Whilst trawling around on the interwebs, I cam across this amazing story, and a reason to award some brass balls:

Up Yours Carter-Ruck

Guido is with the in-laws for Christmas and only has internet access via a dial-up or his mobile. So the megabyte size attachment from libel solicitors Carter-Ruck received a few days ago has only this morning been downloaded. Guido emailed Carter-Ruck back at the time to explain he was driving and only had mobile internet access, so what were the contents of the attachment? No reply from Carter-Ruck.

The email contains a Court Order by Mr Justice Tugendhat, threatening Guido with contempt of Court if Guido even reveals the existence of the Order.

Guido believes that he is not the only leading blogger to receive the injunction. He is however the only one willing to break it. Unfortunately for Carter-Ruck they seem to have forgotten that since 1922 the orders of British Judges have been happily ignored by us Irish in our own country. So Carter-Ruck have merely tipped Guido off to a case of which he was previously unaware and Guido will, as a consequence, now share what little he knows with with his co-conspirators as a Christmas treat.

Somebody (unknown) hacked into the email accounts of Zac Goldsmith and his wife Sherazade, Jemima Khan also appears to have had her email accessed. They thieves tried to sell the illegally obtained information to the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday. Not really that interesting politically, though Goldsmith is a Conservative candidate and presumably Zac is his father’s son…

This particular case isn’t really a matter of principle and Guido isn’t claiming it as such. As fascinating as Zac’s love life probably is, it isn’t really hypocritical. It does illustrate how Britain is increasingly heading towards the French situation of a politically cowed client media injuncted and restricted by privacy laws from reporting on the rich and powerful. The government has also been making a lot of noise about curtailing online publishers and Stephen Carter is gearing up with legislation to attack bloggers. Freedom of the press is soon going to be even more curtailed in Britain.

So we will have a situation where offshore bloggers broadcast the truth to Britons in much the same way as Radio Free Europe kept the citizens of the Soviet Empire informed. The legislation won’t succeed, only Chinese style internet censorship will prevent the truth getting out. Is that the path politicians want to go down?

Guido Fawkes

Now there is a man who has a pair. Sadly, he calls Scientists, Architects and Engineers who have learned that the official story of the mythical ‘911’ is false, “Troofers“.

But hey, no one is perfect, right right right?

Here is a link to the Wikileaks page.

It is right that people should not have their private email sold to and then printed in newspapers. It is however, entirely wrong that secrete (yes, ‘secrete’) hearings and secret orders be used to silence people. Those same secret orders, like the National Security Letters being used in the USA are immoral and WILL ALWAYS result in an abuse. These National Security Letters have been used to stop librarians from disclosing that the government has investigated who has been borrowing what books from the library. When you get one of these letters, you are not allowed to say that you have received one.

The only correct response to these letters and orders is the one that Guido Fawkes made; to immediately release it to the public. If everyone who got one did this, they would be rendered useless.

This takes us to the subject of leaks and the recent government plans stupid idea to get into your hard drive remotely.

One of the comments at that SpyBlog post lead to this site that has a list of what to do’s to be an effective and safe whistleblower. One of the tips is as follows:

Anti-forensics precautions

• Licking a Postage Stamp is likely to leave both your fingerprints on it, and to preserver a sample of your DNA from your saliva.
• Sealing a letter envelope or parcel affixing a postage stamp using sticky adhesive tape or glue etc. will also tend to trap possibly identifiable fibres, dust particles, hairs, skin cells and fingerprints (which may contain sufficient DNA for analysis) , or even a characteristic scent which could be used by tracker dogs.

Commercial Postal Box rental, either from a private company or for an extra fee from the state postal service, has its place, but there is always a financial paper trail to the person who rents the box, and often CCTV video footage of anyone picking up mail from such boxes.

Wikileaks.org offers a supposedly secure Postal Whistleblowing service, for whistleblower leaks to them, but they do not seem to recommend many anti-forensics precautions. except regarding the serail numbers embedded into batches of CDROMs, and the unique Recorder IDs which most CD or DVD burners embed in each copy which they produce.

Interesting…lets think some more about it.

Most stamps today come in the form of a white adhesive label, laser printed behind the counter and then stuck on to your mail by the Post Office worker:

As you can see the date is on there as well as a serial number.

The other types of stamp are the ones that are sold in booklets and which have peel adhesive as the backing. Licking stamps rarely happens today, but it is good advice not to lick stamps nonetheless.

A bigger threat to you is the time-stamp of these stamps combined with the CCTV that is found in most Offices. In order to see who mailed the package, all they have to do is look at the time-stamp from the serial number, and then go back to the time index on the CCTV footage to see your face.

If you want to minimize the effectiveness of a forensic attack, use gloves. Use gloves when you buy your envelopes. Use gloves when you make your photocopies in a public place. Use gloves when you buy your adhesive stamps and use gloves when you stick them to the envelope.

Do not use envelopes from a sealed pack. There are many places where you can buy packs of envelopes that are not sealed. In fact, these are often displayed adjacent to the Post Office queue. Why should you do this? If you use one of these loose envelopes, you can be sure that the sneezes, browsing touches, hairs and and breath traces of tens of thousands of people are going to be on them. These envelopes will be hopelessly contaminated, and that is good for you.

Now you can see yet another reason why setting up a National DNA Register would be such a bad thing. If they had such a register, not only could they catch a whistleblower who was not careful, but they would falsely accuse and then investigate tens of thousands of people simply because they stood in a queue in a Post Office.

I have updated our own additions to the SpyBlog post the most important one being to dump winblows if you are still using it. In the light of govenrments wanting to gain backdoor access to your files, why make it easy for them by running an operating system that is insecure by design?

Ubuntu is massively peer reviewed, and as soon as any flaw is found, it is announced immediately and patched very soon after for free. It is like being a part of a huge body with a self aware immune system that by its nature, cannot lie to itself. This is the first time ever that the vast majority can take advantage of this high level of security and openness without needing any technical prowess.

Once the penny drops about how secure Ubuntu is, several things are going to happen.

First, there is going to be a mass adoption and abandonment of windows.

Second, there will be moves to outlaw Ubuntu, since it is secure by default.

We can make the second prediction because we remember l’attitude Fraiçaise and how they had to change 180° from their previous total ban on encryption. After all, it would look ridiculous if every browser had 128 bit SSL and it was illegal to use it; it would mean no credit card transactions online etc etc. They had no choice but to cave in, and in fact, this is always true; when governments are faced with an entire population that point blank refuses to obey, or they are faced with a massive loss of revenues because they will not adapt to a new way of doing business, they cave in and ‘change course’.

If everyone switches to Ubuntu, then banning it means banning computing itself and destroying commerce, learning and communication completely. There is no way that any government would allow that to happen, so as long as Ubuntu remains under the control of its thousands of developers there would be nothing that anyone could do to stop it. All attempts to poison it would fail, any attempt to attack it would strengthen it – it would be game over for mass automatic surveillance.

By adopting Ubuntu to replace windows everyone gets:

• Unprecedented security
• Unprecedented stability
• Unprecedented ease of use on a Linux system
• Freedom to copy and distribute ad infinitum
• Free updates forever
• Free extension of the useful life of hardware
• Free world class applications (Gimp, Open Office, Evolution etc)
• Ownership of the software
• Permanent exclusion of governments ability to taint the OS

Ubuntu is a massive win for everyone. It is a game changing event, and every move to violate our privacy will simply push more and more people away from windows and to Ubuntu.

The Oxford Libertarian Society mailing list mentions a conference called ‘Modern Liberty’.

Let’s smell it…

Why?

From Anthony Barnett, Phil Booth, Shami Chakrabarti, Henry Porter, Stuart Weir

We are entering a dangerous period in our country.

Economic turmoil threatens profound hardship and disharmony.

Good. Now is the chance to put things on a better footing. Starting by admitting the true cause of this ‘crisis’; fiat currency. This is an unprecedented opportunity to stop the war machine permanently by choking off its fuel; the printing presses that manufacture money by the command of government.

Disenchantment with politics is growing and even legitimate protest is threatened by an unprecedented programme of challenges to our rights, freedoms and democracy.

Good. Politics is corrupt by its nature. Legitimate protest is worthless and has been for decades. We have been over that before.

Sixty years ago Britain was a proud co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Now it is increasingly centralized, abandoning its historic principles some of which date back to the Magna Carta.

And it is getting worse because gatekeepers an safety valvists deliberately prevent the necessary change from taking place by diverting the anger and momentum of the population into useless ‘feel good’ activities that have no real effect in attacking the problems. We have told you about them before.

The Government’s continued stated determination to extend detention without charge in terrorism cases to 42 days is one symbol of the damage done to our hard-won rights and freedoms. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which gives hundreds of agencies access to people’s records without their knowing, is another. The collection of all available records on a huge central database for the use of the authorities is a third.

None of these things could happen absent the cooperation of all the people who think they are wrong. Listing all the bad stuff over and over and publishing condemnations of them does not destroy them. If you want to destroy something, you have to make a plan and then execute it.

The fundamentals behind all of this evil are not being addressed at all. One of the people out there who does address this is Jan Helfeld. When all these people address this fundamental issue, then the whole true nature of the problem will start to unravel. Then, when they eventually get around to the nature of money, ‘their’ money, the circle will be complete. The answer to all these problems will present itself by virtue of the facts being laid out in front of everyone.

But if you look at who is lined up to speak at this gathering, you will see that for the most part it is precisely the sort of people who have absolutely no interest in changing the way things work. See below.

We believe that such threats can be overcome but only if the public is woken to the dangers. While we may be impatient for action, the issues must be addressed in an open-minded way with as thorough and accessible public debate as possible.

First of all you have to define, precisely, the problem. There are some things which are non-negotiable, like ID-Cards. No amount of open mindedness and public debate has anything to do with the wrongness of this and other subjects when it comes to people’s rights; murdering is wrong, ID-Cards are wrong, stealing is wrong, and employing others to steal or murder or put numbers on people on your behalf is wrong. There are many uninformed, purely ignorant people who think that ID-Cards are OK; you know the type, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”. Are we to consider the unthinking opinions of these people like they have merit? I think not. And this goes right to the heart of the problem; Democracy is fundamentally flawed, because the illiterate, the unintelligent and the evil can use the vote to force other people to do something through violence financed by the collective.

Therefore we invite you to join a Convention on Modern Liberty. It will ask three broad questions:

Are our freedoms and rights threatened by an over-powerful state and if so how do we defend ourselves from this?

If the majority who show up say ‘no’, then what? It’s all over? This is why you people FAIL.

Are dangers to our security from terrorism and other threats, from climate change to pandemics being used to attack our rights, and how can we best defend ourselves?

This is like asking wether or not the sun is hot. As to how we can best defend ourselvs, history has all the answers to that one. The real question is what can we plan right now to DO IT.

How can we arouse sustained public interest?

The public…what is to be done with them?

It only takes a small minority of people to set things right. We do not need to get everyone on board (that pesky idea of ‘Democracy’ again, EVERYBODY, the MAJORITY must be behind something for it to be ‘right’. It’s a lie.)

We are making Modern Liberty a convention not a conference. We want to bring as many people together to see what common ground can be reached in defence of our freedoms.

No. When there is ‘common ground’ there is the risk of compromise. If the majority of people there agree that its OK for the state to steal from some to give to others or impose ID-Cards then its no better than any other grouping of people who agree to do evil ‘for the greater good’.

The Guardian is the main media partner.

