“Stitch up” has been the overwhelming reaction of home educators to the Children, Schools and Families Committee’s announcement of its oral evidence schedule for the allegedly “independent” inquiry into the Badman review of elective home education in England, due to be held next week.

A controversial line up of witnesses has been announced, which calls into question the independence of the selection process, and complaints are already being dispatched to the committee querying the choice of home education “representatives” who are anything but representative.

England’s most active home education group AHEd has been snubbed in favour of undemocratic home education organisations, while two male (probably both white) “home educating parents” have been invited, one of whom has mounted personal attacks on (mainly) female home educators and has been banned from at least one online home education network.This does not inspire confidence in the process.

One home educator commented: “It is difficult to imagine a more skewed line up. The only good thing about it is that it can now easily be denounced as a farce.” Another remarked: “Scotland it is, then. No point in hanging around in this unpleasant land.”

Bloggers have been equally unforgiving. Freedom in Education under Threat is “mad as hell” and posts a video reminding us that we should all be yelling ot loud about the injustices being wrought upon the home education community in England by state sponsored bullies. Watch the video and get mad!

Live Otherwise writes, “If you haven’t seen the list of witnesses for the select committee the phrase read it and weep comes to mind”, and suggests sticking a flea in a few MPs’ ears. Meanwhile, in an aptly titled Are we F****d? post, Maire observes, “If I wanted to make it look like the views of the 80% of home educators who voted for no change in the current arrangements had been ignored the list might look like this.”

We await the mighty Blogdial’s comments with trepidation, but he is not known for mincing words which are likely to include “illegitimate”, “corrupt”, “f*ck” and “off”. Let’s hope there are no (so called) public servants of a sensitive disposition who might feel vilified or harassed by fair comment.

Both the UK Government and Parliament have now lost all credibility with home educating families who have been disenfranchised not only by the DCSF but also by parliamentarians and home education organisations which erroneously claim representative status. It just will not do.

Enough is enough. Just Say No. Watch that video again, and yell.

http://www.home-education.biz/news/16/15/Selective-committee-stitch-up/

Home Educators are not thinking about the attacks on their liberty in the correct way.

The fact of this matter is that none of these politicians or civil servants can ever be trusted. If you put your faith in them, your way of life will be destroyed, your family broken up, your children kidnapped and you will end up in chains or dead.

They have made their minds up that you will no longer be allowed to Home Educate. What you are seeing now is a pacification operation, designed to wear you down and force you to become resigned to the fact that you will have to accept some form of the end of your way of life.

Think about this committee; what power does it have to stop any new legislation from being enacted? Does it have any power to throw the Badman report out as a fundamentally flawed, biased and poorly constructed piece of fiction? Even if all the witnesses were exactly who you want them to be, and the committee had the power to quash this illiberal, fascist, perverted, anti family, anti education, deeply sinister and suspicious nonsense, do you REALLY think that they would do it? Would you risk your life that they would get it right?

All of the Home Education consultation results were overwhelmingly in favour of the law being sufficient to protect everyone’s interests. The beasts ignored everyone’s facts and opinions and even deliberately concealed and continue to conceal any fact or opinion that is in opposition to their sick desires.

This committee will sit and hear evidence on a report that contains cherry picked parts of submissions that are being kept secret on the most flimsy of pretexts. Until all the information that was used to construct this absurd report is released, this committee is negligent in taking any evidence on it, because no one has a complete picture of what the TRUE nature of the submissions were. Clearly some of the members have a sense that something is not quite right with this report; a careful, thorough investigation cannot be done without ALL of the evidence.

If it is to be taken seriously in any way, the process should be suspended until all the submissions have been released and the concerned parties have had at least 90 days to pour over them. That is what reasonable people who were working in your interests would do.

How many times do you have to be trodden upon before you finally understand that these people are not reasonable? These people are not guided by reason, logic, decency or anything that guides normal people. A perfect example of this is Bridget Prentice, who when confronted by a group of Home Educating children on a visit to Parliament, imperiously intoned that:

children belong in school because learning in groups is best for children”.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=675

This is the level of ignorance, nonsense, illogic and pure insanity that you are dealing with.

Only someone who is actively hostile to Home Education would dare suggest that Simon Webb should provide evidence to this committee. Putting aside the legitimacy of a committee sitting to determine wether or not you have any rights, and that they will be examining a report where the submissions that contributed to it are now being kept secret, any competent, fair minded, and thorough committee would ensure that the holders of different opinions would be summoned to provide evidence.

It is widely known that Simon Webb is actively hostile to Autonomous Learners, and that he is a journalist that has used his column in The Independent to attack them and Home Education in general. This should mean, if the committee was acting in a fair manner, that this particular individual is INSTANTLY DISQUALIFIED, since he is overtly for the report’s nauseating recommendations.

In fact, the only person who should be there to defend this scandalous report is the author himself; but even that should be challenged, since the report is finished, has been submitted and accepted and should now either be re-accepted or rejected on what is already in it.

It is completely wrong that more evidence should be submitted to bolster this outrageous paedophile’s charter; how was it that the report was accepted in full, instantly, without this extra evidence in the first place? And for the record, I call this report a paedophile’s charter because it has a provision in it that gives social workers the power to interview children alone in the family home, without the parents consent. Training to be a ‘Home Education Inspector’ is now the dream of every monster in the land; it would be a perfect cover for those who prey on children, and this report opens the door to them. We have all read the stories of fat smiling nursery workers and teachers who were in fact perverts, all CRB checked, that abused nursery children and students. I will leave it to you to imagine the character and motives of people who would make, endorse and agree with such a recommendation.

On the other hand, it has been speculated that the unthinkable parts of this report were inserted as bargaining chips designed to be discarded, leaving Home Educators with a feeling that they have ‘salvaged something’ by getting them removed, whilst the core of the report’s recommendations, that Home Education be licensed, remain intact.

Who knows?

All I know is that a committee of fourteen people cannot decide what your rights are or are not. Your rights are given to you by your creator; they are not bestowed upon you by government or a committee.

This committee cannot sit and say you have no right to educate your children as you see fit, or practice your religion as you see fit, or that you should live or die, simply because they have a vote in a wooden chamber or produce a report. The representativeness of the people giving evidence is also irrelevant. Putting aside all of that, if this committee is powerless to completely destroy this bad thing that is about to happen, then they should not be sitting at all. Ed Balls is simply going to disagree with the findings of this committee in his written response if they in any way question the Badman report, and carry on with the legislative programme unchanged. In any case, the only acceptable result would be the total rubbishing of the report, guaranteed maintenance of the status quo and a further guarantee of no further discriminatory, predatory attacks or harassment.

In other words it is either illegitimate or it is irrelevant. I put it to you that it is both, since no matter what they say, Home Educators have almost universally vowed not to obey any new regulations of any kind.

AHED have not been invited to submit evidence because they HAVE evidence that this report is fundamentally flawed, and if they were given access to everything that they have requested but have been refused, there is no doubt that they would uncover even more evidence that this report is utterly worthless in every way that something can be worthless.

The charities that have been invited to present evidence have no business being there. Phillip Noyes of the NSPCC was actually forced to apologise for an unwarranted, ignorant and purely hostile attack on Home Education and the families that do it:

Vijay Patel, a policy adviser at the NSPCC, had told the Independent: “Some people use home education to hide. Look at the Victoria Climbié case. No one asked where she was at school.”

This is the sort of brainless nonsense that these people trade in. The newspapers (in this case, the same one that Simon Webb writes for) pick it up and repeat it without question, and now, the very organization that produced this lunacy is being called AGAIN to present evidence on a report that it has already submitted evidence to. If they have already submitted evidence to the report, that should be sufficient input. If their submission has not been released, it should be released, otherwise, when they speak to the committee, they will be talking about a submission no one has seen in full. If their submission was incomplete, they should have been more thorough in the first instance. The whole point of this exercise should be to determine the veracity, thoroughness and true motives behind this report as a fait accompli, it should not be an opportunity to scramble around and tidy up and make excuses for shoddy work.

Home Education is not a child protection issue. The swarms of charities (fake or not) whose concern is the welfare of children should have nothing to say about Home Education, since Home Educated children are in the most safe, stable families in the UK.

The very fact that a family is Home Educating demonstrates a greater than average devotion to the duty of child rearing. As usual, the perverted and twisted imaginations of the people behind this report, the charities and the government departments that are hell bent on outlawing Home Education completely reverse the true meaning of this act of selflessness and sacrifice. It is they who are the ones that are a danger to the welfare of children, not Home Educators.

If all of this had been happening in a vacuum you could give these cretins the benefit of the doubt, but we are in the age of the internets and in America, Home Education is exploding and the misguided laws regulating it (where there are any) are being repealed. If these hostile charity workers, quangonoids and apratchiks do not know about Home Education in the USA they should. That they do not speaks volumes on their level of competence.

Charities should focus their work and submission making on subjects that are their expertise. The fact that this committee is looking to the NSPCC and the National Children’s Bureau (another charity) for evidence demonstrates that they have no understanding of what Home Education is and its true context between the state the family and children. Home Educated children are the OPPOSITE of neglected children, and as for the education aspect, we note that this reports call for licensing does not hinge on the academic results Home Educators achieve, because Home Educated children perform so well.

That they have called a representative from a county council’s Children Missing Education team says alot about the ignorance of the people organising this. Children who are Home Educated are NOT missing education, in fact it is the opposite that is true. Imagine the logic of sending a ‘child poverty inspector’ to a country pile, simply because a family with children live there. This is the level of ‘thinking’ you are dealing with.

Home Educated children outperform state schooled children in every metric both academically and socially, but it is important to remember, Home Educators should not be forced to prove this, or demonstrate this to anyone.

Home Educating families and their children are not the property of the state. This is the fundamental objection decent people have to all of this constant harassment, discrimination and buffoonery. Talk of ‘The Five Outcomes’ is nonsense. The state has no business setting the goals for families and children, and even if we were to concede that they do have this duty, Home Educated children outperform state educated children in these aspects, and the services provided by the state are failing on a massive scale.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, they cannot win the argument. It is an argument that should not have been started in the first place.

I would not discourage a Home Educator from submitting evidence to this committee; knock yourself out. There might even be a few people on this committee who are decent, genuinely sympathetic, horrified by this government and its outrages and who understand both Home Education and their role as public servants. That doesn’t change the vicious nature of this attack on Home Educators, an neither should it weaken your response to it.

What I will say, is that if you put your faith in these people to defend your natural rights, if you put your faith in the democratic process, you are a COMPLETE FOOL, especially after having been kicked in the teeth again and again and again.

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, SHAME ON YOU.

