Another article from the radical social worker has trickled down the internets. Here we go…

The reform of child protection by so-called ‘experts’ has failed disastrously. Very urgent action is required to re-assert the fundamentals of good practice and restore public confidence in the social work profession.

At the root of the problem is a government that has undermined child protection work by introducing the Common Assessment Framework which requires social workers to gather masses of information on children not at risk of harm. Social workers find it difficult to focus on those at greatest risk because they are overwhelmed with paperwork and computer-based work. It is obvious that the public wants child protection services to be improved – as shown by the outrage over child abuse scandals – and expects social workers to rescue children suffering appalling treatment at the hands of their parents. A stronger focus on child protection would not only be popular but would also make services more responsive to the local community.

Serious weaknesses in child protection have lead to shocking failures to spot abuse or dangers in high-risk cases. Reform is urgently needed to improve social work practice in the following areas:

Formal Investigations into Abuse and Neglect

Social workers have a legal duty to investigate where there are suspicions, or allegations, of abuse or neglect. This does not mean they carry out a criminal investigation but they do have a lead role in gathering evidence which may later be used in care proceedings. Unfortunately, an over-emphasis on early intervention and prevention has diverted attention away from this work.

Child abuse is a crime. If a crime has been committed, then the criminal process must be initiated. What is unacceptable is that there is a parallel legal system, where the normal standards of evidence are not applied to something that is a crime.

Social workers operate as a law unto themselves, as we have seen in the case of the man who had his children kidnapped because he believed they were at risk. If social workers are to be able to do their jobs properly, they need to follow the rules of evidence and be subject to the same controls and procedures as the police are. It is completely wrong that they can invade a home and remove children from their parents or initiate investigations on the basis of anonymous phone calls or rumors in ways that the police are not able to do.

It is well known that the competence with which the investigation is handled will crucially influence the effectiveness of subsequent work. Usually, the focus is on a single incident and some critics have complained that this is unfair and causes unnecessary stress on families. However, a speedy investigation of the incident may provide the oppportunity to obtain medical evidence of abuse which could be useful in legal proceedings.

Once again, if there is evidence of a crime, then a criminal case should be opened, full stop.

The social work investigation involves more than looking for physical injuries (important though this is) and gathering facts about the reported incident or concerns. Judgements also have to be made about the quality of family relationships, verbal and non-verbal communication from the child, and any other possible risk factors that might become apparent.

My emphasis. This is where the problem starts. It is not the proper role of government to say what is or is not ‘a quality family life’. No one but a parent can determine this, and no one has the right to come into your house and make a judgement on you and your family and how you conduct yourself in private. This is how, in the United States, children have been kidnapped from their families when social workers find piles of dirty plates in the sink, and then scream ‘HEALTH HAZARD’.

Therefore, it is essential that all authorities should have a centralised investigation team that is fully staffed and has good management back-up so that all child protection (section 47) referrals are thoroughly and promptly dealt with. Social workers in this team need to consider the dilemma of how to intervene both minimally and as early as possible and should not take crucial decisions without managerial involvement. They need different skills and style of working from social workers who provide family support. Ideally, initial investigations should be carried out by experienced workers working in pairs, as this ensures greater objectivity.

Social workers should only be engaged when a crime is committed. Anything else is not social work, but is instead, social engineering.

Some cases where child maltreatment is suspected may be dealt with by the district team if it is felt the initial assessment should be carried out over a longer period of time. However, there are advantages in a specialised team carrying out initial investigations because the focus of work is more likely to be kept firmly on the concerns reported and on gathering evidence. In some cases it is good practice to arrange a joint interview with the Police to avoid the need for the child to repeat their story twice.

If the police have been called, then it should be a police investigation into a crime. Social workers should not be able to make up law as they desire, based on their personal standards and prejudices.

It is anticipated that referrals will increase as new guidance to agencies on spotting early signs of abuse takes effect. Early identification of children suffering abuse and neglect should lead to better-informed decisions and more effective interventions. Children’s social work services have a lead role and carry greater responsibilities than other agencies and therefore a more pro-active approach may sometimes be necessary.

No. This will lead to more false positives, more harassment and an eventual curtailing of the powers of social workers. One day soon, these people will mess with the wrong family and find themselves at the receiving end of a multi million pound lawsuit that will be successful. The entire culture of social work will be fixed soon after that.

Every Child Matters

The Every Child Matters programme has been driven by a government more interested in social engineering and surveillence than good social work practice.

This doesn’t make any sense. Those who read BLOGDIAL know about the story of a fat child who was kidnapped from his parents because he was fat.

Someone went into that family’s house and made a judgement that a child was ‘too fat’, and then kidnapped that child, “for its own good”. This is social engineering; where a social worker, who is actually in this case acting as a social engineer, decides that a child does not fit in with ‘societal norms’, and should therefore be ‘adjusted’ so that it becomes ‘normal’.

Social workers with principles need to decide wether or not they are social engineers or not. They need to decide wether or not their role is to look after those children who have no one else to care for them, or wether they are the third parent to all families.

As for surveillance, social workers are colluding in the most Orwellian surveillance systems ever seen on this earth. More on that below.

It is over-ambitious, unrealistic and unworkable.

And it is IMMORAL. It is not the proper role of government to set the goals that families should strive for when it comes to their children.

The Government’s aim is for every child, whatever their background or their circumstances, to have the support they need to ‘be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being’.

And this is total nonsense. Not everyone can be a rock star, or more appropriately for these days, the winner of Big Brother. This is the same flawed thinking that has resulted in examinations becoming less than worthless; everyone, no matter what their ability is, ‘deserves to pass an exam’ for the sake of inclusiveness. There have been many writers that have explained why this is complete madness, and I will not delve into it here. Suffice to say that Neu Liebour is totally insane in its social engineering agenda, and crazed and insatiable in its need to make everyone equal. It does not work, it cannot work, and it can and has wreaked havoc everywhere it has been applied.

It involves agencies sharing information and working together, to protect children from harm and help them achieve what they want in life.

Totalitarianism.

When a child is identified as vulnerable professionals are to assess the needs of the child and share personal information about the family with other professionals.

What does ‘vulnerable’ mean? In the case of this child, it means merely being fat.

The computerised Integrated Children’s System for recording this information has been a bureaucratic nightmare for social workers resulting in masses of meaningless data. It should therefore be scrapped.

And yet, the only reason why it is full of a mass of meaningless data is because social workers put it there, without question, without analysis, without introspection or an application of any principles whatsoever.

ContactPoint will would have been just as bad, and the fake charities are all lining up to say how good it is. Social workers must reject, on principle, ContactPoint or anything like it that may be proposed in the future. They need to do this not only so they can be moral people, but so they can do the real work of being a social worker.

Problems have arisen because this programme has been driven by top-down policies that have distorted the social work role and produced an enormous amount of confusion throughout children’s services. It has given social workers a free rein to behave coercively because of unthinking assumptions about the protection of children.

No programme can cause a person to be immoral. The people who kidnapped that fat child acted immorally because they are immoral, as were the people who ambushed a father outside of his school. The new tools at the disposal of these wicked people are nothing more than an ‘Amazon for kidnappers’ where they can see, ‘other cases like this in your area’ and every other database driven way of connecting entries. Absolutely despicable.

Also, government is encouraging social workers to ‘nanny’ families where ‘concerns’ are identified in order to prevent children from becoming a problem for society.

There is nothing in this world that can make a social worker violate the rights of any person. They willingly and gladly do it, for wages. The role of a social worker, like the proper role of government, should be extremely limited. They should not be measuring the waists of children, monitoring how they are dressed, ‘running CAFs‘ on them or any of the completely insane, immoral, intrusive and ridiculous things that they are called upon to do.

It is not easy to differentiate between good social work practice and harassment by the ‘nanny state’ – but it is an important distinction.

On the contrary, it is EXTREMELY easy to differentiate between good social work practice and harassment. Lets see if we can come up with a short list on the fly:

• Social workers calling on Home Educators because they have received an anonymous phone call that someone is Home Educating: HARASSMENT
• Social workers kidnapping a child for being fat: HARASSMENT
• Social workers ambushing a father for asking a head teacher if he can pick up his children inside the school because they might be at risk: HARASSMENT
• Social workers judging a mother to bee ‘too stupid’ to look after her own child: HARASSMENT
• Social workers kidnapping children because the kitchen sink is ‘dirty’: HARASSMENT
• Social workers kidnapping children because the mother has quintuplets: HARASSMENT
• Social workers kidnapping an infant because the mother has questions about breast-feeding: HARASSMENT
• Social workers taking a child into care when its parents are killed in a car accident and there are no relatives: NOT HARASSMENT

See? Not that difficult. The principle here is that social workers are not parents, and when they act as if they are parents, then they are doing wrong. When they take children from their parents and no crime has been committed by the parent against he child, then this is doing wrong.

Good practice requires social workers to have a clear understanding of their statutory powers and to be as open and honest as possible about their concerns.