The Guardian is the worst criminal in this affair. It has some good articles once in a while, but these are dead batteries buried deep in a landfill. They routinely call for Britain to interfere in other people’s countries, scream for government to solve ‘problems’ and are generally on the wrong side of history.

Fundamental rights and freedoms are common to us all.

No, they are not. People in other countries are not the business of The Guardian, or of you or I. What I believe applies only to me, and I do not have the right to force my beliefs on anyone else, or to join with others to make them obey my beliefs or service my views.

If you really want to live in a free country, this is the first principle. You cannot initiate force against anyone and you cannot ask someone to do it on your behalf.

Still don’t get it?

The Universal Declaration recognises ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. In Britain such values have an even longer history.

No. The foundation of peace is the acceptance that no one has the right to initiate force. There is no such thing as ‘the human family’ there are only people with their own beliefs, who organize themselves in the way that they like. The shape that those forms take is not our business, and no one has the right to say that anyone or everyone is part of this fictitious collective ‘human family’ that has to live by the rules written down by some wine soaked career diplomats in New York. This declaration is the same paper that is used as a pretext for murdering people and toppling governments.

We are indeed the inheritors of an inspiring tradition of liberty.

This is not true. If Britain had a tradition of liberty we would not be suffering the abuses that we are today. The British have been living under a gentlemen’s agreement that totalitarianism was not good for business. Free range livestock is what Britain has been all about. Steph says it very well, in that link. I will leave it to others to thoroughly debunk that particular passage.

At the same time technical advances from information technology to explosives and the threats of catastrophic climatic change have altered the framework of power and fear.

Wow, its recursive; abusing the generation fear to talk about the problem of the abuse of the generation fear.

This calls for a renewal of our democratic self-confidence.

WRONG. What we need is a change to principles of liberty AWAY from democracy and false, delusional ‘self-confidence’. We need to address the problems directly with a set of simple principles that are applicable to any situation so that even the thickest of people can point to them as a basis for absolute refusal to obey anything that is offensive to the free man.

This is the purpose of the Convention on Modern Liberty. Whether you agree or not we hope you will join us to debate these issues.

Amazing. Wether you agree or not, we hope you will come and spend time talking to us Question Time style.

Good luck with that.

As everything gets worse and worse, the heat under the pot increases and they need a bigger release valve to control the overheating pressure cooker containing the incandescent rage of the population. The biggest gatekeepers and cattle herders gather to vent off the steam, and that is what this gathering is. It is not in any way dangerous to the problem. It presents no threat, no threat of a solution, and not even the promise of a solution. It is chaired by people who are the problem, the panel members are almost without exception people who are the problem and so it is a complete waste of time.

All these people, since they cannot come up with a program of strategies that revolve around destroying what is wrong (a strategy to commit suicide) will be aiding the problem by making people feel that they are still ‘free’ since they can organize and gather without permission.

Remember; these are the same people who offer a candle lit vigil should Iran be bombed with weapons they have paid for. These people are part of the problem, and I would not trust any of them with overseeing an empty milk bottle; never mind guarding my liberty, (least of all The Guardian). The only one with any real credentials is Phill Booth who, via No2ID is actually asking people to disobey the law en masse and building an organization to make it happen – the only thing that will stop the problems dead – and they are having a real measurable effect.

Lets see who else is in there:

Anthony Barnett (openDemocracy)

“openDemocracy offers in-depth news analysis and commentary from a pro-Democracy, pro-Human Rights perspective”

I am AGAINST Democracy. Democracy is BAD, people who want to spread it everywhere world-wide are EVIL or in league with it. See what I mean?

Phil Booth (NO2ID)

Really worthwhile. I put my money where my mouth is with them. Real people offering real information and real solutions. No calls for pointless gatherings. Highly efficient. Highly focussed. And its working. They are actually dangerous. Maybe this is why they are part of this…I’m sure that there are plenty of people who would want No2ID de fanged….hmmmmmmmm!

Shami Chakrabarti (Liberty)

No, no, and no.

Henry Porter (the Observer)

Henry Porter has written many excellent articles and is mostly on the right side. There really isn’t anything more to say about him. Everyone does what they are capable of doing, and he does what he does. He calls a spade a spade. Sadly, the evil people don’t care at all what anyone writes in a newspaper, and so if you are not going to use it to organize disobedience, there comes a point where writing articles that describe a problem accurately serve no further purpose. Its like reporting calmly that your neighbors are being taken away in railway cars to be incinerated. They will end up as ashes while the newspaper rolls off the presses.

Then again, lets look at this from his last column of 2008:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all but that is not the same as the state granting itself powers to know everything about us and to bully those who resist its invasive instincts. In 2004, the Courts and Tribunals Enforcement Act made it legal for the first time in 400 years for bailiffs to force entry into homes on a civil order and remove goods. Now we hear from the Justice Ministry that bailiffs may offer reasonable violence to force inside their own homes. That gives us an idea of how the government plans to enforce the £1,000 fines handed out to ID card refuseniks – ultimately by violence meted out by men who may be no better than nightclub bouncers. It is astonishing that we are going to allow this to happen.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/25/civilliberties

“I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all”. Well, this is what we call ‘epic fail’. Once you give power to the state, legitimized by a vote, you inevitably end up with the very situation that we are in now. This belief is fundamentally wrong and immoral, as you can see explained here, and as we see explained here.

The only astonishing thing here is that Mr. Porter asserts that it is astonishing that ‘we are going to allow this to happen’. If ‘we’ give our consent to it via democracy, and he believes that “that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all” then surely it is completely legitimate for bailiffs to enter houses on civil orders. If they are behaving on ‘behalf of us all’ then it is legitimate. Period. Mr. Porter cannot pick and choose what parts of Democracy he does and does not like; majority rules and once the majority has been given power to do something, it is by definition right.

That is the true face of what Henry Porter believes in.

I suspect that he doesn’t know what he believes in at all, and that he would crumble under the questioning of Jan Helfeld if he were to be forced to strip his beliefs down to their core elements and explain what he actually thinks from first principles.

The fact of the matter is that the state granting powers to itself is exactly how it works and now it always has worked. The public, the electorate, has never been allowed fine grained control over the legislation that goes through Parliament; which has always voted on whatever they like without any reference to or meaningful consultation with the public. That is part of the reason why the statute book is full of garbage.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot on the one hand, believe that it is OK for violence to be done on behalf of the collective but then say its NOT OK in certain circumstances just because you say so. It is either right or wrong. What Mr. Porter is referring to when he says, “but that is not the same as” is the breaking of the gentlemen’s agreement, “its not cricket to give bailiffs the power to break into your home and use violence old chap”. Well, these people are not playing cricket…certainly not with YOU.

I’m afraid that many of the people interested in this gathering are of the same confused type. Look at this comment and the others on this post about The Countryside Alliance joining this farce:

Anna Stanley says:
December 31st, 2008at 9:17 pm(#)

In February 2008, an independent survey of over 2,000 British people was carried out. Of these, 73% said that fox hunting should remain illegal. The House of Commons voted in favour of the Hunting Bill by 339 votes to 155. There is no doubt that the minority are unable to hunt as they please, but it is clear that an overwhelming majority of people are in favour of the ban on hunting with dogs.

Whether the Countryside Alliance like it or not, we live in a democracy. There is no violation of civil liberties here, merely proper application of the democratic process.

Their prescence at this conference is insulting to those attending who are genuinely in need of support.

And there you have it, “we live in a democracy. There is no violation of civil liberties here, merely proper application of the democratic process.” meaning that if the majority rule that all penises must be cut off, thats it, off they go ‘we live in a democracy’. This is the sort of moron that we share air with, and with whom Henry Porter partially shares his philosophy. Bankrupt.

But I must move on.

Stuart Weir (Democratic Audit)

“Democratic Audit is an active research organisation which audits democracy and human rights in the UK and internationally. We are a consortium of scholars, lawyers and others. We often work with partners in mature and developing democracies to assess the quality of their democratic arrangements.”

Democracy. We have said enough about that. As for ‘developing democracies’ you mean like Iraq? I think we have all had enough of THAT also. Spreading democracy is evil. Period.

http://www.modernliberty.net/what/why

and look at the first Plenary

Chair: Georgina Henry (executive comment editor, The Guardian)
Speakers:
Nick Clegg MP (leader, Liberal Democrats)
Dominic Grieve QC MP (Shadow Attorney General)
Helena Kennedy QC (Doughty Street Chambers)
David Lammy MP (Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property)
Ken Macdonald QC (former Director of Public Prosecutions)

Second Plenary16.00 – 17.00

Freedom and Democracy after the Market meltdown

Chair: Anthony Barnett (founder, openDemocracy)

Speakers:
Chris Huhne MP (Liberal Democrat spokesman on Home Affairs)
Will Hutton (Chief Executive, The Work Foundation)
Caroline Lucas MEP (leader, Green Party)
Chuka Umunna (Labour Party candidate, Streatham)

Lammy? Lucas? Umunna? Clegg? These are the very people who are on the way OUT!

This is a plenary of foxes gathered to discuss how many chickens they will consume in their ideal Democracy. David Lammy? You have got to be freaking kidding me. Why not get Clarke, Blunkett or Smith in while we are on the case? It’s a good thing that guilt by association is hogwash, otherwise we wold have to throw out the baby with the bath-water on this one.

Its £35.00 to get in.

Finally, the thing that irks me about many of these people is their misuse of the Possessive Pronoun ‘Our’. They misuse it everywhere – its ‘our’ democracy, ‘our’ money, ‘our’ troops, ‘our’ police, ‘our’ taxes, ‘our’ country, ‘our’ $something_that_is_not_actually_owned_collectively.

Happy New Year BLOGDIAL Man Dem!!!!

[Google translation from German to English. – WK]

Wirtschaftswoche
06.12.2008

On the black market for personal data after searching the business week, the bank accounts of 21 million German citizens in circulation. Then, in extreme cases, three out of four households in Germany fear that money deducted from her checking account, without ever that they have given a direct debit.

Dusseldorf magazine was the gigantic amount of data for almost twelve million euros offered. A CD with 1.2 million customers received the Business Week as a model. In addition to the Personal details such as dates of birth include the records with the bank account number and bank code, in some cases even more detailed information on assets.

The Duesseldorf prosecutor in the week, the explosive economic data on Thursday passed, must now clarify how so many account numbers illegally in circulation could. According to Business Week first traces lead almost completely on small call center operators. To serve mainly to highly competitive mass markets such as telecommunications, power or cable television many suppliers almost exclusively external service providers and call centers. These receive the relevant customer data in part by the client. Turn the service providers for their subcontractors, lost control over the data sometime in nothingness.

[…]

http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmer-maerkte…

You see?

Just like we, and other people have been saying, the data that is collected in any database, once it gets out, either wholesale or piecemeal will be collected by criminals, compiled and then sold to whoever wants it.

You are guaranteed that before this newspaper, ‘received the Business Week as a model the CD’ that this information was used for many months to slowly leech money from the accounts of hundreds of thousands of people; think about it; you take a random amount from 20 to 90 euros from each account, spread over a large number of accounts in different banks, going to many different bank accounts and there will be no pattern to discern. Once you have done this, the data is useless because any further harvesting will set off alarms. That is when the data is valuable only as something to sell to the criminals on the lower rungs, who have a different risk threshold.

This will be repeated with every sort of data imaginable, because all data is valuable to someone.

