activités de conduite et les habitudes d’achat détaillée sous votre numéro unique de NIR. Ces bases de données, qui peut facilement s’adapter sur un stockage appareil de la taille de votre main, seront vendus aux tiers légalement ou illégalement. Il sera alors possible pour une entité non-gouvernementales pour créer une dossier détaillé de toutes vos activités. Certes, le gouvernement aura l’accès à tous les clandestins d’entre eux, ce qui signifie qu’ils auront une complète record de tous vos mouvements, de combien et quand vous vous retirez de votre compte bancaire pour les médicaments que vous prenez, jusqu’au niveau de quelle sorte de pain que vous mangez – tous accessibles via un numéro unique dans une base de données centrale.

C’est tout à fait un bond significatif à partir d’une carte d’identité simple qui montre votre nom et le visage.

La plupart des gens ne savent pas que c’est le vrai caractère et la portée des proposé de carte d’identité. Chaque fois que les détails de comment il fonctionnera sont expliquées pour eux, ils changer rapidement d’être ambivalente envers elle.

Le gouvernement va vous obliger à entrer vos coordonnées dans le NIR et de réaliser cette carte. Si vous et vos enfants veulent obtenir ou renouveler votre passeport, vous serez obligé de prendre vos empreintes digitales et vos yeux scannés pour le RIN, et une carte d’identité sera émis pour vous si vous voulez un ou pas. Si vous refusez de prendre ses empreintes digitales et oculaires numérisées, vous ne serez pas en mesure d’obtenir un passeport. Votre carte d’identité sera, juste comme votre passeport, ne pas être votre propriété. Le ministre de l’Intérieur aura le droit de révoquer ou de suspendre votre identité à tout moment, ce qui signifie que vous ne pas être en mesure de retirer de l’argent sur votre compte bancaire, par exemple, ou faire tout ce qui vous oblige à présenter votre carte d’identité émise par le gouvernement.

Les arguments qui ont été mis transmise en faveur des cartes d’identité peuvent être facilement réfutée. Cartes d’identité NE SERA PAS arrêter les terroristes; chaque Espagnol a une carte d’identité obligatoire, de même que les Bombers de Madrid, et probablement la plupart des les criminels 9 / 11. Les cartes d’identité ne sera pas «d’éliminer la fraude aux prestations», qui en comparaison, est faible par rapport au coût astronomique de cette proposition, qui seront évalués en milliards selon l’Ecole LSE (Londres des Economics). Ce schéma existe uniquement pour exercer une surveillance totale et contrôle sur le citoyen britannique ordinaire libre, et ce sera remplir les poches des les entreprises qui créeront des systèmes informatiques au détriment de la votre liberté, d’intimité et de l’argent.

Si vous ne saviez pas toute la portée du système de carte d’identité proposée avant et vous sont instables comme je suis à ce que cela signifie vraiment pour vous, à cette pays et son mode de vie, je vous exhorte à l’email ou une photocopie cela et lui donner à vos amis et collègues et tout le monde pense que vous devez savoir et qui se soucie. Le projet de loi a procédé à ce stade en raison de l’absence de renseignements exacts et complets sur cette proposition soient rendues publiques. Ensemble et main dans la main, nous pouvons informer la nation toute entière, si tous ceux qui reçoit ce qu’elle transmet. ”

Ce message n’a rien à voir avec la politique – il est à faire avec notre liberté. Mais ce sont les politiciens qui dans l’ignorance vont voter pour la carte d’identité et donc nous rapprocher de l’Etat de police qui semble être le but de notre actuelle Gouvernement. S’il vous plaît transmettre ce message – et d’utiliser votre prochain vote Élection générale pour se débarrasser des gens qui veulent détruire notre chéri démocratie.

Envoyer le traducteur de cet article, un Bitcoin à cette adresse: 14ScQgQRi2U5o6cdAJNhgyzY6w5UtwmX16

Thanks to a lurder (yes, ‘lurder’) who knows just what buttons to push to cause a BLOGDIAL post to emerge, we have this amazing piece of violent assertion from http://www.theartistscharter.org/

Lets pull it to bits.

We the undersigned, writers, artists and musicians, along with our fans and those millions of people worldwide who work in or are otherwise supported by the creative industries say as follows:-

We have the right to earn a living from our work.

True.

We reiterate that basic human right to work enshrined in Article 23 (1) of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and by virtue of Article 23(3) of that declaration to ‘just and favourable remuneration’ for our artistic endeavours.

False. Rights do not come from the UN. You have no ‘right’ to remuneration; you own your own body, and no one has the right to control you or force you to work under terms that are not agreeable to you. Those are the only rights you have with respect to your labor. There is no such thing as ‘just and favourable remuneration’; there is only what you will agree to work for and what you will not agree to work for. What that amount is for any particular task is up to you and the person who is hiring you to decide through negotiation.

We seek to make technology a friend and not an enemy of our creativity.

I doubt it.

We ask to be allowed to make a living, whether through performing, writing or recording music, derived from the power of our ideas and the commercial use of our talents.

You have a right to do what you want, on any stage or any medium. You already have this right, and should not ask to be ‘allowed’ to ply your trade.

We say it is a fact that the protection of our creative output depends substantially on copyright law, and we urgently call on all governments to assist us in the legal protection of our collective artistic output from piracy and other unauthorised infringement.

This is a lie.

It is absolutely not a fact that the protection of creative output depends substantially on copyright law. This is a myth, one that has been dispelled by by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine in Against Intellectual Monopoly and others.

When these people ask for all governments to ‘assist’ them, they are actually saying that they want the state to violently put grandmothers in gaol (for example) for copying from objects that they own.

They are asking for the State to do violence for them. This is wrong in every way that something can be wrong.

There is no such thing as ‘collective artistic output’. You own the physical objects that you produce. Once you release them, and someone else buys them or obtains them legitimately, you have no right to tell them what they may or may not do with their property. That means that you have no right to tell someone that they cannot make a copy of a record for someone else, or that they may not re-sell a book they have bought, or that they may not make copies of their own wedding photos or do anything of any kind with something that they legitimately own.

In sum, you have no right to suppress the rights of others by violence because you want to make money.

It is self-evident that any commercial enterprise requires revenue flows to not only survive, but thrive, innovate and take calculated risks.

True.

We say that the internet service provider industry must accept its share of responsibility for the rampant abuse of copyright online. Easy unauthorised access to our material goes unchecked every day across the world and infringers do not seek our consent when sharing our works.

False. Internet Service Providers provide access to the internet. It is not their responsibility to police their users, any more than it is the business of the operators of telephone services to spy on their users on behalf of a malignant and violent group.

ISPs are not part of some imaginary Socialist collective, with responsibility to everyone everywhere. They are private businesses with responsibility to their shareholders only.

Our creative industries are facing unsustainable revenue losses due to weak or unenforced copyright laws. This means one thing and one thing only: millions of jobs lost and young talent ignored.

There are no ‘our creative industries’. The record companies are dying because the world has changed thanks to computers and networks. This is a good thing that will benefit everyone, including the people who make music, write books and do other creative things that can be digitized.

You sound just like the fear-mongers who said that the VCR would, “kill the film industry“, or the clowns who said that, “home taping was killing music“, or or that phonograph records would kill off sheet music sales or that sheet music would kill live performance. All of those were lies, and what you are saying now is also not true. There is a long history of artists and ‘music industry’ people getting it totally wrong when it comes to technology, and this rather ill informed declaration is just another example.

Creative people (the ones who are really creative, and not just lazy, ignorant, unintelligent, computer illiterate luddites) will find a way to adapt to the new reality and thrive off of it, just as previous generations did with the advent of recorded music, VCRs, home copying and every other innovation that helped people spread ideas and wealth.

You people just don’t get it.

While our industry has collapsed to annual revenues of less than US$20 billion, the ISP industry has more than doubled its revenues in the last five years to US$250 billion — due in large part to infringement of our artistic works.

This is a lie. The ISP industry has grown because more people need access to the internet, no matter what is on it. As for the collapse in revenues, even if it is true (which it often is not) the opportunity the internet presents to creative people is without precedent; all that is needed is for you to go out and harness it. You do not need anyone’s permission, all you need is some software and… creativity.

We demand our indisputable right to copyright protection be no longer ignored. ‘Free’ should not come at such a terrible cost.

Copyright is not indisputable, and it is not a right. Copyright it is very disputable, and is in fact, entirely illegitimate. No matter how loud you shout, your buggy whip business model is dead and dying. New people are supplanting you, and while you waste your time trying to prop up the zombie corpse of the old business model they are getting on with the task of inventing the new ways of making money from music, that you will inevitably have to accept.

Stand with us to ensure the creative industries survive.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/artistscharter/

Standing with you means standing up for and supporting violence and immorality. No thanks!

Here it is, again, the book that you must read to understand the true nature of the State, its laws and the violent truth behind them. If you cannot read, there is always a nice video for you to digest.