No. Social workers must have their duties outlined very clearly. They must not have ‘powers’ in the same way that the police have powers. They should be there to provide a service to the public only, and they should not have the power to control any intact family, i.e. a family where there is at least one living parent or close relative available to act as a parent.

An appropriate balance between care and control must be negotiated with the family.

This is absolutely and totally wrong. And once again, we hear another stock totalitarian phrase; you know the ones I mean, “You are who you say you are”, “we must strike a balance between…”, “justice must be seen to be done”, “paying their fair share” etc etc. Care and control are the remit of the family, and are not the business of the state. Social workers, when they are acting properly, are a temporary safety net in cases where there are no parents or relatives. They have no business telling people what to eat, how much they should eat, how children should be educated or disciplined or anything else. This is the fundamental philosophical failing of social workers; they believe they have the right to control other people, making those people into property – their property. That is wrong in every way that something can be wrong.

Let me help those who are having trouble understanding this. If we were talking about a slave who did not want to be a slave, the master’s slave manager would opine, “we must strike a balance between the needs of the slave and the needs of the household”. Not very palatable for the slave is it? But that is exactly what social workers are advocating; that people are property, and that they are the managers of that property on behalf of the property owner, THE STATE.

The role of the social worker is like that of a good parent.

NO it is not. And this is the fundamental failure of principle that is the core of the problem.

Very often the social worker provides support and encouragement to families struggling to cope but occasionally a more controlling approach is necessary, signalling that certain behaviour is unacceptable.

This is absolutely wrong. The state and its aparatchicks do not have the right to tell people what behavior is right and wrong. If someone is committing a crime, then the state comes into play. Anything else is up to the individual and the family, and the state has no say in it. This is the gray area that social workers inhabit, where they can, through the dirty lenses of their own prejudices, say what is and is not appropriate behavior. It is unacceptable, totalitarian, unprincipled and completely WRONG. Social workers are making up bespoke law when they determine that a child is too fat, or that a relationship in a family is ‘unacceptable’… unacceptable to WHO?

However, the social worker who tends to ‘nanny’ people, or harass them, is less respected and can appear weak and ineffectual. In the same way, parents who nag a child, or make threats that they do not carry out, teach the child not to respect parental authority.

This is pretty sickening stuff.

The social worker who tends to ‘nanny’ people should have no power to do that in the first place. They do not deserve respect because they have no principles and are nanny state aparatchicks. They deserve only contempt. It is not in any way ‘the same way’ when a parent ‘nags’ a child. First of all, who is to say what nagging is or is not, and secondly, a parent is not in any way equatable with a social worker. Social workers ARE NOT PARENTS. Thirdly, how can a child come to respect parental authority when social workers can trump parental decisions at any time? This is not only immoral thinking, it is illogical thinking.

Another insidious development is the increasing use of the rhetoric of social exclusion to imply that people who are different and who do not share the dominant values should be made to conform because they are ‘at risk’ or ‘socially excluded’.

But this is exactly what using the phrase ‘unacceptable behavior’ does. By saying, arbitrarily, that some behavior is unacceptable, there is a presumption in the mind of the social worker that their perception of reality and decency is ‘the norm’ and that their victims are ‘abnormal’ or ‘unacceptable’. This is exactly the same as saying that people who are different and who do not share the dominant values should be made to conform; only in the mind of the social worker, the dominant values are not ‘dominant values’ they are acceptable. This is double thinking; it is the same double thinking that makes social workers think that Home Educated children are likely to suffer ‘social exclusion’, when in fact nothing like that is true.

These people really need to take a step back and think about what their principles are and what their core ideas are. They seem to be holding contradictory thoughts; in the case of this person, who appears to be very thoughtful and sensitive, if she is the better kind of social worker, heaven help us; what are the BAD one’s thinking like?

Recent government proposals to introduce greater regulation of home education is a good example of its efforts to extend the ‘nanny state’. Social workers must take a stand against this authoritarian trend which puts the profession in a very bad light.

You see? A sensitive and thinking person! But sadly, some of the principles she outlines above, if applied to home educators (social workers nannying people, the rhetoric of social exclusion, ‘the role of social workers is like that of a parent’, ‘a controlling approach is needed’, ‘certain behavior is unacceptable’, ‘An appropriate balance between care and control must be negotiated with the family’, It is hard to differentiate between help and harassment, etc etc) would put prejudiced and ignorant social workers at odds with Home Educators. You cannot have it both ways; either social workers are there to set the norms and if Home Education is not the norm according to a social worker then control is warranted OR social workers are not parents and should not be nannying families and should, quite rightly, not be interfering with or investigating Home Educators. Which one is it?

Back to Basics

Grandiose ideas about ‘safeguarding children’ through all-embracing professional intervention need to be ditched and replaced with more realistic thinking.

They need to be ditched, and then real thinking needs to be done, not just realistic thinking. The principles of social work need to be outlined and their special powers (that even the police do not have) removed entirely. Their role must be reduced to caring for the truly needy only (even so, what ‘needy’ means needs to be carefully defined), so that all social engineering is removed from their jobs. That means no more kidnapping fat children, ambushing fathers who want to collect their children inside the school gates and no more abuses period. The safeguarding of children is the duty of parents, not social workers.

Social work urgently needs to break free of government control.

No. Social work needs to be strictly defined by government and stripped of all its power. Social work free of control means an unlimited license to nanny, harass, kidnap and abuse.

Child protection social workers should be allowed to concentrate on the core task of identifying parenting which definitely puts a child at risk, using their legal powers correctly and working to protect and support children.

No. Social workers are not parents; it is not their role to ‘support children’. They should be there to help when the family disappears from a child’s life and there are no living relatives to pick up the slack. It is not their role to interfere in the lives of people, to surveil them with databases (as the phrase ‘identifying’ implies) and to impose their prejudices on perfectly ordinary and free people.

Too many children are being brought into the child protection system and are stretching social work resources to breaking point.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot on the one hand, desire to act as a parent to all the children in a country ‘supporting’ them, and then complain that you have too much work. Stop kidnapping fat children and interfering with people who have a different world view to you and then your caseloads will start to look more doable.

Increasingly, social work is collapsing under the weight of unrealistic expectations and is unable to do the very thing it was set up to do.

Those expectations are not only unrealistic, but more importantly they are immoral. You do not have the right to tell people how to live. The sooner you accept this, the easier your job will become and the more meaningful and rewarding your work will be.

To summarise, the organisation of child protection work needs to undergo radical change. Good social work practice will only happen if there is a clear focus on child protection.

Wrong. Child protection is a fad. The vast majority of children in the UK are perfectly safe. In fact, they are so safe, that social workers have to create bogus pretexts to interfere with their development, like obesity.

Social workers need to be told what their role is; they cannot be left to determine what it is themselves. They are not a law unto themselves, they are not a separate branch of government, though they seem to act like it at times. They need to be reigned in severely and have their role written down in a form that explains and delineates what they can do; everything not on that list they should be forbidden from doing.

Also, the complexity of long-term work child protection work needs to be better understood so that appropriate management support and training can be provided.

No.

Finally, local authorities should have a career structure for social workers that encourages them to stay on the front-line and a style of management which promotes stable, committed and supportive teams.

[…]

http://www.radical.org.uk/barefoot/reform.htm

And there you have it. “Give us more money”.

Once again, this is one of the ‘GOOD’ ones!!!!

HMG is wasting more money setting up a ‘Swine Flu Hotline’, where at least 2000 underpaid minions are waiting ask you a number of set questions which will tell if you have Swine Flu. A correct response will get you a ‘scrip for antivirals.

Won’t it be open to abuse?

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, has himself admitted people will be able to cheat the system.

It will not be long before the “correct” answers that will get people anti-viral drugs will appear on the internet somewhere.

However, the government accepts this is the price it is willing to pay for relieving the pressure on the health service.

Sir Liam says he believes it will only be a “minority” of people who do abuse it.

There are also safeguards in place. Everyone in the country has a unique flu number so if they try to get anti-virals more than once the NHS will know.

So, it’s your taxes, and HMG admits “this is the price it is willing to pay for relieving the pressure on the health service”, so go for it! Get your free Tamiflu and stock it up for when a real virus hits.

“This amazing interview was done back in 1985 with a former KGB agent who was trained in subversion techniques. He explains the 4 basic steps to socially engineering entire generations into thinking and behaving the way those in power want them to. It’s shocking because our nation has been transformed in the exact same way, and followed the exact same steps.”

Sound familiar?

This just came to me over ‘teh internetz’:

Elizabeth Mills response to the regulation of Home Education seemed to echo the common response from home-educators. Another opportunity for the state to control how we treat our children. And so on. It’s something I find an increasingly tiresome argument, as I seem to be one of the few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing.

Here we go…

I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was, in the most polite terms, a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then I think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child I barely left the house except maybe once a week to help do the shopping in Morrisons. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manics fan, otherwise I suspect I would have never had that.