So, I hear you cry, WHAT SHOULD WE DO THEN?!

Refuse, point blank, to obey in any way, anything that comes out of this report.

For certain, nothing you do will stop these monsters from creating new legislation. They are deaf to reason, inherently immoral and violent. And if any of you do not believe that these people are violent, think hard about what they are advocating.

If you are an Autonomous Learner and you do not want to break your child’s education, these people are advocating that violence be used against you so that your child attends school. That is the bottom line in all of this; these people are violent and they are willing to use violence to make you conform to their sick philosophies.

Finally, and perhaps most upsetting and galling to you will be the fact that anyone who is wealthy will be virtually exempt from these regulations. We already know that the rich (and these very MPs deciding on your fate) are to be excluded from ContactPoint, the database (which is going to be scrapped) they planned to use to track down all Home Educators.

The rich can travel wherever they like, whenever they like, and can live wherever they like. Because one of you (if you are living with a husband, wife or partner) gave up working to Home Educate, you are now poorer than you would have been had you sent your child to school and went out to work. By showing the proper devotion to your family, you have found yourself not only viciously demonised but also financially penalised.

What should you do? You should firstly be INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE, and secondly ABSOLUTELY steadfast in your determination that no one will abuse you or your children by way of any new regulation on Home Education.

No matter what they say, no matter what procedural shenanigans they pull out of their hats, this is a step TOO FAR, beyond which THERE ARE NO MORE RULES and NO GUARANTEES OF ANY KIND.

FURTHERMORE

This toothless committee has been rebuffed by Ed Balls over an appointment:

Sheerman, said night: “The committee believes this should be a campaigning role … and it didn’t seem to the committee that Maggie saw it in the same way.” He added that if Balls rejected the committee’s decision, it could be fatal to the process. “Every select committee in the house will say what’s the point if the first one not accepted is over-ridden?” he said.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/18/ed-balls-maggie-atkinson-childrens-commissioner

That is exactly my point. These Select Committees are window dressing, a charade, a pointless waste of time and an exersise to make everyone feel that they are participating in government, when in fact, they are doing no such thing and the decisions are all finalised in advance.

Now get this:

Ed Balls branded ‘a bit of a bully’
Barry Sheeman, chairman of the Commons children’s committee, criticises Balls after schools secretary ignores panel’s advice on appointment of next children’s commissioner.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/19/eb-balls-bully-claim

What a joke. This is a man who sits on a committee that deliberated on the merits of violating people’s homes and changing relationship between the state and the individual, and he has the GALL to call Ed Balls a ‘bully’ for ignoring HIS wishes?

Now that my friends, really does beggar belief.

Ali P pumps her foot on the grindstone with her cutlass oiled and becoming more sharp by the second:

Tories consider splitting DCSF
“Sector leaders” have expressed alarm at the potential break-up of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) under a Tory government after it emerged the shadow children’s secretary was in favour of an independent education department.

Michael Gove said “schools have lost their principal purpose and been saddled with a host of supplementary roles since the creation of the DCSF”. He added: “What we do not have – and what we desperately need – is a department at the heart of government championing the cause of education.”

Schools, he claimed, have become “less places of learning and more community hubs from which a host of services can be delivered”.

Naturally the vultures don’t like it as they’ve got fat on failed Labour policies. But the money is running out, thanks to that nasty big economic crisis, and cuts glorious cuts are coming.

But Kim Bromley-Derry, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, warned that central government must reflect councils’ integrated approach to children’s services. He said joined-up policy-making is vital to improving outcomes for children. “Services will always have the greatest impact when they are delivered coherently, consistently and through the pursuit of shared priorities identified at the highest level,” he said.

Some of us don’t share these “priorities”, of course.

Andrew Cozens, strategic adviser for children, adults and health services at the Improvement and Development Agency, said dismantling the DCSF would be a “backward step”. “There is interplay between so many aspects of children’s lives,” he said. “It’s very difficult to separate their needs at school from their wider family life.”

Children’s most basic needs at school (if parents send them there) are secondary to keeping the big monster machine running for its own benefit. Bullying us endemic and so is denial. And we all managed incredibly well without an Improvement and Development Agency in the past. Who needs it?

And wait up, here’s our very own Select Committee chairman, Labour MP Barry Sheerman, with a predictable view on the matter

“The principle behind the DCSF is a good one. I would just like to see a government that doesn’t change departments or ministers so often.”

Deferred gratification is overrated. I’d like to see Gordon’s anti family army thrown out now and not have to wait until May.

http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/8822-tories-consider-splitting-dcsf.html

“I would just like to see a government that doesn’t change departments or ministers so often.” You mean like a one party state, with a ‘president’ for life?

What a telling statement.

It is not the proper role of government to provide schools for people. Period. When ‘Kim Bromley-Derry’ talks about an ‘integrated approach’ to ‘children’s services’ what he is talking about is the replacement of the parent by the state and nothing less.

All of the quangos, departments and apparatus swarming around the provision of ‘services’ to children should be abolished. Lets just look at two:

The ‘Improvement and Development Agency’ does this:

The IDeA supports improvement and innovation in local government, focusing on the issues that are important to councils and using tried and tested ways of working.

We work with councils in developing good practice, supporting them in their partnerships. We do this through networks, online communities of practice and web resources, and through the support and challenge provided by councillor and officer peers.

We also help develop councillors in key positions through our leadership programmes. Regional Associates work closely with councils in their areas and support the regional improvement and efficiency partnerships (RIEPs).

Unbelievable. I wonder what the budget of this department is? Whatever it is, the money for it was stolen.

Now for ‘The Department for Children, Schools and Families’.

There is no need for a government department that deals specifically with children. Children are the responsibility of parents, not the state. Even if it were the responsibility of the state in some dystopian parallel universe, it would be far more efficient to distribute the responsibility (it’s called DELEGATION) to all the people who are the ‘biological initiators of the nation’s youth’. But that is another story.

There is no need for a government department responsible for families. The family is an entirely private arrangement between individuals who are either married or not, who decide to have children or not and none of it, how they are married, under what terms or how they breed, is the business of the state. Mormons choose polygamy. Others monogamy. Some people share their children, others do not. There are as many ways to organise a family as there are people, but they all have one aspect in common; they are PRIVATE associations that have nothing to do with the state.

There is no need for a government department that is responsible for schools. Parents who pool resources to provide an education for their children in a single place (a school) are not the concern of the state. And that is how schools should be provided for. The state should not be in the business of setting curricula, or any standard of any kind when it comes to education. Education is not a right, it is a good, and it is not the business of government.

Those are only two of the many absurdly named and money sapping state feeders that bleed the public dry whilst violating their rights and literally destroying the country by unleashing an army of uneducated monsters on the land, brainwashing the unfortunate children trapped in state schools with their state mandated pseudo religious programming…. and actually poisoning and killing them with noxious, needless ‘medicines’.

But you know this.

Once the Tories split the DCSF, it will be easier to close its broken down parts… if that is even an issue in the future.

Ali P is correct about the economic crisis. A perfect storm is brewing; you can feel the low pressure and the winds picking up. Several elements are going to combine to wipe out this totalitarian state. People are beyond the end of their tolerance and any single outrage could trigger a significant event; the expenses ‘scandal’ is a good example, and if it were not for the widely anticipated and expected total death of Labour, the streets would already have been taken. The Tories are for sure coming in at the next election and will completely wipe out Labour. The biggest driver of this cataclysmic storm however, will be the destruction of the dollar and the death of the pound (which is backed by the dollar).

As this slow motion train wreck starts to happen, all of these arguments and positions will cease to be the important things. Everyone will be scrambling around to preserve their savings and to keep food on the table.

This is the best possible thing that could happen. There will be a wiping out of the system; a cleaning of the slate. It will take them decades to return to this level of police statism, if at all.

The question will then be who controls the money, and this is absolutely crucial to our liberty. If the replacement for the pound is anything other than a 100% gold sterling standard, where the population holds the physical coins, then future governments will be able to print the new money and finance a new legion of departments, quangos and vendor driven police state apparatus to enslave everyone.

By all means, read about it yourself.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It is also a once in a generation event, like the Bolshevik revolution, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or the… $insert_world_changing_event.

Whether it is by choice or by force, the Tories are going to be at the helm dismantling the apparatus very shortly.

The BBQ is at it again, uncritically repeating the state’s lies:

Paedophile checks scheme defended

This is not a system of ‘Paedophile checks’ this is a system that will cause MILLIONS of INNOCENT people to be put in a database for no good reason. To call this a ‘Paedophile Checks Scheme’ is simply not factual.

The head of a government scheme to vet adults who work with children has hit out at criticism of the initiative.

Sir Roger Singleton, chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), said people need to “calm down” and consider the issue “rationally”.

It is Roger Singleton who should have considered this rationally in the first place. Any rational, logical person can see instantly that this ISA is a foolish and illogical proposal. The recent clutch of paedophiles caught in nurseries, all of them CRB checked, demonstrates amply that any system of vetting is a flawed concept. All of the people who have recently been caught were CRB checked; what Roger Singleton is suggesting, which is completely irrational, is that a further system of checks on top of the CRB will be able to do what the CRB cannot. It is illogical on its face. Anyone who says otherwise is irrational, and I put it to you that Roger Singleton is irrational and illogical for being a willing part in it.

The ISA has come under fire after it emerged parents who regularly give children lifts to sports or social clubs will have to undergo checks.

People who ignore the new regulations face fines of up to £5,000.

This has nothing to do with protecting children; it is a scheme whereby millions of people, should they succeed, will be forced to enter the NIR and ID Card scheme. That is its true purpose, since it is clear that the ISA cannot protect a single child.

The Home Office’s Vetting and Barring Scheme, which is designed to protect children from paedophiles, covers adults who are in regular contact with young people.

If this system was designed to protect children from paedophiles, then the design is a complete failure. Also, Roger Singleton needs to say PRECISELY HOW this system will protect children. Of course, he cannot say how because it CANNOT, just as CRB checks cannot protect anyone. CRB checks and ISA checks cannot predict the future behavior of anyone; that is why they will always fail to do what they say it should do. This is well known to both the Home Office and anyone with a single working brain cell. The true purpose of this, once again, is to act as midwife to the NIR and ID Card.

‘Public outcry’

Anyone taking part in activities involving “frequent” or “intensive” contact with children or vulnerable adults three times in a month, every month, or once overnight, must register with the ISA.

Even if the ISA could predict the behavior of people, these arbitrary rules mean that anyone having contact with children less than the requirements above will not have to be vetted. It is nonsense on stilts.

