From For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

[…]

All right, we are to have education through both theory and a movement. But what then should be the content of that education? Every “radical” creed has been subjected to the charge of being “utopian,” and the libertarian movement is no exception. Some libertarians themselves maintain that we should not frighten people off by being “too radical,” and that therefore the full libertarian ideology and program should be kept hidden from view. These people counsel a “Fabian” program of gradualism, concentrating solely on a gradual whittling away of State power. An example would be in the field of taxation: Instead of advocating the “radical” measure of abolition of all taxation, or even of abolishing income taxation, we should confine ourselves to a call for tiny improvements; say, for a two percent cut in income tax.

In the field of strategic thinking, it behooves libertarians to heed the lessons of the Marxists, because they have been thinking about strategy for radical social change longer than any other group. Thus, the Marxists see two critically important strategic fallacies that “deviate” from the proper path: one they call “left-wing sectarianism”; the other, and opposing, deviation is “right-wing opportunism.” The critics of libertarian “extremist” principles are the analog of the Marxian “right-wing opportunists.” The major problem with the opportunists is that by confining themselves strictly to gradual and “practical” programs, programs that stand a good chance of immediate adoption, they are in grave danger of completely losing sight of the ultimate objective, the libertarian goal. He who confines himself to calling for a two percent reduction in taxes [p. 300] helps to bury the ultimate goal of abolition of taxation altogether. By concentrating on the immediate means, he helps liquidate the ultimate goal, and therefore the point of being a libertarian in the first place. If libertarians refuse to hold aloft the banner of the pure principle, of the ultimate goal, who will? The answer is no one, hence another major source of defection from the ranks in recent years has been the erroneous path of opportunism.

A prominent case of defection through opportunism is someone we shall call “Robert,” who became a dedicated and militant libertarian back in the early 1950s. Reaching quickly for activism and immediate gains, Robert concluded that the proper strategic path was to play down all talk of the libertarian goal, and in particular to play down libertarian hostility to government. His aim was to stress only the “positive” and the accomplishments that people could achieve through voluntary action. As his career advanced, Robert began to find uncompromising libertarians an encumbrance; so he began systematically to fire anyone in his organization caught being “negative” about government. It did not take very long for Robert to abandon the libertarian ideology openly and explicitly, and to call for a “partnership” between government and private enterprise — between coercion and the voluntary — in short, to take his place openly in the Establishment. Yet, in his cups, Robert will even refer to himself as an “anarchist,” but only in some abstract cloud-land totally unrelated to the world as it is.

The free-market economist F. A. Hayek, himself in no sense an “extremist,” has written eloquently of the vital importance for the success of liberty of holding the pure and “extreme” ideology aloft as a never-to-be-forgotten creed. Hayek has written that one of the great attractions of socialism has always been the continuing stress on its “ideal” goal, an ideal that permeates, informs, and guides the actions of all those striving to attain it. Hayek then adds:

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibility of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote . . . . Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may rouse [p. 301] the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.¹

Hayek is here highlighting an important truth, and an important reason for stressing the ultimate goal: the excitement and enthusiasm that a logically consistent system can inspire. Who, in contrast, will go to the barricades for a two percent tax reduction?

There is another vital tactical reason for cleaving to pure principle. It is true that day-to-day social and political events are the resultants of many pressures, the often unsatisfactory outcome of the push-and-pull of conflicting ideologies and interests. But if only for that reason, it is all the more important for the libertarian to keep upping the ante. The call for a two percent tax reduction may achieve only the slight moderation of a projected tax increase; a call for a drastic tax cut may indeed achieve a substantial reduction. And, over the years, it is precisely the strategic role of the “extremist” to keep pushing the matrix of day-to-day action further and further in his direction. The socialists have been particularly adept at this strategy. If we look at the socialist program advanced sixty, or even thirty years ago, it will be evident that measures considered dangerously socialistic a generation or two ago are now considered an indispensable part of the “mainstream” of the American heritage. In this way, the day-to-day compromises of supposedly “practical” politics get pulled inexorably in the collectivist direction. There is no reason why the libertarian cannot accomplish the same result. In fact, one of the reasons that the conservative opposition to collectivism has been so weak is that conservatism, by its very nature, offers not a consistent [p. 302] political philosophy but only a “practical” defense of the existing status quo, enshrined as embodiments of the American “tradition.” Yet, as statism grows and accretes, it becomes, by definition, increasingly entrenched and therefore “traditional”; conservatism can then find no intellectual weapons to accomplish its overthrow.

Cleaving to principle means something more than holding high and not contradicting the ultimate libertarian ideal. It also means striving to achieve that ultimate goal as rapidly as is physically possible. In short, the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them?

In short, to really pursue the goal of liberty, the libertarian must desire it attained by the most effective and speediest means available. It was in this spirit that the classical liberal Leonard E. Read, advocating immediate and total abolition of price and wage controls after World War II, declared in a speech, “If there were a button on this rostrum, the pressing of which would release all wage and price controls instantaneously, I would put my finger on it and push!”²

The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty. Of course, he knows, too, that such a magic button does not exist, but his fundamental preference colors and shapes his entire strategic perspective.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

You need to buy that book.

Long time readers of BLOGDIAL know about ‘the button‘ and the number of times I have pressed it. Hard.

Celente Calls for “Revolution” as the Only Solution

Kingston NY — Taxed to death, angry at government bailouts, outraged by Wall Street greed, and bitterly resentful of a system that rewards the undeserving rich, the American public is ready to revolt.

“The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution,” said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute. “But they are not enough. Much stronger and directed action is required. Our call for ‘Revolution’ will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.”

The Revolution Celente proposes is unique in concept and bold in execution. It is about a lot more than just “taxation without representation.”

“Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America,” said Celente. “We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system. Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds. These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative. Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

The country is restless, and ripe for radical reform. There is no doubt protests will proliferate and intensify. In response, the government will call out the troops and bring in the police. They will use the Patriot Act to silence, detain, harass, persecute and prosecute groups and individuals exercising their Constitutional rights.

But Celente’s Revolution need not degenerate into violence or open warfare.

“Intellectual Revolution”

“I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’. I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’ This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades. It’s about brain power – not brute force.”

For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up. Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.

What are America’s prime information sources? CNN, “The most trusted name in news”? Fox, “Fair and balanced”?

CNBC, “First in Business Worldwide”? The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”?

Who do the people listen to? A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions. Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats, pretending they’re the people’s voice.

Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.

TV tough guys, broadcast big mouths and Beltway blowhards have now been joined by featherweight comics throwing powder puff punches at sitting targets.

[…]

Yonkers Tribune

We like people who can predict the future; it means that they have all the facts to hand and are able to synthesize a very small number of highly probable futures that must result from those facts. It means they are more likely to know what they are talking about now, in the present, since they knew what they were talking about before. Those are the people who will reward your scarce attention.

What I imagine people like Celente are waiting for is the tipping point of popular outrage, after which they will be able to openly call for a physical rather than intellectual revolution.

Calling for a physical revolution too early is pointless; no one will stand up and you will be picked off. At the same time however, calling for feel good actions pushes the tipping point back, since it is the opposite of feeling good and secure that is the fuel for revolution. If the criminals manage to finish the job before everyone wakes up and the tipping point occurs, they win. The question is, do we have time to wait for a tipping point that might arrive too late?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

Imagine a country where this intellectual revolution had happened, and everyone from coast to coast knew the entire facts and was informed to the level that Celente is. Once that point is reached, clearly there has to be a second step, the ‘real revolution’ that puts a stop to the criminals once and for all.

The media and all the know nothing (as opposed to the know everything bloggers) clowns who work in it are never going to change sides (either because they are too thick or are deliberately keeping a lid on public outrage). That means every chance we have to ‘go viral’ with a message should be taken as an opportunity to organize a real action that ‘fixes the hole in the roof’. Anything that is just a protest, which is a feel good, ‘Yellow Ribbon Moment‘, or which will have no effect is not a good thing. It is in fact, quite the opposite.

Its like draft dodgers in the 70’s having a tea party to protest going to VietNam and then showing up obediently for basic training and shipping off to fight ‘Charlie’. No, what you do is BURN YOUR DRAFT CARD and then do not show up.

Imagine 10 million people all having a ‘tea party’ and then BURNING their 1040 forms. Imagine millions of people demanding that they be paid the full amount of their wages, without any withholding of any kind, or they all go on STRIKE. Those two actions when done in the tens of millions are not something that can be ignored; demonstrations, tea parties, rock concerts, petitions – all of those things can and will be ignored. That is why we keep saying that it is pointless to do them.

Without a doubt, there is an information war going on, and educating the great mass of television fed flesh is an ongoing task. It is the furnace in the steam ship that needs to be constantly stoked. It is not however, the end goal; the end goal is Liberty in Perpetuity, and education is a means to that end.

And as for protests causing the police to be called out, once again, protesting is pointless.

Lets try and imagine an optimal revolution.

Its a revolution where no one is killed, and there is no violence. It would look something like the fall of East Germany.

All that is required for this revolution to take place is for everyone to stop obeying. That means everyone, to a man, refusing to obey anything and everything to do with the state.

That would be a revolution, an amorphous, nebulous, static swarm of disobedience, which could not be countered, any more than a truncheon wielder can batter a cloud to sweep it away. Without the compliance of everyone, the state would simply cease to exist; the monsters who control it would scream and shout hysterically at first, but would very quickly want to associate with the static mass as they desperately try to reposition themselves for a role in the new disorder. Those creatures are very good at sensing the right time to jump ship – when its about to do down – they are after all ‘political animals’ (rats).

I heard the other night, a commenter saying that if we start to win, “these people (the rats) are not going to go quietly into the night…”. That’s probably true. They will make a huge noise, but just like the aparatchicks in East Germany who lost their status and jobs, they were defeated and they did lose power there is no reason why this cannot happen via an unprecedented campaign that reaches tens of millions of people at the end of their tether. Many millions of people are ripe for it, ready for it, and as things get worse, will prefer it to having to take up arms.

The means to make this happen are at the tips of our fingers. Every month a new tool is written that shortens the time to critical mass. There is no reason why a peaceful transition to… something resembling a free country, cannot be done. It would happen in a very small amount of time; it may coincide with this event:

The Fed’s plan to increase the money supply 15-fold

But the real story starts to unfold when you realize the Federal Reserve is now hell bent on multiplying the U.S. money supply by a whopping fifteen times in 2009! This excellent article explains how this number is derived: http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/…

Now think about this: If the Federal Reserve increases the U.S. money supply by a factor of fifteen, that means your dollars will be worth only 1/15th the value they represent right now. So a loaf of bread that costs a dollar right now could cost $15 when all this extra money ripples through the system. (Which will obviously take a couple of years, but 2009 will be the beginning of it.)

This is called “hyperinflation.” We’re talking about a loss of over 93% of the purchasing power of the dollar. That, my friends, is called a collapse of the currency.

And once it starts, the floodgates will be opened and the tsunami of investors and nations offloading dollars will be catastrophic and irreversible. By the time it’s all done, the dollar might end up losing 99.9% of its value, and you can use greenbacks to light a fire or wipe your back side, as they will be useless for anything else.

[…]

http://www.counterthink.com/025688.html

Unbelievable. It’s still hard to accept that the money really has already been wiped out, and that hyperinflation is already on its way like a mudslide coming to destroy everything in its path. It seems that either way, wether there is a revolution or not, the dollar is toast. People will either kill it trying to get out of it, or they will have their purchasing power wiped out by this 15-fold story high wave of dollars that are going to devastate everything in their path.

Anyone old enough to remember Pan Am knows what it is like to have to imagine life without something so huge, so integral to an industry, something so ‘too big to fail’, that its non existence seems an impossibility, and yet, Pan Am is no more, its just a memory…only its beautiful corporate identity remains. Pan Am also teaches us that nothing is too big to disappear from the face of the earth. No company, no system of money, including the dollar, no government (history should already have made THAT clear); literally nothing that exists is going to last forever, or even a few years if the conditions are right.

Once you accept that, the possibility of restored liberty does not seem like something in the far distance, but instead takes on the appearance of something within striking distance.

We at BLOGDIAL have blogged about this subject a few times before:

By David Coates, The Detroit News, via AP

In Detroit, three downtown businesses have created a local currency, or scrip, to keep dollars earned locally in the community.

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.
Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

“We wanted to make new options available,” says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. “It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace.”

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

By law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States, says Claudia Dickens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

“We print the real thing,” she says.

Yes, we know; THAT IS THE PROBLEM!

The IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Tom Ochsenschlager of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “It’s not a way to avoid income taxes, or we’d all be paying in Detroit dollars,” he says.

Pittsboro, N.C., is reviving the Plenty, a defunct local currency created in 2002. It is being printed in denominations of $1, $5, $20 and $50. A local bank will exchange $9 for $10 worth of Plenty.

“We’re a wiped-out small town in America,” says Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels, which accepts the Plenty. “This will strengthen the local economy. … The nice thing about the Plenty is that it can’t leave here.”

[…]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-05-scrip_N.htm

Now.

Imagine if all the dimwitted and destructive demonstrators got together to disseminate the ideas behind sound money and then print and promote their own money.

Wouldn’t that be effort better spent instead of smashing an RBS office? Or gathering impotently in the streets to be corralled like cows?

We have been over this again and again and again:

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.
Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

Join Amnesty
Visit and sign up online:
web.amnesty.org/pages/join-eng
Join Liberty
Visit and sign up online:
www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/join
Email Your MP
Demand to know what they are doing about the issues raised in the film:
www.writetothem.com
Join the Mass Lone Demos
Demonstrations take place 5pm to 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, forms [MS WORD] [PDF] must be handed in or sent by recorded delivery 1 week beforehand.
[…]

Joining Amnesty will not cause one law to be repealed, nor will it stop new bad legislation from being enacted.

Similarly, Joining liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

Emailing the very people who pass the laws that enslave you is just STUPID.

And joining demonstrations we know about, don’t we?

Telling the truth is not enough. Acting is not enough. Correct Action is the only thing that will change what you want changed.

But you know this!

If you want to fix a problem, DO SOMETHING TO FIX THE PROBLEM, DO NOT do something THAT WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM.

If your problem is a currency that is being inflated by a criminal government who is stealing your value to give it to their partners in crime, and you cannot change the government, CHANGE THE CURRENCY YOU USE AND ACCEPT, since THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Demonstrating against bailouts is like dancing to stop the damage to your car caused by hailstorms.

