After HRH Elizabeth the second officially killed the ID Cards bill (for the indigenous people of the UK only) we now read this story from the Manchester Evening News about what was actually going on at the time of the Manchester ID Card trials.
We can infer much from this, and also extrapolate to what is happening today:
Revealed: The full shambles of the ID card trial in Greater Manchester
Civil servants were urged to sign up their own families for ID cards as the controversial scheme flopped, it can be revealed today.
Confidential reports into trials of the controversial £30 cards, obtained by the M.E.N., expose for the first time the chaos that surrounded their introduction.
The £1bn scheme was launched in Greater Manchester in November last year but proved a hugely expensive failure, with only 13,200 people signing up.
It was scrapped by the coalition government days after it came to power.
Today the M.E.N. can reveal how:
Senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives encouraging them to buy cards because of fears about the level of demand
UK and overseas border guards refused to recognise the cards – with one traveller chased through an Italian airport after trying to use one as ID
The Home Office discovered the cards could stop some credit cards from working properly
The cards – which contained fingerprint and other biometric details – were championed by the previous Labour government as a way of preventing terrorism and identity theft.
The documents highlight particular concern about low take-up by staff at Manchester Airport –
By April this year, only 15 per cent of airside workers had enrolled for a card.
Reports reveal how the airport took the unusual step of appointing a full-time ‘National Identity Card Administrator’ to drive up demand and considered a competition to promote the scheme.
The report also said: “One participant complained that the identity card interfered with other cards kept in the same wallet.”
The ID scheme – which cost £292m before it was axed – was initially championed by Labour minister as an anti-terror measure that would allow them to keep track of people in the UK.
But public pressure eventually forced them to concede that the cards should not be compulsory. Manchester was chosen to pilot the scheme but all 13,200 cards issued have now been cancelled.
Participants who forked out £30 for the documents have been told they will not get refunds.
The Home Office refused to comment on any of the problems cited in the reports
Damian Green, the home office minister, said: “The Identity Card Scheme was intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive.”
But Leigh Labour MP Andy Burnham, who previously oversaw the biometric cards while a Home Office minister, said: “The Tory-Lib Dem government are trying to make the cards a totem of what our government stood for– but I think they were a good idea and many people are still be in favour of them.”
only 13,200 certifiably insane signed up for the ID Card; we knew that the uptake was very small, but what we did not know was that senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives to encourage them to buy the cards because demand was so small.
We did not know that UK border guards did not recognize the cards. That is just completely ABSURD.
The staff at Manchester Airport, bless them, held fast and refused to knuckle under, with only 15% of them taking the card. This is highly significant, since the jobs of these people might have been on the line if they refused.
We did not know that they appointed an NIR Administrator to drive up demand.
The question here is (and you know the answer) why did we not know all of this at the time it was happening?
BBQ was there ‘reporting’ what was happening in Manchester, with its vox pops and biased articles; surely they must have known about the low uptake, the NIR Administrator and the ridiculous scene of a man not having his ID Card at the borders of ‘his own country’.
Its a 1000% guaranteed fact that the BBC was aware of all of this and did not report it. We at BLOGDIAL know for a fact that they were involved in setting up NO2ID for their vile propaganda pieces; its a very safe bet that they withheld these sensational and game changing stories because they knew that if they reported them, the ID Card fiasco’s collapse would be accelerated.
Readers of BLOGDIAL know what we think of Andy Burnham. That he is still saying in public that ‘ID Cards are a good idea’ at this stage, when the Queen has just destroyed his ‘good idea’, with the entire nation galvanized against them, is simply staggering.
That man is an unrepentant, unctuous, evil little socialist. Period.
Now for the comments on this article…
Comrade Burnham would think they were a good idea wouldn’t he…moron.
Anthony Cutt (30/12/2010 at 12:42)
I like it!
£292 million later & Andy Burnham still thinks they’re a good idea?
Let me tell you something Andy: I shall probably vote Labour come the next election but not if idiots like yourself are still around.
Ivor Rash, Oldham (30/12/2010 at 12:43)
Oldham, up North, where they vote Labour, hates Burnham.
“The Tory-Lib Dem government are trying to make the cards a totem of what our government stood for”
They were. Money p****d against the wall on unnecessary, unwanted & unworkable ideas by an incompetent & inefficient government.
Anthony Cutt (30/12/2010 at 12:50)
The image has cracked; these scumbags cannot lie anymore, thanks to the internets. People have a vocabulary to defend themselves with, thanks to the internet; its a vocabulary that you will not be able to collect from any Broadsheep newspaper, the BBC, Sky or any MSM news source.
I signed up for an ID card but it got stolen.
It’s hard to type when you’ve had to saw off your fingerprints & difficult to see when you’ve had to have a cornea transplant!
NoSignOfHealthToBeWellAdjustedToASickSociety, Tameside (30/12/2010 at 13:00)
I lol’d!
Yes a lot of people are in favour of them, Sun readers and other sub normal cretins mainly.
PeteB, Hyde (30/12/2010 at 13:35)
I can feel your anger! It makes you stronger, gives you focus!
Stretch out with your hate BOY!
I’d be willing to bet that far more Guardian readers are in favour of ID cards. Personally, I wouldn’t have got one even if it had been made compulsory. I already have a passport, a driving licence and my Army ID. If they’re not enough to prove my identity, tough.
John Evans (30/12/2010 at 13:04)
When the army goes against the State, then the State is in big trouble. I have no doubt that there are more secret documents that detail revolt from the Police and the Military. We already know that BALPA came out against them unanimously. They killed this because it was offensive to everyone once the truth of how it actually works was spread virally.
But still there a number of morons in Greater Manchester who would SERIOUSLY consider voting for Andy Burnham come the next election, even in light of his absolutely obserd remarks!
Says it all…… To think the likes of him and many others in the LIE BOUR camp who still support the I.D card system beggars belief!
Red Army (30/12/2010 at 13:09)
They are truly human garbage, the whole lot of them.
You may read the rest of the comments at your leisure.
BLOGDIAL is offering £10 cash bounty for UK ID Cards; if you have one, we want to buy it from you. I am going to set them in a frame as a trophy to our victory in bringing this disgusting, immoral and vile scheme down. Email us!
Now for the extrapolation.
As you know ID Cards have been abolished only for the British; they still exist for the ‘wogs’.
What do you think the BBC is not reporting about the uptake of these Apartheid style cards by the dirty foreign invaders?
I guarantee you that the uptake of these cards amongst foreigners is even less than the uptake in the Manchester trial, and once the news of the racist nature of these cards spreads virally to all the victims of this abominable crime, you can be sure that there will be a blanket refusal to interface with the system.
ID Cards for foreigners will collapse just like the ID Cards for Brits collapsed, because if no one carries them, even the UK ‘authorities’ will not recognize them; they will be literally useless.
These racist cards will never reach critical mass, and of course, there are all the problems of an Apartheid state where millions of ‘honorary whites’ are also living unsegregated who, by law, are not required to carry an ID Card or show it upon demand.
Its a recipe for disaster of course, but it seems like the painful and expensive process has to be gone through before ID Cards can be completely eradicated for good.
A commenter gets the gist of this:
So what’s happened to the “full-time ‘National Identity Card Administrator’” now that the scheme has been scrapped and he has nothing to administrate.
I doubt he has been sacked. More likely he’s been given a new job title, a pay rise and an assistant.
ebble, manchester (30/12/2010 at 13:37)
This is what it is all about; fleecing human beings as if they were cattle, creating an ID Card ecosystem where there are guaranteed jobs for decades administrating, examining, reporting, issuing, replacing, repairing, distributing and interfacing with these diabolical cards.
Its very difficult to persuade people that they are supporters of violence by being in favour of Democracy. The brainwashing that they have been subjected to for the entirety of their lives presents an almost impenetrable barrier of disbelief and pavlovian disdain that even the sharpest scalpel cannot cut.
As soon as you tell these poor deluded fools (and calling people ‘poor deluded fools’ does not, of course, help), that they are violent people, they recoil like slugs that have been sprinkled with salt; no one wants to think of themselves as a violent type, and yet, that is exactly what people who are for Democracy are; violent human beings.
Decent people with intact moral centres and sound ethics are not violent and are against initiating violence. They would never dream of using violence to get what they want from other people, or to make them behave in a certain way, or to refrain from behaviours; the very idea is repugnant to them. This is how it should be.
Sadly, there is a huge sea of people who have been brainwashed into thinking that the state is not only necessary, but that it is an inherently good thing, it is not violent and that the democratic process justifies anything that the state cooks up, no matter what it is.
The idea that the State is inevitable is false, and every day, people are waking up to this fact.
Seemingly out of the blue, comes this clip:
as you can see, it beautifully, and gently demonstrates to anyone with a single brain cell how the state is violent and immoral, and how it doesn’t matter how many people vote for it, it is still violent and immoral.
A critical mass of understanding is on the way, and this video is evidence of it When we reach the tipping point, there will be a majority of people who do not accept the States’ alleged, self proclaimed ‘right’ to steal money and murder.
The coming economic collapse, the discrediting of the state through Wikileaks and every other thing that is just around the corner will push people towards Libertarianism and the true idea that people do not need a state to live in peace and prosperity.