The first people who are going to run to be included in this database are people who have no criminal record of any kind and who are paedophiles. By registering with this sinister scheme, they will have the stamp of safety and certification by the state. They will then be given license to attack children at will, and since everyone has lost all common sense, they will be immediately trusted simply because the government says they are trustworthy. This is the same modus operandi that we can assume the paedophile nursery workers operate under; get CRB certified and then you can work with children unfettered. In the case of these nursery children, their victims could not even speak to say that something wrong was happening. This ISA and CRB / ‘the state knows all’ insanity is putting children at risk by creating a system whereby dangerous animals can be put with children and given trust that they have not earned.

All school governors, doctors, nurses, teachers, dentists and prison officers must also sign up.

OR they can all refuse en masse. Dentists have no need to sign up for this at all – they can simply refuse to treat children! All of the other people on that list, especially in education, already have to have CRB checks, so what is the purpose of this extra layer of false security for? It is to put them all in the NIR.

People must go through a series of checks and have their names put on a list of approved individuals. Those seeking employment would have to pay £64 for the checks – but the charge would be waived for volunteers.

Its not about the money STUPID.

Informal arrangements between parents will not be covered.

And of course, most abuse happens between people who know each other, not stranger abuse.

“ It is about ensuring that those people who have already been dismissed by their employers for inappropriate behaviour with children do not simply up sticks and move elsewhere ”
Sir Roger Singleton Independent Safeguarding Authority

This is a total lie. If someone has been dismissed for inappropriate behavior with children there should have been a prosecution, otherwise there would be no grounds for dismissal. If the person is convicted, then they are put in the criminal database and that is the end of their career when it comes to children.

If no prosecution happens, then the person is INNOCENT FULL STOP.

What this ISA does is rely on hearsay to destroy people’s reputations. It is a repugnant and highly immoral system, and the people behind it and who are promoting it share its worst aspects; they are REPUGNANT and HIGHLY IMMORAL.

Sir Roger, whose agency will run the vetting scheme, said: “We need to calm down and consider carefully and rationally what this scheme is and is not about.

It is with a completely calm and rational mind (and logical mind) that the criticisms to this have been forged. It is Roger Singleton who has reacted hysterically and irrationally to the statistically insignificant cases of abuse. To put EVERYONE in a database because of the actions of a few criminals is an irrational knee-jerk reaction, born out of hysteria and unwarranted fear.

“It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.

It is not that now, but it will be in the future, when the database is open to search by anyone over the internet for a small fee.

“It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives and it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children or discouraging volunteering.”

This is a lie. The ISA will use hearsay and rumor to determine wether or not someone should be listed in their database. Even harsh words are enough to get you on their list of bad people:

The Safeguarding Authority are looking for events with ‘relevant conduct’ – awful jargon – which means they’re looking for reports of ‘abusive’ behaviour (and one can argue quite convincingly ‘politically incorrect’ behaviour), irrespective of whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime. Been on the Jeremy Kyle show? Had an unfavourable story printed about you in the Metro? Someone written about you on the internet? Ever pissed off a social worker? Importantly, has anyone made any complaints about you to the police or the council, whether or not you went to trial?

In stage one, they’re not interested in whether or not the event happened. They simply check whether or not the reported behaviour meets the criteria they’re looking for.

So let’s see what this includes (even the list listed is listed as ‘non exhaustive’ by the way)

Any remark or comment by others that causes distress

Whoa. Any remark? Explain further, please:

Demeaning, disrespectful, humiliating, racist, sexist….

I think I see where they’re going with this…

… or sarcastic comments.

Whoa. Sarcasm? Really?

Excessive or unwanted familiarity, shouting, swearing, name-calling.

Okay, so I’ve gone through their list of ‘relevant conduct’ and picked out the bit we’re all guilty of at one time or another. We all have our bad days, our weak moments… but sarcasm? Being disrespectful? Shouting? If you haven’t, then congratulations. For the rest of us, we need to hope the Safeguarding Authority haven’t heard about our ‘abusive’ behavior.

Charlotte Gore

None of that has anything to do with ‘Paedophile Checks’ does it?

The people behind this are LYING when they say that it is not there to get into the details of your life; if they are taking records to the level of detail that is described above, it means that someone is putting on your ISA record the fact that you said any of the things above. It means that there is a file on you containing the words that you have uttered, wether in public or in private.

That counts, to any rational and sensible person, as intensive scrutiny of the personal lives of millions of people.

He added: “It is about ensuring that those people who have already been dismissed by their employers for inappropriate behaviour with children do not simply up sticks and move elsewhere in the country to continue their abuse.

Utter rubbish, as their own documents demonstrate. If someone has been dismissed because they are a paedophile, they should be prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated, not put on a database and left at large to continue to rape. Is that what this idiot is suggesting? Because that is the result of what he is saying.

“And it is about bringing an end to the need for repeated CRB checks which so many people have found irritating. ISA registration is a one-off process for a single fee.”

And this is the truly irrational part. Is Roger Singleton really saying that people who go into this ISA system will only have to be checked once? Is he REALLY THAT INSANE? Think about this scenario; your son joins a soccer club, and then joins a cricket club. The head of the soccer club will have to check you against the ISA database, and then the cricket club organizer will have to ALSO check you against the ISA database. How is the ISA in ANY WAY DIFFERENT in this respect? Will the ISA telepathically transmit the details of your good character to every organization in the country? Of course not; Roger Singleton is demonstrating the great facility to not tell the truth that New Labour are expert at. And once again, the BBC fails to pull him up on this whopper – how EXACTLY is the ISA going to end the need for repeated CRB checks? How is a SINGLE CHECK going to transfer information to different people who need to know if a person is not barred?

This is PURE BULLSHIT!

‘Insulting’

The scheme will run in England, Wales and Northern Ireland from next month, and a separate but aligned scheme is being set up in Scotland, to be introduced next year.

Separate but equal… ‘Scotland the brave’… HAHAHAHA!!!

But critics claim it is threatening civil liberties and may deter volunteers.

“ When you get this degree of public outcry, there is generally a good reason for it ”
Wes Cuell , NSPCC

Translation, “People are stupid but they are not THAT stupid”

The NSPCC’s children’s services director Wes Cuell told the Sunday Telegraph the move could stop people doing things that were “perfectly safe and normal”.

There is nothing normal about this, and the people who created it and who promote it. They are subhuman monsters, criminally minded paedophile enablers, fear-mongers, cretins and communists. They are The Cancer that is Killing Britain. Their every instinct is perverted, their solutions are bankrupt both morally and financially. They are against the family, against nature and against God. Finally the British people are waking up and saying NO; this far and NO FARTHER.

“The warning signs are now out there that this scheme will stop people doing things that are perfectly safe and normal: things that they shouldn’t be prevented from doing.

“I think we are getting a bit too close to crossing the line about what is acceptable in the court of public opinion.

That line was crossed long ago, with the idea of the NIR and the ID Card. This scheme is a direct offshoot of that corrupted and immoral thinking, and it is only now that they are trying to put it together that everyone is beginning to see what it really means.

“We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Who is this ‘WE’ that these morons keep talking about?!

Mr Cuell stressed that while it was important to strengthen rules to protect children from potential sex offenders, overzealous interpretation of the regulations could threaten civil liberties.

The only thing that needs to be strengthened is the length of prison term given to those who commit and are convicted of these crimes. They should all be put away for life. Or even executed. Once the small number of them are all incarcerated, the problem will disappear.

Children’s authors, including Philip Pullman and Michael Morpurgo, have complained the requirement is “insulting” and say they will stop visiting schools.

Earlier this week children’s minister Delyth Morgan said safeguarding children was the government’s priority and it was about ensuring people in a position of trust who work with children are safe to do so.

She says alot of things, and once again, if it is about safeguarding children, she needs to say, in detail, how the ISA is going to do that. Of course she cannot do this, because the ISA cannot protect anyone, and neither can a CRB. These checks can only tell you what a person has been previously convicted of, and that does nothing to protect you if the criminal has never been caught.

The scheme was recommended by the Bichard report into the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by college caretaker Ian Huntley.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8253789.stm

And of course, the BBC fails to mention that Huntley was a known criminal who passed CRB checks. Because he passed the checks he was trusted immediately by the people who employed him. This is the fundamental error of the idea that a computer can bestow trustworthiness onto a human being.

Since roughly a third of sexual crimes are committed by people without a previous conviction, it is inevitable that some people with apparently excellent credentials but sinister intentions are going to get jobs working with children or vulnerable adults. And we will only know when it is too late.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3313099.stm

And this, my friends is the truth.

Putting eleven million people into a database CANNOT protect children. Roger Singleton knows this, and so does Delyth ‘Mutterschwein’ Morgan. This is about getting the maximum number of people onto the NIR. This is about humiliating and conditioning the British public to accept machine mediated trust. This is about dehumanizing people, destroying the natural instincts of the British, substituting distrust and fear for every natural impulse that people normally have. This is about putting the state in the middle of every single thing that you do, no matter what it is or where it happens. This is about building a dossier on every person, where if you hold opinions that the state does not like, you are BARRED.

Kill it all with fire say I.

FURTHERMORE

Mimi Majick points out the following, “What if a parent is accused of some politically incorrect infraction of the kind the ISA say they are taking into consideration. Does this then mean that they are not fit to be in charge of their own children?“. The number of people who are politically incorrect runs to the millions. Jonathan Ross for example, has said things that fall into the ‘Demeaning, disrespectful, humiliating’ category; are his children going to be put on the at risk database because of his sense of humor? What about all the people who hold political views that are not liked by the prejudiced apparatchiks at the ISA, for example, BNP members, who whilst no one likes them, have the absolute right to believe whatever they like.

Finally, because this ISA is being mislabeled as a ‘paedophile checklist’ anyone who finds themselves on it will be mislabeled as a paedophile when in fact someone just doesn’t like the things that they say or write.

APPALLING!

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love…” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1958

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal…” Dr. King, 1967

I remember back in the good ol’ days of 2005 and 2006 when being against the wars was not only politically correct, but it was very popular. I remember receiving dozens of awards, uncountable accolades and even was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Those were the halcyon days of the anti-war movement before the Democrats took over the government (off of the backs of the anti-war movement) and it became anathema to be against the wars and I became unpopular on all sides. I guess at that point, I could have gone with the flow and pretended to support the violence so I could remain popular, but I think I have to fiercely hold on to my core values whether I am “liked” or not.

Killing is wrong no matter if it is state-sanction murder or otherwise. Period. Not too much more to say on that subject, except what I quote above from Dr. King.

However, while the so-called left is obsessed over supporting a very crappy Democratic health care plan, people in far away countries are being deprived of their health and very lives by the Obama Regime’s continuation of Bush’s ruinous foreign policy.