GET YOUR CAR UNDER COVER IF IT STARTS TO HAIL.

Demonstrating against taxation is like applauding to stop your drive from being blocked by snow in a blizzard.

IF YOUR DRIVE IS BLOCKED BY SNOW, GET A SHOVEL AND DIG YOURSELF OUT.

Demonstrating against a leaking roof is like waving a banner to stop being hungry.

IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, MAKE YOURSELF A SANDWICH.

It’s simple really, but to my constant amazement, even intelligent people persist in believing that demonstrations are a good thing. They are not, not because they are inherently bad, but BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WORK!

FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME

By Paul Craig Roberts

Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, is not unknown to Americans.

My last column noted the absurdity of Obama lumping the upper middle class in with the rich. The income distribution in the US is so skewed that the rich are found in the top one percent. The truly rich with the accoutrements associated with that class are in the top half of one percent.

Those points were lost on those Americans who regard anyone slightly better off than themselves as “rich.” A slightly bigger house in a better neighborhood, a BMW instead of a Toyota, and the ability to go on vacation without going into debt is all it takes to be rich in the minds of those whose eyes are green with envy.

This observation led me to the realization that freedom has been lost to envy.

Americans no longer know what freedom is. Historically, the definition of a free person is one who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves were not free, because they do not own all of their own labor.

An income tax is inconsistent with the historical definition of freedom. Today in America government has a claim on every person’s labor, just as feudal lords, the government of that time, had claims on the labor of serfs and nineteenth century plantation owners had on slaves.

Understanding that an income tax was serfdom, our Founding Fathers wrote the US Constitution in a way that prevented an income tax. This was altered in 1913 with a constitutional amendment that some claim was not properly carried out.

This first step in the enserfment of the American people was taken in envy. The rich were the targets of the income tax. Once in place, the income tax was extended by law and by inflation until ordinary people were being taxed at rates several times as high as the original top rate for the rich.

After almost 100 years of income tax, generations have been born into serfdom and accept the government’s claim on their labor as normal, even just. Some say they don’t mind paying taxes to help the poor. They should look to see what share goes to the poor and what share to war, armaments, and the bailout of the Treasury Secretary’s rich friends.

The problem with a tax on a person’s labor is that it subtracts from a person’s independence. Without independence, it is difficult to exercise constitutionally protected rights, such as free speech.

In former times, family farms and businesses provided a measure of independence for many Americans. Today, most work for wages and salaries. The only real avenue to independence is to save part of one’s earnings and acquire enough wealth upon which to live. For most Americans, the government’s claim on their labor makes this impossible.

This is even more the case when government fails in its regulatory responsibilities and allows banksters to join in the plunder of the hard-pressed citizens.

The inheritance tax, another product of envy, has also done much to destroy the independence of the citizenry. For example, family owned independent media, once a source of independent power that held government accountable, has been lost to corporate media chains in order that families could pay inheritance taxes.

The same people who complain of rule by giant corporations support the inheritance taxes that transformed the face of American business. A family owned business has community roots and loyalties. A corporation’s owners are spread across the country and abroad. Their interest is the share price. The consequence has been that many corporations no longer even have national loyalties.

A corporation’s existence is not threatened by inheritance taxes, but a family owned business is. An inheritance tax is a tax on assets accumulated from income that has already been taxed. To raise the cash to pay the inheritance tax, businesses have to be sold or taken public. Eventually, their ownership is divorced from the community.

In the past, great wealth accumulations found their way into endowments of private universities, museums and public libraries, institutions that also contributed to the independence of citizens from government control.

Today even private universities and tenured faculty have lost pieces of their independence. There are subjects that cannot be investigated and opinions that cannot be expressed. We can rationalize the inhibitions by saying that they are proper subjects for censorship. However, once the process of suppressing thought and speech begins, it spreads.

The Tax Foundation has calculated that tax freedom day arrives on May 29 this year if the federal government’s budget deficit is included, as it should be, in the tax burden. That means that Americans work 42 percent of the year for the government, a higher tax rate than was endured by medieval serfs and one approaching that of a nineteenth century slave.

In the nineteenth century, there were “underground railways” that slaves could use to escape to freedom. In our time, “underground railways” are known as “tax havens.” Just as slave owners sought to abolish “underground railways,” our owners today seek to outlaw “tax havens.”

Some Americans will reject these analogies. They can test the validity of the analogies by refusing the government’s claim on their labor. Perhaps the best evidence of American serfdom is that most Americans do not even have the ability to test the validity of the analogy, because the government takes its share in withholding tax before wages and salaries are paid to us serfs.

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090405_freedom.htm

Henry Porter has now completely discredited himself, with a shameful piece of luddite nonsense masquerading as a call for justice:

If indeed a new era of global responsibility has come into being with measures that actually restrain banks and isolate tax havens,

See this. The politics of sour grapes is alive and well at the grauniad. Irrational, illogical and destructive, like the rest of the ideas in this misguided, buggy whip cracking article.

it may be time for the planet’s dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.

The greatest invention of the 21st century, equivalent in importance to the invention of the printing press, characterized as ‘destructive’ and ‘anti-civic’. The greatest force for empowering the little guy, thanks to which the playing field is made forever flatter; this is a ‘bad thing’. A set of devices and protocols that allow you to have a private conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world for free…and all the other myriad things it can do and will do. This is something ‘to be stopped’.

Only a total computer illiterate, luddite, anti-freedom, anti-human imbecile could believe such a thing.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs – worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.

The internet and the World Wide Web are two separate things, as this commenter points out:

1) Tim Berners-Lee created the WORLD WIDE WEB, which is a distinctly different thing than the Internet. The World Wide Web is a layer on top of the internet that provides the websites that we see, but the largest portion of the internet is not visible, and does not interact with home computers. The internet is hardware, software, protocols, servers, undersea cables, standards, repeaters, satellites and so forth, all operating on the same protocols (IP, Internet Protocol). Tim Berners-Lee certainly created a revolution with the World Wide Web, but the creation of the Internet is an even grander achievement, which took decades, cost billions, and was mostly the responsibility of three groups: AT&T, Cisco Systems, and The United States Department of Defense.

In the strictest sense, the internet was born in 1971, just under 20 years before Sir Berner-Lee’s breakthrough, when many of the standards and theories that became Internet Protocol were developed.

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

One day we will live in a world where everything that is quantifiable knowledge will be contained and indexed by Google. And it will be a good day for mankind, because all that information will be equally available, so long as you speak the English language.

What Google does, to put it stiffly, is vastly more important than some novelist exploring how much the human condition absolutely sucks.

Thanks to the commenter called ‘Netwrk’.

Google is the most prominent WWM,

Is that something like WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) I wonder? Hmmmmmmm…. Guilt by acronym association!

but let’s start with an American site that is making a name for itself in straightforward misappropriation. Scribd.com offers free downloads of every kind of book, magazine, brochure, guide, research paper and pamphlet to 55 million readers every month. Many have been uploaded illegally. Last week the publishers of JK Rowling, Ken Follett and Aravind Adiga took action to remove books that had been illegally published on the site.

First of all, Scribd is a wonderful service. It is being used by the computer literate to disseminate knowledge. Only the completely ignorant, imagination-less luddites are against it.

Mr. Porter, you are on the wrong side of history. You need, as a matter of priority, to read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘. The arguments you put forward against ‘piracy’ are from an imaginary world before the internet (like buggy whip salesmen before the motor car). The ‘community’ you speak of would be much better off living in a world without patents and copyrights, and Against Intellectual Monopoly proves it. The new services like Scribd, are clearly more beneficial than harmful, even with the present copyright regime in place. No matter how loud you shout, and complain, copyright, like alcohol prohibition is dead, and we are all better off for it.

To add injury to insult, your type of ‘thinking’ is disrupting the flow of materials that are out of copyright. Our own Scribd account was the subject of an attack from your lobby this last week.

On our Scribd account, I publish some of our works, and other historical works that are free of copyright. Because Scribd is under attack from mentally retarded luddites, we were sent the following:

Subject:

Copyright notification

From Jason Bentley, on 2009-04-03:

Message:

Dear Irdial-Discs,

We have removed your document “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd.

Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.

As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms

Jason Bentley
Directory of Community Development
jason@scribd.com

People like you might believe that all works should be copyrighted forever no matter how old they are. The fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally tolerated in the belief that they served society, and rewarded the creators of content whilst promoting innovation and creativity. This is why the term of protection was short, so that the works would pass into the public domain, where they could spread and be of benefit to the public after the creators had reaped the benefit of protection via a state sanctioned monopoly over their ideas and how they could be used and copied.

The work in question above is by Adam Smith, published in 1776:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

[…]

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

In case you are unfamiliar with it.

I replied:

From Irdial-Discs,
on 2009-04-03:

Please restore this deleted document. It is in the public domain:

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

It would be an interesting project for Scribd to add the entire contents of the Project Guttenberg texts to your checking system, so that you can exclude documents like this from being flagged.

./akin
./irdial

Scribd.com complied:

Jason Bentley, Apr 04 10:33 pm:

Hi,

I’m sorry that our automated copyright protection system misidentified your document as infringing. We try very hard to protect the rights of authors, and sometimes our copyright robot get a little oversensitive.

I’ve restored your document and removed all references from your account.

Cheers,

Jason

***

Jason Bentley
Community Director and Copyright Agent
Scribd, Inc.

This is the sort of world Henry Porter wants; a world where everything is unavailable because of the incredibly small number of giant publishers and their prostitute luddite lackeys whining that the old days are over. At the very least, Porter is calling for a web where everything must be screened by copyright police before it is posted. This is the same voice that wants ‘civil liberties’; the very voice that is calling for a fascist regime to enforce the insanity of copyright transposed to the web.

Scribd.com complied, but what is interesting is the company’s institutional lack of guilt when the piracy was exposed.

‘Piracy’ (as it is defined today) only takes place when someone sells a book or movie; a ‘movie pirate’ is someone who copies movies onto DVDs and then sells them instead of buying discs from the manufacturer and re-selling them. People who copy movies are not ‘Pirates’, what they do is not ‘piracy’ and in fact the act of copying music, books and movies is beneficial to society even if they sell copies. Furthermore, the people who make movies, music and who write books are able to make a living without copyright laws (state enforced monopolies) in place. This might come as a shock to people like Henry Porter, who writes in the bosom of a nest of copyright brainwashed computer illiterate vipers, but it is a fact nonetheless. Against Intellectual Monopoly has some illuminating examples of why (in this case patents) are a bad thing:

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts above suggest a different interpretation. Watt is a clever inventor who, after getting one step ahead of the pack, remains ahead not by superior innovation, but by clever exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner is a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, is not a minor help.

The evidence suggests that Watt’s efforts to use the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two. The granting of the 1769 and, especially, of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine:innovation is stifled until his patents expire; and very few steam engines are built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occur immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations in an effort to avoid the fate of Hornblower. Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills are badly allocated: we find him spending as much time engaging in legal action in an effort to establish and preserve a monopoly as he does in actual invention.

Indeed, this story contains most of the important elements of our argument Against Intellectual Monopoly. The sort of wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges we have seen in Watt is one of the greatest dangers of monopoly. It is commonly referred to as rent-seeking behavior. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension is clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Finally,there is the slow rate at which the steam engine was adopted be for the expiration of Watt’s patent. By keeping prices high and preventing other from producing cheaper steam engines, Boulton and Watt hampered capital accumulation and slowed economic growth. Intellectual property, as it is currently conceived, has other damaging social effects but the three listed here and exemplified in Watt’s story are the most serious ones: rent-seeking, innovation suppression, and slow-down in the process of economic growth. We shall see that Watt’s experience is the rule, not the exception.

[…]

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Anyone with even one brain cell can see the parallels between this story and the others in Against Intellectual Monopoly in the context of Google, Scribd, the services that run on the Bittorrent ecosystem and the other internet services today. The world, ‘the community’ that Porter is so eager to protect and serve would have been far better served if Watt had not been able to use government force to stop other inventors from improving the steam engine. As soon as Watt’s government granted monopoly ended, the efficiency and power of steam engines increased at a rate far greater than when Watt was able to stifle innovation with his patent, and what’s more, when his patent expired, Watt’s profits continued undiminished.

This is a very important lesson for everyone involved in any sort of creativity. We at Irdial knew instinctively that releasing our catalogue for free would benefit us more than keeping it locked up. That is why we freed our works for non commercial use in 1999. If we lived in a society where there were no copyrights at all we would gladly give up the commercial use rights in an instant.

Instead of fighting the reality, resisting the new tools and clinging on to broken models, it made sense to us to embrace it all and use it to get our works in as many places as possible. To us, it’s obvious. To people like Henry Porter, the future and its wondrous tools are a threat to be destroyed, and he doesn’t care about all the historical works that are burned in his insane quest to cleanse the internet of copyrighted works. We see the direct result of people like him in the erasure of Adam Smith’s work from Scribd.

Instead of admitting it and apologising, it issued a statement claiming Scribd possessed “industry-leading copyright management system which goes above and beyond requirements of Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.

So, Scribd should now apologize for innovating, for bringing millions of documents to millions of people, for nothing. They should apologize for having to invent a piece of filtering software thanks to lobbyist bought government pressure, which might never work accurately and which diverts time away from the software developers improving Scribd, and which diverts capital away from improving Scribd. This is totally insane, and exactly what is described in Against Intellectual Monopoly. Thanks to the luddites like Henry Porter and his distant cousin Watt, innovation is being retarded, as companies divert resources to satisfy monopolists.

That’s like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he’s covered by the best insurance company. What matters is the crime, the theft of someone else’s content, which has taken care, labour, money and expertise to publish.

This is wrong. What you are doing is protesting that the internet should not exist so that you can continue to collect a rent on your works at the expense of the entire world’s population and at the expense of the progress of mankind itself.