Already in the UK, there is open talk of the illegitimacy of the State, and clips like this and the ones that will surely follow will help guide and solidify people’s thinking.
Any attempt to shut down the free internet will only make things worse for the State. Their best option now, if they want to survive in any shape or form, is to adapt. Already in the UK, some councils are thinking about going semi voluntary; slashing their ‘council tax bills‘, reducing the number of ‘services’ they have a monopoly on providing, leaving the rest to private companies. This would be a good move; garbage collection should not be done by the state at all for example.
If they fail to switch to pure voluntarism, essentially becoming charities without any pretence that they have the right to demand money from anyone, they will be swept away entirely, and the people who work in these places, their pensions and jobs also swept away.
It would be far better for them; they have the infrastructure already in place, local knowledge and an immediate ability to act in everyone’s interests immediately. The only thing that would change would be they would lose the power to steal money. Most people would go along with a town council that worked only to clean the roads, keep them salted in winter and the hedges trimmed.
These new councils would be very responsive to what people actually want, because everyone would have the option of paying someone else to do the work, and of course, any talk of planning permission and the other big brother, rights destroying nonsense would be instantly dead in the water.
How everything would work precisely (or not work) is irrelevant; its important to remember that the foundation of the State is pure evil. There is no option to say, “well, if statelessness doesn’t work out, we can always go back to violence”. No, you cannot go back to immorality chaps; immorality is not a choice on the table for moral men. The violence of the state must be stopped. Period. It is unacceptable to all decent people that a society based on violence is simply tolerated as, “things just as they are”.
The State is a house built on immorality. It is a loathsome, noxious and bad smelling weed that has grown from a bad seed. This is the root problem that has to be fixed, and without it being fixed things are only going to get worse. Its time to pour the RoundUp® on this parasitic plant to kill it right down to the roots.
Finally, here is another video for you, that explains what is about to happen with the forthcoming collapse that we have been talking about:
it is these events that will be the turning point.
Lets hope that when this happens it spells at the very least, the end of the State. As everyone walks out of the wreckage, we can but hope that the shock wakes them up out of their hypnotic trance as the fatal blow to the Stat, its apparatus and apologists shuts the hypnotic transmitter that has kept everyone asleep.
There are enough Libertarians in circulation in the USA to save it from a return to a murderous imperial government. Perhaps with their example the rest of the civilised world will follow along. Certainly, if the USA turns to Libertarianism, they will drain the brains out of every other country with a population.
Police may ban future marches to prevent disorder Police may ban anti-Government marches through central London to prevent further disorder and strain on officer numbers.
By Martin Beckford, Heidi Blake and Steven Swinford 7:00AM GMT 15 Dec 2010
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said that outlawing the demonstations was an option for the authorities but conceded it could anger protestors further.
He admitted he was “very worried” about the effect on law and order in town centres and suburbs caused by large numbers of officers being sent to the centre of the capital.
Despite widespread criticism over the policing of the protests, and warnings that the Met’s tactics risk leading to the death of an innocent bystander, Sir Paul said he was proud of the professionalism of the 3,000 officers on duty last week.
I’ve said it before; the police are in an impossible position. On one side, they have the socialist PC nanny state, making them enforce all sorts of insane and draconian laws that have nothing to do with protecting people and property, causing them to misallocate time and resources. On the other, they have the people who spit on them and hate them for doing what they are told. Then we have the protestors who are pushing on another side, with their irrational, violent and destructive behaviour, and for their troubles, they are paid next to nothing for the amount of personal danger they face.
All of that aside, we have already written about demonstrations, how they are entirely useless and how they are nothing more than a way to keep people inside an illusion that they are free.
Now this police ban on protesting is going to do exactly what we say demonstrations do, only it will be explicit and not implicit; banning demonstrations will cause all those unenlightened people who think that demonstrations are effective to spend their time fighting for the ‘right to demonstrate’ instead of working to solve real problems with strategies that achieve discreet and real goals.
Alex Jones says that Britain is de-facto going into martial law. This is very probably true, but the fact remains that there is nothing any state can do to stop people from spreading ideas and then acting on them, especially when those acts are essentially private. This is why it was impossible to completely eliminate alcohol sales during prohibition, for example.
Demonstrating in the streets does not solve problems, so what needs to be done to reverse the rot?
For a start, you have to understand that the state does not have enough staff to control everyone. Widespread control of the population can only be achieved with the consent and help of business.
For example, VAT is going to rise to 20% in January. The people who are going to collect this Tax are the businesses of the UK. The individual shoppers are not the ones who are forced to collect and hand in this money; if every business refused to collect VAT, then the system would be abolished by default. It could happen in a single week.
Just as we wrote in the ‘Zero TRust Society‘ essay and proposal, the key to stopping any predation of the state is to convince the businesses that do the work of the State to stop doing that work en masse.
ID Cards would have become useless if every business refused to interface with the NIR and the cards; business is the crucial interface that allows police states to function. The smoking ban could not have been implemented without the every publican acting as a locum policeman; indeed, in Germany, the smoking ban has failed precisely because the publicans are ignoring the ban:
Many methods of getting around the ban have been utilised; mobile smoking bars now drive around towns catering for smoking customers, one restaurant cut holes into the walls so that diners could pull open a curtain and lean outside to smoke and with Germany bordering a wealth of more democratic countries many people now pop across the borders into tolerant countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia to enjoy an evening out. In many parts of Germany the anti smoking laws are simply ignored completely.
Instead of demonstrating, people who want real change and an end to the police state have to convince every business owner not to cooperate with the apparatus on any level, they have to make it so that the businesses who choose the side of freedom rather than the side of the State, profit from doing so and are protected.
In the end, this act of banning demonstrations is going to push the population towards the conclusion that we have laid out here.
Already the French have woken up and understood that demonstrations do not work; this was the key insight that led the instigators of Bankrun 2010 to do what they did… and did you notice that there was nothing about it in the news? Have you also noticed that the incredible violence and disruption in Greece is also not being reported?
But I digress.
People are slowly waking up to the fact that they are not making any headway on any front, and the tools they are using are simply not working. Things are getting worse through no fault of their own, and everything that they have been trying is not making things better.
At long last, they are beginning to sense the truth.
Make sure that you have no coffee next to your keyboard, or in your mouth, because if you do, you WILL splutter or spill over your keyboard it as you watch this unprecedented, foul, loathsome and appalling display of inhuman nastiness:
All of you who still believe that the BBC is a ‘fair’, necessary, unbiased, professional and beneficial organisation, take note; what you have just watched is a manifestation of the true nature of the BBC and the people who control it.
This is what they are really like, right to the bone. At all other times, they are merely pretending to be human beings, with soft voices, seemingly reasonable opinions and lack of bias.
You are paying for this. Literally and figuratively. You pay this man’s salary. You pay for the whole sick and twisted organisation. You paid for this presenter and his attempt to humiliate and vilify a man who cannot even push his own wheelchair.
And they have the GALL to ask for the ‘License fee’ to be INCREASED.
It should be ABOLISHED Period, the BBC should encrypt its signal and anyone who wants to pay for this sort of trash can do so if they like seeing human beings treated like this. Anyone who does not concede that the BBC has GOT TO GO is FOR what we have just seen.
(Wikileaks gives us) “a snapshot of the world as it is, rather than the edited account agreed upon by diverse elites, whose only common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance”.
Give me a break.
The 250,000 cables handed to Wikileaks are all being trawled through by The New York Times, El Pais and the Guardian, and other newspapers all of whom use their biased editorial filters to decide what shall and shall not be published. It is only AFTER this process takes place that Wikileaks posts what they have extracted and redacted.
The newspapers that are publishing these cables are precisely a group of diverse elites whose common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance.
The players of the old, ‘dinosaur’ media have a common interest in maintaining their power as the gatekeepers of information and how it is disseminated. What they have done with these cables is pure pre-internet newspaper thinking; “we know best what you need to know”, “take what we give, do not think”. By doing this, instead of releasing all of the information into a system that can be crowdsourced, they deliberately maintain the ignorance of the public. At the current rate of release, it will take years for all the cables to see the light of day, if they ever do at all.
“Tell us what to search for and we will let you know if we find anything interesting”. I’m sorry, but this is just so ridiculous you couldn’t make it up if you tried…. unless you worked at the Grauniad.
Bear in mind this is the same newspaper that built a brilliant crowdsourcing tool to facilitate the pouring over of MPs expenses. Its not that they do not know how to write or deploy software in innovative ways; in the case of Cablegate, they do not want you to know what is in there. There is no reason whatsoever why they cannot repurpose use the tools they have already built for the Cablegate data; in fact, it would work even better because we are not dealing with scanned receipts but with plain text
This blog has had issues with Henry Porter’s writing in the past and it seems that nothing has changed; he thinks he can type out “black is white” and everyone will simply believe it, because he printed it.
The facts are these, and this goes for all the newspapers gatekeeping the Cablegate files:
The Guardian is for the warmongering state.
The Guardian is a protector of the warfare state.
The Guardian is a gatekeeper whose job it is to keep you ignorant.
The Guardian is there to conceal the truth from you.
The Guardian is there to head off your ability to come to conclusions based on the facts.
The Guardian is there to aid the state in destroying your rights.
If none of these are true, then that newspaper should release the Cablegate files immediately, without equivocation or redaction or delay.