I was never dismayed when the so-called right attacked me and called me names for protesting Bush. However, something inside me gets a little sick when I hear people who claim to be peace activists supporting the Obama Administration’s foreign policy, a policy that is not like Bush’s in the fact that it’s much worse.

I have been called a “racist” from the so-called left. In these people’s opinion, I was totally justified in protesting Bush, but I am a racist for protesting the same policies under Obama. When I opposed Bush’s policies, I was called traitor, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and other names I cannot print. Name-calling is a great way to shut down critical thinking and discussion. And, not to mention, I think the murder of innocent life in the Iraq-Af-Pak regions is racist and morally corrupt.

There are many people in this country who oppose Obama because they’re racist, but I am not one of them. I oppose Obama’s policies because they are wrong…again, period!

One cannot obfuscate when innocent lives are being destroyed, here and abroad. We cannot allow “political reality” to get in the way of morality. Human sacrifice is not worth the political reality. Violence, killing, war and more war are NEVER the solution to any problem. Period.

If Obama has violent shadow forces around him pulling him in the direction of violence, which begets more violence and more resistance; then we, especially people in the peace or anti-war movements need to gather and organize to pull him in the direction towards peaceful conflict resolution and solutions that aren’t based on exploiting people’s fears, anxieties or ignorance.

I am going to Martha’s Vineyard because we have the moral high ground. The war supporters aren’t going to protest Obama’s wars. They are strangely silent over his foreign policy, unless they are praising it.

I am going to Martha’s Vineyard because someone has to speak for the babies of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan that do not deserve the horrible fate that has been handed to them by the US Military Industrial Complex. The voiceless need a voice, and even if I am called every name in the book by all sides, I will speak up for them.

I am going to Martha’s Vineyard because so many people have been blinded to the fact that the system has momentum that rolls on and over and around no matter who is the titular head of the system.

Let's just pretend that elections are fair in this country and my candidate, Cynthia McKinney, won for president. If she wasn’t able to rein in the systemic violence, then I would be going wherever she vacationed to protest her policies, too. I guess at that point, I would not only be called “racist,” but I would be called a “self-hating female.”

In a recent conversation someone was trying to convince me that I should not be so stridently opposed to Obama’s policies and I responded that today 75 people were killed and 300 people were wounded in a bomb blast in Iraq and 26 mostly women and children were killed in a wedding party in Afghanistan this week and she said: “Oh, that wouldn’t be acceptable if it happened here.”

And that ‘s the problem: it’s not acceptable if it happens anywhere, to anybody, no matter who is President of the USA.

Not only is the death toll mounting for innocent civilians but also is once again climbing for our troops.

While the “festivities” are occurring on Martha’s Vineyard next week, there are families all over the world who will never again be able to fully feel festive. Ahhhh…. everyone should just stand down, relax and sip an Obamarita on the beach…Hope reigns once again in The Empire.

And, yes, we are going to Martha’s Vineyard to get attention. We vehemently want to call attention to all of the points I have made above.

Even though there is a small anti-war, peace movement in this country, there still is one and this movement has the moral high ground and punditry, personal attacks, glitzy marketing, or “political realities won’t drown us out.

Members of Dr. King's own caucus tried to convince him not to publicly speak out against the Vietnam war, and that's when he delivered his brilliant Beyond Vietnam speech at the Riverside Church in NYC exactly one year before he was assassinated. That speech was in response to the critics. Dr. King took the moral high ground when he said: "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

That time has now come, once again. By our silence we are betraying humanity.

Love the President or hate him, or anywhere in between, but we must speak out loudly and without any timidity against the institutional violence of the US Empire.

Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

[…]

All true. And we agree.

Brain-jacking quangos turn British citizens into ‘zombies’.

Experts say they have discovered horrific cash-eating quangos which are able to infect British citizens and turn them into “zombies”.

The hapless victims are then compelled to toil away in a prominent high street location where their immobilised bodies – as they are gradually taxed from above, acting as money supply and nest to the ghastly quango offspring – can repeat state propaganda to seize control of more hosts.

For now, the terrifying Legislata Unilateralis quango appears to be focusing its zombie taxation campaign primarily on carpenters of the sort found in the McDonald’s of Tottenham.

“The quango has accurately manipulated the infected workers into desiring what the government prefers them to be, by making the workers travel the ‘third way’ during the last years of their lives,” says Dr David Hughes of Exeter and Harvard universities.

Having successfully taken over a person, the quango compels it to leave its normal haunts, perhaps getting high in the local park and directs the unfortunate person down into the dark, moist basement layers of the high street. There the luckless creature is compelled to clamber onto the underside of a multinational leading to the O unilateralis’ favoured rate of taxation – some 25pc above the base, on the management side of the takeaway or franchise in question.

Once in such a location, the dying worker is made to clap its hands and firmly grip onto the multinational, and then hangs lifelessly from them to become a money supply and home for the burgeoning, ghastly quango-children within. Most of the worker’s rights are gradually converted into tax and CCTV, but the muscles holding the burgers out are cunningly left alone.

In order to prevent any rivals trying to snaffle the nutritious worker’s income, the quango also forms a protective coating or “security blanket” over the hanging victim. Presently a chip or “RFID body” is implanted into the back of the worker’s head and begins to burble drifting thoughts down on the greasy floor beneath – each of which could infect another unlucky passerby.

The quangos’ dreadful capabilities were already well-known in the worker-zombification blogging community, but Hughes’ latest research has revealed just how precisely the hapless walking-dead citizens are controlled. He theorises that a deadly rain of mind-control BBC shows may be why the blogosphere tries to avoid the lower levels of prime-time as much as it can.

It seems like the great and the good are finding that Britain has lost all of its appeal:

Cory Doctorow has written an article that sums up what is wrong with this country, and his piece chimes with what I have been writing.

Although he is a Candian native, Cory’s family came from the Soviet Union: he asked his grandmother why she didn’t stay there.

I asked her why she didn’t stay, and she shook her head like I’d asked the stupidest possible question. “It was the Soviet Union”, she said. She waved her hand, groped for the answer. “Papers,” she said, finally. “We had to carry papers. The police could stop you at any time and make you turn over your papers.” The floodgates opened. They spied on you. They made you spy on each other. Your grandfather wouldn’t have been allowed to stay – he was Polish, they wouldn’t let him stay with the family in Russia, he’d have to go back to Poland.

There are many people who are simply not going to put up with what is happening in the UK and are either planning to leave or have already left. Many more will fight till the bitter end. This is not just ‘foreigners’, but British citizens also.

Only a total fool, having full knowledge of recent history, would wait around to be ‘Kristallnacht’d’; and of course, if that does not happen, there are an infinite gradation of bad things that can happen beneath that, like the state saying you cannot remove ‘your’ money or your property when you leave. There was a time in the very recent past where the maximum you could take out of the UK was £100. Anyone that does not think this can happen again is insane, especially with the economic chaos that is about to unfold before our eyes. The US has already passed laws that are aimed at stopping americans from leaving – the ‘Hotel California’ laws – what makes anyone think that Britain will not follow them? They follow them everywhere else, so why not there?

Cory then moved to Britain, where he found—as Bella has—that his status here is at the whim of the disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts in government, responding to the BNP dog-whistle morons who populate this green and increasingly unpleasant land.

Britain is run by disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts; it is not populated by disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts. The same Britain that we all remember and loved is still there, as are most of the people who inhabited it; its just hidden under a layer of grime that needs to be jetwashed off.

Britain can be great again. This next election is clearly its last chance; the things that have been done since the Bliar regime are so contrary to everything that is right, if the Tories do not move to undo them, Britain will be lost. I know many people who are going to leave this beleaguered island if the Tories do not clean house. There are only so many chances that people are willing to give a place, and if it does not improve, it is pointless to stay and suffer the indignities of a police state when you can simply get on a train and LEAVE.

People from all over the world have given up on Britain. They do not come here for medical treatment anymore (for example) instead, they fly to Dubai, where they get a high standard of treatment, equivalent or better than what you get in Britain, without having to be treated like a criminal. In the end, when this country starts to wither, as it becomes culturally isolated, they will either have to change their ways or end up being just like a Soviet satellite state; grey, grim, paranoid, devoid of innovation on all fronts, purged of individuals and individuality, freedom-less and inert… like soot, the chemically spent remains of combustion.

A few years later, I was living with my partner, and had fathered a British daughter (when I mentioned this to a UK immigration official at Heathrow, he sneeringly called her “half a British citizen”). We were planning a giant family wedding in Toronto when the news came down: the Home Secretary had unilaterally, on 24 hours’ notice, changed the rules for highly skilled migrants to require a university degree. My immigration lawyers confirmed it: people who’d established residence in the UK for years and years, who’d built businesses and employed Britons here, who owned homes and given birth to British children, were being thrown out of the country, taking their tax-payments, jobs and families with them.

My partner and I scrambled. We got married. We applied for a spousal visa. A few weeks later, I presented myself in Croydon at the Home Office immigration centre to turn over my biometrics and have a visa glued into my Canadian passport. I got two years’ breathing room. My family could stay in Britain.

Then came last week’s announcement: effective immediately, spousal visa holders (and foreign students) would be issued mandatory, biometric radio-frequency ID papers that we will have to carry at all times. And I started to look over my shoulder.

You must do what you think is right of course.

We have spoken about this before; about changing the rules half way through the game:

[…]

Many people came to the UK because the rules were favorable. Now, after settling down, doing good work, bringing prosperity and creativity to the UK, the government wants to change the rules halfway through the game. That is not cricket.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=986

The financial crowd understands this better than anyone, “… if the rules can change in this way, arbitrarily, unfairly, insanely, then its best to get out NOW before some other, even worse, more insane rules come down the pipeline, locking us in here”. That is why so many financiers have already left and have vowed never to return.

When someone asks you to ‘hand over your biometrics’, which actually means GETTING FINGERPRINTED LIKE A CRIMINAL, it means that a fundamental line has been crossed. With the NIR, once you hand over your fingerprints, YOU ARE IN THE SYSTEM. It doesn’t matter if they issue an ID Card or not, the mobile fingerprint scanners they are going to deploy mean that your fingerprints ARE THE ID CARD.

Its pointless to now, after having submitted to violation, leave the UK because they are discriminating against foreigners by compelling them to carry ID Cards. You are already in their system to the exact same degree that you would be had you been made to get an ID Card right now.

Biometric (violating) VISAS are vendor driven garbage. They do not improve border security or stop illegal immigration. There are better ways to issue VISAS that do not threaten the recipient.