What matters here is that copying books is in no way ‘a crime’, is entirely beneficial to society, and in no way detracts from an authors ability to make money on the works that they have taken care, labour money and expertise to create. I have no doubt that some non-BLOGDIAL readers will not believe that this is even possible. Not only is it possible, but we have made money from giving our works away for free, and Against Intellectual Monopoly has examples in it where works that are not copyrighted have made millions for publishers; look at the case of the title The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States where the publisher (Norton) printed this rather large book at a huge profit, despite there being no copyright on the text and it being downloaded world-wide by millions of people:

[…] To be clear: what Norton received from the government was the right to publish first, and the right to use the word “authorized” in the title. What they did not get was the usual copyright – the right to exclusively publish the book. Because it is a U.S. government document, the moment it was released, other individuals, and more important, publishing houses, had the right to buy or download copies and to make and resell additional copies– electronically or in print, at a price of their choosing

[…]

Assuming that St. Martin’s has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money, this suggests Norton made at the very least on the order of a million dollars. We also know that their contract with the government called upon them to donate their “profits” to charity – and we know that they did in fact “donate $600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism prevention.”

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[…]

The point is that even if Scribd removes books, it still allows individuals to advertise services for delivering pirated books by email, which must make it the enemy of every writer and publisher in the world. In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

Advertising a service is everyone’s right. The right to publish (or ‘freedom of the press’) is not ‘the right of newspapers and journalists to write what they like without restriction’. In this case, ‘The Press’ means not ‘the press corps’ but THE PRINTING PRESS as in a device to disseminate writing to a large audience. Journalists always make this mistake; they go berserk when their newspapers face censorship, but when its Bloggers or individuals who claim their right to print and distribute whatever they like, then it’s another story. Shameful.

Scribd is the friend of every writer and publisher in the world, wether they know it or not. Copyright law needs to be abolished, not just turned on its head, and the internet has made this progress begin to happen. If it does not take place before hand, the deaths of the luddites like Henry Porter and his employers and their replacement by ‘The Pirate Generation’ will spell the end of copyright, and the removal of all related legislation from the statute books. As it is, if these laws remain on the books, hundreds of millions of people will be and are being criminalized at the behest of luddites, lobbyists and the corporations they serve…people like Henry Porter.

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community.

This is so absurd I actually LOL’d. Google makes it easy to find authors; easier than it has ever been before. It makes all sorts of research easier by orders of magnitude; every link on this page was found for me by Google. Henry Porter wants a world where this, the greatest research tool ever invented is deliberately broken, just like Scribd is being broken. This is the ‘benefit’ he wants to bring to ‘the community’, and it is laughable that he thinks that ‘commercial institutions’ work for the benefit of ‘the community’… only when they work for HIS benefit… which community PRECISELY is he talking about? I think it’s the community of published authors and publishing houses; the intellectual monopolists, who want to strangle innovation and hold humanity back.

One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

This is called ‘rent seeking‘; the artists concerned, Socialist Billy Bragg and his strange bedfellow, falsetto Robin Gibb, intellectual monopolists both, threatened Google that if they did not pay the rent for videos on YouTube they would face action. Google removes the videos, the infringement, and then is accused of ‘playing very rough’. Do they want their material infringed or do they not? They complained, and their wishes were acceded to; why are they complaining? The fact of the matter is that they want to collect rent. They would like their music to be posted and hosted on YouTube without them having to lift a finger, but they want the rent also. 22p per play is absolutely ridiculous, and if every rent seeker asked for and recieved this money, there would be no YouTube. YouTube is turning out to be one of the most potent political tools available from, the UK to Saudi Arabia. Henry Porter wants it killed so that his (completely irrational) rent seeking socialist friends can make money they do not deserve.

Socialists really are ridiculous creatures; they claim that they are for the masses being empowered, but when something comes along that gives them more power than anyone has ever had EVER, they are AGAINST IT, and want to DESTROY it. The fact is that Socialists are not for anyone other than themselves; they want to be the bosses, the controllers with absolute power. Billy Bragg is a perfect example of this. A luddite that would smash the internet so he can collect rent. Robin Gibb is at least consistent; he is a rich man who doesn’t want the party to end – at least he is honest.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

This is total garbage. Google can in no way be characterized as putting a boot on anyone’s windpipe…though in the case of Billy Bragg, that would save us from hearing his ‘singing’.

Secondly, songwriters have everywhere else to go. This is because the internet is essentially infinite; they can set up their own site and sell their wares; they have had over a decade to do it, and have failed miserably to meet this new challenge. Instead of buying Napster, they destroyed it. Instead of working with Mininova and The Pirate Bay, they are trying to outlaw them. Even Apples iTunes store, where they were making money, met with fierce resistance from them. The fact of the matter is, these people, Henry Porter, Billy Bragg and the entertainment industry are collectively unintelligent and unimaginative. Were this not the case, they would have seen the opportunity for super-distribution of their works and embraced the internet at the beginning.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

That is incorrect; what we are seeing IS heroic young enterprise, being misunderstood and slandered by old rent seeking luddites, who are the REAL monopolists in this story, the Intellectual Monopolists. It is Henry Porter that is trying to destroy industry’s enterprise – new industries – Google, Scribd and all the other content services empower individual enterprise by allowing the creative to circumnavigate the luddite gatekeepers at the Guardian and the major record labels.

Google make profits and the entire world benefits from a tool unprecedented in human history, that no one has to pay for to use, and which helps authors and publishers make more money and reach more people than they ever dreamed possible. Only a total fool would be against it, and given the facts of the history and nature of copyright and patents, only the evil and utterly selfish would try to destroy it.

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is covered by the comments on this very bad and revealing article:

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

[…]

To say that Google produces nothing is ridiculous. As many people have mentioned the search algorithms they have developed make the internet useful for millions. One might as well dismiss Dr Johnson for compiling a book of other people’s words.

Beyond search they have produced some of the easiest to use and most compelling software available. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Calendar have reset expectations for what can be done in internet applications.

They may not be the perfect institution and I love to know if one ever existed. I want to live in a world of Newspapers and Google but if Newspapers don’t survive it won’t be Google’s fault.

[…]

“… Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time”.

This is utter blindness. It’s like arguing that the Ordinance Survey have never done anything useful, because everything on their maps was created by other people, or that Henry Ford added no value because he only shuffled around metals, wood and leather into different shapes.

Google have made searching on a vast scale incredibly easy, and they are the only company who has done so, covering everything from Ethiopian restaurants to the notebooks of Leonardo, at any time, from anywhere. In fact, for absolutely nothing, they provide me with a service worth several times more than any other company does, bar none. If this puts them in a position to earn a lot of money, good on them. If Billy Bragg would still prefer to be back in the workers’ paradise of the GDR, he’s welcome to it.

Closer to home, I note that 95+% of what the Guardian provides overlaps several times over with what is provided by the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Economist, etc, and that the marginal value of any one of these is minimal. The challenge for newspapers is to make themselves distinctively useful, (e.g. the New Yorker’s employment of Sy Hersh), rather than, like the Guardian, recycling a huge amount of content from the AP in manner that makes it, “in the final analysis, a parasite …”.

[…]

What a bitter and twisted load of oldschool, oldfashioned, defensive Fleet-Street-Journalist dinosaurian rubbish this article really is.

Just listen to the decription of the Internet and Google: “amoral”, “destructive, anti-civic”, “exuberant contempt”, “threat to livelihood of individuals”, “a parasite that creates nothing”, “delinquent”, “sociopathic”, “invaded the privacy of millions”, “needs to be stopped in its tracks”.

This is the typical rant of the dying newspaperman – yes, mate, your “power” as a “journalist” with your beholden readers IS on the wane, your influence IS falling, your role IS diminishing – I can understand why you see the Internet and Google as bad.

But this isn’t journalism – like so much we now see inthe papers against the Internet, it’s massively ill-informed, superficial, frightened, self-serving invective. I fear it will do nothing more than to confirm the authors as dinosaurs who have received the last rites.

[…]

And there you have it.

On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

Twitter, if they want to be bought by Google, is a private matter. It’spurchase will benefit the users of that service…in any case, that has nothing to do with the thrust of this article, intellectual monopoly. It does point however shine a light on Henry Porter’s hatred of the rich and innovative, his sour grapes politics. As for ‘contested by academics’, this is ‘some people say‘. That is the company that Henry Porter keeps.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.

Newspapers are dying because they do not provide what people need. If the Guardian provided what people want, the truth, then it would be a thriving business. The fact of the matter is, as the commenter says above, the Guardian’s content overlaps with every other newspapers content. they run the same stories, from the same point of view, and everyone is sick of it. This is why readers have turned away from newspapers:

Definitely the most ill-informed piece of propaganda I have read in a very long time and a great example of why nobody wants to pay for newspapers

Well said commenter. This is an absurd article that flies in the face of reality and the truth; why should anyone PAY to be lied to when they can get the truth for free and unfiltered from the internets?

Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Newspapers, if they were to remove their content, would be committing suicide. They should do this, and go out like an hero instead of whining like spoiled brats. They have executed themselves by prostituting their non advertising column inches for anyone with money, and the Guardian is the biggest whore of them all. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google no one would notice; the content in all the papers is the same, and so it is already like there is only one newspaper… no breach of competition rules is possible between those bird cage liners.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

I think this Thomas Jefferson quote is more appropriate:

“Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Quote found by Google of course.

Sharing knowledge is just like sharing a light from a candle; Henry Porter and the intellectual monopolists want us all to live in darkness.

If, at a time of profound challenges, newspapers fall out with Google, it could be pretty serious for British society, which is why I referred earlier to anti-civic forces.

British society is in trouble because the newspapers have utterly failed to raise the alarm about the police state. They have failed to rally the people into revolt. They have failed in the very task that Henry Porter believes is their raison d’etre and sacred duty. The internet has done more than any newspaper to galvanize inform and solidify the revolt against the police state, as we are well aware; even email circulars are more powerful than newspapers in properly informing the public. Then there are the Blogs which have changed the game entirely. And now, YouTube, which shamed television news into playing catch up on one of the most important speeches delivered in front of a sitting Prime Minster ever. That is a blog post, by the way, NOT a newspaper article. No, newspapers are an irrelevance now thanks to their prostituting their power, and this article, this shameless, vulgar piece of transparent propaganda, is a perfect example of it.

Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 – now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand – does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

The only delusional people in this story are Henry Porter and the lobby he represents and is shilling for. The only people without conscience are the ones who would retard or destroy man’s progress for their personal profit. It is Henry Porter who is acting like a breast fed 11-year-old, whining that the world is changing and he can no longer get his ‘bitty’….”I want my rent mummy!!! WAAAAH WAAAHHH WAHHHHH”

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience.

Henry Porter is painfully unaware about the history and true nature of intellectual monopoly, and how it is damaging to society. He wants to prevent failure of fossilized and sclerotic businesses by strangling innovators so that methods can never change and business and culture remain in stasis.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

Henry Porter perfectly conveys spoiled and ignorant immorality that poses as righteous indignation. He chastises Google for obeying the laws of other countries while whining that Google does not better obeying the insane laws of the UK. This is hypocrisy, but when it comes to China, all journalists at the Guardian are in the same boat.

And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain’s civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

And yet, all the journalists who jumped on Google for Streetview, which everyone can use equally, did not make so much noise when the CCTV started to go up, which no one can access but the state. How is it that CCTV, ANPR etc is not as bad as Google Streetview? Henry Porter has been making the right noises about CCTV to be sure, but the newspapers as a whole have totally FAILED to make the right noises about CCTV. Google Streetview is NOTHING compared to the real-time CCTV and ANPR that the state has, and yet, where is the universal moral outrage? Where are the pig ignorant little Britain villagers taking down the surveillance cameras en masse? Oh, I remember, Henry Porter says:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499

which means that he is FOR CCTV as long as the democratic state is behind it, acting on behalf of us. Those villagers are FOR CCTV as long as its the government behind them! They are all as thick as two short planks.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy?showallcomments=true

I am happy to say that articles like this are the death rattle of the pure evil that is newspaper journalism.

I am also happy to report that the majority of the comments on his article are entirely against it, for all the right reasons.

Farewell newspaper journalism, don’t let the door slam behind you.

1. We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, met in London on 2 April 2009.

This, we know.

2. We face the greatest challenge to the world economy in modern times; a crisis which has deepened since we last met, which affects the lives of women, men, and children in every country, and which all countries must join together to resolve. A global crisis requires a global solution.

FALSE. It is not true that all countries must join together to resolve this ‘crisis’, and it is also false that this ‘crisis’ reqires a global solution.

The adage ‘Think locally act globally’ applies here. Each country needs to have its own sovereign currency that is based on Gold coins. That is the long term solution to this problem.

3. We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible;

FALSE. Prosperity is the byproduct of liberty. It is liberty that is indivisible.

that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared;

FALSE. Not only is the idea of sustained growth not an absolute, but the idea that it has to be shared is also absurd.

and that our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too; and must reflect the interests, not just of today’s population, but of future generations too.

If that is true, then priority number one must be the adoption of a monetary system where the hard earned work value of the people cannot be arbitrarily destroyed by the fallible leaders of the G20. If that is true, then no one anywhere should accept a fiat currency or legal tender laws that make it impossible for people to preserve their wealth and prosperity in the long run.

We believe that the only sure foundation for sustainable globalisation and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions.

It is not at all agreed that ‘sustainable globalisation’ is a desirable outcome. Rising prosperity, for sure, many people on the earth are living lives that are not optimal; the question is what is the best way that they can serve their own interests. Market principles create the prosperity that the leaders of the G20 are now able to squander. ‘Effective regulation’ is code for total market regulation, which means the death of market principles. ‘Strong global institutions’ means global governance, anathema to the free market and a death blow to it.

4. We have today therefore pledged to do whatever is necessary to:

LIE. If this were the case, they would immediately cease and desist from interfering in the process of the market.

restore confidence, growth, and jobs;

They cannot do this. The market is more powerful than any of them or even 1000 of them.

repair the financial system to restore lending;

They cannot do this. They do not have the ability to do this. If they could do this, it would be the wrong thing to do because credit was the cause of this problem.

strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;

Trust is not the problem. More onerous regulation will not restore it; it will further damage the market.

fund and reform our international financial institutions to overcome this crisis and prevent future ones;

You do not have the money to fund and reform international financial institutions. You can only print money or tax citizens. You cannot tax any further without a global revolt, so you will steal the money by printing more fiat currency. This will worsen the ‘crisis’, hasten and increase the severity of the implosion.

promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism, to underpin prosperity; and

Global trade does not need promotion. Companies are very good at selling their wares world-wide. Investors do not need encouragement to find places to put their money. If you get out of the way and remove regulations and restrictions money will flow at the speed of light to where it is needed.

build an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery.