OR
At the very least, desist from printing the untruth that they are in any way separate from the ‘elites’ that seek to control the perception of the world.
I wonder if someone in the Gruaniad has the balls to MYSQLDUMP the cables and ‘do a Wikieaks’ on the gatekeepers…
Now THAT would be amazing!!
UPDATE!
As we told you, The Guardian is nothing more than a tool of the state, to the bone.
The Editors of the Guardian have allowed James Richardson, ‘journalist’, to publish a hit piece on Wikileaks attempting to shift the blame for a cable that they inspected and released which will now have real world consequences that they would rather they did not.
The Guardian has been one of the virulent rabid anti Mugabi newspapers calling for the ouster of that man for years. When they received the 200,000 plus cables, they naturally threw his name into the search box to dig up whatever dirt they could on him to further the agenda of destabilising that country and replacing Mugabe with a puppet.
Since Wikileaks does not actually leak these cables themselves, but instead, only publishes what their ‘media partners’ sanitise and publish they cannot be blamed for what is about to take place in Zimbabwe.
James Richardson however, wants to blame Wikileaks for this cable release, when it was his newspaper that did it. This is a deliberate, total and shameful misrepresentation of the facts.
The Guardian is clearly trying to separate itself from any harm that is to come out of this particular cable, placing all the blame for their vindictive actions on Wikileaks.
This is just what you would expect from a gang of traitors, liars and collaborators, whose sole aim is to bolster and reinforce the power of the state.
Unfortunately for them, the internet is here, and they cannot get away with an article like this; we all know the Wikileaks process, we all know who the criminals and their facilitators are, and no amount of lying and spinning can change that.
The Guardian and its Editors are responsible for the release of this cable, and no one else.
As for the whole idea of ‘media partners’, clearly The Guardian and its editors are the sort of people who cannot be trusted with an empty bottle of milk, let alone sensitive information of any kind, or a gentlemen’s agreement. Its extraordinarily naive and simple minded to put your faith in The Guardian, and anyone who has been paying attention to them over the last 13 years will know this. The Guardian will stab you in the back once it has what it wants. They will sell you out in an instant, without hesitation or remorse. They will lie about you, spin the truth and hang you out to dry. That is the lesson.
Expect Wikileaks to be hung out to dry by the Editors at The Guardian, and as their embarrassment over this ‘facilitating Mugabe’ affair becomes ever more painful, expect their denial, lying and spin to become more shrill, in the way they are so expert. Expect more salacious ‘revelations’ about Assange and ‘full coverage’ of his trumped up charges and kangaroo court trial.
In the end, Wikileaks is going to have to release all of the cables, either to protect itself from lying Newspaper Editors, or because its ‘leader’ has been renditioned. One thing is for sure; now that they have handed over all the cables to the Guardian, they cannot cease being ‘media partners’ with them without a full escalation from the Editors; Wikileaks has no cards left in this hand, the Guardian has them all.
Wikileaks should have released everything at once in the first place, but I suspect that they were seduced by the silver tongued ‘journalists’ at the world’s biggest newspapers, whose main objective is circulation and serving their master, the State.
Full disclosure is the only way to manage this sort of information. If you accept that State secrecy is legitimate in any way, then this sort of information should not be released at all. If you do not believe that the State is acting correctly or does not have the right to murder, steal and corrupt, then the only course of action is to give a warning and then release the information.
I’m sure that whatever happens in the future, no one with a brain cell who has been paying attention is going to trust the Editors and ‘journalists’ of The Guardian, who have once again, shown their true colours.
If you have been paying attention at all, you will have read about the mass manifestation, the acephalous Anonymous and their successful attacks on MasterCard, Visa and PayPal:
What is interesting about all this is not that the sites of these large organisations have been bumped offline, but the slick consumer grade tools that are being used to do it.
LOIC is an acronym for ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’. It is a piece of software that runs on Windows Mac and Linux, and every instance of it presents the user with this simple interface:
It is easy to install and run, and when you run it, the twenty five people who direct the Botnet created by thousands of installations of LOIC can pour traffic onto any website they desire.
What is interesting about this is that LOIC, which does a sophisticated job in an interface that a child can use, is now spreading everywhere because one man, Joe Lieberman, made a public statement attacking Wikileaks, where he claimed that anyone who helped the site could be committing a crime.
Glen Greenwald dispels this lie very efficiently here:
With his single act, Lieberman’s words have had the unintended consequence of spreading the knowledge of how all of this works and LOIC itself into the machines of many tens of thousands of irate, dedicated internet users and the knowledge into the minds of millions of people who previously didn’t know anything about the workings of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Indeed, I didn’t know what LOIC was until this event took place. So many people are talking about it, Google has a realtime results box on the main results page for the search term.
The perfect storm of this consumer grade DDOS tool, social media, Wikileaks, Joe Lieberman and the cowardice of the online payment systems has spawned a game change in how the internet is going to work in the future.
These tools and the ones that will surely follow, can never be stopped. In a perfect world, where companies like MasterCard, VISA and PayPal work only in the interests of their customers, these tools would not not be used to pop them off of the internet, if they existed at all.
But that is not what is really interesting.
Its clear that there is a problem with the way payment systems on the internet are structured; they are top down in shape, with a single point of failure, forcing two parties that want to transact to use the services of a third party.
This point of failure is a problem if you are like Wikileaks and have your account frozen and your ability to receive and send money stopped. It is a problem if you want to donate to a cause the state would rather see die. Its also a problem if copycat groups styling themselves on Anonymous decides that you are evil and that you should be ‘punished’.
With a single point of failure, both the customers and the companies that run the payment services are at risk of having their business disrupted.
The same is true for DNS; the state is arbitrarily, without warrants, charges or any legal process at all, seizing domain names to shut down access to websites. Clearly DNS and the way it works is a huge problem, especially when we are talking about Wikileaks and the sites like it that will surely follow. There are already plans afoot to create a distributed DNS system; hopefully it will be robust enough to protect everyone and their domains.
As for the question of money, a system like Bitcoin is a possible solution to the problem of companies like MasterCard, PayPal and VISA who do not have the best interests of the customer uppermost in their minds:
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency. ”Peer-to-peer” (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or to keep track of the transactions. Instead, those tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. ”Anonymity” means that the real world identity of the parties of a transaction can be kept hidden from the public or even from the parties themselves.
This sounds good. In the Bitcoin system, there are a limited number of ‘coins’ the number of which cannot be increased; when the system is twelve years old there will be 21,000,000 coins in circulation:
New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain calculational problem (i.e. creates a new block), for which an average solution time can be calculated. The difficulty of the problem is adjusted so that in the first 4 years of the Bitcoin network, 10,500,000 coins will be created. The amount is halved each 4 years, so it will be 5,250,000 in years 4-8, 2,625,000 in years 8-12 and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21,000,000 over time.
This is very interesting indeed. It means that there is now a greenback style currency that the state can have no control over, cannot monitor and which people can use to exchange goods. It seems to take the best parts of Chaumian e-Cash, whilst removing the bad parts, i.e. centrally controlled mint in a centrally controlled location, owned by a single corporate entity, constituted under the laws of a state. It does have some serious flaws however, one being that everyone can see your transaction history if they have your address… yikes!
The source for Bitcoin is available, so if you are minded to do it, you can set up your own identical network. Its all very intelligent, and it costs you nothing to try it out. You could even fix its flaws and release an improved version.
This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be done to solve the problems sketched out above.
Using LOIC to knock websites off the internet doesn’t pass the BLOGDIAL demonstration test; once the act is over, just as in a demonstration, all the problems are still there:
Wikileaks can’t receive donations.
Wikileaks is still having its websites attacked by the state.
The online payment systems still cut anyone off with only a phone call from the state as a reason.
All of this is predictable from the beginning, and so, using LOIC ‘to make a point’ doesn’t make sense in the long run.
It is however, and hopefully, an iteration. Once the futility of DDOSing sites dawns on Anonymous, they might turn to writing pieces of software like Bitcoin, or simply running the Bitcoin client to help the creation and spread of the currency. Or as has just been announced something else.
They might get the millions of people who are following them to contribute financially to the effort to create a distributed DNS. They might even reproduce the work of Operation Clambake where the ‘Sacred Documents’ of Scientology were so extensively mirrored on the internet that if you search for OT3 Operating Thetan you can read it all – which is exactly what the Scientologists do not want.
MasterCard, VISA and PayPal have made a massive long term business error. In their knee jerk response to appease Joe Lieberman, they have awakened millions of people to the fact that their money and access to goods on the internet is not guaranteed if you use their services. They have awakened a software developer somewhere who is going to write the equivalent of ‘Bittorrent for Money’ that will completely eliminate their dominance of the online payments market; remember; credit cards are a 1970’s idea that has been superimposed onto the internet. It is inevitable that this system of cumbersome numbers married to plastic cards is going to be superseded. Bitcoin might be this system, it might not be. It might be one of several replacements. Either way, these new systems are coming now, guaranteed, and there will be nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
Think about this; imagine that Bitcoin is huge, with millions of users. It is running not only on laptops and desktops, but on mobile phones. It is integrated into tens of thousands of websites through its API. Some of those users run exchange services; they sit in Cafes or in dorms or offices, and they will trade ‘street money’ for bitcoins. Social networking brings these parties together to transact. Now there is an interface between the real world and the Bitcoin ecosystem that will be impossible to shut down or even monitor. You might be able to pick off one or two of the people who provide this service, but for all intents and purposes, it will be as impossible to stop this Bitcoin economy as it has been for the state to stop the illicit drug economy in its ridiculous ‘war on drugs’.