Your problem is that your mother was a ‘manipulative bitch’. I would also say that she failed to teach you any logic. It does not immediately follow that Home Education is bad for everyone else, just because your mother was not a very good parent. All the families in the UK should not have to suffer at the hands of the state because you were born to a dysfunctional family.

Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier. My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.

I feel very sorry for you, just as I feel sorry for all the people who have ‘bad parents’. Once again, this story and all other ‘horror stories’ are not enough to smear ALL PARENTS. We do not live in a world where if there is one nutcase in the country, everyone gets a new raft of laws eliminating ancient freedo….. oops.

Yes, some people are just honestly supporting children with learning difficulties or trying to embrace their own culture, but there are cases where it does just turn into abuse. The chances are, like me and my sisters, that it isn’t really reported or known. The reason for that being that, with no real or completely accurate figures oh home education, its possible for the worst situations to slip between everyone’s fingers. Who would have considered themselves responsible for my welfare when I was growing up? We just went on living in a dysfunctional and destructive family until we were old enough to be dysfunctional adults. I’m not even sure if my sisters can read or write properly.

And there are abusive families who send their children to school. The point is, once again, that no natter what the statistics are, people have rights. People are innocent until proven guilty. They have the right to privacy. They have the right to organize themselves and their families as they see fit. We are now starting to see what it is like to live in a country where because a few people get hurt, the government tries to ban everything that could potentially cause harm, we now call it ‘the nanny state’ and everyone agrees, its not a very nice place to live in.

It seems like the majority of opinions on this are all about embracing positive alternative education. I don’t dispute that home education can be a positive experience for many and take them leaps and bounds beyond others in their schools. Equally though, I fail to understand why so many parents can’t see that it could turn into a nightmare. Surely, if you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of, then no harm will come of someone checking that your children are being educated.

‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear‘ only the most naive of people believe this. Thankfully, their numbers have dwindled to almost nothing.

My sisters and I are all completely estranged from our mother now. She hates us because we stole her life because she had to teach us. As soon as I got to sixth form I felt that even the weakest student, with Cs and Ds, was better educated than I was. Around this time we fell out. She denies my existence now.

This is all very sad, but is has nothing to do with Home Education in general, our rights, right and wrong, or anything else. There ARE bad parents out there. There will ALWAYS be bad parents. You can never have perfection or the elimination of crime, bad parenting or any other ill. What we need to do is pay attention to the vast majority of people who are good, trustworthy and decent, and not allow ourselves to be sucked into a totalitarian nanny state because an EXTREMELY small minority of people have a bad time of life.

Your best revenge is not to try and destroy the lives of all the decent people in the UK by calling for them to be violated, but to use your pain and your experience to make the world a better place, without trampling on the rights of other people.

Surely someone checking that your children meet a standard of numeracy and literacy, and aren’t raised to believe that the world is controlled by Jew-hating-lizards from outer space is something that should be done, not beaten down by shouty hippie parents with anger issues towards the local education authority, or Labour, or Catholicism or various other issues, is a good thing? If parents become ill, or must work more, and can’t support their children’s education, shouldn’t there be someone to step in and make a stand about that?

You sound like an angry person who has deeply seated problems that you have not resolved. You want to lash out at all parents because your parents were bad. Hurting other people will not make your pain go away. You need to get some psychiatric help to get you over your problems.

After all, when you’re young, whoever teaches you tends to be your earliest guide in the world. Did you know how you should be educated when you were 8 or 9? You don’t really have any authority on this yourself when you’re young, parents decide it for you. If you did, you’d probably just sit in the dirt chopping hair off dolls and eating refreshers all day.

This is not an argument.

I fail to understand why there’s such opinion that the government/ LEAs/ the big bad whoever are anti-home education.

That is indeed, a big failure on your part. A failure to read, a failure to empathize and a failure to understand what a real family is like. This is understandable, since you never had one.

The attitude against this regulation does seem to broadly be part of a much larger anti-Labour grudge, or a grudge against local education authorities and regulation.

This is simply not true. No matter what political party is in charge, if they were to propose what New Labour are proposing they would be rounded upon. You really do not understand what this is all about!

Regulation seems to be a dirty word to these people, implying control when it equally means protection.

Regulation does not mean protection. Get yourself a dictionary. You have no experience in parenting or of parenting, you have no idea of what the nature of the state really is… you are ignorant.

Home education has grown as an alternative option since the 70s or so and there really has been very little regulation on it at all, and yet it concerns one of the most important factors in a persons life being decided by what could be the whim of an unstable parent. What seems to be recommended is an enforced and compulsory regulation of what is currently very loosely done. The suggestions made by the recent review have flaws, which have been pointed out on the previous post’s comments, but I view them as caring for the education and welfare of vulnerable children who are currently beyond any particular authority and whose lives are solely controlled by one or two people.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/18/regulating-home-education/

Those ‘two people’ are called PARENTS they are not just ‘people’.

Compulsory school education is a relatively new phenomenon:

Whilst the intentions of compulsory school laws were good, what we have now is a system that serves to brainwash people. Now that there is a trend away from state schools, there are many forces that want to reverse it.

Teachers unions are bitterly opposed to Home Schooling. Departments of education are against it. Communists are against it. Fascists are against it. Well meaning busy bodies are against it.

What is most bizarre is that you come off sounding just like a person who is a product of the state school system with its ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ doublespeak lines learned by rote.

Either way, The point remains the same; your deeply saddening story of suffering at the hands of your parents is not a reason to destroy the sanctity of the family in general by mandating that the state become the parent of all children.

Finally, there are only a few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing because it is wrong; most people understand the threat that the state represents, what their freedom is worth and have a naturally powered ferocious desire to protect their children.

And this comment, says it all:

I feel for you, I really do, but…

The current proposals would have instead turned your once in eight year beating to coach your responses into a once a year beating.* I’m sure your mother could have turned in a report every year to show she was trying, and she would have been approved, even supported, by the authorities. She was in your own words “a manipulative bitch”, and who’s to say that she, like Baby P’s mother, like Eunice Spry, couldn’t wrap the authorities round her little finger.

Your story is repeated over and over with schooled children as well, with school staff at the very least ignorant, if not complicit in wilfull silence.

The authorities have shown that they cannot prevent abuse in schooled children, or children which are under the tightest scrutiny available to them. They have also demonstrated that people who are not manipulative, who are simply anxious in the presence of authority, get their children removed from them on the weakest of grounds because social workers don’t want to be the ones in the headlines for inaction.

The hostility to authorites is not due to some airy-fairy anti-establishment dogma, but due to a history of abuse of authority, coupled with a demonstrated inability of authorities to use their existing powers effectively.

I think you’ll also find that most people who believe the world is truly ruled by jew hating lizards from outer space were, in fact, schooled, along with the vast majority of British Islamic extremists, BNP supporters, climate change believers / deniers (delete where you agree) and people who vote on Britain’s Got Talent. Being schooled does not, on present evidence, innoculate you in any way against collective insanity.

*Yes, I’m sure there were more beatings, just this one was for coaching before the authority visit.

NO $ALE!

Madeline Bunting writes at the Grauniad.

She has penned a breathtaking piece of trash; terrifying in its ignorance, its basis in illogic and bone shaking fear.

It is terrifying because she is an example of the devotees of the new secular religion of Environmentalism who are polluting our internets and taking up our time with their increasingly shrill and absurd claims.

And these shrill noises are going to get worse as more and more data emerges to destroy their false religion. They will do anything for their religion and because they are irrational and have no holy book to follow, they can change the focus of their religion at will.

First the threat to the environment was the coming of a New Ice Age. Then it was Global Warming. Now it is Climate Change. Each time, as the data shows that what they believe is not true, they change what they believe.

I have no problem with people following the religion of Environmentalism. They can believe in Santa Claus for all I care. the problem I have with the religious devotees of Environmentalism is that these people are ready and willing to make blood sacrifices on the altar of their new religion, and the blood they will be sacrificing will be yours and the families of other people.

Similar to the Malthusian “mass cull” enthusiasts Attenborogh and Porritt, Madeline Bunting wants everyone to be entered into the most fantastic and fine grained totalitarian system of absolute control in order to satisfy her insane Environmentalist agenda of complete degradation and subservience to Gaia.

These people feel a deep seated guilt at having lived in comparative prosperity, and they are desperate to ‘pay back’ for what ‘they’ have ‘taken’. The problem is, they want to superimpose their guilt onto everyone who lives in their part of the world. Like the Eugenics boosters who will not kill themselves and their children, Madeline Bunting is not willing to suffer alone as a dignified religious fanatic; she must CONVERT everyone, and drag them down into her pit of excrement.

Read the rest of this entry »

NHS Blog Doctor, one “Dr John Crippen” has linked to a Blogdial post on MMR:

The champagne corks will be popping to night at JABs

First, we are Blogdial.