These are weasel words, inserted to placate the adherents of the new secular religion ‘Environmentalism’.

By acting together to fulfil these pledges we will bring the world economy out of recession and prevent a crisis like this from recurring in the future.

And if you fail, will you all collectively resign and cease to interfere in matters beyond your understanding?

5. The agreements we have reached today, to treble resources available to the IMF to $750 billion, to support a new SDR allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs, to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed IMF gold sales for concessional finance for the poorest countries, constitute an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy.

Selling Gold? Anyone with common sense will see this as a great buying opportunity. The price of Gold (real money) is going to go down on this announcement, and then, once these insane measures fail to work, it will skyrocket.

This paragraph fails to say where the $1.1 trillion dollars promised is going to come from. It also does not say who is going to receive these fiat funds.

Together with the measures we have each taken nationally, this constitutes a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale.

LIE. This constitutes theft on a scale previously unknown to mankind. This $1.1 trillion has to come from somewhere. It can either come from the printing press, or the savings of a nation or from taxation. Either way, it is going to come from somewhere, and then it is going to be given to someone at the diktat of a small handful of people. This is more than insanity. It is criminal. We note that none of the citizenry of the G20 were asked to vote wether or not ‘their’ money was to be used in this way. This ‘solution’ was arrived at in secret and delivered as a fait accomplit. No one with any decency would accept such a thing. And to top it all off, this solution WILL NOT WORK.

6. We are undertaking an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion,

You cannot make something out of nothing. Value cannot be created out of nothing. Any fiscal expansion must come from the production of work; governments are unproductive – they cannot produce anything, they can only take from the productive and give to the unproductive. This is called ‘stealing’.

which will save or create millions of jobs which would otherwise have been destroyed, and that will, by the end of next year, amount to $5 trillion, raise output by 4 per cent, and accelerate the transition to a green economy. We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained fiscal effort necessary to restore growth.

This plan will not save or create real jobs. It will in fact, destroy real jobs and capital.

7. Our central banks have also taken exceptional action. Interest rates have been cut aggressively in most countries, and our central banks have pledged to maintain expansionary policies for as long as needed and to use the full range of monetary policy instruments, including unconventional instruments, consistent with price stability.

Central banks and fiat currency are the cause of this problem. They do not have perfect knowledge, and therefore are not able to set the interest rates correctly. Only the market can do that. It was the artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve that started this crisis. The fact that you do not know this disqualifies you from being able to present a solution.

8. Our actions to restore growth cannot be effective until we restore domestic lending and international capital flows. We have provided significant and comprehensive support to our banking systems to provide liquidity, recapitalise financial institutions, and address decisively the problem of impaired assets. We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system and ensure the soundness of systemically important institutions, implementing our policies in line with the agreed G20 framework for restoring lending and repairing the financial sector.

You cannot be for the market and also be for forcing people to lend money where they do not feel that it is prudent to do so. Trying to expand access to credit to people who had no business buying a house was one of the factors that caused this situation. When you get out of the way, money will begin to flow instantly. By standing together as you are, you are in fact acting like a dam, blocking the flow of capital. Money is like information; it wants to be free. When you finally give up your delusion that you understand economics and get out of the way, the dam will burst and money will flow and wash away this problem.

9. Taken together, these actions will constitute the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus and the most comprehensive support programme for the financial sector in modern times.

And it will fail spectacularly. Stimulus packages will not work, cannot work, and have never worked.

Acting together strengthens the impact and the exceptional policy actions announced so far must be implemented without delay.

Acting together intensifies the storm, increases its devastating power and will make everything 1000 times worse.

Today, we have further agreed over $1 trillion of additional resources for the world economy through our international financial institutions and trade finance.

What is the ultimate source of the money? It can only be tax or printing press or savings. Why is it that you cannot speak plainly? Say you are going to do one of the three!

10. Last month the IMF estimated that world growth in real terms would resume and rise to over 2 percent by the end of 2010.

They could not predict this crash, and yet, we are to believe that they can predict the future now?

We are confident that the actions we have agreed today, and our unshakeable commitment to work together to restore growth and jobs, while preserving long-term fiscal sustainability, will accelerate the return to trend growth.

And this is why you FAIL. Confidence is not enough; confidence does not get work done, it does not create value. What confidence DOES do, is deceive the confident into believing paper money is real, that it has value, and that by printing it, you create value out of thin air. Commitment to a false idea is suicide. In this case, that is a good thing. Long-term fiscal sustainability can only be had with gold coins as the money. The trend growth that you refer to was produced by the printing of fiat currency. Those graphs should be thrown out immediately, as they represent an unattainable goal.

We commit today to taking whatever action is necessary to secure that outcome, and we call on the IMF to assess regularly the actions taken and the global actions required.

If you want to fix this, you need to STOP TAKING ACTIONS. It is your taking of actions that has been and which is causing the problem!

11. We are resolved to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability and price stability and will put in place credible exit strategies from the measures that need to be taken now to support the financial sector and restore global demand.

Long term pice stability can only be had with a gold coin standard for money. Since gold cannot be printed, its value cannot be corrupted – the money cannot be debased. When denominated in gold, the price of almost everything has not changed in decades. Global demand is not your affair. You do not have the competence to engineer it, and everything you do to try and generate it causes more problems.

We are convinced that by implementing our agreed policies we will limit the longer-term costs to our economies, thereby reducing the scale of the fiscal consolidation necessary over the longer term.

People used to be convinced that the earth was flat. You are all in the same camp. You all believe that paper money has value, that you can control ‘the economy’, and that your insane spending measures will fix this, when every indicator says that it will make things worse. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein.. What you are doing, is, by this definition, INSANE. It was debt that created this problem. You cannot borrow your way out of debt.

12. We will conduct all our economic policies cooperatively and responsibly with regard to the impact on other countries and will refrain from competitive devaluation of our currencies and promote a stable and well-functioning international monetary system.

The only way to create “a stable and well-functioning international monetary system” is to get out of the way and allow the market to determine what money should be and how it should work.

We will support, now and in the future, to candid, even-handed, and independent IMF surveillance of our economies and financial sectors, of the impact of our policies on others, and of risks facing the global economy.

The IMF did not see this crisis coming. They are not omniscient. They do not have the ability or the right to supervise the private affairs of nations.

Strengthening financial supervision and regulation

13. Major failures in the financial sector and in financial regulation and supervision were fundamental causes of the crisis.

This is a LIE.

Confidence will not be restored until we rebuild trust in our financial system.

This is FALSE.

We will take action to build a stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and citizens.

This is NONSENSE.

Global consistency means the absence of a free market, where the individual can choose the best jurisdiction to do business. A world run by incompetents at the IMF and the G20 is a world where innovation and business will be stifled. The needs of business and citizens are best served by each of the two groups acting without onerous regulation laid down by incompetent people.

14. We each agree to ensure our domestic regulatory systems are strong.

They already are strong. So strong in fact, that people spend all their time thinking up ways to get around the regulations so that they can make a profit. No one would put their money into risky derivatives if there was a less risky alternative that paid the same returns. The fact of the matter is that the already overburdened regulatory and taxation system makes it very hard to earn a profit; this is the true mother, the genesis of the exotic financial products.

But we also agree to establish the much greater consistency and systematic cooperation between countries, and the framework of internationally agreed high standards, that a global financial system requires.

The ‘global system’ does not require this. Greater consistency means a playing field where no one has the incentive to win, much less step out onto the field.

Strengthened regulation and supervision must promote propriety, integrity and transparency; guard against risk across the financial system; dampen rather than amplify the financial and economic cycle; reduce reliance on inappropriately risky sources of financing; and discourage excessive risk-taking.

Regulation cannot promote propriety or integrity. Regulation in fact, promotes and exacerbates the tactics of evasion. Transparency already exists in the place that it matters; between the client and the entity that offers a financial product. You cannot “risk across the financial system” AND be in favor of fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, the latter being the most dangerous. The economic cycle (which is actually The Business Cycle) is the creature of governments with their bad money, regulations and interference in the market. The state cannot decide what is and is not inappropriate. Only individuals can make this determination. When the state involves itself in legislating risk-taking, moral hazard is the result.

Regulators and supervisors must protect consumers and investors, support market discipline, avoid adverse impacts on other countries, reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage, support competition and dynamism, and keep pace with innovation in the marketplace.

Regulators failed to spot Madhof (the scapegoat). They are incapable of protecting consumers, even if it was appropriate for them to do so, which it is not. Markets are self disciplining, just like the weather. No doubt you at the G20 would like to control that also. Avoiding adverse impacts is also impossible. If it were possible to do it, the IMF would have stepped in to stop the current crisis from emerging.

You cannot,”support competition and dynamism” and also be FOR regulation and the sort of fine grained supervision you are advocating. We understand what you mean by ‘keep pace with innovation in the marketplace’; stop any and all new internet based payment systems from taking root and supplanting the ossified, corrupt, sclerotic financial system over which you preside, or pretend to preside.

15. To this end we are implementing the Action Plan agreed at our last meeting, as set out in the attached progress report. We have today also issued a Declaration, Strengthening the Financial System. In particular we agree:

to establish a new Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a strengthened mandate, as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), including all G20 countries, FSF members, Spain, and the European Commission;

Pointless.

that the FSB should collaborate with the IMF to provide early warning of macroeconomic and financial risks and the actions needed to address them;

This will never work. The IMF did not see this crisis coming, the biggest ever in world history, and they will not see the next one, if there is going to be a next one.

to reshape our regulatory systems so that our authorities are able to identify and take account of macro-prudential risks;

This will be used to blackmail institutions that are the personal enemies of the insiders.

to extend regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets. This will include, for the first time, systemically important hedge funds;

Total control by incompetent unproductive over the productive.

to endorse and implement the FSF’s tough new principles on pay and compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms;

This is UTTER NONSENSE. There is no such thing as a ‘sustainable compensation scheme’, and executive remuneration has nothing to do with this problem. The fact that this childish, sour grapes scapegoating language is in this document demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the problem, its root cause and the steps that need to be taken. It proves that you are incompetent, dull witted and doomed to failure.

to take action, once recovery is assured, to improve the quality, quantity, and international consistency of capital in the banking system.

recovery will not be assured by this plan, and even if it were possible, by what metric are you going to declare that it has happened? Improving the international consistency of capital in the banking system means a global currency. We are not stupid!

In future, regulation must prevent excessive leverage and require buffers of resources to be built up in good times;

It is not the place of the state to say what is or is not excessive leverage. Banking is a private business. So is risk. Neither is the business of government.

to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens.

Tax ‘havens’ have nothing to do with this crisis. You would do better to ask why it is that money is fleeing your jurisdictions; once you address that problem, no one will have the incentive to remove their money from your shores. As for non co-operative jurisdictions, this means that the G20 is now going to act as if it is the de-fact world government, and there will be no more national soverignty. People will not be able to choose places to invest based on thier own requirements, and nations will not be able to organize their affairs as they see fit. All laws will now pass through the filter of G20, and if you do not agree, you will be listed as an ‘outlaw nation’. This will be the case even if the country, through the democratic process, decides that it wants nothing to do with the G20 and its absurd and destructive policies.

We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems.

This is a non sequitur. You do not use sanctions to protect YOUR public finances, you use YOUR LAWS to do that. Sanctions are used to disrupt OTHER PEOPLE’S finances and financial systems. The money in sovereign nations is not YOURS it is the property of the OWNERS of that money, and the responsibility of the sovereign nation where the funds are stored.

The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information;

None of this has anything to do with the financial crisis. Banking secrecy has no effect on anything, other than the ability of the venal government’s ability to steal the wealth from its beleaguered citizenry. You are using this crisis to extend your reach into places where you have no business being.

to call on the accounting standard setters to work urgently with supervisors and regulators to improve standards on valuation and provisioning and achieve a single set of high-quality global accounting standards; and

None of this will work. You will not have enough time to roll it out; the collapse will see to that. Barring the collapse, there will be a ground-swell of rage that will permanently scupper your plans.

to extend regulatory oversight and registration to Credit Rating Agencies to ensure they meet the international code of good practice, particularly to prevent unacceptable conflicts of interest.

16. We instruct our Finance Ministers to complete the implementation of these decisions in line with the timetable set out in the Action Plan. We have asked the FSB and the IMF to monitor progress, working with the Financial Action Taskforce and other relevant bodies, and to provide a report to the next meeting of our Finance Ministers in Scotland in November.

The only confilct of interest that matters here is the prevalence of financial insiders in the corrupt governments.

17 to 24, snipped, as it is repetitive and refuted.

Ensuring a fair and sustainable recovery for all

25. We are determined not only to restore growth but to lay the foundation for a fair and sustainable world economy. We recognise that the current crisis has a disproportionate impact on the vulnerable in the poorest countries and recognise our collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis to minimise long-lasting damage to global potential. To this end:

The state cannot determine what is ‘fair’ and what is not ‘un-fair’. Global potential, like gravitational potential energy, is storable. Sound money stores value; it is called capital (potential to invest). If you want to minimise long terme damage to global potential, sound money must replace fiat currencies that can be printed and debased at the will of incompetents.

we reaffirm our historic commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and to achieving our respective ODA pledges, including commitments on Aid for Trade, debt relief, and the Gleneagles commitments, especially to sub-Saharan Africa;

Others haver written about this, Google them.

the actions and decisions we have taken today will provide $50 billion to support social protection, boost trade and safeguard development in low income countries, as part of the significant increase in crisis support for these and other developing countries and emerging markets;

Where is this money coming from, for the thousandth time, and is this not giving fish to people instead of teaching them how to fish?

we are making available resources for social protection for the poorest countries, including through investing in long-term food security and through voluntary bilateral contributions to the World Bank’s Vulnerability Framework, including the Infrastructure Crisis Facility, and the Rapid Social Response Fund;

More failure on the cards.

we have committed, consistent with the new income model, that additional resources from agreed sales of IMF gold will be used, together with surplus income, to provide $6 billion additional concessional and flexible finance for the poorest countries over the next 2 to 3 years. We call on the IMF to come forward with concrete proposals at the Spring Meetings;

Who is going to buy this gold, and what will they give in exchange for it? Gold is money. The people who want to buy it have fiat currency. People who want to protect the value of their money will line up for this bargain price gold, hand over their worthless dollars and euros and then sit back and watch the spectacle unfold.

we have agreed to review the flexibility of the Debt Sustainability Framework and call on the IMF and World Bank to report to the IMFC and Development Committee at the Annual Meetings; and

we call on the UN, working with other global institutions, to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable.