In today’s Telegraph, we read, with not too much surprise, that The Coalition is quietly bringing in ID Cards for all, only this time, it will be ID Cards 2.0 and not Labour’s centralised NIR powered ID Cards 1.

All of the problems of the old ID Card remain however, and some new ones are introduced, which I will point out right now.

Coalition builds new national identity system

The Coalition has quietly begun work on a new national identity system, less than a year after it scrapped Labour’s derided ID cards.

Didn’t take long did it? And this latest attempt had to happen at some point, since HMG refused to rule out ID Cards for Foreigners, meaning that eventually everyone in the UK would have to be in the system because targeting only foreign looking people is racist and irrational, as we said before.

A prototype of the new system is due to be in place as soon as October this year. It will aim to reliably identify users of government websites, as part of plans to deliver more public services via the web.

This is a lie. The new system is a prototype of ID Cards for everyone. It is not just for accessing government ‘services’. ID Cards always lead to feature creep whenever they are widely deployed, for a variety of reasons; for example, so that people who sell alcohol, cigarettes, aspirin and scissors, can prove that they did a proper ID check before making the sale, the information being stored on their database, indemnifying them from prosecution. This is what it would look like:

the devil really is in the details:

This time, the receipt will not say NIR but will say ‘assured identity’. You will not be able to buy anything on the list of ‘verify before buy’ items without either showing your VISA or paying by VISA.

George Osborne believes the shift online will cut Whitehall administration costs and so help soften the blow of spending cuts over the next few years.

Several private companies that already hold personal data, including credit card providers, will be involved in the system.

There is the big difference, and the new moral problem. Previously the liars of New Labour claimed that ID Cards mandated by the state were OK because, “private companies already have much of this data”. This is a classic fallacious argument of course, and now the coalition is re-imagining it to justify ID Cards 2.0.

If you volunteer to interact with a company so that they can provide you with a service, that is one thing (and its a good thing) but when companies join with government where you will be compelled to use their services, that is fascism.

The government compels you to pay for and use it ‘services’; they are not voluntary. By partnering with VISA and other companies to identify you, and mandating that you use VISA to access their systems, they are forcing you to use the services of a company.

This is completely immoral and unjustifiable.

If government cannot deliver services on budget, then they should not be offering those services. Savings of money are not a sufficient excuse to introduce ID Cards.

Such firms have already verified their customers’ identities, so privacy campaigners hope government will not itself collect personal data, in contrast to the National Identity Register that was to be the basis of ID cards.

This is straight out of a PR pack I imagine. The laws of the universe, having not changed since the death of Labour’s ID Card, mean that when you identify yourself to the state in this new system, you will be issued a unique number by them, or by the issuer of the card.

That number will travel with you from the moment you sign up till the day you die. That number will act as a primary database key to track all of your purchases, interactions, money transfers and every time you show the card.

It is exactly the same problem that the old ID Card system had, except this time, the financial and technical burden of running the system is being outsourced to VISA, Nectar and the other crony capitalist, fascist companies that are selling their customer databases to the state.

You will have no opt out in this. Even if VISA require that you consent to having your card used to identify you at a government portal, and they are not compelling you to use a VISA ID Card 2.0 service, the fact of the matter is that you will be compelled to interact with them because the state will mandate, backed with violence, that you identify yourself using the new system.

Visa is known to be involved in the plans and is conducting trials that would allow its customers to log in to government websites using credit card details.

This is yet another step in the transition to a completely corporate state, where companies overtly are in charge of the government at every level.

“Currently customers have to enter multiple login details and passwords to access different public services, sometimes on the same website,” said Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the cross-government plan.

“This involves significant duplication, is expensive to operate and is highly inconvenient for users.”

If that is the only problem, then switch to Open ID; one login for all your websites. Or stop using the web to deliver ‘services’. These justifications are paper thin transparent nonsense.

He also claimed the new scheme, dubbed “identity assurance”, would also make it more difficult for fraudsters to dupe the benefits and tax systems.

This is a lie. If it is not a lie, then he needs to say precisely why this is so. Credit card fraud is rampant, and using credit cards to interface with the state will allow everyone with a fraudulent or duplicated credit card to masquerade as someone else when identifying themselves to a government portal.

Look no further than the recent SONY breach where the credit card details, dates of birth, names and addresses of SEVENTY MILLION people were copied.

The population of Britain is 61,838,154 – 2009 That means that a number of people, larger than the population of Britain had their credit card details copied.

It means that if such a thing happened in the UK, every single person who identifies themselves to the state with their VISA could be impersonated with ease. This means more benefit fraud, GUARANTEED.

The government has informed privacy campaigners such as the pressure group NO2ID about the plans, in an attempt to avoid the civil liberties outcry that ultimately destroyed ID cards.

This preemptive strike will not work. The genie is out of the bottle about the dangers of ID Cards.

But Guy Herbert, NO2ID’s general secretary warned that “the devil will be in the details and especially the legal details” of the new scheme. He said the Cabinet Office had not yet offered details despite its tight schedule.

“It’s not a bad thing in itself to check that the person you are talking to is the person you want to talk to,” Mr Herbert said.

“But whatever the good intentions at the outset, the fear will always be that the bureaucratic imperative to collect and share more data about the public will take over.”

And that’s not the half of it. I’m sure that he said much more that was not quoted in this piece.

Identity assurance will be implemented from August next year as part of major government initiatives such as forthcoming radical reforms to the benefits system and improvements to online tax assessments.

They will use your credit card transaction history to ensure that you are not spending more than you should be according to your tax return. This is a part of the move to ‘real time taxation’ that was quietly mooted recently. It doesn’t get any more sinister than this.

It will then gradually be extended so users will be able to use the same login for all public services online.

Telegraph

Once again, there is no need to use credit cards to do this; Open ID will suffice if this is the real problem, which of course, it is not.

Personally, I think that most credit card holders, after having been educated about online fraud for years, and instilling in themselves a healthy paranoia about putting their card details into a form online, will understand exactly what it means to identify yourself with your VISA or MasterCard. They will understand immediately that this is a threat, because credit cards are money and people guard their money more jealously than they guard their privacy.

Of course, this has some other side effects.

What about the people who do not have credit cards? Either they will be excluded from receiving government services to which they are entitled (and they are the ones who use them the most), or VISA will be made to issue everyone with a VISA card hastening the death of cash, that other project hight on the agenda of the State.

It is a win-win deal for both VISA and the state:

• The State gets an ID Card system they do not have to manage
• The State eliminates cash which is untraceable and un-taxable
• VISA gets to run the de-facto new electronic currency of Britain

In the mean time, it is only the productive, credit worthy tax payer who is going to be guinea pigged, fleeced, max-taxed and tracked as he dutifully interfaces with this new system… if he doesn’t have any brains.

This is the wrong time, societally, to introduce this. The biggest ever act of civil disobedience has just happened, people are fed up to the teeth with crony capitalism, inflationism, bailouts warmongering and corruption.

Go ahead. Keep pushing.

Here we go again.

Ian Duncan Smith and his Tories are set to reintroduce ID Cards.

How do we know this? They are attempting to scrap the byzantine system of ‘benefits’ in favour of a single ‘Universal Credit’ that will be able to take into account what your circumstances are on a month to month basis.

Has an alarm bell rung in your head yet?

The Workers Revolutionary Party website (of all the people) reveals the crucial details:

Defend benefits! down with ‘universal credit’!
THE announcement yesterday that the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, had won his battle with the treasury over bringing in a single ‘universal credit’ has rightly been described as the ‘bonfire of the benefits’.

Under his scheme, every single benefit available to the unemployed, elderly, low paid or incapacitated – about 50 benefits in all – will be scrapped overnight and replaced with a single universal credit.

Due for the chop are housing benefit, incapacity benefit, the tax credit system for low-paid workers and single mothers as well as the job seekers allowance.

According to Smith, bringing all these benefits together is now possible due to computer technology that would even enable benefits to be varied from month to month depending on changes to a claimant’s circumstances.

This means that there will need to be an ID Card, tied into a system that Ian Liddle-Grainger MP hinted at, ‘real time taxation’, which translates to ‘total realtime financial surveillance’.

[…]
Nobody in their right mind will believe the nonsense being put about by Smith that these huge amounts can be obtained through efficiencies being made by collapsing the 50-odd benefits into one single universal credit, that can be varied according to changed circumstances.

Efficiency savings have never been made on this vast a scale by any government.

This is true. The system that IDS and Liddle-Graiinger are describing would be bigger, more complex and intrusive than the doomed UK ID Card system, and of course would be even more immoral and unethical, quite apart from being undoable as all UK government IT systems have proven to be.

On every level none of this should be considered seriously. And remember, this job will be contracted out to Lockheed Martin, Capita or some other company, that will have access to all private and company bank accounts in the country.

The very idea is beyond absurd.