Had MasterCard and its like taken a stronger stance against the state, they would not face this inevitable circumstance in the near term, and might have been able to transition to the new styles of online payment; now it is too late – no one trusts them.
Finally on to the subject of boycotting Amazon for kicking Wikileaks off of its hosting service.
Amazon, being the rightful owner of its servers has the absolute right to refuse to serve anyone. The consumer has the absolute right to refrain from using Amazon services for whatever reason.
Think about this; imagine if Amazon was knowingly selling sex slaves or ‘murder to order’ through its service, ‘because it could’. This reprehensible and unambiguously immoral trade would be enough to cause you to boycott them. On the other extreme, because Amazon sells pornographic novels, there are some who would not use them by virtue of that taint.
Somewhere between those two poles is the Wikileaks case.
Wikileaks, by exposing the lies of the mass murdering, thieving and destroying state is a benefit to you directly. Amazon, in the act of kicking them off of their service, without being forced to do so, i.e. voluntarily, is wilfully aiding and abetting the state in its aim of covering up its deception, mass murder and theft. That means that Amazon is working directly against your interests as a human being.
Amazon is not a victim of the state, and I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few days; they are a willing participant in covering up the evil of mass murderers. They acted without a court order, national security letter or any other direct attack from the state. Had they received such an attack, they would be victims of an attack, but since no such attack came to them, they are and were not under direct threat.
In this instance, a boycott is justified in my view; these people are directly attacking me and everyone else by arbitrarily deleting the Wikileaks site; and it must be pointed out that they did not delete the site during the previous Wikileaks expose ‘Collateral Murder’.
Once again, if they want to delete Wikileaks, they have the right to do so; its their property. What you cannot claim is that Amazon is a victim, because that simply is not true.
Its been a very interesting week. Whatever the truth is behind Wikileaks, there have been unintended consequences that will change the internet in ways that the state has not factored in to its responses or plans, depending on what you think about the origin of Wikileaks and the people who run it.
The state is not all powerful. They cannot predict what people will do with software, and that is the truly profound game changing factor. LOIC is just the latest in a long line of pieces of software that change the way people think; Napster, Gnutella, Bitorrent, are all predecessors of this trend, Bitcoin is a new one and there are others in the pipeline. One thing is certain; the state cannot keep up with all of the developments, because there are too many people out there developing the tools and using them once they are deployed.
When the next perfect storm of software and a cause comes around the effects will be even more intense and more unstoppable; this is the trend that the state cannot resist. As they clamp down harder, the internet pushes back with an exponentially greater force.
The Wikileaks output is being widely and heartily condemned by those with vested interests. Sarah Palin has called for Assange to be ‘hunted down’, ‘like al Quaeda’. So, he won’t be found for a decade at least then..
However, Bob Aisworth, previously UK Defence Secretary, noted in this interview (from 1min50sec) a very interesting point. I shall quote:
There are no secrets any more. […] Anything goes. Nobody is prepared to take authority that you should not disclose this or should not tell people this and things systematically leak, and one must assume, whether you’re a politician or a security planner that anything and everything, every scrap of advice that you do is going to wind up in the public domain, not in 30 years time, but tomorrow or even later on today, and you have to do your business in that way, effectively, it’s as simple as that.
Mr Aisworth goes on to suggest that this will be damaging for the way diplomacy is done (he remains part of the old structure, but has at least seen the near-future clearly in this case). However, one could argue that it will not just be damaging, it will be absolutely and completely destructive for the way diplomacy is currently done . This can only be a Good Thing.
We may imagine a system in which there is less and less interference in the business of other nations and peoples, in which backroom deals can no longer be done to decide who invades whom and for what share of the spoils, in which influence would be curtailed, nepotism and corruption laid bare. A system in which the state of paranoia is shifted from the populus to the existing elite, who will know that their every word is essentially broadcast to the world and there will no longer be any sub- to their -terfuge.
If all the political build-up to the Iraq invasion had been leaked at the time, it would never have happened. If all the internal motions of the gravy train that is the European Union and Council Of Europe were broadcast and available for dissection, the system would rapidly dissolve in its own digestive juices. At the very least, the populace may be reduced to pleading stupidity should they then allow these things to continue, but they would no longer be able to plead ignorance.
Business will, by necessity, be carried out on a small scale, with the requisite security controls in place. Business will no longer be allowed to exert self-serving interest over public servants – directing policies and law-making to their own benefit – and neither would government be able to interfere with business.
There is already an enormous propaganda war begun by those who stand to lose most from the “novyi glasnost”, from those who will be seen as naked emperors during the perestroika that will surely follow. We will be, and already are being, told that life cannot go on this way, that secretive dealings are the only way to maintain trust and international relationships, that secrets held by the few to wield power over the many are the only way to maintain a happy life. “Go back to bed, your government is in control. Watch [$retarded_reality_show_for_retards]” (to misquote Bill Hicks). These lies, that only through secretive government can one achieve happiness, are as much a fairy story as the ugly, evil troll lurking beneath the bridge. An horrific fear existing simply to scare you away from the lush meadow on the other side. All that is required to break the fear is one small billy-goat… and one big billy-goat can destroy it forever.
Additional: Should you require any evidence that They are extremely concerned with this situation, and the potential harm it may cause their future ability to do business in the way to which they have become accustomed (i.e. in secret, doing as they please), please note that there have been calls for Julian Assange to be assassinated, and he has already been branded a rapist (in a very poor quality smear) in order to alienate him from the public. The person responsible for bringing the comments of public servants into the public arena has been branded a traitor and may be executed for his actions. In addition, the Wikileaks servers are being attacked, both digitally and politically.
All this is being done not to punish Wikileaks for facilitating this release, but instead is only to persuade any future leakers that it may not be in their best interest to do so. Very reminiscent of the way North Korea, China, Iran et al. deal with dissent to prevent it spreading, isn’t it?
This call for a bank run has people in ‘authority’ very worried:
Valérie Ohannesian, of the French Banking Federation, said she thought that the appeal was “stupid in every sense” and a charter for thieves and money-launderers.
“My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic,” she told the Observer. “One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought.”
If that is all they can come up with, they must be shitting their knickers.
For a start, everyone now knows that ‘money laundering’ laws are not there to catch ‘criminals’ but are instead for the ordinary people who are trying to protect their money from the ravaging, rapacious state.
As we posted before, this bankrun is an entirely good thing, but what has to happen is a complete exposure and defining of the problem, before it can be fixed.
For a short time, the international press reported the call for a bankrun that we launched on Facebook to invite all those who wish to follow us to withdraw their money from their accounts on the 7th of December, 2010.
Since the publication of our call, people around the world mobilized to translate the text into their language to recreate the event in their country, to promote our initiative by all possible means and invite their contacts to do the same. Our call has met with a success that we did not dare to hope for. We are very happy about it and thanks to the personal investment of all those who, like us, want to enjoy a healthy banking system, equitable, affordable and accountable, we hope that over the weeks we can convince enough people in the world to finally be heard by our respective Governments.
Good. There is only one problem however; a healthy banking system cannot be equitable; a bank exists to hold your money for you and to facilitate transfers for you and to do other services that you require of it, in return for fees. What those fees are is a matter of negotiation, since you are entering into a private contract with a company or an individual.
This is why it is not smart to ask for an ‘equitable’ or an ‘affordable’ banking system; market forces produce the best possible banks, and therefore, banking should be left completely up to those forces, in the same way that the operation of self storage units are left to the market.
The problem with banking is not deregulation, it is regulation and interference from the state.
For clarification purposes, we do not speak on behalf of any political party or from any labour union or religion. Our action is a civic involvement that keeps its distance from any form of hate or conspiracy theories that could be made on behalf of our movement, by others during their interventions on any areas of discussion, which is beyond our control. We only speak for ourselves and for no other organisations. We do not seek to harm anyone in particular. It’s towards a corrupt, criminal and deadly system that we decided to oppose, as far as our ability our determination and respect for the law are concerned.
Very good.
Why have we launched this action?
First of all, we wanted to raise public awareness on the functioning of the monetary system.
The overwhelming majority of holders of a bank accounts, savings accounts or even a pension plan, are unaware the way money is created or what the banks are doing with the money that ‘they are given. They know nothing about the principle of money as debt. They do not know the reality behind words like “asset bubbles”, “Treasury bills”, “Hedge Funds” or “securitization”. Hence the media in general make little effort to inform in an objective, transparent and accessible way to all. The only thing the public really understands is that most major financial crimes and insider trading remain mostly unpunished, but they are the first to pay the consequences.
True. People are almost completely ignorant of what money is, how banks work and what the current role of the state and central banks is. They cannot define inflation, do not understand that it is deliberately caused, do not understand that the money in their accounts (so much as it even belongs to them) is worthless and that this is all by design.
Not only do we deplore how many questions posed by ordinary citizens on the economic situation remain without clear answers in your columns,
There are highly intelligent commenters who regularly destroy the nonsense some ‘journalists’ peddle about all of this. We are past the tipping point; its GAME OVER for this immoral system.