A waste of money.

26. We recognise the human dimension to the crisis. We commit to support those affected by the crisis by creating employment opportunities and through income support measures.

How is this going to be paid for?

We will build a fair and family-friendly labour market for both women and men.

It is not the place of the state to build labour markets. While we are at it, a ‘family-friendly’ labour market would be one where the mother gets to raise her children full time, instead of being forced to earn money because the prices of houses is so great (which is a direct result of interference in the market by the state).

We therefore welcome the reports of the London Jobs Conference and the Rome Social Summit and the key principles they proposed. We will support employment by stimulating growth,

Growth cannot be stimulated.

investing in education and training, and through active labour market policies, focusing on the most vulnerable. We call upon the ILO, working with other relevant organisations, to assess the actions taken and those required for the future.

More nonsense.

27. We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure. We encourage the MDBs to contribute fully to the achievement of this objective. We will identify and work together on further measures to build sustainable economies.

28. We reaffirm our commitment to address the threat of irreversible climate change, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Utter, unscientific garbage.

Delivering our commitments

29. We have committed ourselves to work together with urgency and determination to translate these words into action. We agreed to meet again before the end of this year to review progress on our commitments.

It is the prayer of every free man on this planet that you meet with TOTAL FAILURE.

Anti G20 ‘Rioters’ display total ignorance, impotence, incompetence, idiocy and irrationality:

A comment from The Times:

To be fair to the protesters, one this occasion they have paid for the damages in advance.
David Masu, Zürich, Switzerland

And check this out:

I have a better idea chubby: Why don’t you get yourself out of the government’s economy??!?!

And of course, the police agent provocateurs were in full force:

Snarfed from The Daily Mail.

Now for some common sense:

NEW WORLD DISORDER

The G-20 meeting begins this week in England. Here, political leaders from 20 major nations meet to share ideas on how to solve an international financial crisis that their central banks created, following the lead of Alan Greenspan’s FED. They never saw it coming. Not any of them – not the central bankers, not the politicians, not the regulators. They were all caught flat-footed.

Then they assemble at a meeting and send out press releases. These press releases are designed to assure the investing public that they, the creators of this crisis, know what went wrong – they don’t – and that by discussing the causes of the crisis, which they don’t understand, they will be able to come up with a joint solution that does not involve either (1) mass inflation or (2) a worldwide depression that lasts for years.

It is a song and dance. It is shuck and jive. It is bait and switch. It is Custer’s last stand.

These people don’t know what to do. If they did, there would be two or three well-defined, fully documented proposals out there, each with national co-sponsors. All of them would have major flaws. They would be mutually exclusive. Economists of various schools of opinion would be mobilizing behind one or another program.

Instead, there are no published plans. There are no working papers. There are only vague promises of joint action. Like what?

There are no detailed plans out of which this team of egomaniac politicians might conceivably hammer into an acceptable plan.

There is no centralized international planning agency.

There is no international enforcement agency. There is no agreement among central bankers.

There is no unanimity to do anything.

There is not going to be, either. The G-20 meeting will issue some sort of bland statement of hope, and everyone will go home.

They refuse to adopt the only system that every brought unity to governments and central banks: an international gold coin standard. The politicians and central bankers could not control the movements of gold out of inflating nations and into non-inflating nations, 1815–1914. They resented the ability of common people to exercise control over domestic monetary policy simply by going down to a bank and demanding payment in gold coins. They all took away this authority in the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out.

These deal-doers, these politicians, these seekers of power don’t trust each other. That is the famous bottom line. They do not trust the common people, which means that they do not trust a gold coin standard. But they do not trust each other.

They are trapped by the dollar standard. They have told their voters that their nations can get rich by exporting to the United States. They have not explained that in order to export lots of goods to the United States, their central banks must create fiat money to buy depreciating dollars at a favorable rate of exchange. They have not told the voters that modern mercantilism depends on lending tax money and central bank fiat money to the U.S. government, which will not pay back the loans. Ever.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north700.html

All BLOGDIAL readers know why this protesting and violence is pointless / futile / stupid /.

A member of Congress is warning the Obama administration to keep its hands off the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s international currency.

U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has introduced a resolution that would bar the U.S. from recognizing any other currency than the dollar as its reserve currency.

Her action comes in response to suggestions from China, Russia and the United Nations that another currency be explored. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has admitted he would be open to the idea, although he quickly backtracked when the stock market plunged on his announcement.

“During a Financial Services Committee hearing, I asked Secretary Geithner if he would denounce efforts to move towards a global currency and he answered unequivocally that he would,” Bachmann said. “And President Obama gave the nation the same assurances. But just a day later, Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table. I want to know which it is. The American people deserve to know.”

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the president has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the president is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution, according to the congresswoman.

As a result, legislation prohibiting the president and Treasury Department from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements, she said.

“If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom,” Bachmann told the Glenn Beck program on the Fox News Channel today.

Her proposal, H.J.R. 41, isn’t complicated:

It is titled: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States ”

Already with several dozen sponsors, it states:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:”

It would add to the Constitution:

The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest voice to endorse an “alternative” to the dollar was the head of a U.N. expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis.

“The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.”

[…]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=93086

Incredible.

These people can smell that something is wrong, but are not sure what it is. They feel that they have to protect ‘their currency’, but they are not sure what it is that they need to do.

This amendment, as tabled, would actually outlaw the Dollar as it exists today.

The Federal Reserve is not ‘the United States’; it is a private bank. That means that ‘US Dollars’ are not issued by the United States, but by an entity other than the United States.

If this amendment is added to the Constitution, the US Dollar, AKA Federal Reserve Notes, will instantly cease being legal tender.

Interesting.

Are these people smarter than they appear to be, and are they trying to kill the Federal Reserve and its worthless fiat currency by a checkmate maneuver?

I doubt it.

It is more likely that they do not understand the nature of the money in their pockets; I would bet that Michelle Bachmann doesn’t know anything about the dollar, the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, commodity money, or anything about any of the real issues behind the problem at the center of what she is clumsily trying to address.

Until you understand the nature of money and currencies, it is impossible to draft legislation (or in this case, REMOVE LEGISLATION) that will permanently fix the problem.

FAIL.

Way back in 1992, we wrote the following piece, printed it on 12″ square pieces of card and shipped it with thousands of 12″ singles:

What is the essence of digital recording/reproduction?
Digital recording systems work on the principal of turning a signal into a series of binary numbers, which are then stored for reproduction. This system of encoding averages the input signal to minimize the amount of data generated. It was believed that 44,100 samples per second was a high enough resolution to sufficiently encode any music signal without the listener being able to detect the inevitable degradation.

Analogue encoding systems work by taking the musical information as it is and turning it directly into mechanical movements ~as in the case of vinyl or directly into magnetic modulations (as found on tape) which in the replay stage do not have to be decoded or mathematically reconstructed. There is no trickery involved; what you hear is what you had.

Reductionism
The scientific community has, over the past 10 years, slowly come to the startling revelation, that there are many systems in nature that cannot be broken down or reduced to a set of simple component parts. This realization has overturned the prevailing paradigm of nature which as ruled for the last 200 years. T he death of reductionism has direct implications for the field of audio, and confirms what everybody has been feeling and saying in private for some time about digital music systems; the resolution obtained at 44.1khz is not high enough to reproduce music properly.

The resolution of analogue systems however, depends on the quality of the materials and components used in the audio chain; in the case of vinyl, the resolution goes down to the molecular level. It is millions of times more sensitive than any digital system that has ever been manufactured.

Upgradability
Because digital systems irretrievably reduce the input musical signal to a series of numbers that is insufficient to encode all of the music, there is a limit to how much you can upgrade your reproduction system (hi fi) to obtain a better sound. No matter how much money you spend, the original musical signal can never be retrieved belong the fidelity at which the encoding took place. With analogue recording however, the amount which you can gain is enormous. I he molecular resolution of analogue tape and vinyl facilitate this upward mobility, and even if you don’t choose to upgrade your equipment, the quality of the signal is still preserved in your recordings, if you should ever desire to take advantage of it. Digital denies you this potential.

What’s happening in the studios: engineers reactions
Studio engineers are consistently confirming that digital systems do not measure up under close scrutiny. At a world famous audio mastering facility which specializes in the preparation of lacquers and PQ encoded tapes for CD production, the verdict has been that digital must be treated with extreme caution. At this facility, the production of masters is carried out from many different sources; DAT, Sony PCM 701, analogue tape @ 15ips and 30ips, 1630 U-Matic and Cassette. The Monitoring systems that this studio employs are among the finest in the world, custom built and calibrated by hand by an audio genius. Constant exposure to different kinds of music, heard through an exceptional reproduction system, from different source tapes, has given these engineers the experience to be able to judge audio. Here is the testimony of one of their senior engineers. . .

“There appears to be an unquestioning attitude to digital audio. It is generally and wrongly accepted that digital recorders provide a true to original sound, however there are many variables that can drastically alter the audio signal and there is a widespread ignorance to the various permutations. On the simplest level, one finds that comparable DAT players of different makes have markedly different sounds. The variety of digital interfaces also gives rise to further differences. The idea that a digital copy is an exact copy of the original music is simply not correct. One can look at all of the variables and reach a good compromise but manufacturers still have a long way to go. There is also a growing feeling that the digital sound is conditioning people to accepting the digital sound as the TRUE sound whereas in reality digital systems impart a texture to the sound which is invariably 'restricted' and 'stifled' as opposed to 'open' and 'breathing'. Sound engineers seem to be subconsciously working around the problem, working towards a compromise that 'sounds good on digital'.”

The analogue infrastructure
The knowledge gained in the manufacture and operation of analogue recording systems is invaluable and irreplaceable. Research and development into further improving the near perfect world of analogue audio reproduction has virtually stopped, due to the destructive influence of digital. It is not only the patents and designs that must be carried into the future, but also the personal expert knowledge of engineers, gained over many years, which must survive; knowledge which can never be replaced once lost – the knowledge of what quality to expect from the best possible analogue reproduction system.

Analogue computing
Digital computing is only an evolutionary step in the development of computers. There exists today, the working components of a new type of analogue computer which will revolutionize computing, and make digital computing obsolete. With the establishment of analogue computing, all tasks that are now being handled by digital computers will be switched to analogue computers, including the recording and reproduction of music. Much experience has been gained in the field of optical discs. High density optical discs will, without doubt, be a major resource for data storage and retrieval when analogue computers come on line. I he advantages of optical disc storage (when the disadvantages of digital encoding are stripped away) are many; durability, pitch stability, low distortion and track numbering to name a few. When these advantages are combined with the perfection of analogue encoding, we will have a system of playback and recording with a quality beyond all expectations. Such a system however will be of no use to anyone if the analogue infrastructure has been dismantled, and there is no one left who knows first hand what real, true to life audio sounds like.

The mass destruction of masters
For the moment, digital is here with us, and a terrible price is being paid. l he entire history of recorded sound and music is being systematically ‘saved’ into digital formats . . . at 44.1 khz. This disaster is taking place because of the life span of recording tape; the glues that have been used to bind the magnetic material to the flexible substrate of most recording tape have been found to be decomposing, putting at risk most of the master tapes that have been recorded in the last 50 years. In what seemed like a sensible move, all of these master tapes have been scheduled for saving to digital; (also, conveniently, this ties in with the re-releasing of the back catalogues of most record companies onto CD) I. What nobody bothered to tell these companies, is that digital sounds like shit; and so, thinking that they have permanently saved their masters, the record companies are THROWING AWAY their original analogue master tapes. . . to save space. When the penny drops it w ill be too late. All of~our favorite music will be lost forever in a quanitized quagmire of brittle, cold, shitty sound, and for no good reason, because analogue machines could just as easily be used to preserve decomposing masters.

The proper place for CD
CDs are very useful, just as cassettes are useful; they have a place in the audio chain, and should be used and sold; BUT NOT TO THE EXCLUSION OF ANY OTHER FORMAT, and certainly not to the exclusion of vinyl, which is the best mass produced reproduction carrier ever made.

Who’s in control?
You have to wonder how this sham has continued for so long, and of course, we all know who is behind this insane state of affairs. The audio equipment manufacturers have realized that if they design and manufacture the hardware i.e. CD players, mini-disc, l)CC, they must control the manufacture of the software I music) to ensure that their investment in time and R&D pays off. Sony learned this the hard way, with the failure of Betamax; it failed because there was no software available to watch; they tried to push the system, licensing movies from film companies at huge cost, but it was too late. NOW Sony owns Columbia Pictures, and every picture they have ever made, so if they want to launch any type of new hardware to play movies, the availability of software will be no problem, no matter how good or bad the system is; they can even release films on reels of spaghetti if they want to. Sony also own CBS records and the CBS back catalogue. Phillips own Phonogram and A&M. This is a terrible situation, not only because the production of music is in the hands of a small number of giant companies that are also the exclusive manufacturers of all audio equipment, but because these companies are deaf to sound quality, due to their need to launch more and more new playback formats. Mixed with the profits to be made from re releasing hijacked back catalogues, the resulting brew is poisonous; companies that profit from reissuing old music again and again into a never ending stream of different and inferior devices to a public addicted to electronic novelty. GOD SAVE US ALL.

It’s not too late
Most of the engineers and companies involved in the production of analogue recording systems still exist and are working. If we stop the digital disease now, music and sound in all of its intricacy will be saved for everyone. Keep buying turntables and vinyl records. Keep buying cassettes. Boycott any release that is on CD only for no good reason. Make sure that the labels you buy from are not controlled by the manufacturers of music systems. It is the only way we are going to save sound.

A MESSAGE FROM THE PUBLIC SERVICE INFORMATION DEPARTMENT OF IRDIAL-DISCS

Now, in 2009, we read in The Times, the following…lets go through it together shall we?

Young music fans deaf to iPod’s limitations

Many people complain that pop music was better in the good old days. Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen are poor substitutes for the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the argument goes.

Older fans also insist that songs heard through iPods just don’t rock as they used to, compared with the clarity of CDs and the crackling charm of vinyl.

Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.

This is nonsense. Young people no longer appreciating high fidelity has nothing to do with the ease of getting a hold of music. They do not appreciate high fidelity for the reasons I outlined in 1992.