In truth, these savings can only be achieved through savage cuts in benefits, by repeated means testing, and by a constant state policing of the former benefit holders, with punishment for those who do not report changed circumstances.

The means testing will be built in comrades; they would have real-time access to your bank account, cash would be outlawed, and they would adjust your ‘benefits’ by a series of programmed break points that are automatically triggered by the amount of money flowing into your account. Theoretically.

[…]
These proposals are not about efficiency, cutting out so-called ‘benefit fraud’ or targeting the really needy, they are simply about smashing all benefits, in order to prop up the bankrupt capitalist system and its bankrupt bosses and bankers.

I just cut out all the nauseating socialist Santa Claus Money Thinking. This section is factually correct however; this is about slashing ‘benefits’, that is true, but it is also about setting up a system whereby not a single penny of money that you earn or spend is outside the scrutiny of the state.

This is about propping up the system of crony capitalism (NOT capitalism, perfect examples of crony capitalists being Lockheed Martin and Capita) and the people who benefit from it; and I use the word ‘benefit’ deliberately in this context, because crony capitalists receive benefits from the state in the same way that the so called scroungers do. They are no different from each other save in the scale of their theft.

[…]
And what is the significance of the title ‘universal credit’ in place of ‘benefit’. A benefit, of course, is something that a person is entitled to by right. A ‘credit’ is basically a loan for which one has to beg, and which must be repaid at some time in the future.

No doubt we will be clarified shortly concerning the issue of repayment.

The TUC must not allow current benefit holders to be turned into beggars. The coalition must be told that any attempt to abolish benefits in favour of a credit will be met with a general strike to bring them down.

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/5696

Very perceptive comrade. Of course, the state cannot create rights any more than it can create jobs. I would say also, that the word ‘universal’ is used in the literal sense; everyone in Britain will be ‘entitled’ to this credit; you will receive an amount ranging from a negative number (taxation, which is theft) to a positive one (‘benefit’, which is redistribution of the stolen money). Of course, you will not be able to opt out of this system, the taxation part being the real-time taxation system hinted at by Ian Liddle-Grainger.

Clearly the only way that such a system can be implemented is with a compulsory ID Card for every economically active person, without which it will be illegal to operate a bank account.

Each ID Card will be linked to your account number, and the state will be able to check a list of your transactions remotely through realtime backdoor access.

It will be forbidden for you to make any cash transaction over an arbitrary limit, to stop the emergence of an underground economy of the size and scope that Russia Greece Spain Italy have for example.

Of course, the ID Card will have all the other side effects and secondary uses that we have been writing about since 2001.

There are no two ways about this. Either they introduce an ID Card for all economically active UK persons (and that means everybody if cash is severely constrained) or they drop the idea of real-time taxation and Universal Benefit in its nascent incarnation.

Finally, Labour are for the idea of a Universal Credit. That should tell you all you need to know about these ideas.

They know it means the introduction of the ID Card and the creation of a system of invasive police state socialism, where once they become the government again, they will have complete control of all the people and everything they do. It will mean the completion of the New Labour project that came to a halt because they ran out of other people’s money and patience with the nanny state.

If you think that life was bad under New Labour, wait till they take the reigns again once this system of complete control is in place. The thirteen years of Blair and Brown will seem like a picnic in the sun.

Obviously, none of this is a done deal, and there are infinitely better ways to secure the social safety net that do not rely on crony capitalists, immorality, faulty economic models and violence.

Hopefully, if the United States turns 180° and returns to its roots, this will cause a huge brain drain from the UK and Europe, causing them to think again.

Already, some of ‘Britain’s’ biggest companies are getting out of dodge for fairer climes. You can expect this trend to continue, especially in the internet business, where moving a company is as simple as running rsync, changing your DNS settings and buying hosting in another jurisdiction.

Britain boasts an internet economy of £100 billion per year. This will shrivel up should the tories introduce this invasive police state system. No one will host here, no one will develop here, no one will use transaction services based here; they will all flee to a restored USA, and other jurisdictions where Libertarianism flourishes.

Mark my words.

UPDATE

We have had some mail…

This is what you need to consider; if all benefits are going to be replaced by a single Universal Credit, in a monolithic system, that takes into account your circumstances automagically, they are going to need to following at a minimum:

• A database with every British person in it, each citizen having a unique ID (National Identity Register)
• Each child that is born would need to be in this database, with their relation to their parent or guardian, to calculate the Child Benefit component of the new Universal Credit (ContactPoint)
• A connection to the medical database so that the disability benefit component of the new Universal Credit can be calculated (NHS Spine)
  A new Universal Credit system (database and business logic) that is integrated into all bank accounts and which, PayPal style, can pay and withdraw monies from your bank account.

That is what is required at a minimum, to pull off what IDS is proposing, and of course, none of it can possibly be optional. It is not possible to do what they are thinking about without tying everything together into a single system that has the citizens unique identifier as the key.

As we say above, this is much worse than the original ID Card, and of course, when we say ID Card, we really mean NIR. This proposal brings together all the worst elements of the database state, and unifies them into a system of total control and surveillance.

The great, insightful, genius mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot is gone.

His revolutionary work can be and is now applied everywhere, including economics:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1465

Image compression.

And so much more….

The object that he is best known for in popular culture, The Mandelbrot Set is iconic, profound and beautiful all at the same time.

Merci professeur!

Tony Benn, war enabler and thief has a piece over in the Grauniad that simply cannot be allowed to stand:

The time to organise resistance is now
We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight

Gravity is not an ideology, it is a fact. In this matter, the fact is that the state is STEALING money from the productive to disburse as it sees fit. This is theft, pure and simple. It is immoral and unacceptable to decent people.

It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services.

What has wrecked the lives of millions is SOCIALISM. The STATE is responsible for all the ills that have been suffered in the twentieth century, and thanks to the internet, everyone can now see that this is the case.

There is no such thing as ‘our jobs’ jobs are created by entrepreneurs, not the state. They are not collective property; they are the property of the people who create them. Pay is what is due to people who do work. The rate of pay is a private matter between employer and the employed. The state should have no say in that private contract whatsoever. Education is not the business of the state; it is not a right, but is in reality, a good like Health Care. Transport is also no business of the state, and niether is the delivery of anything, including the post, and any other service, like the internet, which some deluded people want to claim is a right.

The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers’ profligacy.

This is a straw man argument. It is completely wrong that anyone other than the shareholders and depositors in banks were made to bail out the banks. In a properly functioning country, no one would be forced to pay for a bailout, or other people’s food or anything else, and the fact that this has happened is no excuse for more organized theft by the state.

The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.

It is absolutely wrong that the state should levy a ‘value added tax’. This is an unjustifiable interposition in the private transactions of individuals. As for that shopping list of people who are going to suffer because of these cuts, they would not be suffering at all if everyone were free to interact economically with 100% of their money, and those that were left out would be take care of by charity.

One thing is for sure, Labour and socialism has utterly failed to produce the prosperity that they promise again and again, and they will never be able to produce it. All they can do is destroy capital, technology and redistribute wealth by force.

If their ideas were great, people would voluntarily finance them. The fact is that people who are creative and productive see their sham for what it is, and run from it like horses run from fire.

Women are expected to bear 75% of the burden. The poorest will be hit six times harder than the richest. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3 million job losses in public and private sectors.

The ‘public sector’ is entirely parasitic. Those jobs are not real jobs; they are invented by government and financed by people who are productive in the real economy.

What happens in the ‘private sector’ or the real economy, is not the affair of the state, and if the state had no power to interfere in the real economy, it would be many times more prosperous, with greater opportunities for both job seekers and entrepreneurs.

We reject this malicious vandalism and resolve to campaign for a radical alternative, with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece and other European countries.

You cant make stuff like this up.

This man is a representative of the most malicious, vindictive, destructive and anti-human philosophy ever known to man. They are violent thieves who steal money from the productive to give away to their friends and to finance their hair brained schemes.

What do they mean by ‘radical alternative’? What can it possibly mean other than more theft, more wealth redistribution, a return to Orwellian bureaucracy and everything evil that all the British are fed up to the teeth with?

These people understand NOTHING about economics and money. Even a child can be made to understand it if they read the right books.

And as for other European countries, Britain is not a European country. Everyone has had ENOUGH of Europe and its insane policies, and rioting like the Greek parasites will only destroy the infrastructure that you need to steal the billions you are craving for like the vampires you are.

I have a feeling that Tony Benn and his band of modern day Robin Hood criminals are going to find that everyone hates them, will not tolerate being stolen from by them, and will push back against them with such ferocity that they will be knocked over.

This government of millionaires says “we’re all in it together” and “there is no alternative”. But, for the wealthy, corporation tax is being cut, the bank levy is a pittance, and top salaries and bonuses have already been restored to pre-crash levels.