That means, again, that:

• ContactPoint will be released on DVDR.
• The NIR will be released on DVDR.
• <insert name of government database> will be released on DVDR.

And remember; just because you have not read about a particular database being leaked, that does not mean that it has not happened. Criminals can keep secrets and so can governments; many times the latter does not know that the former has access.

What a mess!

And what is so galling, infuriating and exhasperating is the fact that Gordon Mass Murdering agromegly Monster Brown admits that government can never keep databases safe and yet they are going ahead anyway with ContactPoint. A most disturbing, sickening and irresponsible action…but then again, what is putting 11 million children in a shopping cart for paedophiles compared to mass murdering one million people? It’s nothing at all, and that is the problem; once you have graduated to the level of a murderer, anything else bad that is less severe than murder is trivial.

That is what you have running the UK.

Like we have been saying for years:

• an ID card scheme that covers only some of the population doesnt make any sense.
• Running ID Card sweeps on only some types of people doesnt make any sense.
• If you have an NIR, EVERYONE has to be in it for it to make any sense.

If Nu Labor had put all of the details of the ID Card scheme into one bill, it would never have passed. They understood perfectly that once the legislation creating the card is passed, an infinite number of subsequent pieces of legislation can be introduced that all make use of the card, thus, they can build a total police state infrastructure by adding on whatever they like down the road. The key to it all is the NIR and the ID Card. The legislation creating it had to be as simple as possible so as not to raise suspicion.

Of course, the computer illiterate MPs passed it, and now we see the legislation that adds the ‘icing on the cake’:

Police and immigration given powers to demand to see identification
Police and immigration officers will be able to stop Britons and demand they prove their identity under proposed sweeping new powers.

Clauses in the draft Immigration and Citizenship Bill give state officials the power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are without needing any suspicion of a potential crime.

This is the logical conclusion of having an ID card of any sort. Once some people have one, everyone has to have one.

Civil liberty groups warned that the catch-all clauses would effectively cover any British citizen who has ever left the UK, even for a holiday, because they will have “entered” the UK on their return.

This is the insane part that will be covered in some subsequent legislation. You cannot prove that you have never been outside of the country ‘on the spot’ obviously. For the sake of argument, there will be people who have never left the UK; how are you going to prove that on the street when some nosey Fascist asks for your ID?

Refusing to hand over the necessary documents would be a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of almost a year in prison and/or a hefty fine.

And of course, the ID card is still not compulsory. Riiiiiiight.

Officers will also be able to hold someone until they meet the requirements and can even demand a medical examination, although that will be more targeted at foreign nationals arriving from countries with high health risks of contagious diseases.

This means forced vaccination and forced medication of course. One assumes that these clauses are meant for immigration staff; if that is the case, people entering will already ‘meet the requirements’. If they have a false passport, how does that relate in any way to their health status?

If a policeman on the street finds an illegal immigrant, does that mean that they will be subject to forced medical exams and everything else? These people have totally lost the plot.

Critics said the move would see a return to war-time Britain where citizens had to carry their “papers” with them and accused the Government of bringing in compulsory ID cards by the back door.

This is through the front door, clearly. So was the Poll Tax.

Phil Booth, national coordinator of the NO2ID campaign, said: “We have not had any sort of law like this outside of war time.

“In practice it will be impossible to determine who has or has not entered the UK and therefore this applies to anyone in the UK.”

Bingo, and that is the whole point. They want everyone in the NIR.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne added: “This is potentially a catch-all power which would allow the police or the officials to arrest and hold anyone who was unable to prove their own identity.

“The Government has always promised that it would never introduce such a draconian intrusion into our daily lives.”

ROTFL…”The Government promised” ….. ‘Liberal Democrats’ BWAHAHHHAHAHAHAAHAAA!!!!

The clauses in the Bill, contained in the Queen’s Speech, were unearthed by civil rights group Liberty and centre on a power to examine those who “arrive in, enter or seek to enter the UK”.

A sub-clause refers to anyone who “has entered the UK” and can therefore mean anyone who has entered either recently or in the past.

It means police or immigration officers would have the power to stop anyone, either at a port of entry or inside the country, and demand their identity purely on the basis they may have entered the UK at some point.

Clause 28 gives the power to require the production of a passport or other valid identity document.

A Liberty spokeswoman said: “This extends powers of examination to several new categories including anyone in the UK (whether a British citizen or not) who has ever left the UK at any time.”

She went on to say, “we strongly recommend that all Britons refuse to enter the NIR, and to comply with any request to show ID, point blank, as an act of civil disobedience. We have a legal fund to defend all those who disobey this immoral legislation”.

POOP! Awake now.

Currently, police or immigration officers can ask for identity if there is reasonable suspicion of a crime or immigration offence.

Probable cause. It is reasonable.

The Liberty spokeswoman added: “Clause 28(3) dramatically changes this premise allowing identity documents to be demanded of anyone that has at any time entered the UK by anyone authorised by the Secretary of State. No suspicion of criminality or immigration offending is required.”

She said it went “far beyond” what is reasonable for immigration control, adding: “We believe that the catch-all remit of this power is disproportionate and that its enactment would not only damage community relations but would represent a fundamental shift in the relationship between the State and those present in the UK.”

Around eight in ten UK citizens have a passport and the majority of those will have left the country at some point and therefore have “entered” again.

The clauses are in the draft bill to be put forward in the Queen’s Speech.

It doesn’t matter what legislation they pass. If no one obeys it, it is meaningless. Just like the insane drug laws; no one obeys them, everyone is doing it and the law is made to look ridiculous.

They say refusal to submit to demands for identification would be a criminal offence that carries a maximum penalty of no more than 51 weeks in prison and or a £5,000.

They don’t have enough space for the people they already have in gaol. Imbeciles!

The Government is currently rolling out the controversial ID cards programme for both foreign nationals and Britons but has insisted it will not be compulsory for Britons to carry the cards.

No one with a working brain cell ever believed that.

But Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti said: “Sneaking in compulsory identity cards via the back door of immigration law is a cynical escalation of this expensive and intrusive scheme.

Time for a candle lit vigil then ay Shami?

Shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green, added “This scheme will do nothing to improve our security, may make it worse, and will certainly land the tax-payer with a multi-million pound bill.

“Labour should be concentrating their efforts on things that will actually improve our security, like a dedicated UK Border police force, instead of trying to introduce ID cards through the back door.

“Now more than ever the issue of our basic freedoms is very important.”

And he knows what its like PERSONALLY.

A Home Office spokeswoman insisted there were no plans to make it compulsory for British citizens to carry or produce forms of identity.

And what was this persons IDENTITY?!??!

She said: “It is simply wrong to claim there are any plans whatsoever to make identity cards compulsory for British citizens or to require British citizens to have their ID card – or any other form of ID – on them at all times and to present it when asked to do so.

What is your name, in what office do you work?

“From next year British citizens will have the convenience of being able to use identity cards to travel in Europe, but they will not become the only way to prove your identity at borders and the UK passport will still be valid.

As we know, you do not need to have a passport to enter the UK if you are British.

“In order to maintain an effective immigration control it is only right that we ask everyone attempting to enter to the UK to produce a valid identity document.”

This is manifestly not about that. BETCH.

But Mr Booth said it was “appallingly-drafted legislation”, adding: “They have got to the point that we must take the worst possible implication of the legislation.”

[…]

Telegraph

No one is going to obey any of the ID Card legislation. Pilots are ready to strike over it, students are waking up to it, Scotland has rejected them outright. They are going to run up against a brick wall with this, and rightly so. It is a terrible, monstrous system of police state control of an unprecedented invasiveness that will turn this once great country into an unrecognizable nightmare land.

These three videos go together.

Do you know why?

Trawling through links on a Sunday afternoon, we see that one of my favorite mathematicians

Disclose.tv – The REAL Maverick: Present Economy worse than Depr Video

confirms the ‘Monetary Monoculture Danger’ BLOGDIAL post, and introduces us to a new smart guy, Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know….” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

I like it.

He wrote a book called ‘Black Swans’, and on his page there is this line:

The Black Swan: Quotes & Warnings that the Imbeciles Chose to Ignore

I REALLY like it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (April 2007)

For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims –epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance –and the use of “science” to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis –worse than what we have ever seen — was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years!

Regular readers of BLOGDIAL will know why this man and his work has such a strong appeal to us.

From what little we can glean from an hour of digging around, this man is a real scientist i.e. a scientist that is outside of the Science Cult.

His Black Swan Theory dovetails perfectly with what we and many other people have been saying about UFOs for decades. All you need is a single event to prove that everything you believe is wrong; in this case, all you need is a single instance of a UFO being of ET origin to demonstrate that there is Extraterrestrial Life and that some of it is intelligent and some of it can get here from wherever it is they come from. Such an even would also trash the mistaken idea that the distances are too far, and every other false piece of reasoning to exclude the possibility that Alien scientists and explorers coming here.

No matter what you think, no matter what you want to believe, facts are either true or they are not and the rules of evidence do not change simply because you do not like what they imply. Putting people out of work for their entire lives does not make something you find unthinkable not true.

But I digress.

We can now add Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Nicholas Taleb to the list of people who have been warning about an impending financial super crash, and Dr Mandelbrot brings a particularly interesting point of view to the table=, because in the discipline that he pioneered we can find a solution to the booms and busts that are created by interfereing in markets, and I wrote of it in my Monoculture post.

If it is true that economic systems are ‘far more complicated than the weather’ AND (for the sake of argument) we want to stop polluting to prevent an environmental disaster from happening, then governments should also get out of the way of how economies spontaneously and naturally order themselves.

On the surface, governments implicitly agree that market forces exist and that you can precisely alter their behavior by chanting the rates of taxes; Gordon Brown’s government is lowering VAT to 15.5% from 17.5% to encourage spending. This is an admission that indeed, human beings are rational, and that the market reacts to prices rationally. If we extrapolate this move and eliminate all government from the equation, that is, all taxes, would not the economy experience a boom big enough to correct the problem? If this is the case, then why not reduce VAT to 0% if this is the greatest crisis since the great depression? Why keep any VAT at all?

Then we read that there is a secret plan to increase VAT to 18.5% after this ‘VAT holiday’ is over. Wait a minute, if more buying and selling is a good thing, and lowering VAT makes this happen, raising VAT will cause buying and selling to slow down, which is exactly what ‘we do not want’.

Looking at this even in these most simple of terms, and then taking into account the true nature of the scale and complexity of billions of people interacting on the smallest of scales, its clear that this government and in fact no government could possibly understand and regulate any economy for any purpose, and they demonstrate the absolute pinnacle of conceit by thinking that they actually can control the economy. This is quite apart from the moral aspects of their ‘running’ the economy by having a monopoly on initiating force.

We are faced with two choices when we observe government interfering with markets.

The first, is that they do not know what they are doing; they are incompetent and are recklessly tampering with something that they do not understand, and that this crisis is a direct result of this incompetence.

The second, they DO know what they are doing, and they have in their possession a complete scientific model that explains every part of the economy, and that they have deliberately created this crash as a means to some end.

No government, not even that of Gordon Brown would claim that they have a complete, mathematical model of the economy that they work from and use to make decisions. This means that they cannot possibly know what they are doing or what the effects of their decisions will be in the future.

Both of these cases mean that no government should be involved in any aspect of any economy, since it is inevitable that they will do harm and not good either by incompetence or by malice. This is, once again, completely separate from their lack of a right to interfere in the private transactions of people who do no harm to others while transacting.