The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.

He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.

False. ‘Our’ perception has not changed; the human ear is the same as it has been for generations. What has been changed are what young people are used to; they have been inured to the sound of garbage masquerading as music. They think that music IS what comes out of ear-buds.

He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said.

No one has EVER preferred the noise of dust particles. Clearly this man has no idea of why vinyl and analogue are superior to compressed digital. Noise is something you sometimes have to put up with in order to hear music, which is what you get from a properly operating turntable and amplification system. It is important not to conflate the faults of vinyl playback and nostalgia for the facts about those high fidelity systems. They were and are good because of how they work and the audio chain, not because of their faults, which is why

“I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”

is total nonsense. The quality of analogue reproduction is not an illusion; it is real and the emotional response you get from music that is played back correctly is your response to the music, which is being relayed to you faithfully.

Music producers complain that the “compression” of some digital music means that the sound quality is poorer than with CDs and other types of recording. Professor Berger says that the digitising process leaves music with a “sizzle” or a metallic sound.

First of all, music producers and mastering studios started compressing tracks so that when they are replayed over the radio they sound louder and more exiting. Tracks that were not compressed in this way sounded weak and not exiting next to those that had been pumped up, and so there has been a loudness war going on in pop music for a very long time. The only thing that has changed are the tools being used to do the compressing; now everyone uses ProTools to get this job done.

That is one sort of compression.

The OTHER type of compression is the Procrustean Bed type, which all young people are now suffering. As was said in that article from Sterophile, not only are we being subjected to sound that is destroyed by being sampled at 44.1khz in multiple passes from the multitrack down, but then these mangled, sterile tracks are then data reduced by the MP3 algorithms that reduce the file sizes to one tenth their original size, in lossy formats that sound nothing like music.

Some people say that the loss of fidelity is worth the trade off; there is more access to music than ever, it now costs nothing to listen to everything, and you get it the instant you want it.

As far as I am concerned, its like being offered immortality, but with the price being you can never eat food or have sex ever again.

Not such a good bargain is it?

Producers complain that as modern listeners hear their songs through iPods and their computers, music has to become ever-louder to hold their attention.

Not so.

“Now there’s a constant race to be louder than other people’s records,” said Stephen Street, who has produced records for Blur, the Cranberries and Kaiser Chiefs. “What you are hearing is that everything is being squared off and is losing that level of depth and clarity. I’d hate to think that anything I’d slaved over in the studio is only going to be listened to on a bloody iPod.”

Sorry Stephen, but your productions will never be recorded or heard properly again.

Other musicians have said that compression robs a song of its emotional power by reducing the difference between the loudest and softest sounds. Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine recently that modern albums “have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no thing, just like — static.”

Completely correct Bob.

Ken Nelson, producer of Coldplay’s first two albums, said: “An example of overcompression is the last Green Day album. If you try listening to it from beginning to end it’s hard work. After three songs you need to put something on that’s been recorded in the 70s.”

You NEVER need to listen to a Green Day album. For ANY reason. No matter how it was recorded.

Rennie Pilgrem, a dance music producer, said that he mixed his tracks while listening to them through iPod headphones to cater to the less refined tastes of today’s youth. “To my ears iPods are not even as good quality as cassette tape,” he said. “But once someone gets used to that sound then they feel comfortable with it.”

Cassette is a great format, and if you used it carefully, you could produce some really fantastic sounding masters with it. One of our most popular tracks was mastered directly from cassette, without any attempt to reduce the nose. It rocks.

Advances in technology have often resulted in profound changes in the style of popular music. Music historians point to keyboards in the 18th century moving from the plucked string of the harpsichord to the hammered string of the piano. For the first time, composers could devise songs that got progressively louder from note to note, something that was impossible on a harpsichord.

And yet, the Goldberg Variations are mostly known and loved through piano performances today, not harpsichord, which is the correct instrument for that work. It is the music of the Goldberg Variations that is great; it can be played on any keyboard and evoke its emotions. This is a completely bogus analogy. What we are talking about is the reproduction of recorded music not the technology of instruments.

In the early 20th century, the cylinders on Thomas Edison’s phonograph could play recorded music for only four minutes at a time, something that listeners became used to. Today tracks are still generally about four minutes long.

The Times

Well, that was a typically uninformed piece. Still, it confirms what we predicted; that one day, there would be no one left who knows what music sounds like. That day has now come to pass.

If you have any interest in this subject at all, do read the Stereophile article. It really is a nightmarish proposition that you are living in right now, and a most prescient piece of writing.

And who knows what is next? No doubt someone somewhere is working on a brain cap device that will allow a computer to directly stimulate the auditory processing parts of the brain so that ‘sound’ never has to pass through your ears at all.

The fact of the matter is that recorded music is a phenomenon that is very recent, that has not existed for the majority of the history of man and it may even disappear altogether. One thing is for sure, it is not going to remain the same. What I maintain is that you should be aware of what things are, why they are good or bad, what their value is to you and so on. What I am against is someone dictating how things should be for their own interests and not in the interests of music or the people who love it, which is exactly what happened with CD. It was designed and pushed (on the back of lies) for the benefit of companies without any regard for music or the public.

And it is only balls that will solve this problem.

Editorial
The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
Article history
It was never in a Labour manifesto that individual freedom should be surrendered in the interests of collective security. Nor was it written that society should submit itself to a blanket of surveillance by the state.

It was never announced as a political creed of the current government that trial by jury is an expensive inconvenience that modern democracies can, in certain circumstances, do without. Nor was it proclaimed that the principle of habeas corpus, that prohibits the crown from detaining a free individual without his or her knowing the charge, was redundant in the face of terrorist threats in the 21st century. And yet, one way or another, all of those views have been expressed in laws introduced by Labour since it came to power.

Whether by complacency, arrogance or cynical design, the government has erected an edifice of legal constraint to liberty that would suit the methods and aims of a despot.

That is not to say, of course, that we have become a police state, or that a slide to authoritarianism is inevitable. It is simply a matter of fact that basic freedoms, conceptions of the moral autonomy of the individual to act without impediment by the state, have been systematically disrespected. Vigilance and resistance to that process is an obligation that rests with every citizen in a democracy.

Crucial steps towards the fulfilment of that obligation were taken by the Convention on Modern Liberty yesterday. Hundreds of people, representing a spectrum of political affiliations and a wide plurality of opinions, gathered to express a single response to the erosion of civil liberties: enough! It is the message that Henry Porter, one of the convention leaders, has urgently conveyed from the pages of this newspaper many times.

Delegates included representatives from all major political parties, non-governmental organisations, local councils, media organisations, trade unions, and – most important – private citizens concerned about the vandalism to the constitutional order is being done in their name.

Until now the government has by and large scorned the civil liberties lobby, seeing it as a peripheral and largely irrelevant fetish of the chattering classes. That arrogant disregard for democratic principle has been uncovered. The call for liberty is rapidly migrating from the margins to the mainstream of politics, and it is time for the government to listen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/01/civil-liberties-surveillance

FAIL FAIL FAIL.

Like we have been saying, all the conferences, meetings and articles have already been done. There is no need for any more that do not result in a concrete plan of action to finally and totally restore the liberties that have been stolen from the people of this once great Island.

Henry Porter and his cohorts now all feel very satisfied that they ‘pulled it off’. They think this is the start of a movement. If the only thing to come out of this is an unnamed editorial saying, “its time for the government to listen”, then they are doomed to fail.

Government must be TOLD.

This government does NOT LISTEN. You have had many MANY examples of this, from the nauseating government run petitions that are ignored, to the biggest ever demonstration of TWO MILLION PEOPLE against the immoral, illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was also completely ignored.

How many times do you people have to be ignored before you understand what it is that you are dealing with?

Let me help you.

The Guardian, if it is really serious, needs to organize its own civil disobedience campaign, where it makes a list of things that will not ever be obeyed, because they are in violation of their readers civil liberties.

1. Absolute refusal to comply with any aspect of the ID Card scheme. This also means that all Guardian staff must also take the pledge to not comply with any of its measures also.
2. All CCTV cameras that point into the street are to be removed by members of the public on sight. That includes all speed cameras.
3. Any and all actions of the state derived from surveillance systems, that do not involve violent crime, are null and void, are to be disobeyed. That means (for example) you cannot be accused by the evidence of a CCTV camera, even if it is operated manually (automatically generated tickets), and also (for example) that if your council tries to prosecute you and used surveillance to ‘catch’ you, the whole case is null and void.

Do you get the picture?

Not only must all the technical apparatus be physically destroyed, but any action brought about by the police state should be null and void and unenforceable.

That is how you TAKE your liberty back.

I’m sure that you can insert your own measures into that list. No more fishing expeditions. No more mass surveillance. No more huge databases of personal information. This is a zero tolerance strategy. The state will cease to function if it is done, and everything that the population does will remain unaffected.

If you are not willing to do this, to have some balls, then NOTHING will ever change. If you are like Henry Porter and The Guardian, who are servants of the state in thought, word and action, then you may as well stop now and save yourself the bother. You will LOSE.

Finally, as we have said many times before. The root of all these problems is bad money. The Guardian cannot have it both ways. They cannot on the one hand be FOR the fiat currency fueled welfare warfare state and ALSO against the police state. The aspects are inseparable. Even the super socialist George Monbiot has had a Eureka moment where he suddenly seems to understand that the root of the problem is fiat currency, and that commodity money is a way out. When someone like Monbiot starts talking about Austrian Economics as being a good idea without knowing he is talking about Austrian Economics, you know we have reached a tipping point.

It’s up to everyone to push it right over the edge; to tip it over. That means taking some ballsy actions en masse, and not just talking about the problems, which we have all been doing for ages.

Finally Jack ‘Mass Murderer’ Straw says that Britain is not a police state, and if you do not like the government, you can always vote it out. Well, we all know how that works.

When, for example the BNP gets votes, democratically, everyone goes berserk, saying how they should be banned or at the very least controlled etc etc. On the other ‘extreme’ you have the LibDems who can never get into power, and even if they did, they would be an unmitigated disaster. That leaves them with two parties that are essentially interchangeable. Face the facts; democracy is hopelessly broken and can never be fixed. The only answer is a de fanged government that is so powerless that it doesn’t matter who is in charge; your rights trump everything they could possibly come up with.

If you do not face this fact, there will always be another Jack Straw or Tony Bliar on the horizon, waiting to destroy your money, take away your rights and sell the sovereignty of your country to foreigners for nothing.

By GEAB
GlobalResearch.ca
2-24-9

Back in February 2006, LEAP/E2020 estimated that the global systemic crisis would unfold in 4 main structural phases: trigger, acceleration, impact and decanting phases. This process enabled us to properly anticipate events until now. However our team has now come to the conclusion that, due to the global leaders’ incapacity to fully realise the scope of the ongoing crisis (made obvious by their determination to cure the consequences rather than the causes of this crisis), the global systemic crisis will enter a fifth phase in the fourth quarter of 2009, a phase of global geopolitical dislocation. According to LEAP/E2020, this new stage of the crisis will be shaped by two major processes happening in two parallel sequences:

A. Two major processes
1. Disappearance of the financial base (Dollar & Debt) all over the world
2. Fragmentation of the interests of the global system’s big players and blocks

B. Two parallel sequences
1. Quick disintegration of the current international system altogether
2. Strategic dislocation of big global players. We had hoped that the decanting phase would give the world’s leaders the opportunity to draw the proper conclusions from the collapse of the global system prevailing since WWII. Alas, at this stage, it is no longer possible to be optimistic in this regard (1). In the United States, as in Europe, China and Japan, leaders persist in reacting as if the global system has only fallen victim to some temporary breakdown, merely requiring loads of fuel (liquidities) and other ingredients (rate drops, repurchase of toxic assets, bailouts of semi-bankrupt industries,) to reboot it. In fact (and this is what LEAP/E2020 means ever since February 2006 using the expression &laqno; global systemic crisis”), the global system is simply out of order; a new one needs to be built instead of striving to save what can no longer be saved.

Orders in the manufacturing sector, Quarter 4 2008 (Japan, Eurozone, United Kingdom, China, India) – Sources : MarketOracle / JPMorgan History is not known to be patient, therefore the fifth phase of the crisis will ignite this required process of reconstruction, but in a harsh manner: by means of a complete dislocation of the present system, with particularly tragic consequences in the case of several big global players, as described in this 32nd issue of the GEAB (see the two parallel sequences).

According to LEAP/E2020, there is only one very small launch window left to prevent this scenario from shaping up: the next four months, before summer 2009. Practically speaking, the April 2009 G20 Summit is probably the last chance to put on the right tracks the forces at play, i.e. before the sequence of UK and then US defaults begin (2). Failing which, they will lose their capacity to control events (3), including those in their own countries for many of them; and the world will enter this phase of geopolitical dislocation like a “drunken boat”. At the end of this phase of geopolitical dislocation, the world will look more like Europe in 1913 rather than our world in 2007. Because they persisted in bearing the ever-increasing weight of the ongoing crisis, most states, including the most powerful ones, failed to realise that they were planning their own trampling under the weight of History, forgetting that they were merely man-made organisations, only surviving because they matched the interest of a large majority. In this 32nd edition of the GEAB, LEAP/E2020 has chosen to anticipate the fallout of this phase of geopolitical dislocation so far as it affects the United-States, EU, China and Russia.

US Monetary base – (12/2002 12/2008) – Source US Federal Reserve / http://www.DollarDaze.com It is high time for the general population and socio-political players to get ready to face very hard times during which whole segments of our societies will be modified (4), temporarily disappear or even permanently vanish. For instance, the breakdown of the global monetary system we anticipated for summer 2009 will indeed entail the collapse of the US dollar (and all USD-denominated assets), but it will also induce, out of psychological contagion, a general loss of confidence in paper money altogether (these consequences give rise to a number of recommendations in this issue of the GEAB).

Last but not least, our team now estimates that the most monolithic, the most &laqno; imperialistic » political entities (5) will suffer the most from this fifth phase of the crisis. Some states will indeed experience a strategic dislocation undermining their territorial integrity and their influence worldwide. As a consequence, other states will suddenly lose their protected situations and be thrust into regional chaos.