Like it or not, it is the millionares and everyone beneath them that owns and runs a business that creates all the wealth in any country. They should be cherished, free to operate their businesses as they see fit, without any interference from the state of any kind. If you want to start a union, that is entirely your absolute right; but the owners of businesses also have rights, and yours do not trump theirs.

This is the principle, that everyone has the same rights, that Tony Benn cannot accept. His position, in his mind, is one of superiority. His rights trump all others. The rights of his friends and followers trump the rights of all others.

He is DEAD WRONG.

An alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control, and raise revenue by increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abolishing the nuclear “deterrent” by cancelling the Trident replacement.

Banks are private property. What Benn is advocating is that the banks be nationalised, STOLEN from their owners if you will. Once again, the word ‘democratic’ is being used as a synonym for ‘fair’, ‘just’, ‘honest’, and ‘good’ when it is none of those things. Democratic control means control of the mob, against the wishes of the owners of property. That is THEFT, IMMORAL and EVIL.

Raising revenue by increasing tax for the rich is just theft. There should be no taxation by the state, full stop. The state should not be engaged in wars of aggression, no matter where they are being fought. And without a state, there would be no money for a nuclear deterrent unless everyone voluntarily wanted to pay for one, which I doubt would ever happen.

All of our problems come from the state, and people like Tony Benn, who control it.

An alternative strategy could use these resources to: support welfare; develop homes, schools, and hospitals; and foster a green approach to public spending – investing in renewable energy and public transport, thereby creating a million jobs.

Welfare is a soul destroying disease, and even those who deal with poverty have come to understand this.

We commit ourselves to:

Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services.

Those workplaces do not belong to you, they belong to the people who created them you THIEF! The welfare services you claim are yours are financed by money you STEAL.

Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.

Fighting rising unemployment can only be done correctly by freeing business to do what it does best, creating jobs, capital and progress. We do not need you, or the state to make this magic happen.

Develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery.

There is no alternative to reality. Money and human nature are fixed. Go and read about it.

Oppose all proposals to “solve” the crisis through racism and other forms of scapegoating.

And no scapegoating of the people who create the jobs you want so badly, the ‘rich’!

Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.

No matter how many people you gather together in your bogus and immoral cause, you will still be bogus and immoral.

Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.

YES! please do that, after all its so very effective!

Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.

That sounds to me like a call to arms to all thieves. Absolutely appalling. They want more theft, more immoral redistribution of wealth, more tyranny, more bureaucracy, a bigger hungrier state, more control over business. Just how stupid can people be?

It seems that there is no limit.

We urge those who support this statement to attend the Organising Conference on 27 November 2010 (10am-5pm), at Camden Centre, Town Hall, London, WC1H 9JE.

Signed:

Tony Benn

Caroline Lucas MP

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/04/time-to-organise-resistance-now

And then there is a list of the usual, delusional suspects.

Thieves to a man, all rotten to the core, leeches, unproductive, insane, destructive, anti-human and all bad!

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.

Lew Rockwell has a great article about the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?

Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that speaks to who is in charge: the state or individuals.

We live in anti-liberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can’t even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have travelled from the Age of Reason to our own times.

Referencing the great controversy about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Karen De Coster put the issue to rest by turning Rachel Maddow’s question on its head. She demanded to know whether a white businessman has the right to refuse service to a black man. Karen asked: does a black businessman have the right to refuse service to a Klan member?

I don’t think anyone would dispute that right. How a person uses the right to associate (which necessarily means the right not to associate) is a matter of individual choice profoundly influenced by the cultural context. That a person has the right to make these choices on his or her own cannot be denied by anyone who believes in liberty.

The right to exclude is not something incidental. It is core to the functioning of civilization. If I use proprietary software, I can’t download it without signing a contractual agreement. If I refuse to sign, the company doesn’t have to sell it to me. And why? Because it is their software and they set the terms of use. Period. There is nothing more to say.

If you run a blog that accepts comments, you know how important this right is. You have to be able to exclude spam or ban IP addresses of trolls or otherwise include and exclude based on whether a person’s contribution adds value. Every venue on the internet that calls forth public participation knows this. Without this right, any forum could collapse, having been taken over by bad elements.

We exercise the right to exclude every day. If you go to lunch, some people come and some people do not. When you have a dinner party, you are careful to include some people and necessarily exclude others. Some restaurants expect and demand shoes and shirts and even coats and ties. The New York Times includes some articles and excludes others, includes some people in its editorial meetings and excludes others.

When business hires, some people make the cut and others do not. It is the same with college admissions, church membership, fraternities, civic clubs, and nearly every other association. They all exercise the right to exclude. It is central to the organization of every aspect of life. If this right is denied, what do we get in its place? Coercion and compulsion. People are forced together by the state, with one group required at the point of a gun to serve another group. This is involuntary servitude, expressly prohibited by the 13th amendment. One presumes that a freedom-loving people will always be against that.

As Larry Elder says: “This is freedom 101.”

What about the claim that government should regulate the grounds of exclusion? Let’s say, for example, that we do not deny the general right of free association, but narrow its range to address a particular injustice. Is that plausible? Well, freedom is a bit like life, something that is or is not. Slicing and dicing it according to political priorities is exceedingly dangerous. It perpetrates social division, leads to arbitrary power, mandates a form of slavery, and turns the tables on who precisely is in charge in society.

[…]

And this is precisely why racialists, nationalists, and hard-core bigots have always opposed liberal capitalism: it includes and excludes based on the cash nexus and without regard to features that collectivists of all sorts regard as important. In the imagined utopias of the national socialists, the champions of commerce are hanged from lampposts as race traitors and enemies of the nation.

That’s because the market tends toward an ever-evolving, ever-changing tapestry of association, with patterns that cannot be known in advance and should not be regulated by federal masters. In contrast, government’s attempts to regulate association lead to disorder and social calamities.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/freedom-of-association145.html

Indeed; all of this is absolutely true, and I agree with it.

Government has no business forcing association or preventing association by law. Which puts into sharp relief the next part of this post.

It seems like the arguments questioning the logic of forcing anti discrimination by asserting that the state does not force people to enter restaurants or forbid people from engaging in boycotts are deflated in one aspect. It is indeed illogical that the state forces restaurants to serve but does not force patrons to enter… actually, they DO force people to trade with each other, and forbid boycotts.

In the USA, the Federal Government has enacted a law that forbids people from boycotting Israel.

What they are saying is that american firms are FORCED to deal with people that they may, for whatever reason, prefer not to deal with.

From the ‘Bureau of Industry and Security’, a department with a distinctly un-American name:

Antiboycott Compliance

The Bureau is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain Moslem countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott. Compliance with such requests may be prohibited by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and may be reportable to the Bureau.

Boycott Alert

U.S. companies continue to report receiving requests to engage in activities that further or support the boycott of Israel. U.S. companies may receive similar requests in the future. If you have questions, please call (202) 482-2381 and ask for the Duty Officer or you may contact us by email.

This is a law that forbids private companies from refraining from association.

Antiboycott Laws:

During the mid-1970’s the United States adopted two laws that seek to counteract the participation of U.S. citizens in other nation’s economic boycotts or embargoes. These “antiboycott” laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). While these laws share a common purpose, there are distinctions in their administration.

Objectives:

The antiboycott laws were adopted to encourage, and in specified cases, require U.S. firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction. They have the effect of preventing U.S. firms from being used to implement foreign policies of other nations which run counter to U.S. policy.

Primary Impact:

The Arab League boycott of Israel is the principal foreign economic boycott that U.S. companies must be concerned with today. The antiboycott laws, however, apply to all boycotts imposed by foreign countries that are unsanctioned by the United States.

Who Is Covered by the Laws?

The antiboycott provisions of the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) apply to the activities of U.S. persons in the interstate or foreign commerce of the United States. The term “U.S. person” includes all individuals, corporations and unincorporated associations resident in the United States, including the permanent domestic affiliates of foreign concerns. U.S. persons also include U.S. citizens abroad (except when they reside abroad and are employed by non-U.S. persons) and the controlled in fact affiliates of domestic concerns. The test for “controlled in fact” is the ability to establish the general policies or to control the day to day operations of the foreign affiliate.

The scope of the EAR, as defined by Section 8 of the EAA, is limited to actions taken with intent to comply with, further, or support an unsanctioned foreign boycott.

What do the Laws Prohibit?

Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under the EAR includes:

• Agreements to refuse or actual refusal to do business with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
• Agreements to discriminate or actual discrimination against other persons based on race, religion, sex, national origin or nationality.
• Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about business relationships with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
• Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about the race, religion, sex, or national origin of another person.

Implementing letters of credit containing prohibited boycott terms or conditions.

The TRA does not “prohibit” conduct, but denies tax benefits (“penalizes”) for certain types of boycott-related agreements.