In order for any reasonable man to accept that these evil entities should have any say in the economy, just for the sake of argument, they would have to demonstrate that a government was competent, but this presents problems by itself; what metrics should be used, who is to say what a success is or is not etc etc. The fact of the matter is that there is no man alive and no group of men that has either the tools or the experience or the knowledge of what is happening right now to be able to steer the behemoth that is an economy of even a small country.

Like I said in my other post, if people are left to their own devices, we will get stability; long term stability where everyone knows, more or less, what is going to happen in the long term future in a narrow field. What is for certain is that once the government, whether it is incompetent or evil, is taken out of the equation if there are future crashes we will be able to respond to them in ways that ameliorate the situation much more rapidly. By nature also, since we would not be in a monetary monoculture, these crashes would be highly localized and not international or even continental.

Just when it looked like statism was in an unchallenged political trajectory in the U.S. and Europe, the classical liberal President of the Czech Republic, Dr. Vaclav Klaus, stands to become the next President of the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc. Needless to say, those who F. A. Hayek dubbed “the socialists of all parties” (be they red, brown, or green) are none too pleased. As the New York Times reports:

Now the Czech Republic is about to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union and there is palpable fear that Mr. Klaus will embarrass the world’s biggest trading bloc and complicate its efforts to address the economic crisis and expand its powers. His role in the Czech Republic is largely ceremonial, but he remains a powerful force here, has devotees throughout Europe and delights in basking in the spotlight.

“Oh God, Vaclav Klaus will come next,” read a recent headline in the Austrian daily Die Presse, in an article anticipating the havoc he could wreak in a union of 470 million people already divided over its future direction.

A professional economist and devotee of the work of Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and other free market thinkers, Dr. Klaus is well-known for challenging the extremely harmful folly of central government planning and interventionism. For example, he has called the current climate change hysteria “a dangerous myth” in misguiding western officials to adopt pointless and anti-social measures, he has derided the bailouts of European banks as “irresponsible protectionism,” and when it comes to the European Union (EU), he is a vocal opponent of the Lisbon Treaty and has called for nothing less than for the EU itself to be “scrapped.” And while other western leaders rattle their swords at Russia, Dr. Klaus has forged closer ties for expanded trade and other peaceful relations.

His accomplishments in the former Czechoslovakia are impressive, as the Times notes:

As a former finance minister and prime minister, he is credited with presiding over the peaceful 1993 split of Czechoslovakia into two states and helping to transform the Czech Republic into one of the former Soviet bloc’s most successful economies.

For the Independent Institute, Dr. Klaus has served as Honorary Co-Chairman and a featured speaker at our 1998 Dinner to Honor Sir John Marks Templeton (listen here), and Honorary Co-Chair of our recent event, A Gala for Liberty, at which we honored entrepreneur William K. Bowes, Jr., actor/director Andy Garcia, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu.

[…]

http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=581

I simply cannot believe it.

My favorite Czech is going to get a chance to make real trouble!

We have already written about this particular individual before.

And of course, the timing could not be better. At the very least, he will be able to bring reality to the table in the form of Austrian Economics and plain common sense.

In the age of ‘teh inernetz’ it is always a safe bet that someone, somewhere, is thinking the same thing that you are thinking.

It seems that the Lakota Sioux have taken the initiative and are starting a clean, no fractional reserve, no Federal Reserve Note bank. The word about this is spreading like wildfire; this is because everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion that the only real money is Gold, Silver and other precious metals, and that Fractional Reserve Banking is fundamentally immoral and a form of legalize counterfeiting and that the best sort of bank for your savings would be one that only held gold that you deposited.

Consent of the Governed does the hard work:

Remember my blogpost about the Liberty Dollar? Those are still available – but now the People of Lakota are launching a Private Bank for Only Silver and Gold Currencies; and you can convert your US Dollars for their Gold and Silver. You don’t even have to be an honorary Sioux to participate.

In a stunning development, the Free & Independent People of Lakota announced today the introduction of the world’s first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that accepts only silver and gold currencies for deposit.

“Today is a great day for us, a day that we begin to exercise our rights as a sovereign people with strength and pride,” comments Canupa Gluha Mani, Tetuwan Council Judicial Member of the Cante Tenza “Strong Heart” Warrior Society. Mani’s 2500 member warrior society has contracted to provide private security services for the Free Lakota Bank.

“We invite people of any creed, faith or heritage to unite in an effort to reclaim control of wealth. It is our hope that other tribal nations and American citizens recognize the importance of silver and gold as currency and decide to mirror our system of honest trade.” Mani, also known as Duane Martin Sr, is a member of the delegation that declared Lakota independence on December 17th, 2007.The Free Lakota Bank issues an American Open Currency Standard Approved currency, making it readily accepted for trade by over 10,000 merchants and businesses across the continent; this is similar to the Liberty Dollar.

The announcement about this also mentioned that:

The launch of the Free Lakota Bank is also an incredible victory for StrikeForce Technologies, the access control experts providing depositor Out-of-Band Authentication. As the Free Lakota Bank does not require a name, photo identification or social security number to transact, StrikeForce’s technology met the challenge of limiting fraud without requiring controversial biometric technology.

They are using some security software for deposits and withdrawals, and since people have become used to doing banking online even with institutions that don’t have physical “branches” like ING, this is nothing new.

It looks like the Native Americans are flexing their position of sovereignty to create gold and silver backed currency – I sure wish the United States would do the same. Instead the US is just printing up gobs of fiat money that shows signs of eventual collapse. I’ll bet the Lakota’s website and phones will be very busy.

The People of Lakota invite depositors to establish accounts and invest in the Free Lakota Bank’s General Investment Fund, the fund it uses to develop profitable free-market enterprise inside Lakota territory. Mani comments that the nation despises donations and charity, and instead insists instead on “earning our wealth by creating value for those that place their faith and trust in our system.”

Let’s hope that the Feds don’t raid them and steal all their Gold and Silver like they did to the Liberty Dollar folks.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion…when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing…when you see your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you…when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice…you may know that your society is doomed.” – Ayn Rand – “Atlas Shrugged”

[…]

Consent Of The Governed

If the Lakota Sioux are indeed a sovereign people, then the Feds cannot go there and raid this bank. What they might do however, is order a Gold and Silver confiscation, and make it illegal for you to take your money off of Lakota Sioux land. We shall see.

I do not think that this will be the first bank of this kind. The more people wake up, the greater the demand will be for a no Fractional Reserve bank that keeps your savings in something other than Federal Reserve Notes.

I have to read their privacy page. If they keep your affairs 100% private no matter what, then they have ‘the total package’.

Before you read this post, press play on this:

The Scottish Parliament has voted against the UK Government’s plans to introduce ID cards.

MSPs backed a Scottish Government motion stating the scheme would not increase security or deter crime, while raising concerns about civil liberties.

Scots Community Safety Minister Fergus Ewing said the estimated £5bn needed for ID cards should be spent elsewhere.

But Labour declined to back the motion, saying parliament should focus on issues which were devolved to Scotland.

The first identity cards will be issued to foreign nationals from next week, while young people will be asked to sign up from 2010 before their expected general introduction from 2012.

Mr Ewing told parliament ID cards were a “colossal waste of money”, and that the UK Government could not be trusted to keep the data safe.

“This scheme won’t achieve its primary stated objective of making people safer nor reducing the terrorist threat,” he said.

“We do believe that it poses an unacceptable threat to citizens’ privacy and civil liberties.”

Liberal Democrat MSP Robert Brown said he was uneasy at the decision to issue cards to foreign nationals.

He said: “It goes under the rather unpleasant title of identity cards for foreign nationals, with all the nasty implied innuendo of the recipients being aliens, other people from far-off countries that we know nothing about and probably terrorists anyway.”

Tory Bill Aitken said governments had every justification to take action on improving security, but added: “Where there have been terrible terrorist outrages in the past, in countries where identity cards are compulsory, they have made not one whit of difference.”

Pointing out Holyrood had no jurisdiction on ID cards, Labour’s Richard Baker said there would be no obligation on people to carry ID cards.

He said the UK Government was bringing forward a series of measures to enhance national security and public safety.

He added: “ID cards are a part of that.

“There’s nothing extreme or unusual in the introduction of ID cards and the kind of data which will be on them.”

The government motion was passed by 69 votes to zero, with 38 abstentions.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7736588.stm

Amen.

Pilots threaten to strike over ID cards
The first wave of ID cards to be issued to British citizens has prompted airline pilots to threaten a strike rather than accept the documents.

The second Brass Balls™ award goes to the airline pilots who vote to strike.

Aviation workers have warned that proposals to make airport staff register for the cards from next year would do little to improve security. The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), which represents 10,000 of the 12,000 commercial pilots and flight engineers in Britain, said its members were being treated as “guinea pigs”. Jim McAuslan, Balpa’s general secretary, said the Government’s “early warning system should be flashing” over opposition to the plans.

The government doesnt have an early warning system. They are blind dumb and deaf when it comes to what actually works and what people’s concerns are. That is how they could ignore two million marchers demonstrating against an illegal immoral and unjustified attack against Iraq.

Pilots going on strike however is a different thing. These highly trained and completely indispensable people going on strike will cost the airlines millions of pounds. These pilots cannot be replaced with scabs. This action is going to hurt where the pain is felt most strongly; in the realm of money.

The Home Office insists the scheme will help airport workers improve security and streamline pass applications when staff move jobs.

They cannot demonstrate how these cards will improve security. All the people who work at airports currently are already carrying ID cards and have already been vetted. Another, state issued card cannot add any further security. If this is not the case, then they need to demonstrate how having TWO ID cards is better than having one.

Ministers will publish draft regulations on Friday to set up a trial requiring airside staff at Manchester airport and London City airport to sign up for an ID card before they can get security passes allowing them to work there. If the regulations are approved, the first ID cards will be issued at the two airports from autumn next year as part of an 18-month trial.

They should ALL go on strike and shut down the entire airport and air transport system of the UK. That would cause real economic damage and would force the government to back down.

Under the proposals, airport workers will be the first British citizens to be given ID cards, which are due to be introduced for young people from 2010.

But Mr McAuslan, whose union holds its annual conference at Heathrow later this week, said he would be consulting members on the possibility of industrial action if the Government presses ahead with the plans. “It may come to an industrial dispute,” he said. “We would want to avoid that. We would want the Government to think again about the compulsory nature of it and think again about the whole scheme. The Government has said previously that ID cards will be voluntary but the indications are that if you choose not to have a card you will not get an airside pass.”

That is a very diplomatic way of drawing a line in the sand. Bugs Bunny would have said, “Of course you know, this means war”.

The British Air Transport Association, which represents airlines including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, branded the scheme a “dubious PR initiative by the Government and one that fails to offer any real benefits”.

Thats more Wile E Coyote.

The shadow Home Secretary, Dominic Grieve, said: “Labour should take their heads out of the sand and abandon this £19bn white elephant which will do nothing to improve our security but may well make it worse.” The Tories have pledged to scrap the scheme if elected. Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, added: “It is no surprise that pilots are up in arms since they are one of the few groups selected as guinea pigs for this benighted experiment.”

And they will be the first to be lined up and violated; fingerprinted and scanned and given a number like concentration camp cattle. It is sickening, and finally everyone is starting to feel queasy.

But a spokesman for the Identity and Passport Service said: “Identity cards will directly benefit airside workers – not just by improving personnel security, but also by speeding up pre-employment checks and increasing the efficiency of pass-issuing arrangements.”