Notes (1) Barack Obama, like Nicolas Sarkozy or Gordon Brown, spend their time chanting about the historic dimension of the crisis, but they are just hiding the fact that they fully misunderstand its nature in an attempt to clear their names from the future failure of their policies. As to the others, they prefer to persuade themselves that the problem will be solved like any normal technical problem, albeit a little more serious than usual. Meanwhile everyone continues to play by decades old rules, unaware of the fact that the game is vanishing from under their noses. (2) See previous GEABs. (3) In fact it is probable that the G20 will find it more and more difficult to simply meet, as the growing trend is one of &laqno; every man for himself ». (4) Source : New York Times, 102/14/2009 (5) Idem companies. Lundi 16 Février 2009

French prospectivist, Pierre Gonod, analyses LEAP’s work of anticipation – 30/08/2006 Global Research Articles by GEAB
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12332

http://www.leap2020.eu/

The true character of a man is revealed when he is under pressure…so they say.

The riots in Paris and the demonstrations against foreign work forces being used at British oil refineries and a power station seemed to be a presentiment of widespread civil disturbance, especially in this country. We are, after all, only at the beginning of a slump which is predicted by the IMF to hit Britain more seriously than any other developed nation. It will be longer and deeper and we can already see the hardship, the bills accumulating.

We need this civil disobedience. I hope that some of the people who plan destruction have the sense to trash only the systems and places that they use to ruin everyone’s lives. Smashing McDonalds and Starbucks is just STUPID.

In the last week, it seems that I have hardly had a conversation that has not dwelled on the economic crisis and how we arrived at a position where we are paying to bail out the bankers, who are still claiming vast bonuses, and face finding another £20bn each year in taxes or losing that amount in services.

And it is a safe bet that in none of these conversations did the phrase ‘fiat currency’ ever pass anyone’s lips. Another safe bet would be that ‘fractional reserve banking’ was never uttered. The fact is that no one who writes for the Guardian knows why this ‘crisis’ happened. None of them understand what money is. All of them are whining about banker bonuses as if that had anything at all to do with this problem. Jealousy politics is alive and well and serving its purpose to divert thinking people away from the true causes of their misery. The fact of the matter is that government is STEALING from the public to disburse money inefficiently, if not fraudulently. In any case, it is certainly immoral. These banks should not be bailed out by any government. Period.

If it had been a matter of straight theft

It IS straight theft; from YOU to the STATE to the BANKERS.

– ie the damage done was equal to every bonus –

this is nonsense maths. The bonuses are IRRELEVANT.

the world economy could easily absorb the hit,

There is no ‘world economy’. This is a matter of YOUR money being stolen and redistributed to bankers. There is no collective entity that you can call a ‘world economy’. This is loose english at its best.

but there is a vast multiple involved between the amount taken in bonuses and the bail-out received from governments. Figures to be published in Vanity Fair next week show that the bail-out in the US is anything up to 900 times the bonuses paid to the top five executives of leading American banks. At Citicorp, bonuses equalled $54m in 2007 while the bail-out was $45bn. This ratio doesn’t capture anything like the economic consequences of greed on both sides of the Atlantic. They are incalculable. The crime is nearly the equivalent to poisoning of the world’s water supply. If the banking industry and advocates of unregulated market capitalism expect a return to normal service after the slump they are gravely mistaken.

The only people who are ‘gravely mistaken’ are those who think that bonuses have any meaning, and that there ever has been a place where unregulated market capitalism has been running. Once again, there is no such thing as ‘the world’s water supply’ there is no one world anything. Constantly referring to things in these terms is simply absurd, and it is part of the problem.

It is fortunate for the hedge fund managers and derivative traders in Britain that the London mob does not materialise at moments like this to drag them from their spruced-up homes and limousines as regularly happened in the 18th century.

Yes indeed, that would help! If hedge fund managers and derivative traders lose their money, what do you care if your money is sound and in a bank that is not exposed? If you owned your own money and kept it safely, you would not have a problem at all.

In one way, it is also regrettable, because then the mob, which, incidentally, is a shortening of mobile vulgus, affected the conduct of politics and on several occasions changed things for the better.

That may be so, but until people understand what money is, all the mobs and rioting in the world will never solve this problem. You need to watch (as a beginning) The Money Masters to understand what is really happening, and how value is being stolen from you. Unless you are willing to do the small amount of work it takes to understand economics and money, you will NEVER be able to understand what is going on.

It was not made up of the depraved and violent underclass found in most historical accounts, but of groups of young working men and apprentices who, while demonstrating for Protestantism and against foreign workers, also played their part in supporting liberty.

You cannot have liberty without money that actually belongs to you. Misunderstanding this is why you FAIL.

Something of their voice was heard last week outside the refineries where foreign workers have been employed en masse instead of British workers, but in London, everything is – for the moment – quiet.

Those people are not ‘foreign’ they are from the EU, which Guardian types are all for. You cannot open up to the EU and then expect them NOT to come here and work when they have the RIGHT to do so. If you did not want Italians working here, you should never have joined the EU o Great Britain. Once again, the brainless demonstrators show just how STUPID they are; they should be protesting British membership of the EU (the cause of those workers coming here) and not the workers…its like treating acne by putting on a topical cream instead of weaning the teenager off of his diet of Tizer and crisps. Not very smart!

We are slower to anger than the French, although I must say that if I were a member of my children’s generation I would very much feel like hurling the odd carton of milk at politicians and bankers of the older generation.

Once again, this is why you FAIL. Your position as a writer could be used, right now, to direct people to the correct information about this problem; unsound money, fractional reserve banking, and regulation. Sadly this will not happen. Or will it? Who knows?

For the people who are going to pay for the lunatic exuberance of the last decade are not its perpetrators – largely the baby boomers born between 1945 and 1965 – but those born after 1985 and, by the way, several succeeding generations.

The people who are going to pay for the bailouts are the suckers. Everyone who knows what is really happening will not pay a penny. The people who are not helping are the ones who are steadfastly persisting in bad thinking and willful ignorance.

To put it crudely, my generation has stolen from its children and grandchildren.

That is a lie. It is ASTONISHING how the pundits and spin masters have turned this crisis around so that the INNOCENT now believe that they are THE GUILTY PARTY in this. How they did it should be studied by everyone everywhere.

It is they who will be affected by £20bn per annum shaved off services and for as long as anyone can predict.

Once again, only the suckers will be paying for this nonsense. As for services, their degradation was always inevitable. To understand why, you have to understand money (what money really is) and economics. You could try Googling ‘Social security Ponzi Scheme’ to find out why degradation was always going to happen.

And this crisis means that we are about to fail in that other important obligation of providing jobs for people coming out of university and school.

Once again, total and complete FAIL.

There is no collective obligation to provide jobs for anyone, so to say ‘we’ are about to fail is nonsense. You cannot be FOR liberty on the one hand and ALSO FOR collective responsibility and accountability of the type that is the driving philosophy behind bailing out banks. Then again, being able to hold two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously is a required skill these days is it not?!

Last Friday, it was reported that unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 16.1%, which is above the European average of 15.9%. That figure is bound to grow over the next two years.

Water always finds it’s own level.

Look coldly at my generation, the one that’s has been claiming every sort of entitlement since the Who sang about it, and you realise that we have been criminally irresponsible.

It is criminally irresponsible to not try and understand what is really happening, and then to perpetuate it by claiming that there are collective responsibilities to provide jobs and every other sort of nonsense. It is criminally irresponsible to prop up that system, and to not try and inform people of its true nature. At the very least, since you cannot throw stones, you would be able to say, “I tried to warn everyone. I did what I could do”.

We are leaving the people born after 1985 not just with the bills for this economic mess, but we also expect them to pay for an increase in the cost of state pensions for us, a rise of benefits and soaring pensioner health costs, which has been clear in demographic studies for some time.

You can expect anything you like. Your pension is TOAST. No one is going to foot the bill for it, there will be no money for it. You were robbed. Deal with it. Start saving NOW…saving REAL MONEY.

How young people are going to get started in paying for our old age without jobs and with a credit crunch and a frozen property market is anyone’s guess.

That is an astonishing statement. The concern is not how young people are going to get started paying for YOU, the concern is how are they going to LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and THEIR children! The selfishness, corruption, immorality and thievery never ends!

Consider the political classes of today, the people who clustered round Tony Blair – born a month after me in 1953 – and who have been in charge for more than a decade. What have they done to make politics and the business of Parliament responsive to the widely appreciated needs of this century?

That is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is who destroyed the money, who stole it, and what are you going to do about it. Note how I do not say, “who destroyed our money”. I am not under the delusion that the pounds in your pocket belong to you. They do not.

Though there are many well-intentioned politicians, politics probably hasn’t been held in such low esteem since the time of the London mob. It simply fails to deliver. Even in the good years, the government spent vast amounts on education and health, but failed to secure a proportionate rise in standards and productivity.

People who are for liberty hold politicians in low esteem by default, reflexively. They also do not expect government to deliver. They do not expect government to secure standards and productivity. People who are for liberty understand that not only is that not the proper role of government, but they also understand that government is incapable of doing these things, and if they do try, they do it inefficiently and immorally.

I won’t try your patience with my generation’s failure on rights and liberty,

We already gave up on you years ago…where have you been?! Not on the internets clearly.

its casual erosion of the privileges that were passed to us by our parents,

THIS IS WHY YOU FAIL. Rights are not a PRIVILEGE that is handed to you; you are BORN WITH THEM.

or its bewildering ignorance of history,

I am no historian, but honestly, when it comes to the history of money ignorance is absolutely EVERYWHERE. Even when there is a crisis people are too thick to try and find out what is really happening. That is the unforgivable sin. Even when people know some history, they sit there and stupidly repeat the mistakes of the past over and over, and then whine when things are getting worse. Knowing history is not enough. You need to know what your place is, what your rights are, what rights are and how to solve problems.

but it is important to understand that at the heart of the deterioration is Parliament and in this sense politics, rather than society, is broken.

This is completely wrong. Parliament is not at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is in a generation of people who do not understand their place in the world, who do not understand what Liberty is, what Rights are, the very nature of man and why it is he owns things. Parliament is the pimple, its corruption and arrogance a symptom of a disease. The people are sick and stupid and brainwashed. They are not even able to frame their thoughts properly so that they can address these problems. That is why they talk about ‘our’ money, and ‘our’ democracy and all the other backwards, wrong headed nonsense that we read over and over again.

Last week, a friend said that what he found so frustrating in the scandal involving peers allegedly offering to influence laws for cash, as well as the apparent immunity of bankers, was the absence of justice.

You tolerate Parliament, put them at the centre of your life and philosophy and so therefore, the problem is YOU and you perception of your place in the world. There will always be corrupt people, and politics normally attracts the corrupt…morally corrupt that is…the bankers, once again, are not the problem, and focusing on them is very stupid, pointless and childish.

None of the 3,000 offences introduced by Labour apparently caters for lords and multi-millionaires.

And yet, you have, “always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all”. That is the result of your belief. Total enslavement and impoverishnemt. The problem is YOU.

But this is minor compared with the crisis in the way laws – often designed to serve the political classes of my generation – are drafted and passed without proper scrutiny.

The problem is that they are passing them at all. They need to be REMOVING legislation, not adding it. And you need to stop looking to them like a sheep and to start disobeying.

My generation wanted everything – good food, cheap travel, large disposable incomes, luxury and security – and we have had them all, but at a great cost.

Bollocks. All of those things come at a price. If the next generation wants those things, then they can have them. All they have to do is pay the price and TAKE them. Your generation needs to be cut loose, your pensions cancelled and the debt defaulted on. Then we can start from a clean slate with sound commodity money and none of the collectivist illusions that have so befuddled and corrupted the men of this land.

We knew about climate change a long time ago, yet our government all but ignored it until the Tories made the running

There you go again. Global Warming Kool Aid nonsense AND saying ‘our government’ in a SINGLE SENTENCE!

We knew that bankers had not discovered the secret of limitless wealth creation, but we failed to regulate.

Bankers do not create wealth. Regulation destroys peoples ability to do it. You people will NEVER learn. And ‘we’ do not regulate. There is no ‘we’ in this debacle. THEY your ENEMY regulates and destroys and murders, and no, it is not on ‘our behalf’ either.

He let it slip, “It’s not your money!”.

And now if my children’s generation demonstrates, we will deploy a newly equipped and trained riot police to protect us. You see we have been expecting trouble.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/01/henry-porter-recession

The trouble will be far deeper and more widespread than you can possibly imagine. No riot squad will be able to contain it. At the end of this process, you and the government you cherish so deeply, even as it flays the flesh from your back with a cat o nine tails, will be utterly defeated. The people who truly understand freedom, liberty and rights will ensure that your world and its vile illusions never returns.

Some of the commenters on this article are beginning to see the light:

Sure Henry – and if you were twenty years older you’d be dead. Our confrontation with the political and business classes does not require youth, we are not throwing rocks and burning tyres – we have a series of modifications that we require of the commercial system to ensure it operates fairly in future. These are not for debate or modification – they are our requirements.

1/ We will restore some measure of value to our currency so that it will be known to us in the same way the length of a metre and the weight of a kilogram are known to us.

You see? The penny has dropped.

Sound money is the NUMBER ONE priority of everyone who understands this problem. Everything flows from it, all conditions are influenced by it.

A lurker who saw this same article says:

I don’t think the UK has the right culture for properly directed riots, a la Belle France for example. There is a small hardcore of politicised activists, such as seen in the poll tax riots, anti-fox-hunting and so on… but no mass body of free-thinking students (for example) with the will to put their high brows in the line of fire. Most other people have kids and would place family safety first. I just don’t see a proper riot as getting anywhere. Not reflective of the will of the general populace, too abstract in a way, and just a fight against police when what we need is a fight against HMG et al. The Iraq demo, and possibly BBC license fee avoidence – that’s what appeals to the middle-england masses. Other people (Sun/Mirror readership?) with job losses and SkyOne to pay for… will they act, and how? Will the miners strikes return in another guise? There is the real power in numbers. Get the two halves together and it could be special…

I just went off in a daydream where a crowd the size of the Iraq demonstration massed on parliament and took it over by mass of numbers, no violence required. Sky news offices next, and Buck House, followed by all the financial institutions of which the public own a slice. Gordon Brown makes one last public address, apologising for his sins and commits seppuku on live TV. The entire Labour front bench follow suit. A nation rejoices, shame is banished and national pride restored. The Tories are too yellow to take power following this and a new system of decentralised government is brought in…

10cm snow here, and more coming. Its gorgeous!