We are not JABS, we have no links to JABS and we do not in any way suggest that our opinions are shared by JABS, and vice versa.

before they dance round the mumbo-jumbo pole to sing “Soomer is a-comin’ in.” Their MMR scaremongering has been successful. There is now a major outbreak of measles.

With insults as poor as the above, Dr Crippen deserves to see a wicker man from the inside. However, he only presents a straw man argument.  There is not a major outbreak of measles.  And if anyone is scaremongering it is the likes of Dr Crippen, HMG and BBQ who present a relentless tax-sponsored campaign to scare parents into permiting their children to be jabbed with whatever They deem necessary. It has been MMR, it is now HPV (as we have discussed before) and will soon be chickenpox (as we have discussed before).

Furthermore, the post to which Dr Crippen links was obviously too complex in its arguments for him to understand. Dr Crippen accuses us of scaremongering when in fact that post simply highlights;

1. how government policy has restricted patient choice
2. how it is the restricted choice of vaccine which is now limiting uptake
3. how HMG could alter this policy, but refuse
4. how, rather than change policy, HMG pass blame onto parents refusing MMR – as is their choice
5. how the NHS, Dr Crippen included, fail to support parental choice and exacerbate the problem
6. how it is HMG, NHS, BBQ and now Dr Crippen – and not parents –  doing all the fearmongering

Health chiefs in Wales are dealing with a “massive” measles outbreak, with numbers already four times the highest figure recorded over the past 13 years.

Lies, damned lies… and very selective reporting. If, for instance, one looked at all the years of measles cases one may say something like “the outbreak is among the 20 lowest number of cases per year in recorded history.”

BBC Heaven forbid that we should start using nasty inflammatory words like “epidemic” or “pandemic” about this illness that could be eradicated were it not for the gullible worried-well lapping up noxious propaganda from the Wakefield brigade.

Patronising tosh. There would not be so many “worried well”, as Dr Crippen calls them, were it not for the deliberate scare-mongering of the health industry. No worried well, no mass market for HPV vaccine, no mass market for chickenpox vaccine, no mass market for statins over-the-counter, no multi-billion dollar industry in unneccessary vitamins and supplements. The ‘worried well’ do not go to the doctors asking for vaccine X, health screen Y or treatment Z  for no reason: – it is because the have been subject to a targeted marketing campaign based on fear, guilt and scaremongering by the health industry.  And the NHS is an integral piece of the health industry. The worried well are exactly the market targeted by BigPharma for vaccines against relatively inoccuous diseases like chickenpox.

And over the last year I have read precisely ZERO articles suggesting a link between MMR and autism (“noxious propaganda from the Wakefield brigade”). In contrast, there is a wealth of “noxious propaganda” telling me I am endangering myself, my children and the health of the nation if I fail to give my kids MMR. A wealth of “noxious propaganda” telling me how evil a disease measles is in 21st Century Britain. Just look at the noxious propaganda on the BBQ alone!

To compare, search the BBC for ‘MMR autism’ and the latest hit is over a year ago. And that is a report of the GMC hearing against the original researchers.

Still, it’s a thought.

No, it’s not.  There is no thought in your post at all, and that is the problem, Dr Crippen.

The NHS news line reports today that there are fewer cases of swine flu in the UK than there are cases of measles. And in Wales, there are two hundred times more cases of measles than of influenza.

Why is it not on the front page of every newspaper?

Maybe because some editors are keeping it in perspective? Maybe because only BBQ is in the pay of HMG? Just a  thought.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington.

In email, some people said….

*******wrote:
Beacuse Monkton is missing the point. Nobody is trying to inform him or fool him.

Did you read the article?

The Democrats ‘…rescinded his (Monkton’s) scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing’. If anything, its the Democrats that are trying to fool and misinform the public by not allowing open debate and the submission of evidence.

Monkton is not missing any point at all, he was prevented from making any point in the first place!

We need to prepare the ignorant mass for a massive change in life style and this includes what gore has done and will continue to do

First of all, who is ‘We’ in this instance?

Secondly, lets define terms:

“Ignorance is the state in which a person lacks knowledge and is unaware of something. This should not be confused with being unintelligent, as one’s level of intelligence and level of education or general awareness are not the same. The word “Ignorant” is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware. The term may be used specifically (e.g. “One can be an expert in math, and totally ignorant of history.”) or generally (e.g. “an ignorant person.”) — although the second use is used less as a descriptive and more as an imprecise personal insult.”

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

So, in order to not be ignorant, we must not lack knowledge, or be unaware of something. In order to be aware, we need to learn, and that means listening and reading.

By blocking Monkton, Al Gore and his democrat friends are fostering ignorance. They are doing this deliberately to boost their social engineering agenda, that they know is based on junk science and outright lies. That is how they have got the ignorant to say by rote, “the debate is over and there is scientific consensus about anthropogenic global warming”, which is of course a bald faced lie. There is no scientific consensus on AGW, they know it, you and I, the people who are not, by definition, ignorant, know it, and they want to stop anyone else from finding out what we both know to be true.

whilst scientists debate in private what to do about the various environmental issues such as , oil depletion, ice melt, co2 rise, population increase, water shortage, food shortage, soil erosion, etc

We know better than to conflate different subjects, and I know that you are playing devils advocate, so lets go there:

• ‘oil depletion’ is a technical problem that will be adapted to by the market.
• ‘Ice melt’ is not happening like the environmental Fascists keep saying it is; you and I both know that, because we study the facts.
• ‘C02 rise’ is not the cause of ‘global warming’ and is not a problem; you and I both know this, because we have been exposed to the facts.
• Water shortage is a problem of efficiency not supply, the same with food shortage. If they are a problem of supply, the market will adjust accordingly.
• Soil erosion is a problem of mismanagement (even vandalism) by a very small number of companies, and is not related to the other things in that list.
• Finally, population increase is not a problem related to oil depletion (even if there were only one car on earth, the oil would still run out since it is a finite resource) or ice melt (AGW lie), or food shortage (there is enough food to feed everyone on earth; this is a problem of will not supply) or water shortage (once again, this is a problem of efficiency not abundance) or soil erosion.

Waste disposal, water pollution, pollution by genetically modified organisms, electromagnetic spectrum poisoning and many other unrelated items could have been on that list obviously.

Ignorant environmentalists who do not have a grounding in or basic understanding of science, or the history of science and technology, or any experience in growing crops or taking care of the land, regularly bundle all of these things together under the banner of ‘the environment’ when they are quite separate and only very tangentially related.

If we are going to talk about AGW, we must stick to AGW and the evidence for or against it, without conflating it with anything that is not related directly to the scientific evidence. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory (hypothesis). It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. When people try and stifle observations that destroy the AGW hypothesis, as in any scientific matter, the people trying to suppress evidence are normally lying about their work or trying to preserve their positions and prestige. This is exactly what is happening, and the Monkton affair is just the latest example.

We either win this battle or we’re all to the dogs

This doesn’t make any sense, and it is certainly not ‘a battle’. If the AGW hypothesis is true, then the effects of AGW can be corrected by taking action to cut emissions. If it is not true, then trying to stop it by cutting C0₂ emissions is a waste of time and will represent a huge distortion in the progress of man, changing the future irrevocably and unnecessarily. The hypothesis has not been proven; what we have are a bunch of non scientists shouting very loud that the AGW hypothesis is correct, and who want to silence anyone with data that says it is not correct. That is not how science is done, and it is not how decisions that change ‘society’ should be made. If society is to be run on the basis of science, then the scientific method must be applied without distortion. What we are seeing is a denial and shutting down of the scientific method for political ends. That is a fact.

and monckton should know better.

This doesn’t make any sense either. Either he is lying and someone has proof of this, or he is genuine and wrong, and what he is saying can be disproved. Either way, the correct way to win debate is not to silence someone with evidence that challenges a hypothesis, but instead to provide evidence. The AGW side does not have this evidence, and Al Gore in particular, has been found to be a consummate liar, his film totally discredited as junk science and propaganda. The ignorant, unlike you and I, are emotionally invested in Gore and his unscientific garbage; that is the true reason why they hang on to all of this and him in particular, not because of any facts, but because they refuse to listen to the facts when they run contrary to their secular religion, ‘environmentalism’, the high priest of which is Al Gore.

he knows that life style needs to change.

Everyone knows that waste is bad, wether it be wasting paper or wasting water. What we must never do is throw away science in a blind ignorant panic and start to mix up things that do not belong together. We must also never run into the arms of the state for our solutions; they do not have any (competence or solutions); all they can offer is tyranny, violence and destruction.

What do you see in a decade?