Canadians can get six month entry when they come to the UK at any port. It is a mistake to get a VISA if you are a Canadian, IMHO. Everyone has their limits, their pain threshold…

Yes, that’s right. And why should immigrants have to do this? They are easy targets, of course. I am now caught up in a similar situation: I am in a relationship—and have been for some time—and the continuance of that relationship is at the whim of bureaucrats and filthy, disgusting, morally bankrupt politicians and the filthy, disgusting, morally bankrupt morons who elect them.

This is a problem that is similar to stock traders and market timing; when is it the optimum moment to exit the market and cash out? If you leave too early, you might miss out on some market movements. If you leave too late, you might not get out at all.

I have seen, at first hand, the second-rate status accorded to those who want to live and work here, and the callousness with which their situation is dealt with. I have seen the way in which this country deals with immigrants, and I dislike it intensely.

The horror stories from Lunar House are legend.

Every one of these measures was beta-tested on less-advantaged groups before it was rolled out to the general public.

It is, quite simply, a divide et impera tactic and it is one that I, as a positive libertarian who believes that we are all human, find morally repugnant.

Libertarians know all about this. There are a growing number of Libertarians in the west. Sales of seminal individualist works are skyrocketing. If enough people get the message, and the coming collapse will make this more likely, then it is possible that we might get the sort of countries that we desire. By the way, if you have not seen it, see this.

I have constantly pointed out that all of these measures tested on minority “undesirables” will be applied to us sooner or later—and probably sooner.

CCTVs used the be the exclusive territory of bank vaults and prisons. Network wiretapping and censorship began in schools, “to protect children”.

Now, we immigrants are to be the beta testers for Britain’s sleepwalk into the surveillance society. We will have to carry internal passports and the press will say, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to live here – it’s unseemly for a guest to complain about the terms of the hospitality.” But this beta test is not intended to stop with immigrants. Government freely admits that immigrants are only the first stage of a universal rollout of mandatory biometric RFID identity cards. What happens to us now will happen to you, next.

Even if it were not the case hat what happens to immigrants now will happen to the natives next (Kristallnacht) it is wrong, and you should not put up with it.

Everyone, when they study Germany, wonders, “what would I have done if I was living in Germany then?”. Now is your chance to find out. As we have seen, some people run to legitimize themselves with the state, getting into a marriage at a time other than their choosing, and them to ‘turn over their biometrics’ for the sake of immigration status. Others opt to disappear, or leave or game the system. The ones with nothing to lose burn their fingerprints off and go hard core. There are many different responses to threats.

Of course, everyone with half a brain cell knows that no one would desire to come to Britain as a ‘sponger’ if there was no welfare state. Libertarians abhor the welfare / warfare state because it is founded on stealing. A Libertarian society would be able to accommodate ‘foreigners’ since the state would not be stealing from anyone to pay for the ‘scroungers’. All resentment of immigration would virtually disappear; the only people harboring ill feeling being the racists who have ethnic identity issues.

ID Cards are going to be justified as a way to control the scroungers, and set the world to rights. They are an unintended consequence of the welfare state; something started with good intentions but which has ended up almost destroying Britain.

No, we aren’t seeing people wandering around with yellow stars on their clothing—but we are seeing them forced to get ID cards that we would never wish to carry ourselves. And what do we do?

Nothing.

The conclusion is simple: had the Nazis risen here, we would have not put up any more protest—as our neighbours were taken to the ghettos and then to the death camps—than the Germans did. In fact, we would probably complain less.

As the repulsive general population continue to make shitty jokes about “not mentioning the war”, they are blind to the fact that—had it happened here—they would have been happy to hassle those Jews onto the cattle trucks.

Because, as our own pogrom happens, I hear not a fucking spark from the “great British public”. They are too busy devouring Coronation Street to care.

If this is true, it means that you will have to do what the Doctorowictz family did. Leave, and never come back. This is the choice that you face; you either stay and fight risking everything, or preserve yourself and your wealth and leave. If the British really have degenerated to the degree that you describe, then they are beyond saving. Many people who felt that they owed a debt to this great country, and who fought to help it keep some semblance of sanity, like Doctorow, who in writing that article is contributing to a place that has been his home and which gave him his wife and daughter, are going to have to decide when the time is right to get out before it is too late. If they decide to flee.

Nothing lasts forever. And that really is literally true. The Britain that we all loved may well be gone forever… and we were lucky to have tasted it at all. From what I can tell, there are many people who are still The Real British™ they think like the British used to think, they act like the British used to think, and, most encouragingly, some of them are young.

Very encouraging.

On the other hand, we have, The Cancer That Is Killing Britain, the physical embodiment of which can be seen in the shapes of the presenters and talking heads in this clip:

This is, essentially, a battle against Cancer, a biological struggle. Either the body will survive, or the cancer will kill it.

We are encouraged to spy on our neighbours and report their suspicious activity. We can be stopped and searched with no particularised suspicion, and during these searches, police officers can and do examine such things as the books we’re reading and the personal notes we’ve made.

This is all true, and all horrible.

What we have to do is look to history, recent history, to see how it can all end. It is important to say not only the truth about how things are bad, but what can happen to turn it all around.

East Germany is my favorite example:

If the British are anything like the Germans, the ID Card alone will not be enough to force a massive change in Britain. They might be made of stronger stuff… who knows? One thing is for sure; the ID Card, if it is not scrapped entirely, along with the NIR, is just the beginning; the aparatchicks have many new monstrosities planned that will be hinged on the NIR/ID Card. When they roll them out, and they begin to bite, THEN we will see a Poll Tax style revolt in the UK.

The question is, once again, are you going to wait around for everyone to wake up, are you going to cut your loses and get out, or what?

It might take seventy years for Britain and its people to grow a backbone; if you are over thirty, you are not going to see it, that is for sure, and even if you do, the only pleasure you will get is seeing the evil apparatus destroyed on TV while you are on your deathbead.

This country is dead as a free nation—when an article about a fundamentally unimportant subject such as computer OSes can get more comments than anything about civil liberties, it is an indication of the intellectual paucity of our citizens—yes, even the bien pensant of the blogosphere.

OSes are actually VERY important. A free OS keeps you and your information private. In a country where omnipresent surveillance of computers and communications is on the horizon, the free OS is the modern equivalent of an unlicensed photocopier in the Soviet Union. It is a computer under YOUR control doing YOUR bidding, that cannot be hacked into by default under secret arrangements with the manufacturers.

But I digress…

Cory has said that—if nothing changes—he will leave this shithole we call Britain. I don’t know if I can do the same—where is there to go?—but for the very first time, I am seriously considering it.

Even if there is ‘nowhere to go’, which is not the case, wherever you go, if it is the same as Britain police state wise, at least the weather will be better.

I am ashamed and afraid: I thought that I lived in one of the world’s great and tolerant civilisations: over the last few years, I have come to realise that is it simply a gilded cage.

There is nothing to be ashamed of. If you did not make it this way, you are not to blame. You actually did live in one of the world’s greatest and tolerant countries; in many ways, it still is. Britain has just lost its way, and it is not too late for it to change course and restore its former greatness. There are still enough people to make it happen, and believe it or not, you are one of them.

It is why this end to V For Vendetta, desirable though it may be, will never happen.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

There is a reason why that film has struck such a chord with everyone who watches it.

Nor will the people of Britain walk the streets in masks. Our “respresentative democracy” is just a sympton of the greater malaise—the shits in Parliament simply reflect the shits who elected them.

Libertarians know what representative democracies really are, so lets not go there.

For every one person who thinks, and evaluates and tries to be just, there are ten thousand ignorant bigots—repulsive in their stupidity and prejudice—whose voice carries far more weight (ten thousand times the weight, in fact) than that of those who can think. It is why this country is such a fucking shithole—because the filth who live in it vastly outnumber those who are decent.

Cough! cough!:

[…]

And this, I fear, is the problem. This genial idiot is the sort of person who will be the interface between you and the NIR. They will accept anything that is put in front of them; they have no idea of literally any concept of morality or the reality of ‘the other’. They are the people who when told that pressing a button someone will recieve an electric shock, press the button without any hesitation. They are without imagination, human drones, Eloi, animals, sub human, and the worst thing about them is that they have the vote, which means that they have control by proxy over how the world evolves. This is unnaceptable to anyone with even half a brain cell.

[…]

BLOGDIAL 2006

Look out for the yellow stars: the concentration camps will not be far behind. And as their friends and neighbours are carted off to the gulags, then the British people take to the streets.

But it will not be in protest, it will not be to condemn—no, it will be to cheer.

[…]

http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/08/no-it-isnt-greener.html

You can thank your lucky stars that you will not be (t)here to see and hear it.

The Independent, that bird-cage liner which is ferociously opposed to Home Education, has let rip again with a piece designed to divide Home Educators and set up a pretext for the government agenda of ending Home Education.

What the author, ‘Simon Webb’, fails to understand is that first they come for the most ‘other’ group and then they move on to you. You all know the poem:

First they came for the Autonomous Learners
and I did not speak out – because I was not an Autonomous Learners.

Then they came for the Christian Home Educators
and I did not speak out – because I was not a Christian.

Then they came for the Structured Learners.
and I did not speak out – because I was not a Structured Learner.

Then they came for me –
and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

Once they enshrine home inspections as perfectly reasonable, they will then begin to shut down all types of Home Education that they do not like. If you are Home Educating for religious reasons, they will shut you down if you do not teach their ideas of how religion should be taught, or what a moral person is or is not, or anything to do with sin. For example. If you do not like the state curriculum, they will shut you down. And in this context, ‘shut you down’ means kidnap your child and force it to attend a school.

Autonomous learners are an easy target. I will be making a post about them shortly. In the meanwhile, lets pick apart this piece of writing:

Simon Webb: We must get tough on home schooling

Who is the ‘we’ that he is talking about? Autonomous learners are not a part of the ‘we’ he is describing, that is for sure. What Simon Webb is advocating is that violence should be used against Autonomous Learners to stop them from Home Educating in this way. The very title of this piece uses the phrase ‘get tough’, which explicitly implies the violence he is calling for.

He is calling for the state to organize raiding parties to kidnap the children of Autonomous Learners so that they can be put into schools. This is violence pure and simple. He is willing to use others to commit violence to force his own opinions on Autonomous Learners.

Most people, if asked about home education, would probably picture a child being tutored at home by his parents; perhaps working at the kitchen table rather than sitting in a classroom. This was indeed the case with my own daughter whom I have taught since she was a baby. Sadly, this image is very much the exception in British home education.

All of this is irrelevant. There are as many ways to Home Educate as there are people doing it. Some are Autonomous Learners. Others are not. Some people live in a small house where the biggest flat surface is the kitchen table. Others live in houses with plenty of space. Whatever the ‘many people’ in this paragraph choose to believe, people have the right to Home Educate as they see fit, and Simon Webb and his ilk do not have the right to contract with others to use violence to make people conform to his notion of what is good and bad education.