We do not need journalists anymore; what we do need is a free internet, millions of awakened people and one or two very famous people to stand up and push the snowball down the hill.
It has finally happened.
but we also regret your lack of zeal in denouncing the measures that have allowed the global economic situation get to the point where it is today: a situation that has bought our heads of states and Governments to their knees before the rating agencies, trembling with fear at the idea that our currencies are deteriorating.
Our politicians can’t meet both the interests of financial markets and those of its citizens. So, it is time to remind them who they were elected to serve.
Strikes and demonstrations are no longer useful because whatever we do, we are not heard. And whatever they do, we are not consulted. So we decided to hit the system at its core – THE BANKING SYSTEM
MY EMPHASIS!!!!……
At long last, they are beginning to understand!
For YEARS we have been saying this; demonstrations DO NOT WORK, and you are an ignorant PART OF THE PROBLEM if you call for them, or a GATEKEEPER in service of the STATE and THE WAR MACHINE.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein
This is true about everything, including demonstrating to stop war or to make government do what you want it to do. You cannot keep calling for demonstrations and expecting the bad things to stop, when it fails to work; doing so is irrational and stupid. Demonstrations and violence are failure tactics, and the idiotic students who smashed Tory HQ are completely wrong in every way you can be wrong.
Think about it; 50,000 students, all of one mind are an army and huge potential financial force that could make a huge change; on the most basic level, that many people could buy a full page advertisement in a national newspaper once a month for ONE POUND EACH.
That would be far more effective in getting a message across, rather than marching in the streets like animatronic showroom dummies.
But enough of that…
Are we aware of the economic consequences that would result from the success of our action?
We are especially aware of the consequences that the deregulated and uncontrollable global financial system will have on our jobs, our health, our education, our pensions, our industries, our environment, our future, our dignity, the dignity of the citizens of countries that the system has enslaved by debt that they will never be able to repay to better appropriate their resources. This is the fate that awaits people if we in the West do not take ourselves in hand.
We are aware of the role this system plays in the prosperity of industrial empires whose interests depend on armed conflicts, diseases, food shortages and poverty prevailing in the countries that provide labour and natural resources at minimal cost. We are aware that this system will never have anything to gain from a world of peace and prosperity and that continuing to entrust our hard and honestly earned money to this sick system, we make ourselves accomplices of its thefts, for its crimes, its wars and the misery war generates.
Beautiful; they can actually see!
The only problem here, is that they are talking about deregulation being a problem when it is not. If these people were able to form their own bank, and run it however they please, they would be an international force unparalleled in its size and transparency, as everyone moved all their money to it en masse.
The reason why they cannot have their bank is because the state regulates banking so that the war machine can be run. They stop anyone honest from running a bank, and they use legal tender laws to prevent honest money from emerging. Once again, the problem is not deregulation, but regulation by the state.
What do we want?
We, the citizens of the 21st century, heirs of generations who have sacrificed so that we may live free and dignified, demand the creation of a CITIZENS BANK- serving citizens, a bank that would put our money away from speculative fever, free of all financial bubbles designed to burst one day, free of operations that transform our loans & assets and use our debt to buy other assets.
This is a very good idea. The only thing stopping you from creating this bank is the state. Remove the state’s ability to regulate banks and then you can have your ‘Citizens Bank’, and you will be able to run it in any way that you like.
We want banks that lend only the wealth they have. Banks that help small and medium enterprises to relocate jobs, & bank lending at zero rate. (*) Banks that support projects that benefit citizens rather than the “market”. Banks where we can deposit our money, which will then create a peaceful conscience within ourselves. Banks we will not have to be worry about. Banks whose success will sound the death knell of the merchants of death, disease and slavery. On the ruins of the old system, we want to build a banking system that will no longer sacrifice more human dignity on the altar of profit.
This is error.
You want ‘banks’ that only lend the money they have; NO, you must make your own bank that does that; you cannot force people to run their businesses to serve you. Your only recourse, as it should be, is to remove your money from banks that are evil and to put them into an honest bank. You cannot on the one hand, say that you want a world free of violence, and then at the same time, call for the state to do your bidding via violence on others. Start your own bank, and if the state tries to stop you, confront them. You can be sure that the existing banks will be pushing for the violent suppression of you and this bank run right now; that is all they have left to fight with; the apparatus of the police state.
You will be able to set your own interest rates, lending requirements and ultimate purpose. There is a desperate need for such a bank, and you have a captive population of over one hundred million to start with.
I’m afraid that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. You are in the trouble you are in now because you trusted the existing banks and the state to take care of you, and like the predators they are, they fed on you. You will never be able to not worry about banking.
As for the ‘altar of profit’ this is just total nonsense; there is nothing wrong with profit, and you are conflating profit with Crony Capitalism and its evil practitioners. Profit, price signalling and all the other elements of real economics are essential to bringing into existence the prosperity, freedom, peace and the kind of bank that you want to be able to use. You cannot deny the laws of nature, and economics is governed by rules that are as firmly set as the laws that cover physics. Learn these rules, and you will make a bank that is more likely to be a long term benefit.
Finally, the old system must be swept away completely. There is absolutely no reason why a new, clean, moral bank should be set up on the ‘ruins of the old system’. If your plan is that you are going to start with a bad foundation, you might as well not even begin.
It is only through peaceful voluntarism that you will ever get a lasting solution to this problem. Forcing banks to obey you by using the state makes the state more powerful, and it is the state that is the true enemy.
We, the people have finally been awakened by poverty and despair afflicting the most vulnerable among us – pensioners, welfare recipients or working poor – and is now threatening what remains of the middle class & entrepreneurs. Even these are exploited as milking cows, and we now simply want the cancellation of the public debts generated by the sick system that we no longer want.
Once again, this is true; this debt belongs only to the people who authorised it; you cannot be made liable to a debt incurred by a third party, without your written consent, and NO, voting in an election does not constitute consent to be made a debtor.
We do not want our taxes, our efforts, our resources to continue to feed this bottomless pit.
Oops, its not ‘your money’ once you have payed it to the state; this is a common error that people make; they believe that the state, “works for them”, and that, “its our money”. It is not. You have no claim whatsoever over that money once you pay it. Its gone, toast, spent.
We want to regain the power to coin money and free ourselves from the guidelines imposed on us by the European Union, which was built against the consent of the majority of people consulted by referendum, not to mention those whose country of origin have no organized popular consultation.
This is absolutely key to the entire problem; without the power to decide what money is best for you, you are nothing more than a slave to the European Central Bank, the Private Federal Reserve and all other central banks, who steal money via the inflation tax.
Gold and silver money cannot be inflated, controlled or used against you by a central bank, and of course, central banks themselves should be abolished, and would be if this Citizens Bank took off; there would be no need for central banks if every country had its own Citizens Bank, working in cooperation with other similar banks around the world, only for the benefit and convenience of the depositors.
remove the power to regulate banking from the state
Without these two in place, it will be impossible to get to the place that the stopbankque organisers want.
(*) What the Islamic banks to successfully achieve by refusing usury for religious reasons, we can do for civic reasons.
Oops, ‘Islam was right’?! Don’t tell Geert Wilders!
To conclude
We draw your attention to the fact that even if we manage to relocate jobs, advanced technologies and machines have replaced human labour in a growing number of areas. They can produce more, faster, cheaper, and for these reasons, they create fear to those who wonder how they will earn their living tomorrow. This is unfortunate because since the invention of the wheel, technology is meant to improve the living conditions of mankind. If progress was meant to serve citizens rather than serve the market, we could make a quantum leap in technology development today paralyzed by special interest groups that are the primary beneficiaries of this system.
This is completely wrong; technology does not put people out of jobs, this is The Luddite Fallacy.
Progress serves citizens though their freedom to choose one service over another. Sadly, Europeans are still steeped in the sticky, hallucinogenic treacle of socialist thinking. They want the state to continue its tyranny unabated, only with them at the helm. Sorry guys NO $A£€!
We already have the knowledge to free humanity of its needs in fossil and nuclear fuels and to produce and deliver drinking water throughout the planet at a lower cost, to produce fruits and vegetables, from ice fields to the desert. Poverty only exists on our planet because of the lack of political will of industrialized countries, subject to market forces. Pollution and waste of resources are the sad consequences of this obsolete system which we must put an end to.
Sigh…You cant have it all it seems… Market forces are the only way to eradicate poverty. The state, and ‘political will’ will NEVER do it, and if they try, it will mean giving up the very rights that the stopbankque people are calling for.
We, the inheritors of chaos, we have a world to rebuild. A world where work is no longer seen as slavery, and lack of work as a tragedy because we have been able to rethink how mankind of tomorrow will ensure its survival, education, well-being and old age.
In order for work not to be slavery, you need to be able to keep the fruits of your labour, that you voluntarily contract for. If the state takes even a penny of it by force, you are reduced to the level of a slave. Everything they do with your money after that, is insult added to injury.
We invite all those who want to follow us on this path – including you, dear journalists – to overcome their fears of the unknown and to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the system that will replace the current one, which with or without us, will eventually collapse when it has taken everything from us. We prefer not to wait until it arrives, or even worse, if in order to save the economy a new war would be declared.