This is an interesting question, and an interesting time horizon. I know some very ignorant people who thought that the world would be in total chaos, “in twenty years”….in 1980. Doomsayers have been with us for generations, environmental doomsayers are only the latest in the breed. The world is still going to be here. Technology is going to be better than we can imagine. The economy will be very different. AGW will be totally discredited as a hypothesis, and we will probably be back to ‘new ice age’ theories like the crackpot junk scientist James Hansen predicted in 1971 when he helped create the model that told us of the coming ice age. When that didn’t happen, he turned to global warming. Of course, it could be possible that the environmental fascists could stifle science with some absurd, ‘environmental hate speech’ statutes, effectively killing science in this field. Who knows? What I do know for certain, is that if the state and ignorant environmental religious fanatics set the agenda, we will be living in a sub optimal future constrained by the lack of imagination and prejudices of a small coterie of nutcases, cult leaders, power mad control freaks and their brainless followers.

How do you see yourself and your children?

That is a good question. I have five children. I do not want their fertility controlled by the people who I describe in the paragraph above. I do not want them taxed in a bogus ‘carbon trading’ scheme whose only goal is to enrich criminal bankers. I do not want their ability to travel to be restricted on the false pretext of AGW. I do not want them to live in a fascist world where science cannot be practiced because the ignorant masses forbid it out of religious fervor. It is my wish that my children are protected from the people who would make this planet a nightmare place. Anyone who wants their children to be caught in such a system, cannot possibly understand what it is they are asking for, and of course, once it is in place, it might never be removed for generations. We need only look at how long it took for the Soviet system to fall; seventy years. Millions of lives wasted and ruined by people who believed the theories of Marx and Lenin. Now we have Al Gore and his new religion of ‘environmentalism’; just as poisonous as Marxism Leninism, only now, it is not the proletariat against the capitalists, it is man against himself. In the environmentalism religion, man is is own enemy, and so he must destroy himself and his way of life to save himself. It is, like Marxism Leninism, utter, unscientific nonsense from beginning to end. If the environmentalists are not struck down, it will take until the models are disproved by the march of time to finally put to rest their wild imaginings. By that time, like Russia, all that will be left of the great civilizations will be wastelands of destroyed emasculated populations of cowed slaves.

And it will all have been for nothing.

As for me, I hope to be alive to see the utter destruction of all of this nonsense, from the insanity of Keynsian economics to the environmentalism religion and everything that flows from them. I live for the day when collectivism is dead and buried, where socialism and all of its masks are consigned to the garbage bin of history. There is a more than good chance that I am going to get my wish.

Neslon Mandela, president of South Africa. ANC in total control.
Barack Obama, for all his many fatal flaws, faults and failings, President of the United States of America.
The Dollar about to go the way of the hyperinflation Deutchmark.
The Internets…
Neodymium Magnets…
Cloned pets…
Cloned humans…

Oh yes, ANYTHING is possible, more than we expect.

Tough question! we really need to try and think about it because we are not part of the ignorant mass and we can go beyond some small propaganda.

I agree. Thinking about it is crucial. In order to do it, to think, we need to hear all of the evidence, not just the evidence that we like. We need to understand and apply the scientific method, and adhere to it strictly. We need to be mindful of the state, and its lust for power and absolute control over the individual and every aspect of life. Science is not propaganda, and neither is the truth. There are people out there who do not want anyone to have access to the facts. We must be suspicious of these people, and make sure that we really have all the facts to hand in spite of what they want. That is the only way that we can come to any sort of correct judgment, and think correctly.

Being rational thinking people, we are rightfully outraged that Monkton was not allowed to speak at the eleventh hour after having been invited to give evidence; what is Al Gore afraid of? That his hoax film would be exposed for the nonsense that it is? Thankfully, due to the internet that he invented, it is impossible to herd people anymore. Whatever the truth is about AGW, it will out.

What is more galling is that Gore and his religious fanatics are appealing to the legislature to enshrine their religion in the law. If they are making an appeal to the legislature, which ostensibly represents all of us equally, it is absolutely outrageous that a person offering scientific data that counters AGW was prevented from speaking. Quite apart from the debate surrounding AGW, this is an attack on Democracy and openness in government. People who believe in those two things are disgusted by this action.

If this were simply an academic debate, it would not be so important, but this is about the creation of law and the use of force on the population in order to carry out the environmentalist agenda. That evidence exists that Al Gore and his gang are dead wrong, and that this evidence is deliberately suppressed when evidence is about to be presented for the record is inexcusable.

Anyone who is reasonable, as you and I are, cannot be for such a suppression of facts.

It is only by the seeking of truth that we have had the technological means to manage our future placed into our hands. It is only through the seeking of truth that we will overcome all the myriad and very real problems that face us.

Suppressing truth, giving into irrational fear and running to the state is not going to solve anything; instead, it is going to make everything much worse, in every aspect.

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.

Thanks to a vigilant lurker, we have this gem from BBQ / BBC:

Italy police warn of Skype threat

By David Willey
BBC News, Rome

The police’s use of wiretaps has forced some criminals on to the internet
Criminals in Italy are increasingly making phone calls over the internet in order to avoid getting caught through mobile phone intercepts, police say.

Officers in Milan say organised crime, arms and drugs traffickers, and prostitution rings are turning to Skype in order to frustrate investigators.

The police say Skype’s encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities.
Investigators have become increasingly reliant on wiretaps in recent years.
Customs and tax police in Milan have sounded the alarm.

They overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an accomplice to switch to Skype in order to get details of a 2kg (4.4lb) drug consignment.

Use of wiretaps by prosecutors in Italy has grown exponentially in recent years.

Heated debate
Investigators say intercepts of telephone calls have become an essential tool of the police, who spend millions of dollars each year tracking down crime through wiretaps of landlines and mobile phones.

But the law may be about to change.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government has drawn up a bill which would restrict police wiretaps to only the most serious crimes.

Much crime reporting in the Italian media is based on leaks of wiretaps and leading politicians, including Mr Berlusconi himself, have found to their embarrassment that details of their private telephone conversations have sometimes been leaked to newspapers.
Under the new law reporting of details of criminal investigations obtained through wiretaps would become illegal until a final verdict has been delivered.

Given the extreme slowness of Italian justice, this would mean that details of cases now before the courts might be reported by the press only in 15 years time.

Not only have Italian journalists been protesting at the new draft bill, but a heated debate is also going on about it within the country’s highest body for the administration of justice – the supreme council of the magistrature, composed of the country’s top judges.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7890443.stm

David Wiley is an ignorant, context dodging, fearmongering, BBC propagandizer of the first order. Look at the headlines of some of his bad work:

Pope Promotes Conservative Cleric
Scientist hails birth of ‘rat children’
Vatican Says Aliens Could Exist
Fewer confessions and new sins
Thou Shalt Not Wear Condoms When Going Forward
Vatican braces for Muslim anger
Vatican ‘forgives’ John Lennon
Vatican archive yields Templar secrets
Italian arrest over ‘toxic wheat’
Vatican divorces from Italian law
ho are the Calabrian mafia?
God’s politician : John Paul at the Vatican
Crib mosques anger Italian party
Italy sounds alarm over migrants
Italy approves tax on pornography
Priest ‘ruins Christmas’ for kids

Those headlines sound like something from a tabloid newspaper. Which is perfectly fine, as long as you are not forced to pay for it.

Skype is not a threat to anyone, any more than any other technology is. The vast majority of its users, which number about 16,000,000 at any one time, are quite ordinary people who just want to make phone calls and chat. There is absolutely no reason why the police should be able to listen to Skype calls or any other call for that matter, without a warrant signed by a judge, and if that cannot be done, then the police have to do in person surveillance ‘just like in the old days’. While we are talking about numbers, did you know that Skype has been downloaded over 500,000,000 times?

Back to the subject at hand. This piece of sickening, context free nonsense, propaganda if you will, in favor of police state wiretapping is pure evil. Lets hear from someone with common sense:

Helping the Terrorists

It regularly comes as a surprise to people that our own infrastructure can be used against us. And in the wake of terrorist attacks or plots, there are fear-induced calls to ban, disrupt, or control that infrastructure. According to officials investigating the Mumbai attacks, the terrorists used images from Google Earth to help learn their way around. This isn’t the first time Google Earth has been charged with helping terrorists: in 2007, Google Earth images of British military bases were found in the homes of Iraqi insurgents. Incidents such as these have led many governments to demand that Google remove or blur images of sensitive locations: military bases, nuclear reactors, government buildings, and so on. An Indian court has been asked to ban Google Earth entirely.

This isn’t the only way our information technology helps terrorists. Last year, a U.S. army intelligence report worried that terrorists could plan their attacks using Twitter, and there are unconfirmed reports that the Mumbai terrorists read the Twitter feeds about their attacks to get real-time information they could use. British intelligence is worried that terrorists might use voice over IP services such as Skype to communicate. Terrorists might recruit on Second Life and World of Warcraft. We already know they use websites to spread their message and possibly even to recruit.

Of course, all of this is exacerbated by open-wireless access, which has been repeatedly labeled a terrorist tool and which has been the object of attempted bans.

Mobile phone networks help terrorists, too. The Mumbai terrorists used them to communicate with each other. This has led some cities, including New York and London, to propose turning off mobile phone coverage in the event of a terrorist attack.