This is twice that they have said it would increase efficiency. This is a lie. Without an ID card no time is made making a meaningless check against the NIR when you apply for a job or go and buy a bottle of wine. And as for the lie of it “improving personnel security” they have to demonstrate how people who are already vetted and who already carry ID cards are going to be ‘more secure’ if they also carry a government ID card.

The timetable

*21 November 2008: Home Office issues draft rules on ID card trial at Manchester and London City airports.
*25 November: Home Office starts issuing ID cards for foreign nationals.
*March-May 2009: Regulations on trial scheme debated by Parliament.
*Autumn 2009: First airport staff to be given ID cards.
*2010: ID cards made available to young people for the first time.
*2011-12: Public invited to register for ID cards.
*2017: Vast majority of the population enrolled on ID card database.

[…]

The Independent

This timetable is nonsense of course.

They no doubt had a similar timetable for the adoption of the Poll Tax…and we all know what happened with that idea.

This idea is going to die.

Every group that they try and use as guinea pigs to stress test the enrollment system are going to violently refuse to be numbered and fingerprinted like criminal cattle.

If everyone says ‘NO!’ then the scheme dies. We have said this over and over and over again.

Of course, the Independent fails to ask any of the questions that a normal person would ask, like “how will this increase security”. They simply parrot the line from the Passport service and the Home Office like trained dogs.

But we expect that.

Let’s start with a superb essay by Lew Rockwell:

The Myth of Good Government

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

One of the great and most persistent errors of classical liberals is to believe in “good government,” a government that does “what it is supposed to do.”

There is nothing the state can do, which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market. Another point that is just as telling: no state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as public opinion will tolerate.

Sometimes the point is easier to see when looking at foreign governments, such as the tragic case of China. The government is embarking on an explosive venture to dump $586 billion into “infrastructure” over two years. The reason is the classic Keynesian excuse: the spending is needed to stimulate investment. Never mind that this trick has never worked in all of human history. This is instead a grand plan to loot the private sector on behalf of the Communist Party, which will then spend the money bolstering its power.

No country knows more about the failures of this type of central planning than China. Every form of collectivism has been tried out on these poor souls, and tens of millions lost their lives in the course of Mao’s insane collectivist experiments. That this new plan is being enacted in the name of Lord Keynes rather than Karl Marx is irrelevant. The effects are the same: expand power and reduce liberty.

China’s recovery from communism is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of economic development. The country went from being a suffering and impoverished land of catastrophe to being modernized in just 15 years. The state shrunk in scope nearly by default as the private sector grew and grew. This wasn’t the plan. It was the de facto result of the new tolerance of free economic activity. The state went into protective mode to keep its power, and did nothing to stop the swell of private enterprise. The result was glorious.

Keep in mind this critical point. China’s restoration as a civilized society came about not due to some central plan, but by its absence. The fact that the state did not intervene led to prosperity. Again, it wasn’t a policy or a constitution or a law that made the difference. There was no switch from a communist-style government to a night-watchman state. Because the state abandoned its posts under public opposition and contempt, society could flourish.

But the state never went away. It’s just that its depredations have been spotty and unpredictable. Had history taken a better course, the central state would have melted away completely, and law would have devolved to the most local levels. Sadly for the Chinese, the state persisted in its old structure, even as the private sector grew and grew. The state still had its hand in the large industries such as steel and energy, and, of course, it controlled the banking sector.

The government never became good (an impossibility). It was and is bad. It was just less bad than in the past because it did less. But all states lie in wait for a crisis. The earthquake in the southwest provided one great excuse for intervention. But nothing except war compares with an economic crisis as a great excuse for state expansion. Chinese officials can count on support from Western “experts” here, and the thoroughly disgusting US response to our own economic downturn has provided an awful model for the world. Think of it: the Communist Party in China is now citing the US as the main reason for its plot to loot the private sector and bolster its own power at the expense of the country.

So much for being a beacon of liberty in a dark world! Instead, the US is helping to shut out the lights and bolster decrepit despotisms. This is surely one of the great ironies of the current political moment. Instead of teaching the world about liberty, the US’s newly empowered unitary executive is christening various forms of dictatorship.

There can be no question that China’s spending will not improve economic growth. It will instead extract $586 billion from the private sector and spend on political priorities. Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. It must come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government’s spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, it will be wasted.

But won’t the spending spur investment? It can create local boomlets, but they will be temporary. To the extent that the new spending causes a spending response from investors and consumers, this is more evidence of an uneconomic use of scarce resources. If the money is used to prop up failing companies, that’s particularly bad since it is an attempt to override market realities, an attempt that is about as successful as trying to repeal gravity by throwing things up in the air.

The nature of the state – and the core of its rationale for existence – is the conviction that it stands apart from and above society, to correct the failings of the market and individuals. A presumption of superiority is at the very claim of the state, whether it is minimal or totalitarian. Who is to say when and where it should intervene? Well, think about it. If the state is inherently wiser than and superior to society, standing in judgment over what is working and what is not working, the state alone is also in a position to decide when it should intervene.

No government is liberal by nature, said Ludwig von Mises. This is the great lesson that people who advocate “limited government” have never learned. If you give the government any jobs to do, it will presume the right to police its own conduct and then inevitably abuse its power. That is true in China and it is true in the US.

It was the science of economics that first discovered the radical incapacity of the state to make any improvements in the social order. It turns science on its head to invoke economics as a reason for the government to loot and pillage in the name of “stimulating investment.” Stimulation here, there, and everywhere amounts to a diminution of freedom, security of property, and prosperity.

Keynes famously praised Nazi economic policies in the introduction to the German edition of his worst book, the General Theory. After a century of horrors, free men and women, in China, the US, and the world surely deserve better.

[…]

Lew Rockwell

Fascinating and true.

If China can turn itself around in 15 years and the state shrink in scope nearly by default, and if banking is the last and most important bastion of state control, what could we expect if the resourceful Chinese adopt a private currency on a large scale?

There would be nothing that the state could do without destroying the economy if the currency was spread quickly and widely enough.

The question is how should such a currency be designed and rapidly deployed?

It would have to be some form of precious metal in denominations that made it practical for many types of transaction, from small groceries to buying a car.

In the past the wealthy of China used ingots:

and of course, the peasants used many different types of coin:

Chinese bronze coin from the Han Dynasty

and look at these coins, with their tamper evident edges:

And this is pretty…sorry, just had to throw it in:

Essentially, you need a mint, to think about the denominations and then to distribute the coins and bullion. It would be a good idea to get hundreds of millions of people to use vast amounts of low denomination gold coins; then by exchange, certain individuals, probably shop owners, would start to accumulate large numbers of coins.

Thinking about it, that is absolutely the way to seed a new economy that runs on a private currency; many small coins whose value goes up to, say the equivalent of a €500 note, spread to as many individuals as possible, so that daily exchange is made as easy as possible for everything from a bowl of noodles to a bicycle.

This brilliant piece by Lew Rockwell is well timed. Some people are organizing demonstrations outside every Federal Reserve building to ‘End The Fed’. These people haven’t got a hope in hell of ending the Federal Reserve system if all they have in their arsenal are the discredited tactics of the twentieth century.

They correctly identify the Federal Reserve as the cause of many ills and the recent crash; what they do not understand is the true nature of the force that should operate to control interest rates in absentia of central banks. The Market.

If they understood the true the power of the market, they would try and harness it directly to end the Fed, and not protest like beggars asking for oatmeal in the poor house. If they understood anything at all about problem solving they would never opt to demonstrate. Readers of BLOGDIAL know the truth about demonstrating.

If they want to solve this problem, they need to attack it directly. That means attacking the Federal Reserve Notes by issuing their own private currency, and then using it for all their transactions. There are difficulties in doing this, and one of them is Gresham’s Law:

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gresham’s law

Observation that “bad money drives out good.” It is named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519 – 1579), financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I, who was one of the first to elucidate it (he had been preceded by Copernicus). The meaning expressed is that, if two coins have the same face value but are made from metals of unequal value, the cheaper will tend to drive the other out of circulation; the more valuable coin will be hoarded or used for foreign exchange instead of for domestic transactions.

If that law is true, then issuing a private currency made of gold will have difficulty driving out Federal Reserve Notes. Hmmmmmm.

Small digression.

With the internet, it should be possible to distribute a private physical currency everywhere in a very short amount of time, and to spread information about it virally.

While we are at it, Obama wants to shut down internet payment systems that he does not like:

Develop a Cyber Crime Strategy to Minimize the Opportunities for Criminal Profit: Barack Obama will shut down the mechanisms used to transmit criminal profits by shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes. Barack Obama will also initiate a grant and training program to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the tools they need to detect and prosecute cyber crime.

[…]

Barack Obama

“shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes” means shutting down any payment system that does not allow back door automatic surveillance. Obviously. It means more laws to meddle in our internetz; laws that will inevitably have spill-over into things other than ‘payment systems’.

Another small digression.

Other private currency vendors (Mints) would no doubt spring up with their own coins, adding to the choices and flexibility.

Either way, you will not stop the bailouts, stop the war machine, or end the Federal Reserve if you do not have control of the money. A private currency is not going to appear from nowhere by magic; someone has to design it properly and release it, and according to this post on mises.org, the Liberty Dollar is not what it should look like:

Silver

As a student of Austrian Economics and supporter of commodity money, I regard the assault upon the American Liberty Dollar (ALD) with alarm and sadness, but not surprise.

While nothing the ALD firm did was clearly criminal, in that no force or overt fraud was used, their tactics could charitably be described as sleazy. They were designed to trade silver medallions to the ignorant and unwary at premiums that were many multiples of the market norm. In doing so, they created unnecessary complexity and confusion about hard money.

Consider:
1) Appropriating the face of Ron Paul without so much as asking his permission. Yes, he is a public figure so the appropriation will not be considered criminal, but it is feels sleazy.

2) Erecting a multilevel marketing scheme that provides profits that have at times exceeded 100% to insiders. The tale (face value) of the ALD was raised from $10 to $20 when the market price for an ounce of silver crossed $7.50. ALD dealers split the $12+ profit with the ALD firm. I am not against profits, I seek them. But I know where I can buy 1 ozt silver medallions, including ALDs, at less than $1 over spot silver. Only the ignorant pay such exorbitant prices for silver coins.

3) Creating confusion and needless complexity by marking their coins with a dollar-denominated tale. Unlike countless other silver coins with tales denominated in STU (silver trade unit), WTU, Sovereign, or simply weight, the ALD was denominated in dollars, a figure reserved to government-issued, primarily US and Canadian, currencies.

Mises himself taught, in The Theory of Money and Credit “…at all times and among all peoples the principal coins have been tendered and accepted, not by tale without consideration of their quantity and quality, but only as pieces of metal of specific degrees of weight and fineness. Where coins have been accepted by tale, this has always been in the definite belief that the stamp showed them to be of the usual fineness of their kind and of the correct weight. Where there were no grounds for this assumption, weighing and testing were resorted to again.
…
Nevertheless, in defiance of all official regulations and prohibitions and fixing of prices and threats of punishment, commercial practice has always insisted that what has to be considered in valuing coins is not their face value but their value as metal. The value of a coin has always been determined, not by the image and superscription it bears nor by the proclamation of the mint and market authorities, but by its metal content. Not every kind of money has been accepted at sight, but only those kinds with a good reputation for weight and fineness.”