The most popular educational method used by those who withdraw their children from school in this country is known as autonomous education and involves nobody teaching children anything at all!

How do you know this? There are no statistics detailing the numbers of Home Educators, and there are no numbers saying what sort of Education each family has chosen to do. This is a statement that is not based on facts.

I believe this peculiar technique is causing incalculable damage to the thousands of home educated children upon whom it is used.

What you believe is your own business. Some people might think that you should not be Home Educating your daughter, and in fact, if you went to live in Germany, you would be committing a crime by doing so. Just because you BELIEVE something, that is not in any way a basis for violence to be called for against the people who are educating in a way that you do not agree with.

Autonomous education is based on a simple principle: that children alone are the best judges of what they should learn and when they should learn it. If a child wishes to spend the day slumped in front of a television or games console, this is not a problem, the choice is his. Many autonomous educators go even further, asserting that it is for the child to decide on bedtimes, diet and other aspects of lifestyle. To see how this works in practice, we cannot do better than look at “How People Home Educate” on the website of Education Otherwise, a registered charity working in the field.

A mother writes about educating her children, aged 10 and seven, whom she describes as “night owls”, at home. They apparently have no bedtimes and get up “later than I would like”. She says: “Their days are often filled with television and lots of play”.

And what on earth does this have to do with Simon Webb? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Autonomous Learners do not try and force you to become one; you can Home Educate in any way you see fit. What is most disturbing here is that Simon Webb thinks that his experience of life applies to everyone else equally. This is a fundamentally wrong, almost autistic view of the world, where other people are not real, but are objects without any will or separate internal dialogue; only SIMON is able to think, only HIS WORLD VIEW is the right one, and when he goes to sleep, the world doesn’t even exist until he wakes up again. Other people DO exist, they are very real, they have their own thoughts and their own lives, their own priorities and philosophies and those lives and thoughts are nothing to do with anyone else but them. If that is not the case, then they become the property of someone else, the property of a ‘Simon Webb’ who knows best about what is good for all families.

There is no academic work at all. Neither child can read but she says: “They will read one day and will do so because they want to, not because somebody tells them to.”

1 in 5 adults in the UK cannot read. Many leave school semi literate. Autonomous Learners are learners who are learning in their own time and in their own way. I have met some of them (at an examination centre this summer for an English Language paper) without even knowing I was speaking to an Autonomous Learner. That says all you need to know about them. And even if they do not want to take exams, that is none of anyone’s business.

As a description of the odd week or so during the school holidays, this is perfectly acceptable; as a long-term lifestyle for growing children, it verges upon the neglectful. Yet this account is quoted with evident approval by the largest organisation for home educators in this country.

And this, my friends, is the government line; that Home Education is somehow linked to child safety. Now we see that they are going to spin their pretext around to neglect, and Autonomous Learners are going to be the example they hold up to prove that Home Education must be ‘brought under control’.

Autonomous Learner families are not neglectful in any way. They are families just like any other, who have great care for their children. A person with an intact moral centre and principles will instantly understand that Autonomous Learning is just another choice that people make, just as converting to a religion is, or moving to another country is. These choices are personal, private, not the affair of the state, and they are certainly not the affair of busy body statists who are violent.

No wonder such parents are vehemently opposed to new legislation which would enable local education authorities to check up on the education being provided for children taught at home.

All decent Home Educators are vehemently opposed to new legislation. They are fully aware that any changes in the law could bring a total end to Home Education in the UK. They are not naive, prejudiced or stupid when it comes to their Home Education, or their rights. They understand that this is a threat to not only them and their Home Education, but it is a threat to all parents in the UK. They also understand that this is not just a threat to their children now, but it is a threat to their children should they become parents in the future. They also understand that holding up Autonomous Learners to be sacrificed is completely despicable, wrong, unjustified and evil.

As I have said over and over, there are many types of Home Educator, many different philosophies and approaches. This Simon Webb character is a certain type; a statist, prejudiced, collectivist. The difference between him and an Autonomous Learner is that an Autonomous Learner is quite happy to have Simon Webb and his daughter Home Educating in whatever way they see fit, without making a judgment on them. Simon Webb on the other hand, wants only his narrow vision of what Home Education is to be the norm. This is a most unpleasant sort of philosophy; one that is not accepting of other people.

The disadvantages of this system are probably obvious to most parents.

And the advantages are totally unknown to most parents, since many people, including journalists, in the UK know nothing whatsoever about Home Education in the first place. There are many advantages to Autonomous Learning. In the United States they call it Unschooling. It is being done because it works.

Once again, what is obvious to most parents today might not be so obvious at another time. There was a time when it was ‘obvious’ that people from different ‘races’ should not be married and have children, or that people should own other people as property, or that the death penalty is completely right. Some people think that all those things are completely legitimate even today. What the majority thinks is not a rubber stamp or guarantee of moral correctness.

Our children are most decidedly not the best judges of what is wholesome and good for them.

We do not know about your children Mr. Webb. If you say that they are not the best judges of what is wholesome and good for them, we will take your word for it; you are their parent, you know them best, you have their best interests at heart, and you can be trusted to do what is right for them.

Or are you having pronoun problems again?!

Many children and teenagers, if left to their own devices, would not surface until lunchtime. Following a sugary snack of biscuits and fizzy pop, they might spend the afternoon playing computer games or watching television.

So what?

Do you REALLY think that it is your business, or the business of the state to know what time a child gets up in the morning… or afternoon? Do you REALLY believe that it is your business to know if a child eats s sugary snack of biscuits and fizzy pop? Both of which were bought by the parents, with their own money? Do you REALLY believe it is your affair that a child, under the supervision of its parents plays computer games (which, once again, were bought with the parents own money and explicit approval) or watches television all afternoon?

Just what sort of world is it that you are advocating?

I think we know what sort of world it is; a dystopia, a totalitarian nightmare, a world of total surveillance, right into the home, where your every action is monitored and controlled by the state.

Lo and behold, Mr. Balls and Mr. Webb concur:

The British government is to put the more irresponsible families under CCTV supervision in their homes – just to ensure their children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls says.

[…]

http://www.medindia.net/

It would be a rare child who chose instead to get up at 7am or 8am, eating a healthy breakfast of wholemeal toast washed down with a glass of mineral water before settling down to teach himself algebra! That is why we as adults assume responsibility for the welfare, physical and mental, of our offspring.

So, getting up ‘early’ is more beneficial than getting up ‘late’. For what reason? To learn regimentation that will be necessary when the child enters the workplace as a drone perhaps. And once again, we have Mr. Webbs ‘breakfast of champions’; this, according to him, is ‘healthy eating’. No doubt his CCTV surveilled families will be made to swallow it.

Parents do not “assume responsibility for the welfare, physical and mental, of our offspring”. By virtue of becoming a parent, an automatic duty, responsibility and right comes into being. Foster parents assume responsibility; what Mr. Webb is implying is that children are not attached to their parents in any moral or legal way when they are born. But of course, this must be the case, if ‘we’ are going to use violence to force Autonomous Learning to be outlawed.

As the law stands, any parent can withdraw a child from school simply by notifying the head in writing.

And why should this not be the case? Children are not the property of the state, or of a school; they are the sole responsibility of the parent, and if the parent, who voluntarily contracts with a school for the service of education, does not for any reason require that service at any time, he or she or they have the ABSOLUTE RIGHT to withdraw a child,, with or without prior notice.

The LEA can make informal enquiries about the education being given to the child, but has no right to enter the home or interview the child.

This exactly as it should be, except for the part where the LEA makes informal inquiries. Removing your child from school is the choice of a parent. They are not and should not be answerable to anyone. If they are, then they become property.

For many, this is the end of their education.

This is simply not so. There are no statistics to say it is so. So why has Mr. Webb said it?

According to the recent review of home education conducted by Graham Badman,

And we know all about that.

there may be as many as 80,000 home-educated children in Britain.

And there you have it. There MAY BE 80,000. There are no statistics, and so every assertion in this sad article that refers to figures is known not to be true by Mr. Webb because he knows there are no numbers.

Under current arrangements, nobody has the slightest idea what sort of education, if any, many of these children are receiving.

But we do know what sort of education people are getting in the state schools, which may be the reason why Mr. Webb, who lives in ‘inner London’, has educated his own child from birth at home.

I wonder how Mr Webb will have responded to all the queries he is bound to have had about socialization; if he has kept his child at home in a small room all these years, surely it is missing out on the playground ‘rough and tumble’ that so many people think is essential to becoming a well rounded person; and what about the exposure to different cultures and peoples that Mr. Webb’s child would undoubtedly have met in an inner London school? Multi Cultural society needs to be actively engaged with and inclusive; if his child has never met anyone outside its cultural group, it will surely be disadvantaged… and no, eating a curry on a saturday night is not sufficient.

Just what is it that Mr. Webb is running from?

I could have gone much further with all of that, but I am sure you get the point. The point is that Simon Webb wants the best for his child, and so he home educated it. That is his right. No one has the right to come into his home uninvited to tell him how he should educate his child, and certainly no one has the right to use violence to take his child from him and sent it to an inner city London school. Perish the thought.

This is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs.

Utter rubbish. Satisfactory TO WHO? The Autonomous Learners are VERY SATISFIED with what they are doing. Just what the hell are you talking about?

My daughter and I welcomed the representative of our LEA into our home once a year to show what we had been doing, but many parents are determined not to allow the LEA any access to their homes.

You welcomed the representative of the LEA into your home. That is your choice and your business. Just because you did that, it cannot be extrapolated that everyone everywhere must ALSO do it. Why do you not go further:

“I home educated my child from birth; everyone in Britain should do so also.”
“I sent my child to a State School; everyone in Britain should do so also.”
“I sent my child to a Public School; everyone in Britain should do so also.”
“I sent my child to a live with my relatives in Australia; everyone in Britain should do so also.”
“I sent my child to a Koran Chain School; everyone in Britain should do so also.”

Its just totally absurd.

Under those circumstances, it is impossible for the local authority to have the least idea what is happening with regard to the child’s education.

And there is no problem with this. It is not the Local Authority’s place to know what is happening with the education of children that are not in the school systems they are responsible for. The curriculum that children in private schools follow is not the responsibility of the Local Authority, and the same is true for Home Educators.

It is high time that LEAs were given the power to check up on the wellbeing and educational attainments of these children.