Let’s all stop and take a deep breath. By its very nature, communications infrastructure is general. It can be used to plan both legal and illegal activities, and it’s generally impossible to tell which is which. When I send and receive e-mail, it looks exactly the same as a terrorist doing the same thing. To the mobile phone network, a call from one terrorist to another looks exactly the same as a mobile phone call from one victim to another. Any attempt to ban or limit infrastructure affects everybody. If India bans Google Earth, a future terrorist won’t be able to use it to plan; nor will anybody else. Open Wi-Fi networks are useful for many reasons, the large majority of them positive, and closing them down affects all those reasons. Terrorist attacks are very rare, and it is almost always a bad trade-off to deny society the benefits of a communications technology just because the bad guys might use it too.

Communications infrastructure is especially valuable during a terrorist attack. Twitter was the best way for people to get real-time information about the attacks in Mumbai. If the Indian government shut Twitter down — or London blocked mobile phone coverage — during a terrorist attack, the lack of communications for everyone, not just the terrorists, would increase the level of terror and could even increase the body count. Information lessens fear and makes people safer.

None of this is new. Criminals have used telephones and mobile phones since they were invented. Drug smugglers use airplanes and boats, radios and satellite phones. Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven’t seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water, and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are — by and large — small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular. And while terrorism turns society’s very infrastructure against itself, we only harm ourselves by dismantling that infrastructure in response — just as we would if we banned cars because bank robbers used them too.

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0902.html

In addition to the above, on BLOGDIAL we have told you about Asterisk many times. Anyone who does not want their phone calls to be overheard can buy some cheap hardware, download some free software, and the Carrabinieri and their colleagues will not even know that there is a call in progress.

Contrary to what ignorant swine, sensationalist, tabloidist BBC correspondents in Italy, who have obviously been brain damaged by too much sun, beautiful women and fine red wine, this is a good thing.

The state has no right to eavesdrop on your private communications. Period. Thankfully, in this unprecedented time of cheap computing power and free software, anyone anywhere can simply take back their privacy and shut out any potential eavesdropper.

A Home Office spokesman said: “HPV vaccines can and do kill unpredictably; there is no such thing as a safe dose. The government firmly believes that HPV vaccines should remain a class A drug.”

A vigilant lurker writes:

I had to send you this abstract. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the full article. 

1: Am J Public Health. 2009 Feb 5. [Epub ahead of print] Links

The Moral Justification for a Compulsory Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Program.

Balog JE.

The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Compulsory human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination of young girls has been proposed as a public health intervention to reduce the threat of the disease. Such a program would entail a symbiotic relationship between scientific interests in reducing mortality and morbidity and philosophical interests in promoting morality. This proposal raises the issue of whether government should use its police powers to restrict liberty and parental autonomy for the purpose of preventing harm to young people. I reviewed the scientific literature that questions the value of a HPV vaccination. Applying a principle-based approach to moral reasoning, I concluded that compulsory HPV vaccinations can be justified on moral, scientific, and public health grounds.

One can contact him here:

Joseph E. Balog, PhD

State University of New York, College at Brockport
Health Science
350 New Campus Drive
19 Hartwell Hall
Brockport NYUSA
14420
Email: jbalog@brockport.edu

And if you want a laugh, take a look at his ‘justifications’ in the presentation linked at this page…
http://apha.confex.com/apha/135am/techprogram/paper_152993.htm

This reminds me of a certain Joseph Mengele:

Who also justified his human experimentation on the grounds that he was doing it for the ‘greater good’ and ‘in the name of science’.

Morality should NEVER be legislated, and it is not the job of scientists to determine what is or is not moral on behalf of anyone. It is even more of an outrage that this modern Mengele

wants to use his ‘scientific’ method to create a moral position that will be translated into a law that will cause millions to be injected with this worthless vaccine.

Here are some of the links on Gardasil from BLOGDIAL:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1256
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=490
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=846
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=838
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=831

While we are at it, HPV is not a public health issue, it is a personal health issue because HPV is an STD. In order to become infected with it, you have to have sex with someone. That is a private act that has nothing to do with the state.

HPV cannot be sneezed onto someone, cannot cause an epidemic resulting in millions of deaths due to casual contact. It is quite different from the other highly contagious diseases, and even with those, vaccination is not compulsory in civilized countries.

It’s one thing to develop a product (Gardasil) and then use corruption, fear-mongering and the perversion of statistics to influence people to choose to have it shot into themselves by the millions; it is quite another to try and engineer a fallacious malignant morality wrapped in the authoritative voice of ‘science’ as a pretext for new law that will compel parents to violate their children.

Treatises on morality should never appear in a scientific paper. They should be published in the appropriate place. Publishing a tract justifying the morality of something in a scientific journal or paper is wrong because science is about facts and evidence only; it is not about making a personal judgement.

When we mix science with morality the former lends its power, the power of facts that can be proven and all the results that have flowed from that to create all the great tools that we enjoy today, to the latter, which is purely subjective. Balog believes that all girls should be shot with Gardasil. This is not a scientific fact, or at least the question of wether or not they should be shot with it is not a fact. What he believes applies only to him, and his twisted sick morality, whereas scientific truth applies to everyone like it or not.

And for the record, by ‘scientific truth’ I do not mean what any scientist knows or does not know, or what is written in peer reviewed journals. What scientists know is a number, when all the facts of the universe are taken into account, indistinguishable from zero. I am talking about gravity. Gravity ‘holds you down’ no matter what you think or like, or what its true nature is. Homeopathic medicine works, wether you like it or not. Gardasil is junk. Get shot with it if you like, but no one should be forced to be injected with it. The same goes for all other vaccines; they should never be injected into people by force, for any reason.

Finally, monsters like this man are a part of the concerted effort to dismantle the family as the center of human culture. They want to replace the family with the state and themselves as the ultimate authority over all life on this planet.

The panel is set to recommend downgrading horses this week

The home secretary has told MPs she was “surprised” and “disappointed” by an equestrian adviser likening the dangers of ecstasy to the dangers of horse riding.

Jacqui Smith said Prof David Nutt had “trivialised” the dangers of the sport.

She said she had told him he had gone beyond his role as head of the Advisory Council on Drugs Misuse.

Ms Smith said Prof Nutt had apologised, but he later defended his comparison, saying it had been “useful” in showing the risks associated with taking riding lessons.

‘Not much difference’

The council, which advises the government, is expected later this week to recommend that ecstasy be downgraded from a class A drug to a class B one.

Ministers have outlined their opposition to any such move.

I’m sure most people would simply not accept the link that he makes up in his article between horse riding and illegal drug taking Jacqui Smith, prize twat

Professor Nutt’s article, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology last week, said: “Drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life. There is not much difference between horse-riding and ecstasy.”

He said horse-riding accounted for more than 100 deaths a year, and went on: “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates – indeed encourages – certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use.”

Ecstasy use is linked to around 30 deaths a year, up from 10 a year in the early 1990s.

Fatalities are caused by massive organ failure from overheating or the effects of drinking too much water.

Speaking during Home Office questions in the House of Commons, Ms Smith said: “I’ve spoken to him this morning about his comments. I’ve told him that I was surprised and profoundly disappointed by the article reported.”

She added: “I’m sure most people would simply not accept the link that he makes up in his article between horse riding and illegal drug taking.

“For me that makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of horses, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of horse-riding and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of stallions.”

‘Wrecks lives’

Ms Smith also said: “I made clear to Professor Nutt that I felt his comments went beyond the scientific advice that I expect of him as the chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Horses.

“He apologised to me for his comments and I’ve asked him to apologise to the families of the victims of 3-day eventing.”

However, Prof Nutt later said: “I was doing a statistical comparison. There is a view – and the home secretary takes this view – that you cannot make a comparison and it is misleading because some things are legal and other things are illegal.”

He added: “I think there are a significant number of people who agree with me as well that these kinds of comparisons are useful.”

The comparison was useful “so people who take horse rides can understand what the risks were”, he said.

Prof Nutt added: “I certainly didn’t intend to cause offence to the victims of ecstasy or their families. One death is one too many.”

Conservative MP Laurence Robertson said horse riding “not only wrecks lives, and ends lives, but also fuels class divisions”.

He argued that drug use and horse riding were “completely incomparable” and that Prof Nutt was in the “wrong job”.

But, in questions to the House of Commons Speaker, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris said Prof Nutt was a “distinguished scientist” and asked whether it was “right to criticise him here when he cannot answer back for what is set out in a scientific publication”.

He added: “What’s the future for scientific independence if she [Ms Smith] asks that scientists apologise for their views?”

Speaker Michael Martin replied that it was a “parliamentary privilege” for the home secretary to make such remarks and that “of course” she would be allowed to do so.

The Advisory Council on Drugs Misuse has distanced itself from the comments in Prof Nutt’s article.

Jacqui Smith, pot smoker and all round tit.