We thank the footballer Eric Cantona for having instilled the idea that we have taken literally. The die is cast. Time will tell whether we were right. (07/11/2010)
Don’t hold your breath for the journalists to come on board; they are in the pay of the newspapers that are owned by the same people or colleagues of the people who own the war machine; why do you think these evil scribblers are for war with Iran? They are for war because they are being told to write pro war pieces. They cannot be relied upon or trusted – thankfully we do not need them. We have the internet, we have myriad ways of spreading information that does not include their channels. These new channels are being put to good use, finally, now all that remains is to formulate a plan and then execute it.
This means:
setting up a bank that is outside the control of the state
buying gold en masse with all the worthless paper money that has been withdrawn from the system
depositing that gold in the new bank
The honest money that you require already exists; GOLD.
The forms of banking you require already exist 100% RESERVE BANKING
If you watch any documentary this year, it absolutely must be ‘Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story’http://bit.ly/9ICXTi.
Where the problem of Britain’s money is laid out so simply and effectively that even a child could understand it.
If you still believe in:
‘Benefits’
‘Grants’
‘Funding’ the arts
Councils to do everything
State funded education
Government ‘subsidies’ of anything
Government ‘investment’ in anything
Then you need to watch this programme. After having watched it, if you STILL think that these things are not immoral, unethical and insane then you really are lost.
Every once in a while, someone writes something that is so clear and efficient at dispelling commonly held beliefs and myths that it changes everything. This television programme is one of those things. The first twenty three minutes alone are enough to expunge all of your false ideas about the true nature of government spending.
What is for sure is that democracy will inevitably lead to absolute socialism, and this documentary proves it. The clients of the giant state, who all have a vested interest in keeping the monster alive, will always be disinclined to vote for liberty and a smaller state, as they will be cutting off the teat that is feeding them. As the programme says, there are places in the UK where 70% of the economy is made up of state feeders; none of those people are going to vote for a smaller state. Ever.
Taking all of this into account, its clear to see that there will not be many more chances for Britain to escape the nightmare of total socialism; if this lot do not unleash the forces of capitalism immediately, subsequent elections will turn this country back towards socialist totalitarianism; there will simply not be enough people left to vote for anything else.
The only way this can be prevented is if the economy is returned to sanity in a very short amount of time, so that the people who used to rely on the state, will be able to find places in the real economy. They will then be disinclined to vote for socialists who will destroy their prosperity. If this is not done quickly, and people are languishing for too long, a reversal will be much more difficult.
Whoever is in charge, if they understand economics at all (fat chance) should be thinking about secondly reducing the size of the state, and firstly, removing all obstacles to capitalism, like the minimum wage, all regulations on hiring people (and everything else), abolishing VAT etc etc.
If this is not done immediately, then there is going to be… trouble.
A failure to unleash capitalism (to ‘go Hong Kong’) will mean that either the system will have to be brought down by some other means, or it will turn to socialism. Which is the most likely outcome? Who knows? The choices are clear however, and there is still alot of educational work to be done, what with all the totally delusional Keynesians, Socialists, Statists and Global Warmistas debating wether or not gravity holds you down: http://j.mp/9Ttwpi whilst it does precisely that. If otherwise intelligent people persist in their wishful thinking, wilful economic illiteracy and statism, then it is going to take nothing less than a wholesale withdrawal of support from the productive to engineer the change to reality based living that is so desperately needed.
Once again, its Libertarianism that is the key to real prosperity of the sort that made Britain great; property rights are the ultimate right that not only protects you personally, it also protects your family, your money, your future, your security and allows you to fulfil your maximum potential.
We have been talking about this for several years now. Anyone who takes what we say seriously (and there are many that do, resulting in profound changes to their entire personal philosophies) will have already read ‘For a New Liberty’.
You need to read that book. I am not just saying that to be saying it; I REALLY MEAN IT. Surf to mises.org and BUY IT. NOW. It is one of the most important books you will ever read. After reading it, you will be left with the choice of being an irrational, imbecillic, violent moron, or an ethical, rational real human being, with a deep, morally based concern for the welfare of your fellow man.
I’m not making that up. I’m not saying it for effect.
If you think that this documentary is digestible, revealing, shocking and redefines your ideas about Britain’s place in the world, you are in for a BIGGER SHOCK. ‘For a New Liberty’ is 1000 times more profoundly life changing than this documentary, because it deals with every part of your life, and not just money alone.
Its great to have a small part to play in spreading these ideas. Its through their spread that we are finally going to be rid of the state, so at the very least our children can live like real human beings instead of cattle.
Ian Duncan Smith and his Tories are set to reintroduce ID Cards.
How do we know this? They are attempting to scrap the byzantine system of ‘benefits’ in favour of a single ‘Universal Credit’ that will be able to take into account what your circumstances are on a month to month basis.
Has an alarm bell rung in your head yet?
The Workers Revolutionary Party website (of all the people) reveals the crucial details:
Defend benefits! down with ‘universal credit’!
THE announcement yesterday that the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, had won his battle with the treasury over bringing in a single ‘universal credit’ has rightly been described as the ‘bonfire of the benefits’.
Under his scheme, every single benefit available to the unemployed, elderly, low paid or incapacitated – about 50 benefits in all – will be scrapped overnight and replaced with a single universal credit.
Due for the chop are housing benefit, incapacity benefit, the tax credit system for low-paid workers and single mothers as well as the job seekers allowance.
According to Smith, bringing all these benefits together is now possible due to computer technology that would even enable benefits to be varied from month to month depending on changes to a claimant’s circumstances.
[…]
Nobody in their right mind will believe the nonsense being put about by Smith that these huge amounts can be obtained through efficiencies being made by collapsing the 50-odd benefits into one single universal credit, that can be varied according to changed circumstances.
Efficiency savings have never been made on this vast a scale by any government.
This is true. The system that IDS and Liddle-Graiinger are describing would be bigger, more complex and intrusive than the doomed UK ID Card system, and of course would be even more immoral and unethical, quite apart from being undoable as all UK government IT systems have proven to be.
On every level none of this should be considered seriously. And remember, this job will be contracted out to Lockheed Martin, Capita or some other company, that will have access to all private and company bank accounts in the country.
The very idea is beyond absurd.
In truth, these savings can only be achieved through savage cuts in benefits, by repeated means testing, and by a constant state policing of the former benefit holders, with punishment for those who do not report changed circumstances.
The means testing will be built in comrades; they would have real-time access to your bank account, cash would be outlawed, and they would adjust your ‘benefits’ by a series of programmed break points that are automatically triggered by the amount of money flowing into your account. Theoretically.
[…]
These proposals are not about efficiency, cutting out so-called ‘benefit fraud’ or targeting the really needy, they are simply about smashing all benefits, in order to prop up the bankrupt capitalist system and its bankrupt bosses and bankers.
I just cut out all the nauseating socialist Santa Claus Money Thinking. This section is factually correct however; this is about slashing ‘benefits’, that is true, but it is also about setting up a system whereby not a single penny of money that you earn or spend is outside the scrutiny of the state.
This is about propping up the system of crony capitalism (NOT capitalism, perfect examples of crony capitalists being Lockheed Martin and Capita) and the people who benefit from it; and I use the word ‘benefit’ deliberately in this context, because crony capitalists receive benefits from the state in the same way that the so called scroungers do. They are no different from each other save in the scale of their theft.
[…]
And what is the significance of the title ‘universal credit’ in place of ‘benefit’. A benefit, of course, is something that a person is entitled to by right. A ‘credit’ is basically a loan for which one has to beg, and which must be repaid at some time in the future.
No doubt we will be clarified shortly concerning the issue of repayment.
The TUC must not allow current benefit holders to be turned into beggars. The coalition must be told that any attempt to abolish benefits in favour of a credit will be met with a general strike to bring them down.
Very perceptive comrade. Of course, the state cannot create rights any more than it can create jobs. I would say also, that the word ‘universal’ is used in the literal sense; everyone in Britain will be ‘entitled’ to this credit; you will receive an amount ranging from a negative number (taxation, which is theft) to a positive one (‘benefit’, which is redistribution of the stolen money). Of course, you will not be able to opt out of this system, the taxation part being the real-time taxation system hinted at by Ian Liddle-Grainger.
Clearly the only way that such a system can be implemented is with a compulsory ID Card for every economically active person, without which it will be illegal to operate a bank account.
Each ID Card will be linked to your account number, and the state will be able to check a list of your transactions remotely through realtime backdoor access.
There are no two ways about this. Either they introduce an ID Card for all economically active UK persons (and that means everybody if cash is severely constrained) or they drop the idea of real-time taxation and Universal Benefit in its nascent incarnation.
They know it means the introduction of the ID Card and the creation of a system of invasive police state socialism, where once they become the government again, they will have complete control of all the people and everything they do. It will mean the completion of the New Labour project that came to a halt because they ran out of other people’s money and patience with the nanny state.
If you think that life was bad under New Labour, wait till they take the reigns again once this system of complete control is in place. The thirteen years of Blair and Brown will seem like a picnic in the sun.
Obviously, none of this is a done deal, and there are infinitely better ways to secure the social safety net that do not rely on crony capitalists, immorality, faulty economic models and violence.
Hopefully, if the United States turns 180° and returns to its roots, this will cause a huge brain drain from the UK and Europe, causing them to think again.