4) Exploiting the self-made confusion of the tale by crowing about the “doubling” of the ALD when they changed the tale from 10 to 20 “dollars” per ozt. “Immediately all Liberty Dollars, in specie, paper and digital forms DOUBLED. If you had Liberty Dollars before the Move Up you profited because the underlying commodity increased in value. If you had digital, your eLD doubled the next day. If you had paper Silver Certificates, you could redeem them for the new $20 Silver Libertys. If you had Silver Liberty in specie form, you were offered a special re-minting rate to exchange them for new $20 Silver Libertys.” Liberty Dollar Doubles

Of course, nothing had changed, 1 ozt of silver remained 1 ozt of silver, and by marking their coins in “dollars” they were caught in the inflation of FRNs. Few “$10” ALDs were actually re-minted; they now circulate with all other silver medallions, currently at premiums of $0.60 to $1 over spot in small quantities (1 to 500 coins).

5) Slander of Walmart (big firm in Bentonville) and the implication that competing silver medallions are not pure in The Liberty Dollar Merchant Script.

6) Note also in that document the multiple referrals to “local business referral currency.” The appeal is to autarky rather than free commerce, with more slander to the effect that “big box retailers are in bed with the big bankers.”

The ultimate argument of the ALD firm boils down to this: A number stamped on an ounce of silver changes its value, and so determines whether it will or will not circulate. The explicit assumption is that “average” people are too stupid to know that a Liberty mint or A-mark 1 ozt silver coin with no dollar figure stamped on it and a norfed ALD with some fictional number of “dollars” stamped on it are really and truly the same thing: 1 ozt of fine silver with markings to prove that fact. Period.

The arrogant conceit that most people are too stupid to understand weight of metal without the assistance of a self-proclaimed “monetary architect” is breathtaking. History and present-day practice shows that always and everywhere precious metal coins are valued by weight and fineness (purity) with minor adjustments for being widely recognized, particularly beautiful, or other characteristics.

The aggressive tactics created by the ALD firm and taught to ALD dealers were designed to fool the unwary into believing that an ounce of silver was worth far more than the free market price. Indeed, some ALD dealers vehemently defend the large premiums attached to their products. In at least some cases, ALDs were passed to unsuspecting clerks with a casual “Oh, that’s the new twenty dollar coin.” Owners and managers discovered the deciet in the till only after the dealer was long gone. These tactics caused an increasing number in inquiries to government agencies, district attorneys, and police. It was not successful competition with FRNs that killed the ALD, it was attracting the attention of government agents with methods that had the look and feel of a scam.

The ALD firm did not deserve to be shut down, but if commodity money ever makes a return, it will do so in spite of ALD-created confusion and without multilevel marketing profit margins. In the happy future where silver and gold coins are used in daily commerce, the markups associated with minting and distributing the coins will fall to their historical norms of a few percent over melt value.

[…]

The Liberty Dollar Question – Mises Economics Blog

Clearly there are a substantial number of people with sufficient knowledge to design a optimal currency to replace Federal Reserve Notes, and there is a demand for this service that will only grow stronger as the value of everyone’s savings starts to evaporate at an ever greater pace thanks to the heat of inflation boiling away the value of the dollar.

We wrote before about the Totnes Pound; there is a demand for clean money not only in the USA but in Great Britain.

The question I have is, who is going to be the one to put their fortune into launching a private currency? What sort of person are we looking for? It seems to me that a Mark Shuttleworth type is the most likely candidate; someone who has been made aware of these problems and the solution and who will see in themselves a beneficial instrument of liberation:

This is not the end of capitalism

Some of the comments on my last post on the economic unwinding of 2008 suggested that people think we are witnessing the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new socialist era.

I certainly hope not.

I think a world without regulated capitalism would be a bleak one indeed. I had the great privilege to spend a year living in Russia in 2001/2002, and the visible evidence of the destruction wrought by central planning was still very much present. We are all ultimately human, with human failings, whether we work for a state planning agency or a private company, and those failings have consequences either way. To think that moving all private enterprise into state hands will somehow create a panacea of efficiency and sustainability is to ignore the stark lessons of the 20th century.

The leaders and decision makers in a centrally-planned economy are just as fallible as those in a capitalist one – they would probably be the same people! But state enterprises lack the forces of evolution that apply in a capitalist economy – state enterprises are rarely if ever allowed to fail. And hence bad ideas are perpetuated indefinitely, and an economy becomes dysfunctional to the point of systemic collapse. It is the fact that private enterprises fail which keeps industries vibrant. The tension between the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly. Despite all of the nasty consequences that we have seen, and those we have yet to see, of capitalism gone wrong, I am still firmly of the view that society must tap into its capitalist strengths if it wants to move forward.

[…]

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/227

In fact, Mark Shuttleworth is a PERFECT candidate, as we can see. He just doesn’t know it yet.

In case you didn’t know, Mark Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist genius billionaire who single handedly accelerated the adoption of Linux and put it into the hands of the masses with Ubuntu. I say single handedly because he financed it by himself; where other distributions were getting better and better slowly like Fedora, Mark Shuttleworth took the Debian distribution and turned it into something that anyone anywhere could use by pouring money, philosophy and hard work onto Debian. The result has been a complete success, and now Ubuntu is being sold on Dell laptops as standard.

There are not many capitalists who understand the Open Source business model and its associated philosophies. Just look at the irrational buggy whip thinking of the music and film industry to hear what ordinary, unintelligent business people think about making money from giving away something for free.

The right man for this job would understand scale. He would understand networks, both internet and real world. He would be driven by philosophy as much as the desire to make money. He would understand the philosophy behind the Free Software movement. He would also have a grasp of banking and how currencies work. He would be able to apply and to synthesize all of this into a project to spread debt free, central banking free currency that is owned by and for the benefit of the public…just like Ubuntu is.

I could not think of a better time to launch such a project; the dollar is collapsing, the headless chickens of the G20 are all jockeying around for a ‘solution’. What better time to checkmate them all with the release of a new, private currency that trumps them all, into which everyone can convert their savings and buy their bread with.

Now that would be something worth while!

Up to a million public sector workers could be allowed to access a Government database containing sensitive information on every child in England and Wales, it has emerged.

Critics say the figure is three times higher than ministers told Parliament, and raises further privacy concerns about the controversial ContactPoint system.

The database will contain the name, home address and school of all 11million children. It will also include information about their legal guardians.

It is designed to make it easier for public bodies to share information. Those permitted by law to access it include bureaucrats such as school ‘administrators’ and ‘any employee’ of a police force.

But campaigners fear that the greater the number of users, the more chance the database will be trawled by the likes of abusive former partners seeking a reunion.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said: ‘Rather than the 330,000 they have previously suggested – which was bad enough – it appears that a million or more people will be able to get access under the terms of the Children Act.

‘This, in the light of the Government’s own auditors saying that ContactPoint could never be made secure, paints a deeply disturbing picture.’

Maria Miller, Conservative spokesman for children, schools and families said: ‘They have grossly underestimated the number of people who will have access to children’s data and now more children will be put at risk. ContactPoint should be scrapped.’

And Baroness Sue Miller, a Liberal Democrat peer with a special interest in data protection issues, said: ‘The ContactPoint system was dubious to start with. It would have been irrelevant to key cases such as that of Victoria Climbie. This latest revelation merely makes it at least three times worse.’

Lord Adonis and Kevin Brennan, ministers for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, have told both houses of Parliament that ‘the number of users (of ContactPoint) is estimated to be around 330,000’.

But the legislation governing the database lists a huge number who could potentially be granted access.

These range from senior police officers and headmasters to officers of local probation area boards and administrators working in schools or further education colleges.

Publicly available staffing figures from education authorities, the NHS, social services and other organisations show that the number of those falling into the categories listed by the Government is one million, according to the respected technology news website Register .

The system, which is the centrepiece of the Government’s Every Child Matters strategy, has been shrouded in controversy since it was first announced, and has been delayed twice.

Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have pledged to scrap ContactPoint.

The Tories want to replace it with a smaller system that will only hold data on children deemed at risk.

Whitehall officials wrote to councils in October arguing against the alternative scheme.

The DCSF later apologised for the breach of civil service political impartiality rules.

A spokesman for the department said: ‘Access to ContactPoint will be strictly limited to those who need it as part of their work and subject to stringent security controls. Not everyone who works in one of the roles listed in the regulations will be permitted access.

‘We have consistently maintained that the estimated number of users for ContactPoint is around 330,000, and this takes into account those needing access across all relevant sectors. This number was informed by the experience of trailblazers, who developed their own systems locally.’

[…]

Daily Mail

This means that:

The ContactPoint data will escape in one third of the time we predicted.
There will be three times as many opportunities for paedophiles to gain access to the data.
There will be three times as many people who will be approached for illicit access.

Gordon Brown has already admitted that they can never keep ContactPoint data safe because it is being run by human beings.

That means that he understands that he is a paedophile facilitator by knowingly setting up this database with foreknowledge that the data will escape and end in the abuse of children.

by Paul Joseph Watson

The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions – all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.

“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.

The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.

The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

In a separate recent interview, Celente went further on the subject of revolution in America.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”
“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”

“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

The George Washington blog has compiled a list of quotes attesting to Celente’s accuracy as a trend forecaster.

“When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.” — CNN Headline News

“A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties.”
— The Economist

“Gerald Celente has a knack for getting the zeitgeist right.” — USA Today

“There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.”
– CNBC

“Those who take their predictions seriously … consider the Trends Research Institute.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark … he’s one of the most accurate forecasters around.”— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic and business trends for corporate clients.”
— The New York Times

“Mr. Celente is a very intelligent guy. We are able to learn about trends from an authority.”
— 48 Hours, CBS News

“Gerald Celente has a solid track record. He has predicted everything from the 1987 stock market crash and the demise of the Soviet Union to green marketing and corporate downsizing.”
— The Detroit News

“Gerald Celente forecast the 1987 stock market crash, ‘green marketing,’ and the boom in gourmet coffees.” — Chicago Tribune

“The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of Popular Culture.”
— The Los Angeles Times

“If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”
— New York Post

So there you have it – hardly a nutjob conspiracy theorist blowhard now is he? The price of not heeding his warnings will be far greater than the cost of preparing for the future now. Storable food and gold are two good places to make a start.

http://www.infowars.com/?p=5938

Yesterday there was a deluge of PR paid propaganda – bullshit if you will – trying to sell the ID Card with the hideous prostitute Jacqui Smith making outrageous claims.

The lying lickspittle bastard repeater journalists at the BBC tweaked this first article during the day for maximum impact and under orders. We grabbed both pages.

First we have this:
12:20 GMT, Thursday, 6 November 2008

and then we have this, later in the day:

15:57 GMT, Thursday, 6 November 2008

The title of the page changed from ‘Shops may take ID card biometrics’ to ‘People ‘can’t wait for ID cards’. The first title is obviously more pertinent, more astonishing and alarming because of the implications of shops taking Biometrics. Later, it was changed to a pure and very cheesy propaganda headline after pressure no doubt from the office of that kebab eating monster. There have been seven versions so far.

The facts of the matter remain unchanged however.

HMG actually plans to allow people to enroll in the ID Card scheme / NIR from inside Tescos.

Do you know what this means? It means that the NIR is going to be full of bad entries. People will be able to go to Tescos and get themselves onto the NIR claiming to be someone who they are not, maybe even you, which is the absolute opposite of what the government has been saying all along was the purpose of this vile and pointless database and its associated card. Perhaps that is exactly what they want – you to be frightened of someone getting there first and stealing your identity. “Claim your identity now before someone else does!” will be the call.