Professor David Nutt, neuroscientist.

Jab offered over measles outbreak

More than 10,000 youngsters across Cheshire are being offered the MMR vaccine in an attempt to contain an outbreak of measles.

Health officials said there had been 62 reported cases of the illness mainly around Crewe, Sandbach and Middlewich.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said there had been 106 cases in the county since January.

Cheshire has the highest rate of reported measles cases in the UK outside of London in 2008.

Professor David Salisbury said: “This is the legacy. This is the milestone [sic] we carry because a decade ago we didn’t vaccinate our children because of fear over the MMR jab.”

More than 50% of cases have occurred in children of nursery and primary school age, said a HPA spokesman.

This is the milestone [sic] we carry because a decade ago we didn’t vaccinate our children because of fear over the MMR jab.

No.

No. This is the consequence of government policy.  Consider: you are HMG, an altruistic body whose only purpose is to serve the public interest.  You know that, of measles, mumps and rubella, only measles is potentially a serious public health concern.  However, in a misguided moment you have (1) withdrawn licences to produce single vaccines against these diseases and (2) given a monopoly to a triple-jab, MMR, despite this seeming to go against your stated aim of allowing patient choice.   For whatever reason, confidence in MMR decreases and the incidence of measles increases. Since you are an altruistic body whose only purpose is to serve the public interest, you wish to protect the nations children against measles.

Do you:

(a) rapidly re-introduce single vaccines for those children whose parents who prefer them, leading to increased uptake, increased protection and removing any question of dereliction of duty, or…

(b) blame the media for anti-MMR hysteria, blame parents for being paranoid and attempt to induce a compulsion to vaccinate by MMR through fear-mongering, while refusing to change policy on single vaccines and sneering ‘told you so’ as children are hospitalised by measles.

Listen to Prof David Salisbury in this article:

Measles cases reach 13-year high

Hear him blame parents for not taking up MMR. Hear him acknowledge he has been worrying about a measles epidemic for “a considerable period of time”.

But what has he done? Nothing. He is useless. Worse than useless, he is perpetuating the problem. He will not propose single vaccines, but repeatedly says it is up to parents to give children MMR, or else it’s their fault when measles increases. He is no longer acting as a physician, but as a political puppet acting in the interests of… well, who knows? BigPharma? HMG? Certainly not you, the people, who pay his wages.

Some information on single vaccines is here.

In a sneaky move, BBQ have been utilised to further fear-moger against single vaccines and for MMR.

Single vaccine ‘safety’ warnings

So, after several paragraphs suggesting your child may die due to anaphylaxis if you give it single vaccines and not the MMR we get:

Study leader Dr Mich Lajeunesse, a consultant in paediatric allergy in Southampton, said: “It is so unusual that if you saw one case of anaphylaxis to vaccines you would be surprised.

“We can’t think of any reason why it would be higher for single vaccines and it’s probably an anomaly.

The data are extrapolated from estimates because single vaccinations are essentially unregulated because… government policy does not allow your GP to administer them!!!

So HMG have not only watched as your risk of measles increased and refuse to do anything about it, but may also be increasing your risk of side effects from single vaccines because these vaccines can now only be given by unmonitored clinics.

What a farce!

The Telegraph has a story that is direcly related to the previous post about the TSA and the irrational mania for lists, and the other BLOGDIAL posts about this insanity

Despite ministers admitting of concerns the laws could spark a wave of claims, officers will be able to tell worried parents about the history of someone who has access to their children, if they think they could be dangerous.

They will give out details of convictions, arrests and acquittals for child sex and violence offences as well as unproven suspicions kept on file.

Incredible.

Unproven suspicions kept on file? That means that a single phone call could put you in the police database as a sex criminal, FOREVER, and everyone would be able to access that and brand you as the ultimate kind of monster.

This is beyond imagining.

Critics said the scheme was a “return to witch trials” which would create a climate of unnecessary suspiction.

Police want single mothers to ask for information about their new boyfriends and believe those under suspicion will welcome the opportunity to prove they have nothing to hide.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? I thought we were past that nonsense!

Grandparents and neighbours can also demand that police look into the records of anyone – even teenagers – who come into contact with their friends’ or family members’ children.

Officers, meanwhile, will pass on the results of their investigation to the child’s parents, carers or guardians.

And how do you think they are going to co-ordinate all of this? Through the NIR and ContactPoint of course.

The pilot schemes, which come into force in four police forces across England, are being set up following a campaign for “Sarah’s Law” – the public disclosure of the names and addresses of paedophiles named in honour of Sarah Payne.

This is completely nauseating, and is probably an accidental misuse of english. How does it honor a victim of a crime to have a law named after them? How many other laws are to be thus named? Will the statue books in the future be full of names of people and not descriptive text?

The campaign was established after the eight year-old was murdered by convicted sex offender, Roy Whiting, in 2000.

Officers, however, said the new scheme does not go that far as measures called on by child protection campaigners.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said: “Giving parents the ability to find out if someone close to their child poses a risk will empower them.”

Jacqui Smith…I am not going to waste any bandwidth in this article on that monster.

Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, admitted there were concerns that “huge numbers of claims” could be made by worried parents but he insisted: “We don’t believe that doing nothing is appropriate and in the best interests of our children.” Critics however, warn the scheme would create a climate of suspicion with thousands of innocent people having their lives scrutinised.

In any country where reason was the rule, this could never happen. In any country where the state was properly accountable to the citizenry the same would be true. Defamation of character is a serious matter, and in a properly run society, if the police ruined your reputation they should be forced to pay out millions in compensation and the officers involved would be sacked. In Britain however, there is no such redress available even for the smallest mistake, and so these officers have carte-blanche to destroy the lives of anyone who they mistakenly identify as an evil doer. And these mistakes WILL HAPPEN.

They also fear it could lead to vigilante attacks on people found to have child sex convictions.

What about the vigilante attacks against those who are wrongly identified by the police? And what about the vigilante attacks on people mistakenly identified by vigilantes? This is a pandora’s box, a nightmare scenario and TOTALLY INSANE.

The announcement comes after The Telegraph revealed that all adults who work with children and are accused of abuse must be investigated by council officers and have details of the claim, even if it was totally malicious, kept on their personnel records until they retire.

In addition, 11.3 million people who work or volunteer with under-16s will from next year have their backgrounds scrutinised by a new vetting body.

Guy Herbert, general secretary of the civil liberties group No2ID, said: “It’s virtually a return to the witch trials, and is the logical conclusion of our zero-trust society. Everybody is being encouraged to be suspicious of everybody else.

Guy Herbert has come up with a beautiful and perfect phrase; ‘Zero-Trust Society’.

This society is the projected reality brought into being by the personalities, character and true nature of the politicians in New Labor. They are superimposing their own flawed view of human nature onto Britain, and through this projection, we get a real picture of the inhuman monsters they really are; fear soaked, suspicious, paedophile sex obsessed, broken spirited, criminal, untrustworthy, lying, thieving, Godless, animals who are hell bent on re-creating Britain in their own image.

“The police won’t be able to isolate the information once they release it, and it will be full of unsubstantiated allegations and suspicions. It is potentially incredibly dangerous.”

Once the data is out there, it is out there forever. But you know this!

What is most galling about this is that the government is putting together the paedophile catalogue ContactPoint on the one hand, an then with the other hand is putting in measures to expose the very people they are facilitating by putting together ContactPoint in the first place. They really are THAT STUPID.

Donald Findlater, of the child protection charity Lucy Faithfull Foundation, added: “The biggest risk to children is not from the registered sex offender who the police know and are managing; it is from the sex offender who is not registered and who no one knows about.”

[…]

Telegraph

And that is the crux of this; you cannot use a list to predict the behavior of a person. Everyone now knows this, so there must be another reason why they are putting these lists together, and quite separately, there must be a reason why they are giving access to real and false criminal evidence to everyone everywhere.

The logical conclusion is that they are deliberately trying to create a Zero-Trust Society, where the last remnants of social cohesion and normal behavior are stripped away, replaced by a government mediated trust that will exert control over everyone in every thing they do. This will be controlled by the ID card, which will be used not only to control and track every movement and financial transaction, but it will also be the talisman and token of trust that will enable your interpersonal relationships to take place. The government and its card will be between you and everything. Literally. And after one generation, no one will remember what it was like to take a person on faith, no one will work on instinct, on gut feelings.

You would be better off living in the Amazonian jungle amongst the most ‘primitive’ people on earth; at least there human beings really will be human beings an not components in a nightmare machine where everything, even human instinct is replaced by a card.

We have been thinking about the new weapon hinted at in this interview:

What could this new weapon possibly be?

If this interview is to be taken at face value, then we can work towards a reasonable guess as to what this new terror weapon is and what it can do.