Already, some of ‘Britain’s’ biggest companies are getting out of dodge for fairer climes. You can expect this trend to continue, especially in the internet business, where moving a company is as simple as running rsync, changing your DNS settings and buying hosting in another jurisdiction.
Britain boasts an internet economy of £100 billion per year. This will shrivel up should the tories introduce this invasive police state system. No one will host here, no one will develop here, no one will use transaction services based here; they will all flee to a restored USA, and other jurisdictions where Libertarianism flourishes.
Mark my words.
UPDATE
We have had some mail…
This is what you need to consider; if all benefits are going to be replaced by a single Universal Credit, in a monolithic system, that takes into account your circumstances automagically, they are going to need to following at a minimum:
A database with every British person in it, each citizen having a unique ID (National Identity Register)
Each child that is born would need to be in this database, with their relation to their parent or guardian, to calculate the Child Benefit component of the new Universal Credit (ContactPoint)
A connection to the medical database so that the disability benefit component of the new Universal Credit can be calculated (NHS Spine)
A new Universal Credit system (database and business logic) that is integrated into all bank accounts and which, PayPal style, can pay and withdraw monies from your bank account.
That is what is required at a minimum, to pull off what IDS is proposing, and of course, none of it can possibly be optional. It is not possible to do what they are thinking about without tying everything together into a single system that has the citizens unique identifier as the key.
As we say above, this is much worse than the original ID Card, and of course, when we say ID Card, we really mean NIR. This proposal brings together all the worst elements of the database state, and unifies them into a system of total control and surveillance.
This video ‘Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America’:
Describes on many levels, why the collectivists, the socialists and all the brainwashed people who believe in ‘democracy’ are nothing more than human cattle.
On the first level, there is a story in this video about how three women living in the same town save and borrow money.
Ms Fitts describes how, with a simple piece of software, it is possible to cut out the bank that is massively charging one of the women a high interest rate, by connecting these three people locally.
This is the sort of thing that entrepreneurs do, and which the socialists cannot even begin to imagine.
The socialist will blame the bank for the ‘problem’ of high interest rates, and then call on the violent state to force the bank to charge less.
The entrepreneur is smarter, and more importantly, ethical.
She understands the true nature of the problem and solves it in a way that not only is better for the consumer, but which has the side effect of completely destroying the business model of the bank. All without any coercion or violence of any kind, all done on the back of the power of human imagination, and voluntary exchange.
This is a good idea, but what is going to happen after the run is over?
The socialist wants to destroy, but he cannot create. He wants to hurt the system, but he wants to leave it all intact so that he can sit in the seat of power and run everything to his own bitter taste.
This is the difference; the freedom loving entrepreneurs who create and benefit everyone, versus the socialist control freaks who are inherently evil and destructive of capital and human life.
Had all the people now going berserk in France taken the opportunity to form their own banks that run on rules they fix for themselves, on a purely voluntary basis, none of them would have the need for what they are doing right now.
One thing is for sure; with all of those people withdrawing their money from the banks, this is an great opportunity to start just the sort of bank that the organisers of this bank run would want to see and use… do they have the brains to do it?
Thanks to the wise Preuss, we have a nifty little pair of articles that demonstrate once again why the people who think that democracy is a good way to organise the affairs of groups of people are spectacularly naïve.
The unethical long winded men who believe that, “the only legitimate way to have a process is if everyone has their say” would do well to consider the implications of these articles, but then, if they had the capacity to understand what the implications of this are, they could not hold the unethical views that they do:
Quote:
In earlier eras, the revelation that there was a Behavioural Insight Team at the heart of government, dedicated to finding ways to reshape the public’s thoughts, choices and actions, would have caused outrage. It would have brought to mind some of the darker antics of the Soviet Union, which treated certain beliefs as mental illnesses to be fixed, or maybe O’Brien, the torturer in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who boasts that the human mind is ‘infinitely malleable’.
Yet the news that David Cameron has a Behavioural Insight Team inside Downing Street, and what’s more that it is increasingly influential within the Lib-Con coalition, has been treated as if were a perfectly normal, even admirable thing. Have we lost our minds?
The Guardian article refered to gives us another prime example of how it doesn’t matter how you vote the government still get in.
Quote:
A “nudge unit” set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.
The unit, formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, is being run by David Halpern, a former adviser in Tony Blair’s strategy unit, and is taking advice from Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor generally recognised as popularising “nudge” theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society.
Thaler was in London for three days this week advising ministers, and in a speech urged the government to adopt longer term horizons. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he believed the unit could change the way citizens think.
And so, there you have it.
There are people in the employ of government whose work is to manipulate the thinking of the population. These people have the power to coercively use economics to alter the behaviour of the population, and of course, they also abuse the English language to do it.
Why do you think that the word ‘fair’ and all its derivatives are now on the lips of every Tom Dick and Harry? Do you think that it is merely by accident that everyone is measuring policy, laws and everything that comes out of government and which is related to ‘society’ is measured against this idea of ‘fairness’?
It is absolutely deliberate, and a direct result of this Behaviour Modification group at the heart of government.
Anyone who believes that democracy is beneficial or ethical is completely insane.
Anyone who believes that “having your say”, or “getting your points heard” legitimises government processes or democracy itself is also completely delusional, insane, Naïve and very very stupid.
It is clear that the frames of reference within which all the problems and non problems (like Home Education and its practitioner’s relationship to government) you face are nothing more than elaborate traps, created by this and other social engineering groups.
The Behavioural Insight Team and its predecessors, by creating the boxes within which you are allowed to address a problem have complete control over you from the outset, and because you are retarded, you cannot see that everyone having their say really does not legitimise anything.
This is why the only response to anything that is unethical should be point blank refusal. As soon as you enter into a discussion on their terms, you are thinking inside their frame of reference and all is lost.
This is why it is not irrational, confrontational or counterproductive to take the Libertarian stance when you are confronted by these persistent pests, but the complete opposite; a rational, ethical and productive thinker does not concede for a moment that the state usurping the role of the parent is legitimate. For example.
Its also why it is so important to use English words correctly:
While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is [p. 25] Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.
All true, and if you have not yet read that book, go and do so immediately.
These are the facts:
‘Taxation’ is actually theft.
‘Conscription’ and ‘National Service’ are in fact a form of slavery.
Government ‘Grants’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
Government ‘Subsidies’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
‘Subsidising the arts’ is in fact redistributing stolen money to cultural gatekeepers.
Central Bank ‘Quantitative Easing’ is in fact Money Printing.
Government ‘investment in industry’ is in fact economy destroying redistribution of stolen loot and crony capitalism.
All of the above have one root thing in common; violent coercion. If you disobey the state, violence is used against you to force you to comply. This is even true in the case of Quantitative Easing, where if you attempt to escape from the criminal and inflationary central bank, you will be arrested and gaoled and your goods confiscated.
It is in no way ‘fair’ to tax people based on the level of wealth they have accumulated; taxation itself is immoral theft. It is in no way ‘fair’ that graduates should pay a tax so that others can receive a university education, or that money is stolen from you for any purpose whatsoever, no matter what the need is or what the money is to be used for.
If you use the language of the state as your frame of reference, you instantly become their prisoner, and this can have consequences that will touch every aspect of your life, quite apart from making you sound like a complete zombie.
While we are at it, what is an example of something that actually is fair?
If there is a piece of cake in a household, and two family members both want a slice, the two can agree that one can cut and the other gets to choose the first piece.
That is fair, since both of the parties have voluntarily agreed on how the cake that belongs to them both should be divided.
free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge.
legitimately sought, pursued, done, given, etc.; proper under the rules: a fair fight.
moderately large; ample: a fair income.
neither excellent nor poor; moderately or tolerably good: fair health.
marked by favoring conditions; likely; promising: in a fair way to succeed.
Meteorology .
(of the sky) bright; sunny; cloudless to half-cloudy.
(of the weather) fine; with no prospect of rain, snow, or hail; not stormy.
Nautical . (of a wind or tide) tending to aid the progress of a vessel.
unobstructed; not blocked up: The way was fair for our advance.
without irregularity or unevenness: a fair surface.
free from blemish, imperfection, or anything that impairs the appearance, quality, or character: Her fair reputation was ruined by gossip.
easy to read; clear: fair handwriting.
of a light hue; not dark: fair skin.
pleasing in appearance; attractive: a fair young maiden.
seemingly good or sincere but not really so: The suitor beguiled his mistress with fair speeches.
courteous; civil: fair words.
Medicine/Medical . (of a patient’s condition) having stable and normal vital signs and other favorable indicators, as appetite and mobility, but being in some discomfort and having the possibility of a worsening state.
Dialect . scarcely; barely: It was just fair daylight when we started working.
-adverb
in a fair manner: He doesn’t play fair.
straight; directly, as in aiming or hitting: He threw the ball fair to the goal.
favorably; auspiciously.
British, Australian . entirely; completely; quite: It happened so quickly that it fair took my breath away.
–noun
Archaic . something that is fair.
Archaic .
a woman.
a beloved woman.
–verb (used with object)
to make the connection or junction of (surfaces) smooth and even.
Shipbuilding .
to draw and adjust (the lines of a hull being designed) to produce regular surfaces of the correct form.
to adjust the form of (a frame or templet) in accordance with a design, or cause it to conform to the general form of a hull.
to restore (a bent plate or structural member) to its original form.
to align (the frames of a vessel under construction) in proper position.
to bring (rivet holes in connecting structural members) into perfect alignment.