Note the double talk, the act does not prohibit conduct, but penalises for agreements. Later on the page says:

Penalties:

The Export Admnistration Act (EAA) specifies penalties for violations of the Antiboycott Regulations as well as export control violations. These can include:

Criminal:

The penalties imposed for each “knowing” violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 or five times the value of the exports involved, whichever is greater, and imprisonment of up to five years. During periods when the EAR are continued in effect by an Executive Order issued pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the criminal penalties for each “willful” violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 and imprisonment for up to ten years.

Administrative:

For each violation of the EAR any or all of the following may be imposed:

• General denial of export privileges;
• The imposition of fines of up to $11,000 per violation; and/or
• Exclusion from practice.

Boycott agreements under the TRA involve the denial of all or part of the foreign tax benefits discussed above.

When the EAA is in lapse, penalties for violation of the Antiboycott Regulations are governed by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The IEEPA Enhancement Act provides for penalties of up to the greater of $250,000 per violation or twice the value of the transaction for administrative violations of Antiboycott Regulations, and up to $1 million and 20 years imprisonment per violation for criminal antiboycott violations.

[…]

http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm

Amazing isn’t it? It does not prohibit conduct, but puts you in GAOL for doing it, removes your ‘export privileges’ (doing business is a privilege?), imposes incredibly large punitive fines, and finally (I presume) can revoke your license too practice your trade.

Absolutely immoral and illegitimate.

On the other hand, you have many states that enforce a boycott of Israel, which is an illegitimate and immoral denial of the right of association.

Not only do all of these countries violate the right of association, but they are violating the right of individuals to freely enter into contracts.

If someone wants to draw up a contract that contains a boycott clause, it is the absolute right of the parties to agree to this. Period. Obviously, the mandating of the insertion of such clauses is a clear violation; you should be able to remove or add clauses as both parties see fit.

Take a look at a representative sample of the clauses:

Office of Antiboycott Compliance

Examples of Boycott Requests

Following are recent examples of boycott requests that have been reported to the Office of Antiboycott Compliance. These examples are illustrative and not exhaustive. Companies should call our advice line (202) 482-2381 with questions concerning these or any request to comply with restrictive trade practices or boycotts.

BAHRAIN

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Purchase Order:

“In the case of overseas suppliers, this order is placed subject to the suppliers being not on the Israel boycott list published by the central Arab League.”

Reportable boycott condition in an importer’s purchase order:

“Goods of Israeli origin not acceptable.”

Reportable boycott condition in a letter of credit:

“A signed statement from the shipping company, or its agent, stating the name, flag and nationality of the carrying vessel and confirming … that it is permitted to enter Arab ports.”

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Contract

“Israeli Clause:
The Seller shall not supply goods or materials which have been manufactured or processed in Israel nor shall the services of any Israeli organization be used in handling or transporting the goods or materials.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Contractor shall comply in all respects with the requirements of the laws of the State of Bahrain relating to the boycott of Israel. Goods manufactured by companies blacklisted by the Arab Boycott of Israel Office may not be imported into the State of Bahrain and must not be supplied against this Contract. For information concerning the Boycott List, the Contractor can approach the nearest Arab Consulate.”

Prohibited Condition in a Letter of Credit

“Buyer shall in no way contravene the regulations issued by Bahrain Government and or Israel Boycott Office. Buyer shall not nominate a vessel blacklisted by the said office.”

BANGLADESH

Prohibited Boycott Condition in instructions to bidders on a contract

“No produced commodity shall be eligible for … financing if such commodity contains any component or components which were imported into the producing country from Israel and countries not eligible to trade with … the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The equipment and materials must not be of Israeli origin. The supplier/bidder who are not black listed by Arab boycott of Israel will be allowed to participate in this bid.”

IRAQ

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Questionnaire

“1. Do you have or ever have had a branch or main company, factory or assembly plant in Israel or have sold to an Israeli?”

“2. Do you have or ever have had general agencies or offices in Israel for your Middle Eastern or international operations?”

“3. Have you ever granted the right of using your name, trademarks royalty, patent, copyright or that of any of your subsidiaries to Israeli persons or firms?”

“4. Do you participate or ever participated or owned shares in an Israeli firm or business?”

“5. Do you render now or ever have rendered any consultative service or technical assistance to any Israeli firm or business?”

“6. Do you represent now or ever have represented any Israeli firm or business or abroad?”

“7. What companies in whose capital are your shareholders?” Please state the name and nationality of each company and the percentage of share of their total capital.”

“8. What companies or shareholders in your capital? Please state the name and nationality of each company and the percentage of share of their total capital.”

“N.B. The above questions should be answered on behalf of the company itself and all of its branch companies, if any.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Contractor shall, throughout the continuance of the Contract, abide by and comply in all respects with the rules and instructions issued from time to time by the Israel Boycott Office in Iraq.”

Prohibited Condition in a Trademark Application

“Requirement for the registration of pharmaceutical companies:

Certification letter regarding the boycott of Israel (i.e., do not comprise any parts, raw materials, labor or capital of Israeli origin).”
“Requirement for the Registration of Medical Appliances, Disposables producing companies, and Laboratory diagnostic kit manufacturers:

Certification letter regarding boycott of Israel.”
Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“Supplies of our purchase order should never be consigned or shipped by steamers included on Israel Boycott list.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The bill of lading shall bear a note that the vessel delivering the cargo is not on the “Black List” and does not call at Israeli ports.”

KUWAIT

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Custom’s document

“[The vessel entry document asks the ship’s captain to certify that,] no goods, dry cargo, or personal effects listed on the document of Israeli origin or manufactured by a blacklisted firm or company are to be landed as they will be subject to confiscation.”

Prohibited Boycott Condition in Letter of Credit

“We hereby certify that the beneficiaries, manufacturers, exporters and transferees of this credit are neither blacklisted nor have any connection with Israel, and that the terms and conditions of this credit in no way contravenes the law pertaining to the boycott of Israel and the decisions issued by the Israel Boycott Office.”

Reportable Boycott Condition in Letter of Credit:

“Importation of goods from Israel is strictly prohibited by Kuwait import regulations; therefore, certificate of origin covering goods originating in Israel is not acceptable.”

Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“All shipments under this order shall comply with Israel Boycott Office Rules and Regulations.”

Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“Goods must not be shipped on vessels/carriers included in the Israeli Boycott list.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The vendor (as person or organization) or his representatives should not be an Israeli national. So the vendor should not be owned, managed, or represented by any companies that carry an Israeli nationality and there should not be any sub-contractors that carry Israeli nationality.

The vendor should not involve any person or representatives that carries the Israeli nationality in importing or exporting the software or hardware mentioned in this contract and its appendices and the vendor should provide all documents that support the above information.”

LEBANON

Prohibited Boycott Condition in Power of Attorney from Lebanese firm

A Lebanese firm sent a power of attorney affidavit to appoint a local agent in Iraq to a U.S. firm. The affidavit asked that U.S. firm answer a series of questions concerning the Arab boycott. These questions included whether the firm had a plant in Israel, has sold to Israel, had offices in Israel, owned shares in an Israeli firm, had provided services for an Israeli firm, or had granted any trademarks, copy or patent rights to Israeli persons of firms.

Reportable Boycott Condition in letter of credit:

“Certificate issued by the shipping company or its agent testifying that the carrying vessel is allowed to enter the Lebanese port…”

LIBYA

Prohibited Condition in a Letter of Credit

“Original commercial invoice signed and certified by the beneficiary that the goods supplied are not manufactured by either a company or one of its subsidiary branches who are blacklisted by the Arab boycott of Israel or in which Israeli capital is invested.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Second Party shall observe the provisions of the Law for Boycott of Israel or any other State which the provisions for Boycott are applicable and shall ensure such observation from any other sub-contractor. In case of contravening this condition, the First Party shall have the right to cancel the contract and confiscate the deposit by mere notice by registered letter without prejudice to his right of compensation.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“Boycott Provisions:
The Contractor shall observe and comply with all the provisions and decisions concerning the boycott to Israel or any other country the same is valid. The Contractor shall secure the respect of such boycott by any other party he might have subcontracted with him.”

Prohibited Condition in a Certificate of Origin

“The goods being exported are of national origin of the producing country and the goods do not contain any components of Israeli origin, whatever the proportion of such component is. We, the exporter, declare that the company producing the respective commodity is not an affiliate to or mother of any company that appears on the Israeli boycott blacklist and also, we the exporter, have no direct or indirect connection with Israel and shall act in compliance with the principles and regulations of the Arab boycott of Israel.”

[…]

http://www.bis.doc.gov/antiboycottcompliance/oacantiboycottrequestexamples.html

Did you know that if you have a stamp from Israel in your passport, none of these countries will issue a VISA?

In the USA, it is clearly illegal for a greengrocer to require a wholesaler to only provide products that do not come from Israel. The law says that it is illegal to participate in foreign boycotts, but how can anyone separate a foreign boycott from a USA led boycott? If the terms are exactly the same, and a foreign boycott started first, then how could you prove that your domestic boycott is not an extension of a foreign one?