Why? Home Education has been working brilliantly for decades (actually generations) with no interference whatsoever. Why NOW is it ‘high time’? This is more unsubstantiated nonsense by a promoter of the nanny state. And of course, the very idea that Home Educated children need to have their wellbeing checkup up on is completely false. Statistically, Home Educated children are more safe than children who attend schools; thanks to AheD we are now in the possession of ACUTAL STATISTICS that prove this.

The furious opposition to any change in the law is spearheaded by autonomous educators who are, not surprisingly, anxious to prevent anybody from assessing the efficacy of their educational provision.

Once again, unsubstantiated nonsense. As for the proficiency of their educational provision, I would not even go there. Despite what everyone might think is the case, Autonomous Learners and Unschoolers do very well… whatever that means which is not up to you or me.

While fighting for their own “rights”, such people are denying their children one of the most important rights that other children in this country enjoy; the right to a proper education.

Astonishing. There are people who would say that Mr. Webb is denying his child a proper education by keeping it out of school. They would say that it is missing out on all the things I listed and more. Who is going to stick up for Mr. Webb when it is decided that his form of Home Education is unacceptable?

The writer is a home-educating parent who works with children with special needs in inner London

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/simon-webb-we-must-get-tough-on-home-schooling-1764348.html

This is a matter of principle. It is a matter of what a parent is and what the proper role of government is.

There are people in Britain, ‘The Cancer That is Killing Britain’, who are willing to give up their liberties to make the ever present other ‘safe’. I fear this article is written by one of those people.

The idea that one type of Home Education is superior to another is false. Home Education is tailored to the needs of the children who receive it. Only the parent can decide what that should be and how it should work. If the state decides, then the child becomes the property of the state.

People who advocate this are advocating the ownership of people, which is slavery.

Quite apart from this, the statistics have shown that Home Educated children are LESS likely to be at risk than children who are sent to school. They outperform all schoolchildren academically… if you read BLOGDIAL, you know all of this and the rest.

The real reason why the collectivists are scrambling to shut down Home Education is that the people this process produces are a real threat, and Autonomous Learners are the most dangerous of all Home Educated people. They are the ones who were never spoon fed education; who came to the realization themselves that they needed to read, and who then go on to university purely because they want to, with the powerful idea instilled in them that they can do and achieve whatever they want, and that nothing can stand in their way.

A person like that is a fearful prospect for those that want every nail to be hammered down.

FURTHERMORE

Look at all the comments that are flooding in on the article at the Independent website from where we get this gem:

Where Mr. Webb feels the heat of an ignoramus hurling vile insults at him and his daughter. In the light of this, HOW is it possible that he can launch an attack on Autonomous Learners like this, having suffered this way himself?!

and NOW we see why this piece was written and published; take a look at this GoogleDocs document!!!

In an almost surreal piece of theatre, an HE woman receives a reply from her MP, after writing to complain about the Badman review. In it, he encloses a reply he received from Mr. Balls himself.

Now think about this.

A constituent writes to her MP to complain that a bogus, biased, unscientific, absurd and factually incorrect piece of birdcage liner that has claimed that the law governing Home Education needs to be changed.

The order for the review came from Mr. Balls.
MP gets letter complaining about Mr. Balls.
MP Writes to Mr. Balls.
Mr. Balls replies with a whitewash justification.

Can you see what is wrong with this?

Those two MPs are both FOXES and the constituent is THE CHICKEN.

Writing to foxes to ask not to be eaten is simply INSANE. They are going to get together, laugh out loud, and then pat you on the head before tearing it off with their sharp teeth:

The following is the text of a letter dated 23rd July from Ed Balls, sent to an MP who had received a visit from an EO member and who had written to Ed Balls passing on the home educator’s concerns:

“Thank you for your letter of 29th June about home education enclosing a set of questions from your constituent.

We published Graham Badman’s Report on his Review of home education on 11th June 2009 and our initial response the same day. I asked Graham Badman to carry out the review in the light of certain high profile cases and because local authorities and other organisations were consistently raising concerns with my department about the current state of the law and policy in this area.

I thought it crucial that the Review found the appropriate balance between two important principles, and I believe Graham Badman achieved: giving parents the right to decide how and where their children should be educated; and ensuring that every child is safe and gets the education they need to help them fulfill their potential.

Home education is a well established and important part of our education system. Both the review and our response reaffirmed our support for its continuation, while also stressing the importance of these principles being put into practice in every area of the country.

The Review recommended that the home education framework should be strengthened significantly, and in two different respects: first, by acting to address the small but worrying minority of cases where home educated children have suffered harm because safeguarding concerns were either not picked up at all or were not addressed with sufficient urgency. We are taking the Review’s recommendations forward in this area by legislating at the first possible opportunity this year.

Secondly, the review calls for access to extra support for those home educated children who need it, including the relatively high proportion of these children with special educational needs and others who require services they would otherwise receive through school. The Review stressed the importance of ensuring that all children receive the kind of high quality education they need to succeed, with local authorities providing the right level of support to home educators to enable them to offer this to children. We made it clear in our initial response that we accepted these recommendations in principle and would set out in the autumn how we intend to take them forward.

I believe that Graham Badman’s Review is fair and balanced and I am confident that it sets out a path for keeping home educated children safe and for strengthening the quality of education they receive, whilst respecting parent’s right to chose to home educate, if they wish to do so. For these reasons I think the outcomes of the Review are good news for children who are home educated and for their parents.

A formal consultation on the proposed registration and monitoring arrangements for home education arising from the Review is open until Monday 19th October and can be accessed at [URL].

Yours sincerely

Ed Balls MP

Oh dear me.

Mr. Balls accepted the report in full ON THE SAME DAY IT WAS PUBLISHED, without any question whatsoever. This is probably because he knew what was in it before it was published. Mr Balls asked Badman to to carry out the review in the light of cases that have nothing to do with Home Education. The whole premise of the exercise is bogus from the outset.

What were the other organizations that were ‘consistently raising concerns’? Would those be the fake charities that have demonstrated that they know nothing about Home Education, and that have had to retract their totally misleading and pig ignorant statements? I’m sure someone is filing a FOIA request to find out.

Mr. Balls said that he thought it crucial that the Review found the appropriate balance between two important principles. That means that when the report was commissioned the brief was to find a balance, i.e. Mr. Balls had made his mind up, and made an order for a report that would find a balance; the status quo was off the cards from the beginning. To say that parents have the right to say HOW their children are educated but to say that they must meet minimum requirements of THE STATE is a contradiction on its face. As for the potential of any human, this is not for the state to determine, measure or legislate in a free country. All men in a free country are at liberty to find their own way. This is a basic principle that is non negotiable.

Home Education is not a part of the State system of education, and so to say that it is a “well established and important part of our education system” is simply rubbish. Many Home Educators do so explicitly to remove themselves from the pernicious influence of Mr. Balls and his legion of aparatchicks.

Mr Balls says that “the Review recommended that the home education framework should be strengthened significantly”. There is no ‘Home Education Framework’ and there is no need for one, just as there is no need for a ‘Home Diet Framework’. Mr. Balls and his merry band of interlopers could be making better use of the little time they have left in office to try and ameliorate the utter disaster that is the state school system, much of it, like the examinations, destroyed by the hand of Balls himself.

Mr. Balls says that they are going to “act to address the small but worrying minority of cases where home educated children have suffered harm”. This is nonsense. As we have seen thanks to AHED, home educators are statistically less likely to fall under the care of Local Authorities than children who are at school; the Badman review misreported the statistics on this, causing a false impression to be given that Home Educated children are at greater risk, when the exact opposite is true. If we take Mr. Balls at his word and that he is doing this for the safety of children in the UK, then in the light of the TRUE statistics, every family in Britain, other than Home Educators should come under this home visit and child interrogation regime since Home Educators are less at risk statistically.

Mr. Balls goes on to say that the Review stressed the importance of ensuring that all children receive the kind of high quality education they need to succeed. This means interfering in what Home Educators teach and the way they teach it. This is the exact opposite of “giving parents the right to decide how and where their children should be educated” which of course, is not a right that Mr. Balls owns that he can give to anyone. Once again, a contradictory statement from this utter monster.

Note how Mr. Balls leaves out the most offensive parts of the review that would turn any normal human being’s blood cold. He left out the deeply suspicious part about social workers taking children away from their parents for ‘private interviews’ during forced home inspections for example. By not mentioning this unsavory and disturbing aspect, he is whitewashing the report.

Mr. Balls knows that this report is not fair and balanced. It was commissioned to produce a result, and the facts in it were ‘sexed up’ in the way that Neu Liebour are expert at. The assertion that they are interested in keeping Home Educated children safe is demonstrably false, since Home Education has nothing whatsoever to do with child safety, any more than summer holidays are a child safety issue.

This report will not strengthen the quality of the education they receive; it will destroy Home Education, burden parents, burden the overburdened Local Authorities and cause people to either leave the country or openly defy any new legislation.

Mr. Balls and his gaggle of clowns cannot run the schools they are already in charge of. The catalogue of failures they have produced are now legendary. That he has the gall, the temerity to believe that he can improve Home Education, which consistently outperforms state provision is beyond laughable. This is a textbook case of a delusional man.

This report does not respect a parent’s right to chose to home educate, in fact, it spits on the rights of parents, and insults them by conflating what they do with child safety issues. It is a disgusting, outrageous smear and Home Educators are not sitting quietly taking it, as we have all seen. The outcome of this review is bad news, has caused and will cause disruption and suffering and the people who are involved in it should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

But now what is this constituent going to do? She has written to her MP complaining about the review, which we all know is a riddled with holes as spoiled Emmental, and Mr. Balls has written back to say, “Ha Ha! we are going to eat you alive and your children no matter what you say!”

Who is she going to turn to? What is there left for her to do?

She is going to simply REFUSE TO COMPLY, which is her absolute right. These people cooked up a pack of untrue garbage to push their sick, perverted, personal agenda, and no MP is willing to say, “wait a minute, this is completely insane”. Even if they DO say that, all Mr. Balls has to do is arrange a three line whip in the House of Commons and then his dastardly legislation will be forced in. It will not matter that the report was false, or that there is no need for new legislation… right and wrong do not matter.

This person, this poor chicken, this constituent, will be morally outraged. She will, like the 90% of Home Educating South African parents who refuse to register with the state, simply disobey.

They barely have enough staff to deal with all the things they need to deal with now. With the deep budget cuts now an absolute certainty, and the coming economic collapse on the near horizon (yes, this is just the beginning of the crash the worst is yet to come) its a pretty safe bet that anyone who wants to Home Educate freely will be able to do so, no matter what Mr. Balls and his hunt dodging, fur bearing, fang toothed colleagues manage to pass. One way or another, Home Educators will be able to maintain their rights, and educate without interference from beasts.