Obsolete . to make fair.
—Verb phrase
.fair off / up, South Midland and Southern U.S. (of the weather) to clear: It’s supposed to fair off toward evening.
—Idioms
bid fair, to seem likely: This entry bids fair to win first prize.
fair and square,
honestly; justly; straightforwardly: He won the race fair and square.
honest; just; straightforward: He was admired for being fair and square in all his dealings.
fair to middling, Informal . only tolerably good; so-so.
Origin: bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs
That pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of ‘fair’ in the Nick Clegg Orwellian sense; taxation is dishonest and unjust. It is illegitimately sought, given and pursued money. And so on.
The same can be said for ‘paying your fair share’ or ‘greed‘, ‘capitalism‘, ‘rights‘ and many other crucially important words that are routinely and deliberately misused to steer you into the squeeze chutes. You need to get a grip on these words, restore their true meanings in your mind, so that when someone tries to steer you and frame your thoughts for you it will be easy to deflect their nonsense. In particular, when some disgusting, unctuous and deeply sinister bureaucrat tries to justify why he should have access to your children, you will not even begin to discuss the subject, because you know that it is illegitimate.
Rather than do this by making a list of words and then re-defining them one by one, you would be well advised to read this book by Murray Rothbard. It will train you to think in such a way that words you have been misusing will automatically find their correct meaning, by virtue of your newly found ethical basis of thought. Once you finish that book, no matter what word they try and hijack as the new rallying cry for collectivism, the principle itself, having been disempowered in your mind, will be unacceptable, and the word in its new usage will cause you to bristle and your hackles to rise.
This is the place that your thinking needs to be in; a place where you are immune to the nefarious work of the ‘Nudge Group’ and the ‘Behavioural Insight Team’. Where no matter what they do, you will NEVER give up your dignity or your rights no matter what they or anyone else says.
Finally, ‘choice, freedom and democracy’; choice and freedom are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from democracy!
Many Austrians have tried to get Krugman to debate business cycle theory. He’s too busy and too sophisticated to debate an Austrian, of course. Until now.
Economist Robert Murphy has come up with a clever way to make this happen. Through a website called The Point, people can pledge an amount of money to make the debate happen. Not one cent is charged to them until it does happen. The money will go to a charity for the hungry in New York. So if it hits, say, $100,000, Krugman will have to explain why getting $100,000 to New York’s hungry isn’t worth one hour of his time. Brilliant. I’ve already pledged. Bob is up to around $5,000 already.
Here’s his video promoting it (it looks like the law school one from the other day, but it’s a different video).
Angela Merkel apologises over German national team photo
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been forced to hold ‘clear the air’ talks with her country’s football federation after she was accused of exploiting the national team for political gain.
Mrs Merkel, 56, was pictured shaking hands with Mesut Ozil, Germany’s star midfield who is of Turkish origin, after she paid an unscheduled visit the team’s dressing room following a match in Berlin.
Its been a rather good week for real scientists, clear thinking and men with balls.
First, watch this scientist (Dr. Art Robinson — homeschooler, a former assistant to Linus Pauling) take apart the appallingly irrational, hysterical, sarcastic lie repeater Rachel Maddow, who has her flesh flayed from her bones and scorched by this very satisfying encounter:
And now for the next course; read the resignation letter of Harold Lewis (Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara) to Curtis Callan, President of same:
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Well, that certainly is refreshing!
Of course, many people understand that the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming is nothing more than a lie and a scam, and now it seems that the taboo is wearing off, and the floodgates of real scientists with either nothing to lose or real integrity no matter what have opened. This is a classic post tipping point event.
Now there are at least two things to consider.
We still have the American Physical Society in place and intact, as well as many other fatally compromised organisations, all parroting AGW and other dogma. The scientists who are real scientists, need to group together to form new associations that are strictly and purely scientific in function. If this is not done, then the organizations that dominate the making of bad policy will continue to rape, rob and pillage.
Which brings us to the cause of all these problems; The State.
It is the entirely corrosive influence of the state that has caused these scientists to lose their way, and even their souls. Without a state to steal money from people to fund boondoggles like ‘Global Warming’, ‘Climate Change’ and whatever else they decide to change the name of the cause to, there would be no financial incentive whatsoever to collude in fraudulent work in order to garner a salary.
There would be no incentive for scientists to push for public policies that in turn feed back into their lies, be they AGW or unnecessary vaccines.
The problem of the state is not just about money; it is a problem that reaches into every corner of human life, from your health, right up to and into your mind, where lies are implanted at its behest.
Thanks to the state, the practice of science is being corrupted to such an extent that human progress is being derailed; it may or many not be possible to catch up to where the collected knowledge of man might have been had there been no state… who knows? What is for certain is that if the state is not stopped, then its evil and retarding influence will continue to hold everyone and everything back.
Scientists who are thinking clearly (as opposed to those who can barely think at all) turn to Libertarianism as the only way to ensure that real science can be done, without the distorting influence of the inherently evil state.
Until this destructive state of affairs is brought to an end, resignations and one or two scientists running for congress will not be able to stop the juggernaut that is the state, and of course, if the state were run entirely by scientists that would be a bad thing, since this is not a problem of the right people being in charge of the machine; the machine itself is the problem.
Thankfully, the economic collapse is coming, and this may give great impetus to the final destruction of the state. With this collapse we can expect at a minimum, for the scope and reach of the state to be drastically limited.
Now is the time for scientists and Libertarians to build the foundations of new voluntary, ethically based organisations to replace the broken, corrupt, venal, unscientific, discriminatory and evil institutions that currently spread lies and misery.
Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing – what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?
Its the feeling you get when you realise that there is no noise, after living in a large city for years. You are actually ALIVE.
If you have ever had a ‘eureka moment‘, where something that made no sense, or was clouded over in complexity, suddenly becomes crystal clear, and you feel a tingling on your neck, and you say…. YES!
The eureka moment here, the smell in this case, the feeling here is the understanding that all along, the ‘crooks’ and ‘criminals’ were in fact right in almost every way.
And by ‘crooks’ I mean the people who didn’t hurt anyone or steal from anyone and who disobeyed every rule out there, and got away with it.
The people in the story linked above are the form fillers, the dutiful, brainwashed good people who believe all the big lies and who paid through the nose in every way.
My sincere hope is that all of these people finally wake up and stop being so insufferably STUPID, all at the same time.
We will then, finally, see the end of the police state, just like the East Germans saw the end of theirs; only this time, there will be no wall to cross anywhere but in the minds of the people who have been shaken from their hypnotic trance.
You know who I am talking about, the robotic, brainwashed, simpletons who think that restaurants must be licensed, that the state should be negotiated with when it comes to the ‘rights’ that they ‘give’ you – the irrational people whose thoughts are wildly incoherent, who get from A to E, again avoiding C, D, and B… you know who I mean… THE PROBLEM!
When these people, these intransigent folk who have based their lives on lies for decades and who simply refuse to accept the truth because it hurts too much, right up until the moment that they are being hauled away to the camps, as they wake up and get really really angry there will be no turning back.
There is a conspiracy theory about nearly everything. So claims that swine flu was a scam come as no surprise. ‘This was a pandemic that never really was’ according to Paul Flynn, MP who prepared a recent report on the flu pandemic for the Council of Europe.1 The report expresses alarm about the way the pandemic was handled. It criticizes the proportionality of the response and argues that over reaction led to waste of public money, distortion of public health priorities and unjustified fears about health risks. It identifies ‘grave shortcomings’ in the transparency of decision-making processes and concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organization (WHO) comes in for particular criticism for failing to publish the declarations of interest of members of its Emergency Committee, the group advising director general Dr Margaret Chan on the pandemic response.
These themes are taken up by Cohen and Carter2 in the British Medical Journal. They found that key scientists had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from advice they gave to WHO. However, declarations made by members of the Emergency Committee, and of other WHO committees that helped produce influenza preparedness plans, have never been disclosed by WHO. Even the identities of the 16 member Emergency Committee remain a closely guarded secret.
This article goes on to conclude that conflict of interest is not necessarily a problem, so long as it is accompanied by transparency.
It is then followed by a declaration of interest by the author;
Conflict of interest: M.R.E. is a member of the UK Scientific Pandemic Influenza Advisory Committee and the UK Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies.
In light of this transparency the article may now be re-read as simply ‘DON’T BLAME US – IT WAS THEM THAT DID IT!’.
The author discounts the conspiracies as merely a ‘cock-up’, yet notes above that “the identities of the 16 member Emergency Committee remain a closely guarded secret”. So how can a conspiracy be so easily discounted? It is certainly no simple ‘cock-up’ for GSK, Merck et al., whose coffers now bulge with extra billions of taxpayer’s hard-earned. For their part, it was carefully managed business run at state and global levels to ensure maximum profitability, as it always is. Please ensure you read this article on marketing HPV vaccine if you think otherwise.
So we are left with public health and public money being manipulated for the benefit of shareholders in Big Pharma as a result of actions (or inactions) and recommendations of unknown persons within an unaccountable advisory body known to have close links to… Big Pharma. Sound like a conspiracy yet?