The people who drafted this law knew that the constitutionality of this law would have been challenged immiediately if it had been an outright ban on boycotting, so they put it in the context of foreign boycotts to get around that pesky piece of paper.

It’s an interesting question.

There are certain trades, like the gem trade, where people from these two supposedly separate spheres, who publicly are unalterably opposed, do business together as if they were members of the same family.

They make agreements on a handshake, where vast amounts of money are involved, and everyone behaves like rational human beings.

This is what happens when you remove the malevolent influence of the state. Without the state interfering, on both sides, people behave rationally and manage to live together without conflict.

This is the truth, it always has been the truth, and the only people who are against the sort of peace that we all expect are the statist collectivists who, with their foul and artificial divisions of humanity, cause every act of violence in the world.

It looks like shouting victory was premature:

[…]

Despite the demise of the national identity card, a separate but technically similar scheme for some foreign nationals will continue. That scheme is run by the UK Border Agency and is still being rolled out.

Some 200,000 cards – known as biometric resident permits – have already been given to migrant workers, foreign students and family members from outside the European Economic Area.

The abolition of ID cards is among measures that the coalition partners have pledged to take as part of a reversal of what they call an erosion of civil liberties.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8707355.stm

As it was in Apartheid South Africa, all ‘foreigners’ are going to be compelled to be fingerprinted and put into an NIR Lite®. This is what it looks like:

If you are caught out in the street while looking like a Pakistani, an Indian or a West Indian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Arab, North African, West African, South African, South American (no, they just SHOOT them on sight), you will be pulled over and asked to show your ID Card. If you do not have it, they will force you to put your finger on their mobile fingerprint scanner then the magic will happen…

But wait a minute, we have been here before!!

——-

Foreigners who repeatedly flout the rules when they are made to apply for ID cards will be thrown out, the Government said yesterday.

Immigrants will have to give two fingerprints, iris scans and a raft of personal details to the Home Office when the scheme is introduced for foreign nationals only later this year.

Ministers said that, if they fail to comply with these “primary requirements”, they could have their permission to stay in the UK revoked.

But papers released yesterday revealed that only serial offenders – who break the rules at least three times in five years – will face removal.

Initially, they will face only fines of £250 per offence. And refugees will face only fines – up to a maximum of £1,000 – as human rights laws bar them from being deported.

A consultation document on penalties under the scheme, which is a fore-runner of the national ID card for all British citizens, also said there was no power to jail anyone who failed to pay the civil fines.

But the offence of contempt, which can carry a jail term, “may be applicable”, it added.

Someone with indefinite leave to remain in Britain would only have their leave cancelled in “compelling circumstances”, the paper went on. Fines would be discounted for people on benefits.

The roll-out will begin later this year, with the children of foreign nationals also expected to carry the cards.

Opposition MPs said it offered a glimpse into how the ID card scheme for British citizens could work, when it is introduced from 2009.

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: “This shows the kind of punitive measures that every British citizen can expect when ID cards are eventually rolled out nationally.

“ID cards for foreign nationals are not going to solve the problems of identity fraud and illegal working. All they will do is threaten the immigration status of hard working people who bring benefits to this country.”

But Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said: “Britain’s border security is currently undergoing the biggest shake-up in a generation, ensuring it stays among the toughest in the world.

“ID cards for foreign nationals will cement the triple ring of security protecting our shores, along with fingerprint visas abroad and a single border force here at home.”

Daily Mail

Look at the image they used to illustrate this article.

It’s just the sort of photo they would use to inflame peoples emotions and get them on board with ID cards for foreigners.

But the question is this; how are they going to differentiate between those people?

Lets look at it from the policeman’s point of view shall we?

Obviously, the first person you stop is the Muslim on the far left in purple, ‘Number 1?. This guy is probably here on a passport with a Visa, and should be carrying his card.

‘Number 2? we do not stop. She has her belly button showing, and is ‘light skinned’. The belly button, tight jeans and no bra means that she cannot possibly be a muslim, so we leave her alone.

Anyway she’s hot.

‘Number 3? we pull over straight away. He looks ‘muslimish’, is wearing a cap and looks ’shifty’. Frowning fits the profile. Stop.

‘Number 4? STOP!

‘Number 5? Call a WPC….STOP. Covered from head to toe, carrying heavy thick plastic bag.

‘Number 6? Mouse brown hair, fashionable clothes, conscious of her hair. No stop.

‘Number 7? Same as number 6.

‘Number 8? Hot blond, no stop.

‘Number 9? Nice handbag strap, caucasian, no stop.

Now, there is one problem with all the above:

EVERY ONE OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH IS A BRITISH CITIZEN!

Not one of them is required to carry or apply for an ID card of any kind, because they are all British and all of them were born right here in the UK.

This is the problem with what they are planning; it is the begnning of ‘racial’ profiling on an unprecedented scale. That is the only way you are going to be able to pick up all the foreigners and get them fingerprinted. Then of course, after it is done (if it ever even happens) You will forever be pestering British Citizens simply because they do not ‘look the part’.

Then will come the calls for everyone to be put in the database, since to have only a section of the population under this system makes no sense at all, as we have said so many times.

Even if everyone were in the system, they would STILL use ‘racial’ profiling every day trying to hunt down the stragglers and the refusniks. This is a disaster in the making of the type that Britain suffered with its ‘sus law‘. Only it will be much much worse.

This is discrimination of the worst kind. It is also a breaking of trust in the same vein as the non-dom debacle; people who have lived here for decades are now to be treated as criminals, and subjected to a system created by habitual liars and incompetents who have so little care for human beings that it strains the imagination as to what it would be like to actually speak to these monsters in person.

The fact of the matter is, this is discrimination, pure and simple. A legal challenge is coming. An infrastructure for mass resistance is already in place.

This measure, this ‘dry run’ will be the death knell of this bad scheme.

——-

Thats how we said it in 2008.

if you think that the borders agency is not going to share their database with the police you are insane.

That means that the police and their mobile fingerprint scanners are going to be used to terrorise anyone who is brown.

As the police use mobile scanners, they will scan you, and if you are not on the database it means one of three things:

does that mean you ARE british? Only the British are NOT on NIR Lite®

does this mean you ARE an illegal immigrant? Only illegal immigrants are NOT on NIR Lite®

you ARE an illegal immigrant: DETAIN IMMEDIATELY AND WAIT FOR BORDER POLICE

Interesting isn’t it? Any imbecile can work this out, but clearly, Nick Clegg has not the capacity to do this.

It probably went down like this: the ID Card vendors had break clauses in their contracts that would have cost the treasury tens of millions. Rather than invoke these clauses and pay out the penalties, the coalition gave the contractors the contract for the Borders Agency NIR Lite® system as compensation, in return for not invoking the break clauses.

Who knows?

What is for sure is that this is nothing more than a delay in the roll out of a compulsory ID card system for every British citizen.

In the end the penny will drop that they have to have everyone in the system to know the status of anyone.

A piecemeal system cannot work; that is why every country that has an ID Card makes them compulsory for everyone.

For the record, there is no reason whatsoever to have an NIR Lite® to control borders. This is vendor snake-oil and the coalition has swallowed it wholesale. All the fingerprinting and iris scanning in the world will not stop illegal immigration.

But you know this!

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1353
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=262
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=157#comment-102
http://www.irdial.com/blogger/archive/
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=222

Take a look at this:

After massive public rejection of the surveillance state, and country wide vandalism of the millions of CCTV cameras in the UK, it was decided to remove all traces of the monitoring apparatus that cast a debilitating fog over life in the UK. Like the fall of East Germany and the STASI, the changes came overnight as the revulsion over the mutated form of British life became universal and ‘went nuclear’.

“We are not going to live like this anymore. Britain has been turned into a prison, and we have had enough”

Parliament has drawn up a list of all ‘database state’ laws going back to the early days of the now discredited Blair government, all of which are to be struck off the books in one fell swoop.

“This has been a long time in coming, but the writing has been on the wall for years; the silent grumbling of the British public has turned into an earthquake of non-violent dissent. Just like the Berlin Wall, the database state has been dismantled one camera at a time in a single day, without any opposition from the police.”

That was an imaginary scenario concocted to paint a picture of how the fall of the Police State would look.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It’s from an old BLOGDIAL post.

BLOGDIAL is great because the people who write on it are:

• way ahead of the pack
• know their subjects backward
• do not mince their words
• can synthesise the facts of the present to produce accurate predictions of how the future will look
• all have impeccable taste

The BLOGDIAL archives are chock full of gems like the one above, and we keep getting better and better as we hone our understanding and expand our learning.

Unlike others, who believe that writing about Liberty is likely to ‘bore readers’ we understand clearly that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Now is absolutely NOT the time to pack up and go home; in fact, it is time to redouble all efforts to push back our mutual enemies and mush them underfoot for all time.