A little snow, and Britain is shut down.

When the people of Britain are ready, they will whip up a blizzard that will erase the evil once and for all. Like the Soviet Union, the Britain of the past will be a memory, and in its place will rise the sort of country that we used to love.

Only TEN THOUSAND TIMES BETTER!

The Blogdial stance on the ‘independence’ of the BBC is well documented.

Two things crossed my path in the last few days regarding the BBC. Firstly, I read a ‘story’, actually a magazine piece, about Darwin and his attitude to slavery. The piece appeared to suggest that it was his anti-slavery stance which resulted in the theory of evolution clicking into place in Darwins thought processes.

This was on the front page of the BBC website, and in your face on the Science subsection. And all it is is a glorified puff-piece for a book, full of conjecture and nothing more.

We read that…

[…] new evidence suggests that Darwin’s unique approach to evolution – relating all races and species by “common descent” – could have been fostered by his anti-slavery beliefs.

And this new evidence? Nowhere to be found. Everything said in this piece I already knew from reading the excellent Darwin biography published by these same authors in 1992.

So why is the BBC plugging this cash-cow as part of their Darwin season? It is nothing but another example of licence fee money wasted. The BBC is riddled with these pieces; non-news, non-attributed, non-stories of no discernible benefit to licence fee payers.

There I am, glad once again that I do not pay the licence fee, and wondering why those who do pay allow the BBC to get away with such behaviour when this hits my inbox…

>>> -------- Original Message --------
>>> Subject:     Re: Fwd: Re: BBC Gaza appeal ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
>>> Date:        Tue, 23 Jan 2009 10:25:26 -0000 (GMT)
>>> To:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> To all British TV viewers,
>>>
>>> We have all seen the terrible devastation of lives in Gaza. Without
>>> thinking about the causes for the moment, we can all, as human
>>> beings, feel empathy for the children that are being maimed and
>>> killed there.
>>>
>>> The BBC who are financed by our money, have refused to show, quite
>>> absurdly and cold heartedly, a humanitarian request for aid to help
>>> alleviate the suffering.
>>>
>>> This is the last straw.
>>>
>>> The BBC works for us, on our behalf. It is completely wrong that all
>>> the people of the UK, the license payers, should have their views
>>> ignored and their money spent in ways that they do not consent to.
>>>
>>> In any other circumstance, if you were not given what you wanted when
>>> you handed over money for a service, you would be able to switch and
>>> pay for a different service or stop receiving the service altogether.
>>>
>>>
>>> Can you in good conscience support the BBC with your money, when they
>>> are so clearly under the influence of people to the extent that they
>>> would refuse an appeal for aid to help children in a crisis?
>>>
>>> There have been other crisis appeals and the BBC has transmitted
>>> appeals immediately and in full. It is clear that this is a blatant
>>> case of bias. The question now is, what are the other things that the
>>> BBC has not shown that should have been? It is clear that we can no
>>> longer trust them; if they can sit in their studios and watch
>>> children die and refuse to even read out an address to help dying
>>> children, they do not deserve our respect and certainly they do not
>>> deserve our money.
>>>
>>> I therefore am calling on all license payers to boycott the BBC
>>> license fee on a permanent basis. It is no longer acceptable that
>>> they should be able to use the force of law to take money from us
>>> when they are so fundamentally out of touch with us and the rest of
>>> humanity.
>>>
>>> If the BBC is going to carry on in any form, they must rely on fees
>>> from people who want to watch their entertainment, news and their
>>> opinions. Now that TV is digital, they can encrypt their signals like
>>> SKY does and ask people to pay for their programming. If people want
>>> what they have to offer, they will pay for it.
>>>
>>> The BBC will then have to respond directly to its audience or cease
>>> to exist because no one will pay for their programming. It will no
>>> longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not
>>> care about what the audience wants or thinks, and that they are a law
>>> unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are outraged at the BBC's refusal to show the appeal for Gaza,
>>> if you think that it is time for the BBC to grow up and join the real
>>> world, and that they should face the consequences of angering their
>>> audience, if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization
>>> that doesn't care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply
>>> do not matter, please forward this to someone you know.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> An Ex TV License payer.

CLANG!

A penny drops.

And somebody, somewhere, finally realizes that money talks. Somebody, somewhere realizes that non-compliance IS an option. Not only that, but non-compliance is the RIGHT option.

Somebody, somewhere has had enough, and I’m surprised it has taken so long. I’m disappointed that it has taken something like the Gaza Appeal Fracas to get them moving, but so what, they are moving.

Without the accompaniment of the sounds of heart strings being plucked, here is the distilled version:

To all British TV viewers,
The BBC who are financed by our money.
The BBC works for us, on our behalf. It is completely wrong that all
the people of the UK, the license payers, should have their views
ignored and their money spent in ways that they do not consent to.

In any other circumstance, if you were not given what you wanted when
you handed over money for a service, you would be able to switch and
pay for a different service or stop receiving the service altogether.

It is clear that we can no longer trust them; they do not deserve
 our respect and certainly they do not deserve our money.

I therefore am calling on all license payers to boycott the BBC
license fee on a permanent basis. It is no longer acceptable that
they should be able to use the force of law to take money from us.

If the BBC is going to carry on in any form, they must rely on fees
from people who want to watch their entertainment, news and their
opinions. Now that TV is digital, they can encrypt their signals like
SKY does and ask people to pay for their programming. If people want
what they have to offer, they will pay for it.

The BBC will then have to respond directly to its audience or cease
to exist because no one will pay for their programming. It will no
longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not
care about what the audience wants or thinks, and that they are a law
unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.

If you think that it is time for the BBC to grow up and join the real
world, and if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization
that doesn't care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply
do not matter, please forward this to someone you know

Without going on too much longer, lets reinforce the message with a little substitution…

>>> HMG will then have to respond directly to its employers or cease to exist because no one will pay for their idiocy. It will no longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not care about what the public wants or thinks, and that they are a law unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are outraged at HMGs behaviour regarding [war x, y or z; ID cards, NIR, corruption, nepotism], if you think that it is time for HMG to grow up and join the real world, and that they should face the consequences of angering their EMPLOYERS, if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization that doesn’t care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply do not matter, please forward this to someone you know.

Get the message. And get the message out.

If you use Apple, you will know that the new version of iLife will include updates to iPhoto that are simply astonishing.

iPhoto 09 will scan your photo library for faces, and allow you to name the people in your photos. It will then put the right name to each face in every photograph in your library automagically.

The first thing that came to my mind was the phrase, “Police state dividend!”.

What is even more fascinating is that iPhoto 09 allows you to upload your named faces to Facebook. I’m sure there are many people who know what this means; why should the state spend billions rolling out centralized databases of everyone’s faces when they can get back door access to Facebook, which not only will have everyone’s name and face, but also all of their social connections and their named faces also!

In any case, David Rowan writes in the times about how face recognition is being touted as the next big thing:

[…]

Rob Milliron, a construction worker, had a close escape back in June 2001, when, while eating lunch in Tampa, Florida, he was photographed without his knowledge by a hidden government facial-recognition surveillance camera scouring for felons and sex-offenders. Police passed images to the press and, although Mr Milliron wasn’t a match to a bad guy, his picture was printed in a magazine alongside the words: “You can’t hide those lying eyes in Tampa.” A woman in Tulsa called police to identify him falsely as her ex-husband wanted on felony child-neglect charges. When police surrounded Mr Milliron days later at his construction site, he had to point out that, yes, that was him in the photograph, but no, he had never married, never had children, and never been to Oklahoma. As he told the local newspaper: “They made me feel like a criminal.”

Tampa scrapped its facial-recognition system two years later, citing its ineffectiveness, but not before Milliron had become something of a poster-boy for the technology’s unreliability and its likelihood to trap the innocent amid its many “false positives”. Since then, the War on Terror has amplified official interest in and financing for face-recognition trials as a means of identifying the supposedly high-risk – but, in projects from Newham in East London to Logan Airport in Boston, results have been flawed to say the least. In one high-profile trial, at Palm Beach International Airport, a facial-recognition system at a security checkpoint matched faces to those in its database just 47 per cent of the time. Ordinary passengers and other airport staff not meant to be recognised, meanwhile, triggered 1,081 false alarms in a month, risking interrogation or detention.

Yet just because, for the moment, such surveillance systems are flawed – their recognition befuddled by human ageing, outdoor light, poor image resolution, even facial hair – the extraordinary pace of development means that far more accurate screening systems are imminent. Researchers are developing sharply accurate scanners that monitor faces in 3D and software that analyses skin texture to turn tiny wrinkles, blemishes and spots into a numerical formula.

The strongest face-recognition algorithms are now considered more accurate than most humans – and already the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers have held discussions about the possibility of linking such systems with automatic car-numberplate recognition and public-transport databases. Join everything together via the internet, and voilà – the nation’s population, down to the individual Times reader, can be conveniently and automatically monitored in real time.

Just listen to senior law-enforcement executives to understand their brave new intentions. Three months ago, Mark Branchflower, Interpol’s database chief, declared facial recognition a desirable means of alerting local forces about the movements of internationally wanted suspects, “a step we could go to quite quickly”. And in evidence to MPs last March, Peter Neyroud, head of the National Policing Improvement Agency, raised the prospect of “automated face recognition” to identify suspects, as well as “behaviourial matching” software that uses CCTV images to predict potential troublemakers.

So let’s understand this: governments and police are planning to implement increasingly accurate surveillance technologies that are unnoticeable, cheap, pervasive, ubiquitous, and searchable in real time. And private businesses, from bars to workplaces, will also operate such systems, whose data trail may well be sold on or leaked to third parties – let’s say, insurance companies that have an interest in knowing about your unhealthy lifestyle, or your ex-spouse who wants evidence that you can afford higher maintenance payments.

Rather than jump up and down with rage – you never know who is watching through the window – you have a duty now, as a citizen, to question this stealthy rush towards permanent individual surveillance. A Government already obsessed with pursuing an unworkable and unnecessary identity-card database must be held to account.

As for me, I’ve been re-watching for inspiration the 1997 film Face/Off, in which John Travolta wears Nicolas Cage’s face as a way of infiltrating Cage’s criminal gang. And if that fails to inspire a means of fighting back, face-transplant surgery is always an option.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5504534.ece

Before I dive in:

Mark Branchflower, Interpol’s database chief, declared facial recognition a desirable means of alerting local forces about the movements of internationally wanted suspects

What if every time they came to find someone, the people who were despatched were simply despatched themselves:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No matter what face recognition software is out there, if the above is the counter rule, the machine will grind to a halt. Today, it will not be half a dozen people with axes, but a flash mob of 500 who will not only despatch the thugs, but who will destroy whatever is put in front of them, like a swarm of hungry nanites. It will look something like this only violent.

The answer to all of this is very simple. There are things that the state simply should not do. It is not the function of the state to issue ID Cards, run central databases that store everyone’s communications, etc etc. It does not matter what technology scientists invent; the mere existence of something does not mean that the state should use it. Quite the opposite.

Small government, with its functions clearly defined is the answer to all of our problems. The government has no business regulating money. The government has no business regulating $whatever_they_do_now. Their job is to clean the shit off the streets with brooms and to arbitrate in disputes between people, should they choose the state as the arbitrator. As soon as they start doing other things, the trouble is set off. We see the result of it every day.

The CCTV cameras in the UK are now like a sleeping giant. Once they become intelligent they will suddenly awake and KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Just think about that.

Every empire that ever existed on the earth eventually fell to dust; these systems and the people who own them are as fragile as a chicken’s egg stretched a mile wide. In a single night the entire machine could be destroyed by an unaccepting population. Whatever happens, this will not last forever. Something will break; either the mass will reject it or the empire that uses it will collapse under the weight of its own debt, like all the others have.

In the mean time, we live in a time where the tools of oppression are available to you to play with. You can download iLife and use its face recognition to organize your photos. This is unprecedented, and very useful. It will instruct millions of people on the true capabilities of the state, causing them to be outraged…but I digress.

This is an age where everyone everywhere can use military grade encryption to keep their communications private. All you need to do is just use it. If Apple rolled it out as a part of their ‘Mail’ application, in a single day many millions of people’s communications would ‘go dark’ to the authorities.

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

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

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

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

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

And What Have You Done With My Body, God?
4 cd digi box set including 56 tracks, 41 previously unreleased. Full “Into Battle…” EP “Close (To The Edit)” and “Moments In Love” cassette singles on CD for the first time. 36 page booklet containing track-by-track commentary by all five original members.

[…]

Tu-umb!

WTF did you read that?

FORTY ONE PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACKS.

As you can imagine, it was ordered on teh spot. Yes, ‘teh’.

When this man:

took this man’s:

manifesto:

The slim volume of essays, presented here for the first time in English translation, is one of the significant documents of musical aesthetics of this century. If the book itself has remained the province of a mere handful of readers, its ideas, passed on through a variety of later musical and literary movements, became the inspiration for some of the most innovative artistic creations of modern times. Luigi Russolo anticipated-indeed, he may have precipitated-a whole range of musical and aesthetic notions that formed the basis of much of the avant-garde thought of the past several decades. His ideas were absorbed, modified, and eventually transmitted to later generations by a number of movements and individuals-among them the futurists, the Dadaists, and a number of composers and writers of the nineteen-twenties. The noise instruments he invented fascinated and infuriated his contemporaries, and he was among the earliest musicians to put the often-discussed microtone to regular practical use in Western music. Russolo’s views looked forward to the time when composers would exercise an absolute choice and control of the sounds that their music employed. He was the precursor of electronic music before electronics had come of age.

[…]

http://www.pendragonpress.com/books/bookdetail.php?PPNo=345B

used this to make it real:

used her:

to make it ‘musical’ very very beautiful…

and never forgetting J.J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan and the priceless Horn….

you received something that ‘raised the bar’ and which today makes almost everything look and sound like shit.

Once again ladies and gentlemen few, was how it was done.

That is what it looks like… and sounds like… when you put people who can THINK together and let them get on with it.

That, my friends, is why I RAIL constantly about the desert of the real, about the dearth of anything real, anything that contains even the faint echo of a single real person’s thought.

A famous bass player said, after being heckled ‘over and over’ to play a song about entomology, “all we need is one person with an original thought”.

That was in 1979.