This ugly, chinless, subhuman, totalitarian garbage actually claims that people ‘can’t wait for ID Cards’; this is the sound of sheer desperation my friends. Look at the comments on BBQ’s ‘Have Your Say’. I think Jacqui Smith is a delusional liar and the only people she has been speaking to are figments of her insane and deeply troubled mind:

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:38 GMT 07:38 UK

Not one bit! And I won’t be buying or carrying one!

This is another snooping measure from the NuLabour Gestapo state. I make this appeal to everybody to refuse to buy or carry this insidious document. If you receive a communication from any department of the Fascist NuLabour apparatus about it cut it up and send it back, unstamped, to some government department!

Let us call time on this now!

Robert Phillifent, Whitley Bay
Recommended by 266 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:12 GMT 09:12 UK

ID cards:

– nobody wants them
– they won’t make us any safer
– the government will lose all the sensitive information anyway

Hokey Cokey, london, United Kingdom
Recommended by 257 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:13 GMT 09:13 UK

Why dont they just tatoo or brand us all? We could all be marked with a number at birth to make sure we were all identifiable.

Hold on, something in the back of my mind tells me that a similar method to this may have been used before?

How did that turn out?

[Free_Scotland], Grangemouth, Scotland
Recommended by 204 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:11 GMT 09:11 UK

Remember everyone – it’s not just a piece of plastic, it’s the vast database behind it too… all your data, addresses, accounts, policies, pensions, all of it nicely formatted and ready to be left on trains, in car parks, in brief cases, lost laptops etc etc

Chris Chris
Recommended by 201 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:49 GMT 07:49 UK

I do not think these cards will do much to improve security. Instead, we will have one card which proves who you are, and when this is cracked and cloned by organised crime (and believe me it will be) it will make avoiding detection and stealing identity much easier for them.

Matt Gallop, Brighton
Recommended by 181 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:49 GMT 07:49 UK

ID cards for the whole population once again punishes the general population for the lack of control of immigrants. When will the government target risk groups & stop wasting everybodys time by monitoring the activities of everyone.

John Doe, United Kingdom
Recommended by 173 people

Alert a Moderator

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:12 GMT 09:12 UK

What is it in the words ‘this ID card system would be unworkable’ does Jacqui Spliff not understand? Security specialists have stated that it would not work and cards can be cloned.copied or falsified with todays technology. Aftter the many fiascos of data going missing, how many times is it now? Would you trust this lot with digitalised information about you? No chance. With the billions wasted on useless IT systems by this government I wouldn’t trust them to run a raffle. Forget it Spliff.

Maximus, Boxgrove UK
Recommended by 168 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:36 GMT 07:36 UK

Yet another money wasting scheme from our illustrious Government.

They are not listening to the electorate, nobody wants ID cards, and as far as I know, nobody has been able to make them “secure”.

Plus can we trust them with our data? Based on countless examples over recent years its obvious the answer is no.

At a time when the UK needs all the money it can get, to pay its billions on previous commitments, you would have thought that schemes like this would have been postponed.

clive hamilton, woking
Recommended by 163 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:08 GMT 09:08 UK

This is not about terrorism! It’s about controlling the population and keeping tabs on them and their movements. Liabor are control freaks and they want to micro-manage every aspect of our live’s and that includes us. We should say no to this and do all we can to stop ID cards from becoming a reality. Is there not already enough information about each and every one of us in their databases? Do I not already have ID we carry? Why should I pay for something I don’t want or need?

Neil, Brighton
Recommended by 147 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:39 GMT 07:39 UK

How many times do we need this same debate? According to the government itself, the checks that should be performed for airport workers are much more stringent that those for the ID card.

In what was does that improve security of the public?

Once again, the government presses ahead with projects to catalogue every citizen and no-one appears willing to stop them in their tracks.

RJ, Zurich
Recommended by 147 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:11 GMT 09:11 UK

So, I have a birth certificate, photo driving license, passport credit cards and more and yet I need ANOTHER piece of ID. Can someone tell me why?

Unless this would replace the driving license and passport, it is, in my opinion, a ridiculous waste of time and money. As for fighting terrorism…..is having an ID card going to stop someone making a bomb? The logic escapes me.

Hard Working, Bracknell, United Kingdom
Recommended by 143 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:46 GMT 07:46 UK

To try to kid us that this is not a Gestapo act, Clown says, we must have an ID card but will not have to carry it at all times. So when a terrorist is asked to present his/her card at the police station within a week……!!
Yes I think that will definitely deter terrorists from blowing up Britain.

[anotherjames]
Recommended by 125 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:48 GMT 07:48 UK

Don’t they already have ID cards or security checks for “people working in specific sensitive roles or locations” in airports? I’m pretty sure that there is already an ID systetm in place for airport workers.

This is just a sneaky way to try and tenderise public acceptance towards nationwide cataloguing. You give an inch…

Blue-eyed cyclops, Norwich, United Kingdom
Recommended by 125 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:40 GMT 07:40 UK

ID cards are just a scam to take an ID card fee from every adult in the UK. They’re a stealth tax, nothing more.

anon., UK
Recommended by 119 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:07 GMT 09:07 UK

The only way I can see ID Cards helping in the fight against terrorism is if they have sharp corners, and you can jab them in to someone’s eyes to stop them blowing something up.

Or maybe – if they were really big and made of metal and teflon – you could hold it up in front of you to protect yourself from a bomb blast.

Or you could jam them in a door to stop it opening and letting in a person with a bomb…..

The possibilities are endless!

[angelholme], Blackpool, United Kingdom
Recommended by 117 people

[…]

Have Your Say

Total comments: 2134
Published comments: 1643
Rejected comments: 39
Moderation queue: 452

Methinks that the argument is lost Jacqui, you piece of trash. Almost all of the comments are violently against the idea of ID cards and this database.

The first comment is one of the best, and it is what we have been recommending for years; simply do not respond or react to anything that is sent to you. If everyone does it, the whole system dies, and that is that.

As we pointed out before, the unions are finally waking up to this problem and are going to cause trouble:

[…]

The Unite union, which represents airport workers, has said staff are already extensively vetted before being given airside passes.

Airport unions have been resisting the scheme, saying workers would have to pay £30 for a card to do their jobs.

However, it is understood that the cards would be issued free during the evaluation period.

Airlines including British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and EasyJet, also spoke out against the plan, saying it was “unjustified” and would not improve security.

On plans to involve retailers and the Post Office in the ID cards scheme, a spokesman said it would be “more convenient” for people than the government’s original plan to set up enrolment centres in large population centres.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) would continue to carry out enrolment at its offices but a spokesman said it also wanted to “drive down costs using market forces and competition” and was talking to a “range of high street retailers and other organisations”.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7712275.stm

I see. They will issue them free for the testers. Last time I checked, when you test something for someone, you get PAID for doing so, and ‘free’ is not paying. It does however mean that they have to eat the cost of rolling out this test because the reaction against the ID card has been so hostile. Finally.

Don’t you think its interesting that IPS wants to “drive down costs using market forces and competition”? If the market can be used in this way to drive down costs, why not let the market take care of the entire ‘problem’?

What we would have is a market response to the problem of ID, and we would get the most efficient solution, in the same way that the market has provided the most efficient solution to the provision of universal and dirt cheap cellular telephone coverage and access.

The problem with letting the market solve the ‘problem’ of ID is that there is no ID problem to be solved in the first place. Business can carry on totally successfully without ID cards; in fact, ID cards are a form of friction, slowing down commerce, not facilitating it in any way.

Only the government wants ID cards. Business doesn’t need them (like the absurd fascist nonsense of having to produce a Passport or ID to get a SIM card), the public does not need them or want them; only the chinless, foul toothed fascists like Jacqui Smith and her equally repulsive predecessors want them, because they are bereft of imagination, fascist in nature and on the payroll of the venal vendors who are in line for billions of pounds for generations.

Now on to the next, most revolting, astonishing and inexplicable article from propaganda central, AKA BBC News:

Foreign students: Identity cards

The UK Border Agency is to issue the first identity cards to foreign nationals who officials say are most at risk of abusing immigration rules – non-EU students and those on a marriage or civil partnership visa.

But how do foreign students feel about carrying identity cards and being targeted as “risk” categories?

WON JAE, 20, FROM KOREA, STUDYING PSYCHOLOGY AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (UCL)

Won Jae from Korea, studying at UCL

I think it would be OK to carry an identity card, so long as it wasn’t discriminatory.

At the moment if I go anywhere off campus I have to carry my passport as my identity, for example if I am buying alcoholic drinks, so it would be better to have a card. So long as it’s not discriminating me against UK people, it’s fine.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7635114.stm

First of all, every student except two (one from the US and one from Nigeria) on that page comes from a country where they have state issued ID cards, and have had them for decades. These people are the most sheepish, inured sad slaves imaginable. Won Jae is very well trained in double think:

I think it would be OK to carry an identity card, so long as it wasn’t discriminatory.

Well done Dear Leader in training! 2+2=5!

And you absolutely do not have to carry your passport to buy alcoholic drinks you moron. Learn something about the country you are studying in, it might help transform you from a slave into a human being.

What can you say to a parade of people like this?

Britain is a country where you used to be able to show, just by living here, that you do not need to have a totalitarian system of constant checks to create a thriving and tolerant society. All the Europeans who cannot imagine living without an ID card could be shown the 4th largest economy in the world doing very well, in fact, better than them, without ID cards and a police state.

Since when is the policy affecting the British public the business of foreign students? For sure, these students (wether they know it or not, and clearly this Korean does not) have rights and should never be compelled to carry an ID card; but since their acceptance of an ID card would inevitably lead to pressure on every British person to have one, why on earth are they being consulted at all, as if their opinion actually matters?

This page from the BBC is one of the most revolting, ill conceived and traitorous that I have ever read. To use foreigners from totalitarian states in this way to apply the force of opinion and change the outcome of a critical battle in the UK is treason, full stop. These people have no intention of living in Britain, and their approval of ID cards, once used to shoe-horn them in would still be here after they have left.

This is a sickening article. It made me so angry that I had to get up and go away for many hours.

The opinions of these people are absolutely irrelevant.

Should we have brought in ID cards in the ’70s because some ignorant Spaniards living under Francisco Franco ‘had no problem with it’ or as this young lady says

MI-YOUNG PARK, 24, KOREA, ENGLISH AT OXFORD HOUSE COLLEGE, LONDON
I think we need identity cards to buy things like alcohol or cigarettes. I have tried to show my Korean card, but they won’t accept it, so I have to carry my passport around with me which is really dangerous.

But I’m not staying in London for much longer, I’m applying to Emirates to be a flight attendant.

I think not.

ID cards are morally wrong. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s opinion is, in the same way that murder is wrong no matter who says otherwise. People like Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith do not have any morals, and so they can mass murder and tag everyone like cattle without breaking a sweat, sleeping soundly every night. Those ignorant, annoying students might not have any understanding about ID cards, and may even want them; that does not mean that they are right, or that these foul instruments of totalitarian control should be introduced to Britain. What the Koreans do in their own country is their business, and I do not care about how they choose to live, and their way of life should have no influence or sway over what happens in a free country or in Britain.