With all of that trumpet blowing out of the way, the Queens speech has just been read, so lets rip through it.

Many of the items in it are predicated on the idea that the state is legitimate in the first place, which it is not. We can however look at each item from a point of view of wether or not it makes any sense or is good in the short term:

Office for budget responsibility bill. Sets up the OBR to take responsibility for producing budget forecasts, meaning the chancellor – who under the current arrangements is in charge of producing his own forecasts – won’t be able to twist the figures.

This makes sense, because the people in charge of the money of the state should not audit themselves or do anything like that.

National insurance contributions bill. Raises income tax allowances, so that “most people would be better off relative to the previous government’s plan”, funded by a rise in national insurance. Reallocates tax worth around £9bn.

This does not make sense. It is more borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, exactly like the completely immoral Child Credit scheme, which took money from taxpayers to give to children.

You could not refuse this ‘free’ investment money, and your child was given a unique number as an identifier. If you did not respond to the agency running this fiasco, they invested the money for ‘your’ child on its behalf and sent you as the parent or guardian, regular updates by post about how ‘your child’s investment’ was doing. A scandalous, immoral, deeply offensive and irrational misuse of other people’s money, which does not seem to appear in this speech, even though its abolition is promised.

Welfare reform bill. Simplifies the welfare and benefits system, improving work incentives and “removing the confusing complexity of the benefits system”.

We all know about the Welfare Warfare state do we not?

Pensions and savings bill. Implements the findings of the review of the state pension age being conducted by the government. Currently the state pension age will increase to 66 after 2024. The review will propose bringing that forward. The bill will also restore the earnings link from 2012.

This is another Ponzi scheme. The people who pay in today are being remunerated in the future with devalued money, thanks to the fiat pound.

Financial reform bill. Gives the Bank of England control over macro-prudential regulation in the City. Not clear yet what will happen to the fate of the Financial Services Authority.

The only thing that needs to be reformed is the nature of the Pound.

Equitable Life bill. Pays compensation to savers who lost money when Equitable Life came close to collapse.

Where will the money come from for this? It’s another bailout, as immoral as any other.

Airport economic regulation bill. Promotes competition in the airport market, possibly breaking up the BAA monopoly.

Makes sense; airports should be entirely privately owned and run for profit.

Postal services bill. Allows the sale of part of the Royal Mail, in line with the plans originally drawn up by Lord Mandelson. The exact proportion being sold has not been specified.

The post office should be entirely private and for profit, just like Federal Express.

Energy bill. Promotes energy-efficiency measures in home by introducing a “green deal” charging system, with incentives to suppliers and households to save energy. The bill may also regulate emissions from coal-fired power stations and create a Green Investment Bank.

This is utter Glegish nonsense of the first order. Readers of BLOGDIAL already know why.

If the idea of a ‘Green Investment Bank’ was commercially viable, it would already exist and entrepreneurs would have created one. Nick Clegg is a complete idiot when it comes to this subject; he is more like a religious fanatic, ranting and frothing at the mouth than a rational human being. That bank WILL FAIL without government concessions to the industries that the bank lends money to, so they can generate profits which are not really profits at all but cost savings since the state will not have its protrusible proboscis on those industries, as it does on all others. This bank will therefore destroy businesses and jobs, just like the Green Jobs of Spain, that destroy 2.2 jobs for every real job. It will also divert capital from the real economy into a false ‘Green Economy’.

These are FACTS.

Academies bill. Allows more schools to become academies, giving them more freedom from Whitehall.

But this is to be paid for by the state, so it is still completely immoral at its base. Still, its better that central control is abolished, so it is a move in the right direction.

Health bill. Replaces the “top-down approach” with “the devolution of power and responsibility to doctors and patients”. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, will set out more details of his vision in the next few weeks.

Is the NHS Spine going to be dismantled or not? That is what everyone wants to know!

Police reform and social responsibility bill. Makes the police more accountable through “directly elected individuals”. The bill will also create a dedicated border police force, ensure health and safety laws do not stand in the way of “common sense policing” and overhaul the Licensing Act.

‘Overhaul the licensing act’ which means ending the freedom to drink when you please, where you please, while the patrons of the House of Commons bar can drink and smoke all day every day year round.

Public bodies (reform) bill. Cuts the number of quangos, with a view to saving £1bn a year.

Makes sense.

Decentralisation and localism bill. Gives more power to councils and neighbourhoods. Also gives residents the power to instigate referendums and veto excessive council tax increases.

What? Give more power to the same councils who use RIPA to investigate dog fouling? These people need LESS power, and to be FORCED to behave like Public Servants. Do you know what a Public Servant is? Read that last link if you have even a sliver of doubt that you do.

Local government bill. Stops the creation of unitary councils in Exeter and Norwich.

Ok….

Parliamentary reform bill. Introduces fixed-term parliaments, gives voters the right to recall MPs found guilty of serious wrongdoing and sets up a referendum on the alternative vote system.

We all know about why voting is illegitimate, and so there is no need to go into that. Recall of MPs would make them more like Public Servants, so that is good. If it ever works.

Freedom (great repeal) bill. Restores freedoms and civil liberties and repeals “unnecessary” laws.

THERE’S THE RUB! What is “unnecessary”? In whose opinion? The predicted backdown starts here!

Identity documents bill. Abolishes the identity card system and destroys the national identity register.

At long last. VICTORY!

After many years of a hard fought information war, we have WON this important battle. Without an NIR and ID Card, it will be very difficult if not impossible to run a totalitarian police state. This is the most important part of the Queen’s Speech!

Scotland bill. Implements the final report of the Calman commission, giving more devolution to Scotland.

Freedom is not free, and if the Scots want freedom they have to have their own money and complete financial separation from England. Without it, all of this is just TALK.

European Union bill. Ensures that there is a referendum on any future plan to transfer power to the European Union.

What about the Lisbon treaty you TRAITORS. There should be a referendum on that and the very idea that Britain is in the EU in the first place.

Armed forces bill. Continues in force the legislation giving the armed forces a legal basis, as well as improving provisions for service personnel.

I’m not even going to go there.

Terrorist asset-freezing bill. Gives the government firm powers to seize assets from terrorists, following a supreme court decision that quashed the previous legislation in this area.

So the court says the law is wrong, so they are changing it so that it is right. So much for all their promises of doing things differently. And of course, this law will be used on ANYONE who they want to destroy. Oh well, what do you expect? Miracles?

And there you have it.

The two most important parts of this speech, the death of the NIR/ID Card and the Great Reform act mean that at least to some extent, things are going to be much better than they would have been under the totalitarian Labour government. Sadly we have already seen the backing down on this Reform Act, which should include ALL legislation that infringes the liberties of people in Britain.

That is why now is NOT the time to stop writing; any newspaper writer with one brain cell will now be getting ready to submit a comprehensive list of ALL legislation that is immoral and an affront to liberty, so that at the very least, it can be rejected and Mr. Clegg can be made to explain why he must retain control over everyone’s personal victimless pleasures; so he can explain why he is the master and not the servant in matters where there is no harm whatsoever.

The World Should Now Be Considered in Revolution

It is noteworthy that so many disparate groups currently hate government activities that the Mayor of New York City was far off on who drove an SUV into Times Square in an attempt to bomb the famed landmark He initially said :

If I had to guess, twenty five cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.

There is so much anger in the world, a government can really be confused as to who is after it.

Consider the range of anger right now. Completely different philosophies, completely different views of the world, but the Times Square bomber, the Tea Party movement, the Ron Paul movement and the protesters in Greece have one thing in common, a rejection of control by the global plotters.

Ron Paul is in most ways as far as you can get from the Times Square bomber. Paul is non-violent and wants to work through the system. The Times Square bomber planned to express his objections to the global plotters by bizarrely attempting to blow up an SUV in Times Square, but triggering all these actions is a rejection of multi-national government attempts to force their will on the people.

Governments have been slowly moving towards global this and global that, well the one thing they have succeeded at is global anger. People are pissed off in Toledo, Islamabad, Athens and Des Moines. The degree of anger is different, the justification for the anger is varied, but around the globe the anger is there, all in one way or another traced back to multinational-government actions.

In Greece, it’s multinational-government actions via the EU and the IMF attempting to push “austerity programs” against the people. In Pakistan, it’s anger against the multinational-government military actions in the area.

In the United States, its anger against the global banksters that brought panic to the financial system and then raped the taxpayers and paid themselves huge bonuses. The U.S. global banksters are, of course,the puppeteers that are behind all these multinational-government actions.

The banksters have created a world that is in revolution. How all this plays out I have no idea. The genie will not be able to be put back in the bottle. The anger appears to be deep enough that the banksters may have to decide how evil they really are. Will they give the order to crush the revolution, and I mean crush, resulting in millions dead, or will they pull a Gorbachev and choose the noble and wise way and let the flawed bankster built system collapse?