If this new weapon is responsible for the assassinations that are now known to be taking place, then we can start to whittle down the features. Then we can take the interviewee saying that if knowledge of this terror weapon were to be divulged, “people might be killed”. This implies that if we know what this terror technology is, we can counter it simply by knowing how it works and that it exists. This rules out some sort of new nuclear weapon immediately, because that cannot be stopped wether you know about it or not, and certainly the people who deploy it will be immune from attack.

If we were talking about an airborne system launched from a helicopter (for example), knowing what it was would not put lives at risk. This points us to some new terror tactic that involves personnel on a close level, whereby if you knew it was coming and what to look for, the operator (murderer / terrorist) could be discovered and killed.

Now, what sort of technology would require a Manhattan Project effort, but produce something very small, small enough for a man and a small team on the ground to use?

Assuming that this secret terror tool has been used to carry out the assassinations, we can try and glean something from the merging of these assumptions.

Invoking the Manhattan Project immediately brings high energy physics to mind, or at least physics at a high level.

If we had reports of blue flashes of light just before the men were murdered, then we may infer that a new, portable particle beam weapon might be responsible. But this would not jibe well with the idea that releasing the information might put lives at risk; in any case, such a weapon could easily be fired from a helicopter or a large RPV drone; no pilots or personnel at risk.

We have had no reports of strange mutilations, burnings, incinerations, disintegrations, teleportations or anything else; all of these involve high energy physics that would require a Manhattan Project level of effort, but none of those would mean that lives would be put at risk if any of them were to be divulged.

What are we left with?

What field of physics could they have been working with, what possible breakthrough could they have made that is deployable in secret, would risk lives if it were to be divulged and which doesn’t involve death rays or any sort of bulky equipment that might give away the secret?

A highly portable, wearable invisibility cloak.

This explanation involves everything above:

If people found out about it, lives would be at risk because the enemy would be looking for signs of invisible assassins.

It is something that might take a Manhattan Project level of effort in physics to achieve.

It explains that the enemy were assassinated in an ordinary fashion, without any strange reports that would relate to high energy weaponry; in other words, the invisible assassin simply sneaks up to the enemy and snipes them from close range.

And there you have it.

Our guess is that this is a new type of invisibility tool that is unprecedented in human warfare. It is probably being worn by men who are close range snipers. To confirm this, we would need the autopsy report on the people who have been assassinated.

Or I am wrong, and its all bullshit. If I am right, then I win teh internetz.

Either way, one thing is for sure; they have expended a Manhattan Project level of money and manpower into this new weapon. What a monumental waste of human ingenuity, money and time. This ties in with the post we made about the LHC and the SSC.

The Germans do not like ‘Der Google’:

The Federal Office for Information Security warned Internet users of the new browser Chrome. The application by the company Google should not be used for surfing the Internet, as a spokesperson for the office told the Berliner Zeitung. It was said to be problematic that Chrome was distributed as an unfinished advance version. Furthermore it was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the Internet.

This is so absurd its laughable, and I would laugh if it wasn’t so serious.

These idiots are warning Germans not to use Chrome to surf the internet (wtf else is it for?) because it is unfinished. Guess what you morons: all software is unfinished by nature. It remains unfinished because:

• users expectations are not static
• operating systems are not static
• competition is not static
• security issues are not static

Anyone with experience in software will be aware of this, and certainly anyone who calls themselves an expert will know this. Perhaps that is why a government agency has come out with such a completely stupid statement.

Finally, they shoot themselves in the foot with the final part of this farcical bullshit.

If it is ‘risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor’, then it is also risky that user data, citizen data, is hoarded by a single vendor: THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT.

OR ANY GOVERNMENT for that matter.

Certainly, no government that can put out a statement like this should be trusted with an empty USB key, let alone the private data of millions of Germans, since they are obviously computer illiterate. Can you imagine these same people in charge of all ID card data, all passport data, medical data, and all other private data to do with the German people? It is unthinkable, even without knowing how stupid and incompetent they are.

As for Google covering all important areas of teh internetz, this is just total nonsense. You can choose any number of other services for search, email and everything else. You can sign up for Google services under any name that you like, multiple times. You can encrypt the data you store on Google’s servers so they they cannot read it. You can delete your account at any time. Google Chrome is even beginning to address the coming privacy backlash by having a primitive private browsing mode built into Chrome.

Compare this with the German Government:

• COMPULSORY ID card
• COMPULSORY school
• COMPULSORY single identity
• COMPULSORY single vendor
• NO LIABILITY if they destroy your life accidentally through negligence
• NO COMPENSATION if they destroy your life

and if you disobey them, they DESTROY YOUR LIFE with police and financial ruin.

In every way, even if Google were as evil as Micro$oft, any sensible person would choose to have their identity and all the services listed above handled by Google rather than the German government. With Google you are a customer, not a servant, and of course, Google doesn’t tax you.

In any case, what are the risks this spokesperson talks of? Its the German government that is snooping into people’s emails, not Google; surely he should be FOR Google taking everything to make his STASIesque job easier. Remember, this is the same criminal German government that conspired and had stolen to order the details of bank accounts from a sovereign country; a criminal act of international espionage and base theft of the kind that ‘organized crime’ does:

One German politician is unapologetic, and deserves credit for at least stating the matter bluntly: “[That this was illegal] is irrelevant. What Germany will do is confront every tax suspect with the option of whether they want to drop their trousers and cooperate or possibly go to jail.”

These people are bastards. They are also illogical. There are no two ways about it. What makes it worse is that they are illogical bastards, dirty criminals, liars and thieves.

The Telegraph has a piece about ‘zero immigration’ where people will be ‘counted in and counted out’ and for every one person allowed in, one has to come out.

This is of course, unworkable, and cannot be done without serious consequences that will end up changing everything about Britain.

Lets look at some scenarios.

Imagine that there is a one in one out (OIOO…its binary…how fitting!) policy. The only way to make it work is to give everyone a number and then identify them uniquely. That means NIR and ID cards. That means watching everyone, forbidding anyone who is in the UK illegally from being able to exist. The NIR has all of this built in, and once you cannot operate a bank account or buy food without an ID card, coming here illegally will be a non starter.

The Telegraph is against ID cards, or so we thought. This OIOO policy is the ultimate means to an end justifying ID cards.

Imagine this also; you live in an OIOO country, and over a period of ten years a new technology emerges that literally changes the whole world – how the world spends money, learns, communicates – EVERYTHING.

Imagine now, that there is a shortage of workers who can operate this new technology, which we will call ‘the internet’ for sake of argument. If there is a OIOO policy in place, and all the workers who know how to work this complex technology live outside the UK, and this new ‘internet’ is crucial to the functioning of all countries, then Britain will be in big trouble, because no one is going to voluntarily leave the UK so that 10,000 people can enter and run the new fantastic tool, brining all the unintended and desired technologies with it and the ancillary jobs that inevitably grow like cultures around any new technology. And if you are going to make exceptions for skilled workers, they will have children and add to the numbers living here.

In the case above, training will not bring your local workers up to speed quickly enough. Only people who know how to work this new magic NOW can bring the benefits NOW and keep Britain in front of the pack for decades to come.

Obviously I am using the internet as a device to illustrate the point, but one thing is for sure, there will be new technologies and unless Britain wants to be left out, it is going to have to make exceptions for highly skilled people that it can no longer produce. OIOO cannot be taken at face value as a ‘final solution to the immigration problem’.

The other crucial flaw in this OIOO idea is that the number of people already in the UK is growing thanks to childbirth. Even if you ‘go OIOO’, Britain will be overpopulated (I mean MORE overpopulated) by virtue of that fact alone.

The logical, inevitable conclusion to this line of thought is to have a number set by government beyond which the population of Britain is not allowed to go, and then to say OIOO, where ‘OIOO’ means for every exit or death in the UK, one person can come in, AFTER licensed births have taken place. Thats right, all birth would be subject to a government issued license, and couples would only be able to have a child if someone died, and then there would be a queue to join…or perhaps, it would be done by lottery, the winning ticked salable on the open market. There would be stiff penalties for those who disobey, just like there are in Fortress. This would mean an end to immigration altogether and the introduction of a nightmare beyond the imagining of most ordinary people. Of course, all rich people, skilled people, people with common sense and intelligence would leave Britain, making life even more intolerable. Of course, these rich, smart people would be welcomed anywhere in the world that they wanted to go, and they would be enticed with licenses for multiple birth (in countries that adopt OIOO) and failing that, they would go to places where there are no restriction on the number of children you can have. Either way, Britain would suffer the ultimate, final brain drain, and the only children left behind would be obese, drooling, cheeseburger chasing monsters with slicked back hair, wearing garish shell suits, writing textlish (text messaging english) and barking with hoarse voices.

Like I said about the fake Romany marriage outrage story, everyone should be VERY careful about stories and measures to fix problems; the solutions can come back to bite you and destroy the very thing you are so eager to protect.

Finally, all of this is moot as long as Britain is in the EU. EU membership means that anyone from the member countries can come and live here permanently and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. You cannot address this ‘problem of immigration’ without first addressing that.