To digress for a moment, none of these students seem to understand that if they take this card, it will mean that the police will be stopping and checking them just because they ‘look Korean’. They will be stopped and checked, and everyone else will be stopped and checked for these cards. These students are the trojan horse for this racist nightmare, where everyone will be profiled by what they look like on the spot. We have already been through this many times in the twentieth century…and this is the problem; all of these pathetic students are very young and have no memory or knowledge of the racist Suss Law (UK) and Pass Laws (South Africa) that caused so much friction and problems. They should all know better. They should all have better self correcting self preservation skills that ring alarm bells when someone wants to harm you or your fellow man. But then again, when you are born into a police state, you know nothing but the police state – its the same for the Spanish as it is for the Koreans and the Belgians.

The BBC, by putting on this parade of idiots has sunk to its lowest level ever, and as usual, there is no named person or editor to point the finger at for this scandalous, treasonous, infuriating article.

I have to say that despite all of this evil being thrown in our faces, that I am greatly pleased by the outpouring of hate against the ID card and Jacqui Smith / Neu Labour. It seems that we are actually very close to or on the tipping point now. There is no one left who is saying ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ except the evil glove puppets in the pay of the vendors and HMG.

This is going to be abandoned completely, and shortly after that, ContactPoint will be scrapped. Gordon Brown has admitted that they can never keep data safe. That means that the children of Britain can never be kept safe once they are on ContactPoint. It means that they can never keep the personal details of these stupid students safe once they are on the NIR. It means that no one will be safe, and this is quite separate from the social ills that will arise from this evil mania for registers.

Once again, the first commenter had it precisely right:

If you receive a communication from any department of the Fascist NuLabour apparatus about it cut it up and send it back, unstamped, to some government department!

This is the only response needed. Make sure that you tell everyone exactly what you are doing and why, and encourage them to do the same, for the sake of themselves and this great country.

Many people died so that we would not have to carry ID cards. I will not dishonor them by giving in like a subhuman.

And neither should you.

Gordon Brown says government cannot ensure data safety

Gordon Brown has made a frank admission that government cannot promise the safety of personal data entrusted by the public.

Hopefully this ‘frank admission’ is the precursor to the complete rollback of all the doomed IT / ID projects this insane government has embarked and wasted money on.

The Prime Minister was speaking hours after it emerged that a memory stick containing the passwords to a government website used submit online tax returns had been lost.

Speaking on the second day of his trip to the Gulf, the Prime Minister said it was caused by "mistakes" which were “human”.

It is a human error when the wrong medicine or too much of the right medicine is injected in a hospital. When this happens, people are compensated via lawsuits. There is an avenue of redress.

When data leaks happen, there is nothing the government offers, other than ‘sorry it was not our fault’.

He also sought to clear government officials of blame, stressing that a private company – Atos Origin, a computer management firm – had accepted responsibility for the loss.

The Department for Work and Pensions was forced to shut down the Gateway service, which is used by consumers to pay parking tickets and fill in tax returns after the data, on a memory stick found outside a pub.

The loss by Atos Origin, which won a five-year £46.7million contract to manage the Government Gateway in 2006, was reported to the Government last week. The memory stick was found outside the Orbital Pub in Cannock and handed in to a Sunday newspaper.

We have heard all this before. What happened to the memory stick BEFORE it was turned over to the newspaper. Who has a copy of it? Was it encrypted so that whoever picked it up could not read it?

Mr Brown said this was completely unacceptable, and warned that the company would be punished.

They could terminate the contract for all the good it will do; once the genie is out of the bottle, it is OUT. We have written about this time and time again. No sanction, no punishment, no words can undo the harm that is done by a leak like this. In the case of credit card details and passwords, those can be changed, even if there are millions of numbers to be cancelled and re-issued. If the data however is the fingerprints and DNA of living people, those CANNOT be replaced; that private data escaped represents a violation on unprecedented scales, and as we keep saying, it WILL HAPPEN no matter what precautions you take to protect the systems that hold the information.

Which comes to another point; why on earth do these sensitive computers have USB slots and DVD burners? SURELY after all the leaks and missing discs, all USB ports should be pulled and DVD burners removed. In a networked environment there is no need for those means of moving data….but I digress, and of course, if any of these computers is on the internetz, remote access by bad guys is guaranteed.

“I think that the company responsible has accepted responsibility and it is a private company. I think action will be taken by the Department of Work and Pensions. It’s not acceptable behaviour,” he told ITV News. He said that the company could expect “changes to the contract.”

I think you are a squint eyed, pig faced liar and mass murderer.
I think any action taken by the Department of Work and Pensions will not matter a single bit, you clod.
I think changes to the ATOS contract are a total irrelevance, and insulting as a sanction, even to the most thick person.
I think the jig is up you scum. People are finally waking up to this total insanity, and you are not going to be able to roll out your ID schemes.

The Government has faced repeated embarrassments over lost data, with 277 data breaches reported since 25 million child benefit records went missing nearly a year ago. Only last week James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was forced to apologise for leaving papers on a train. Mr Brown appeared to accept data loss in future was inevitable.

Data loss in the future is only inevitable if you allow yourself to be put onto these systems. If you allow your fingerprints to be taken, your fingerprints will be released to the public. If you allow your DNA to be taken, your DNA will be released to the public. If you allow your doctor to upload your information to the Spine, your medical records will be released to the public.

Once again, for all those thick morons who trot out the, “we already have credit cards and loyalty cards, so what’s the difference” line, the difference is that if your data is released by a credit card, you can be compensated. The same goes for all of your interactions with private companies, and if any company does not guarantee your privacy, you should shun them, full stop.

Also, the State is not the same as a private corporation with whom you deal willingly. You should already know all of this.

“It is important to recognise we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings. Mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like in the communication, of information.”

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5065795.ece

Therefore, it is important to recognise that sensitive information should never be hoarded in centralized databases by compulsion of the State. The State should abandon all IT projects that collect personal data, all data sharing should be stopped, and each citizen should have the right to demand that data on him is deleted should he so wish.

The ContactPoint database listing all 11 million children in Britain should be scrapped immediately in the light of these comments by Gordon Brown.

He has admitted that he cannot keep children safe from paedophiles who would inevitably (by his own admission) gain access to ContactPoint data, making that database nothing more than a catalogue for paedophiles. We have described how this would happen before.

ContactPoint. The database that is:

• ‘too risky’ for the children of the famous
• a catalogue for paedophiles
• impossible to secure, putting all children at risk
• will be leaked in its entirety within months of it going online

MUST BE ABANDONED RIGHT NOW.

Anyone who is for ContactPoint, or any of these insane IT / ID projects simply does not know what they are talking about. All of them should be scrapped. If they are not scrapped, you should do everything you can to stay out of them, starting by refusing to take the ID card.

Government can run perfectly well without any of it, and none of it is of any benefit to the public.

Lew Rockwell Podcast

Lew Rockwell interviews Naomi Wolf:

More from Naomi Wolf:

She wrote Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Her numerous appearances are documented on YouTube.

Lew Rockwell Podcast

Download

As you will remember, being an avid reader of BLOGDIAL, we are not too impressed by the reluctant Red Pill eater Naomi Wolf, who should, given her age, know better.

Nevertheless, this is an unmissable piece of audio. Naomi Wolf, despite the age of the internets, despite being exposed to Alex Jones and his fine documentaries, still doesnt kow the facts about the Federal Reserve.

I find that really hard to believe.

If she was just some mother from Jersey with one of those odd hairdoos, then it would be understandable, but someone as connected and exposed as this MUST know about the Fed; her not knowing about it is an impossibility.

If she really doesn’t know about the Fed after having been exposed to everything, after having been handed it all on a silver platter (she has had at least between now and April 2007, when we posted about her essay) she is either deliberately pretending to be ignorant, is actually ignorant (impossible, since she has been given the materials) or is stupid.

Naomi Wolf is not stupid. That is for sure.

Is she pretending to be in the dark about everything?

Who knows…who cares.

All I know is that this person has woken up too late, wether her waking up is real or not.

Further to all of this, it is interesting that the State thinks that passing laws actually means something; that they believe their wishes need to be codified in order to make them real in some way. Naomi Wolf is a facilitator of their evil by her believing that the State, by enacting laws, somehow changes reality from one thing into another.

The fact is that no matter what law they pass, their power remains just as illusory. If you choose not to obey, the law is meaninless.

People like Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, John Gotti, and all ‘Organized Crime’ figures understand reality far better than Naomi Wolf does. They understand that it doesnt matter what laws are passed; you can do whatever you like, and thrive.

The Poll Tax failed because everyone refused to obey. The Berlin Wall fell because people stopped believing that the power of the state had any hold over them. Once everyone takes for granted that the State has no right to tell them anything, from how they should measure the goods they sell to wether or not they should do anything at all whatsoever it may be, the illusion of the power of the State will simply dissapear all at once. Soldiers will take off their uniforms. The offices of the state will be abandoned. People will move freely.

And sanity will be the norm.

Before any of that can happen, the Naomi Wolfs of this world need to not only swallow the Red Pill, but digest it, and let its essence become a part of their body.

BLOGDIAL began on Friday, January 12, 2001 with a quote from The Matrix. Before BLOGDIAL, we had published articles on these important subjects. We are not the only ones who have been doing this for years, and certainly there are others who have written more and more eloquently than we did.

There really isn’t anything more that can be done for the likes of Naomi Wolf and the millions of people like her. The question now is not what is to be done to educate them, but what are we going to do to protect ourselvs from the sleeping sheeple, the half awake half wits and the legions of zombies out there who are going to drag us down.

That is the question!

I don’t know much about fell running, but I know what I don’t like – the sensationalised scaremongering surrounding the washed-out mountain marathon in the Lake District. The overreaction revealed less about the risks facing the runners than the risk of us walking into a society where nobody is allowed to be “unaccounted for”.

When the Original Mountain Marathon was abandoned amid terrible weather on Saturday, police reported 1,700 of the 2,500 competitors “unaccounted for”. The implication was that all must be in peril. On Sunday fears were still being expressed for more than 900. By that afternoon all were safe.

It turned out that the 1,700 “unaccounted for” could account for themselves, having sheltered in farms, a school and a slate mine. A dozen were treated in hospital, which can hardly be unusual for such an event. Others reported only that the car park was flooded and “our credit cards are still in the car”.

Yet they were met with a chorus of official condemnation, as a spokesman declared: “We have come within inches of turning the Lake District mountains into a morgue. We need to learn from it.” The lesson, it seems, is that all must be accounted for, with no freedom for running wild.

These were not children lost on a school trip, but experienced, well-equipped runners who enjoy extreme conditions. As a race organiser said: “They are capable of looking after themselves.” That is seen as madness today when, notes the OMM website, “the idea of self-reliance isn’t a popular one” so that “the fact that 900 people are said to be unaccounted for” must mean “they are lost and in trouble, which is not the case”.

This is all another sign of a culture where people are not trusted to cope without support, supervision and surveillance from above; where mobile phone calls and e-mails must be accounted for, and soon you may be unable to buy a phone without a passport or to breathe without appearing on a DNA register.

As one who would think twice about walking fells in summer, I can still see that the attraction of running them in a storm must involve being “unaccounted for”. That’s why running free through woods and fields appealed to the borstal boy in Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, or to Bobby Sands, as seen in the film Hunger. Weekend reports suggested that it was a problem the runners were out of mobile phone range, but that was probably why some were up there.

No doubt Socrates was right to suggest that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. But the “unaccounted-for life” certainly is.

The Times

Quite so, and a reminder that even people with ‘nothing to hide’ are never exempt from prying minds.