I don’t think the people of the world have figured out yet that they are all protesting, in one way or another, the same one world government/banksters, but if they do, I would hate to be a bankster or a tool of the banksters.

[…]

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/world-should-now-be-considered-in.html

This is all true.

The solution in the long term is for everyone to switch to gold coins for their money, on an individual basis. The abandonment of paper money and the mass disobedience of legal tender laws is the only way that everyone is going to get rid of these criminal counterfeiters.

Britain has a huge problem facing it, and the only solution that will pull it free of its crisis is the implementation of Natural Law and this island turning into a Hong Kong style free trade zone. In one year, the entire ‘crisis’ would be over; there would be widespread prosperity, a massive influx in investment from abroad, and a huge reduction in the jobless numbers.

Snipping around the edges with a pair of nail-clippers is not going to do anything to solve the problem, and if they think they can tax their way out of this problem, like the insane Greeks who are going to raise VAT to 23%, and bring in all sorts of draconian regulations like outlawing cash transfers of more than €1500, they have another thing coming. Anyone in Greece with money or brains and talent or any combination of all three is already planning to escape from that sinking ship. The only way that the criminal Greek government is going to be able to stop it is by barring the doors.

Either way, its clear that business as usual is off the table. We have said it on BLOGDIAL before in the context of Home Education; there is no money for the massive and completely illegitimate nanny state. Like all socialist states, this one has run out of other people’s money to spend; they can now either voluntarily shrink and stay in power, or collapse and let chaos bring order. The choice is a simple one, and the British already know how to run an extremely successful country as a free trade zone.

I do not believe that anyone is going to tolerate garbage from the Tories, and of course, they would be insane to do so even for one second.

While we are at it last night, I got the explanation of why Labour are polling so incredibly, inexplicably high.

I went out to a fine Tandoori restaurant, where a young waiter foolishly mentioned the election.

I said to him, “heh, anyone as long as it is not Labour.”

He said, “Why is that? What do you mean?”

I said, “They are the only one that is for the ID card; every other party is going to scrap it”.

He said, “What’s the problem with that?!”

I said, turning to the large mirror behind us, “You see that person in the mirror (pointing to him); that person is BROWN. That BROWN person is going to be stopped and searched by the police to show his ID Card just because he is BROWN. Just like the South African ‘Pass Laws’ the ID Card will be used to discriminate against you and all your family, who will have to prove, every day, that you are legally in this country. If you do not bring your card out with you, dont worry; your fingerprint in the National Identity Database will be checked with a hand held scanner that the police are going to be issued with….IF LABOUR GET IN”.

His face DROPPED, as he realised the racist nature of the ID Card.

He said, in an agitated voice, “WHY DIDNT ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS?! I JUST VOTED LABOUR BY POST!”

I said, “You what?!”

He said, “I have always voted Labour, because my Father always did, so thats why I vote for them, you know what I mean? I just told my brother to vote for them also…. why don’t they tell us these things?!”… Fingerprinting… thats like if I was a murderer or something!….

And there you have it.

I was so angry I felt sick to my stomach. I could barely eat my food.

Once again, the question came to me that I have asked myself for decades; why is it that anyone should be subject to the will of people like this?

Of course, free people are not subject to any of it whatsoever, but you, who believe in democracy and who willingly submit to it, well, you are simply and demonstrably INSANE.

People are voting who have not the slightest idea of what they are doing, its implications, the policies on offer or anything at all to do with voting or politics… they are simply doing what their Fathers did. That is why Labour are polling so highly, where they should be running at ZERO.. and of course, the totally insane LibDems want to lower the voting age to 16 to exacerbate this problem of the influence of the ignorant on the levers of control.

Yes indeed; it really is GAME OVER for this madness. Its just a question of time and the shape of the system that will emerge from the ashes. And I do hope that its not literally ashes.

You will, if you eat anything containing flour, soon be forced to eat folic acid.

Folic acid should be added to bread on a mandatory basis, the Food Standards Agency has advised government.

Basically HMG is saying a certain percentage of people, through choice or ignorance or any number of reasons, do not take folic acid as currently advocated by… er, HMG… and so the entire population must be force-fed folic acid to compensate.

Note that there will be no opt-out. Folic acid will be added to flour, not bread, meaning that even home bakers will be forced to swallow this.

Last month there were calls for all Scottish women to take folic acid – even those not planning a family – after 15 babies were born with spina bifida since the start of the year.

I sympathise with those families, but I will not have a bizarre form of collective guilt expunged by forcing me to eat something I do not wish to eat.

Cereal has long been fortified on a voluntary basis by manufacturers, but suggestions that bread must be supplemented by law have been rejected by those who argue it is tantamount to mass medication.

Not ‘tantamount to’, is mass medication. As is fluoride in water.

Concerns about the how the potential risks weigh up against the benefits have been expressed.

As well as suggestions of a link with colorectal cancer, studies have also shown it may speed up cognitive decline in elderly people with other B vitamin deficiencies.

SACN did look at these issues for a report in 2007, which ultimately recommended fortification. But following publication of that report it was also asked to analyse two more studies relating to bowel cancer.

The FSA said that since SACN’s advice on fortification has not changed significantly as a result, its own recommendation in favour remained the same.

There is good evidence to suggest a link between excess folate and increased incidence of various cancer (look up what happende in the US and Canada after folate madation).  Even if inconclusive, the doubt is enough to block mandatory addition. Or should be, were we living in The Real World.

Discussions planned

The government’s Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson is expected to discuss the issue with counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland having received the updated advice.

Sir Liam is known to be in favour of mandation.

Legislation would be necessary to introduce the measure, and it would also mean stricter controls on fortified foods like cereals to ensure people did not exceed recommended daily intakes.

How the hell is that going to work? Please, tell me? Will it be mandated that we all eat 2 slices of bread and 30g of cereal per day, and consume no foods containing natural folic acid? Will all folate supplements be withdrawn for risk of overdose? That, my friends, is one fucked up idea. In fact, so little thought, so little forward thinking at all has gone into this proposal that it does not even qualify as an ‘idea’. It is just the ramblings of madmen. Madmen who wish to mandate what you eat.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “We will now consider their recommendation for the introduction of mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid alongside controls on voluntary fortification.”

There, a man-made analogue of something you can get better from real food will be present in everything from bread to cakes to fish and chips … anything containing flour.

Now we must ask the questions, why do they wish to do this and for whose benefit? The mandation of folic acid has been pushed several times in the last decade.

Delaying folic acid fortification of flour

Governments that do not ensure fortification are committing public health malpractice

The failure of European governments to mandate universal fortification of flour with folic acid has allowed a continuing epidemic of preventable human illness. It is ironic that the United Kingdom has not required fortification, as it was a randomised controlled trial from the United Kingdom that conclusively proved that supplementation with synthetic folic acid prevents about 75% of spina bifida and anencephalycommon and serious birth defects.¹ This study provided the primary scientific basis for the United States, Canada, Chile, and other countries to require fortification.

This is an editorial from the British Medical Journal (one of the most important journals in the world) from 2002. It is a sick and twisted viewpoint, based on the opinion that ‘We Know Best’. It is belittling, patronising and enslaving. It demands that the populus kneel before it and take the medicine, and be thankful that we are being saved from our own stupidity. It makes me want to spit in the face of Godfrey P Oakley, author of this piece of sanctimonious shit and ‘folic acid ambassador‘.

In 2006 they tried again.

FOLIC ACID will be added to bread within a year to reduce the number of babies born with spina bifida and other defects in a U-turn by the Government’s food watchdog. The Food Standards Agency will recommend this week that the vitamin be added to all loaves and flour, The Times has learnt.

And in 2007 Sir Liam himself had second thoughts and blocked it, based on meaumeau’s rebuttal, no doubt.

Dr Sian Astley, from the Institute for Food Research and also quoted in todays BBQ article,  said at the time…

Dr Sian Astley from the institute said: “Fortifying UK flour with folic acid would reduce the incidence of neural tube defects (such as spina bifida).

“However, with doses of half the amount being proposed for fortification in the UK, the liver becomes saturated and unmetabolised folic acid floats around the blood stream.

“This can cause problems for people being treated for leukaemia and arthritis, women being treated for ectopic pregnancies, men with a family history of bowel cancer, people with blocked arteries being treated with a stent (an internal splint) and elderly people with poor vitamin B status.”

She said it also increased the likelihood of multiple births for women undergoing IVF treatment.

She does not appear to have changed her mind.

You can read the FSA letters and reports here.

So we are left with a scenario where around 100 neural tube birth defects per year (20% of total) may be eliminated, balanced against an unquantifiable increased risk of cancer for the entire population.  Best case, this is a 100:0 balance. Worst case, who knows?

So again, why do they wish to do this and for whose benefit?

Other than a mass exercise in control-freakery, I don’t know. Perhaps one mandation begets another.  But it will be whole grain for me.