And THAT is the truth.

FURTHERMORE

It seems Mr. Balls has been using this text as a stock reply to whoever asks him about this shabby shameful report. Renegade Parent destroys the same text found in a different place!

The nail that sticks out is hammered down is a Japanese saying, encapsulating their societies attitude to individuality, outsiders, weirdos, eccentrics and anyone who does not fit in:

Scary stuff ay?

While we are at it, take a look at this:

I recently met “Maria,” a college-age Brazilian of Japanese descent. She and her younger sister, “Nicola,” grew up as children of Brazilian laborers in Shizuoka Prefecture. With factories producing machinery, chemicals, tea, etc., their region contains about a third of Shizuoka Prefecture’s nearly 100,000 NJ residents.

They went to Japanese primary schools without incident.

In high school, however, Nicola ran afoul of school rules.

Nicola has wavy brown hair, unlike Maria’s straight black. So Nicola got snagged by the school’s “hair police.”

“Every week teachers would check if Nicola was dyeing her hair brown,” explained Maria. “Even though she said this is her natural color, she was instructed to straighten and dye it black.

“She did so once a week. But the ordeal traumatized her. She still has a complex about her appearance.”

Even after leaving the school, Nicola’s hair is still damaged.

Her health may also have suffered. Google “hair coloring” and “organ damage” and see what reputable sources, such as the American Journal of Epidemiology and the National Institutes of Health, have to say about side effects: lymphatic cancer, cataracts, toxins, burns from ammonium persulfate

[…]

http://www.debito.org/japantimes071707.html

More here. Absolutely unbelievable. To many people, these acts seem backwards, brutish, brainless, pointless and terrible; remember however, what happens in Japan, stays in Japan. What they do in their own country is their own business. If you do not like what they do, do not go and live there. They have been like that for a very long time, and even if they had not been like that, if you do not want THEM to come to your house and tell you what to do, you had better not go to THEIR houses and tell THEM how to live.

Before anyone says the same about Britain and its proposed changes to Home Education, i.e. if you don’t like it, LEAVE, you must realize that Home Education has been well established in the UK for generations, and that what is being planned is a complete change of the rules after the game has started. If someone came to live here thirty years ago because Britain was one sort of place, and invited them on that basis, it is totally wrong to ‘bait and switch’ and then change everything to garbage.

There is a meme circulating around the educationalist circles, ‘0-6’, ‘0-5’ ‘0-n’. These educational talibanistas are obviously all reading the same journal. Take a look at these two pieces, one from Japan and the other from India. The emphasis is mine:

Escalating Home Visits by Authorities in Japan and elsewhere

Kyoko Aizawa of Otherwise Japan (a homeschool support organization) sent out word of a new law that is effective as of July 1.   Kyoko states this new law authorizes arbitrary governmental visits of any child’s home. 

Wendy Priesnitz of Natural Life Magazine also pointed out The Long Arm of the Law in Japan – July 12, 2009

I’ve just received an email from my long-time contact in Japan, Kyoko Aizawa (Otherwise Japan) about a change in the law about homeschooling in Japan. Until now, the law has been rather murky there, with a few (estimated at under 1,000) families labeled as “school refusers.” Now, it seems, the government is cracking down with a new law that passed on July 1 governing people ages zero to forty, some of whom could be willfully unemployed or otherwise not comfortable functioning in society…or who choose to learn at home. Kyoko worries it is “really dangerous” because it gives the police the power, among other things, to enter people’s homes and force children under the age of 15 who don’t go to school either “into school or a mental hospital to be medicated.” This is, says Kyoko, “forcing parents to raise children according to the government’s childrearing practices…and endangers basic parental rights to education children according to their convictions.” The stated aim of the new law is “to support people who have problems living as normal members of society.” But the definition of “support” is one I’d have to disagree with and, in fact, this law appears to violate human rights in some serious ways.

Zero to five is a popular catch phrase in the United States now.   It describes a plan to get children “school ready”, from the time they are first born until they walk in the kindergarten door.  That oversight (including home visits) is suggested far and wide, from the right heading over to the left. Universal screening for mental health is often part of that package.

Kyoko has legitimate concerns in Japan and there are alarming comparisons in the United States.

From the Home Education Magazine 1998 archives about the ramifications of “school refusal”:

In Japan, Alternative Ed Linked To Truants And Dropouts- –Linda Dobson

“Can Truants, Dropouts Find an Alternate Road to Education?” Mick Corliss, The Japan Times, January 4, 1998, pp. 1 & 2

In this one of an eight-part series of articles for this English language newspaper, reporter Mick Corliss takes a look at alternatives to state education in Japan. These alternatives appear not to be successful, viable family options, but options for kids who are truant or drop-outs, “the overlooked casualties of the rigid educational system.” “More than 77,000 students missed more than 50 days of school in 1996 for the expressed reason that they ‘hate school,’” states Corliss, admitting this is merely an official number, and when you add in those “who missed more than 30 days for other reasons, such as illness…the total exceeds 180,000.” Corliss notes a gradual change in society’s attitude toward these students; instead of problem youth they are “labeled” nonattendance students. Even the Education Ministry has been forced to acknowledge the country has a problem and accepts that “school refusal” can happen to any child and is not “akin to a sickness requiring treatment.”

Apparently the situation has not improved, as home education is still not legal in Japan.  The solutions for these problems don’t seem to be serving the children’s educational needs.  From Linda Dobson’s 1998 article:

Kyoko Aizawa, who runs the homeschool support organization Otherwise Japan and who attended the GWS conference last August, points out that Japan needs alternatives that are “not under government control.”

Genji Tsuda is an attorney who specializes in child welfare law.

“Ever since the Meiji Era,” says Tsuda, “Japan’s educational system has been designed to strengthen the nation-state. The emphasis has been on producing people who can help Japan become a great power…The inertia of the status quo has preserved this antiquated system, embedding it deeply in the social psyche.” I’d say Tsuda has put his finger on the pulse of what is wrong not only in Japan, but in America and elsewhere.

[…]

Home Ed Mag

And from the Times of India:

Children in the age group 0-6 years not covered

The Supreme Court’s historic Unnikrishnan judgment in 1993, gave all children up to 14 years of age a Fundamental Right to Education. The court contended that the Fundamental Right to Life (Article 21) of the Constitution should be read in ‘harmonious construction’ with the Directive in Article 45 to provide free and compulsory education to children of 0-14 years, including those below six years of age. However, the 86 th Constitutional Amendment Act, Article 21A, limited the fundamental right to education to 6-14 years and this Act will further this huge mistake by not recognising the importance of the early years. This is in contradiction to India’s own commitment at the Jomtien Conference (1990), acknowledging expansion of early childhood care and development activities as an integral part of the ‘Education for All’ objectives. Globally, recognition exists that the early years are the most critical years for lifelong development. This recognition comes from various quarters, including evidence from brain research that ‘…neurological and biological pathways that affect health, learning and behaviour throughout life, are set in the early years…’ (Mustard, 2007). Research has noted that neglect during the early years can often result in irreversible reduction in the full development of the brain’s potential. On the other hand, research the world over has underlined the short and long term benefits of good quality early childhood care and development programming especially in contexts of deprivation, leading to improvement in children’s health, cognitive ability and performance at school.

How can a Bill be enacted six decades after Independence and make this major error? India cannot afford to deprive its youngest 16-crore population of a right to nutrition, health and early childhood education as enshrined in the Convention of the Rights of Children, to which India is a signatory. By not including 0-6 years in the Bill, the country is also furthering gender discrimination, since it is always the girl who is left to take care of the younger siblings, thus, depriving her of her right to education.

[…]

Times of India

And there you have it. Renegade Parent wrote about how, in a near future Britain should ContactPoint be rolled out refusal to accept the ‘offer’ of a nursery place might land you with an accusation of being a bad parent; its clear that there is a move, internationally, to remove parents from the equation of child-rearing from ‘year zero’, and that this agenda is being deliberately and maliciously orchestrated.

We have to call it what it is, Fascism, in order to begin to put a stop to it.

We read from the HSLDA, that Sweden is trying to outlaw Home Education:

Signatures Needed to Oppose Restrictive Homeschool Legislation

Homeschooling freedom in Europe is under attack. England, Belgium, France, and Sweden are all faced with policies and/or legislation imposing severe restrictions on parents’ right to homeschool.

On June 15, 2009, the Swedish government released its draft for a new school law, which, if passed, would impose severe restrictions on parents wishing to homeschool their children.

Citing the European Convention on Human Rights, the law only allows parents to homeschool if the following three conditions are met:

1. The home education program is considered to be a fully satisfactory alternative to the education otherwise available to the child according to what is prescribed in the law;
2. Oversight of the home education program by the authorities is provided; and
3. Extraordinary circumstances exist.

According to the proposed law, permission to homeschool can only be given for up to one year at a time, and permission will be immediately withdrawn if it can be assumed that the prerequisites (listed above) no longer exist.

Even more disturbing is the government’s written explanation of the legislation, which argues that because a child’s education should be “comprehensive and objective and thereby designed so that all pupils can participate, regardless of what religious or philosophical reasons the pupil or his or her care-takers may have … there is no need for the law to offer the possibility of homeschooling because of religious or philosophical reasons in the family.”

Thus, if this law passes, parents would not be able to homeschool because of their religious or philosophical beliefs!

The Swedish government is accepting comments about the law through October 1, 2009, when the consideration period closes. The final law will be presented to Parliament during the spring of 2010 and if passed, will take effect in 2011.

The Swedish Association for Home Education has officially been asked to provide input to the government—a small victory—but they are asking for our help.

Swedish homeschoolers need international support to show that Sweden, as a member of the international democratic community, cannot take such a position. As Sweden is often seen as the great social utopia of the world, it is important for Swedish homeschoolers to win this battle. Please consider helping by signing a petition protesting the law.

[…]

http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Sweden/200907210.asp

Its the same sort of nonsense we have seen from other discredited countries. They do not want people to think in any way other than what is prescribed by them; what is worse, in their rather chilling ‘explanation’, they claim that their philosophy is perfect, and therefore there is no need for anyone to seek anything outside of what they offer. That sounds like textbook totalitarianism to me. And just what the HELL are ‘extraordinary circumstances’?

Then, in the Washington Post:

South Africa has long fascinated me. In the 1990s, this country courageously and voluntarily discarded the racially based political structure of apartheid and created a new, universal democracy that included all the nation’s peoples. To heal the many injustices and injuries, they then created a truth and reconciliation process that stands as a model to the world.

The story of how the freedom to home-school was established in that country is not well known. Leendert Van Oostrom said he and his wife decided to home-school in the waning years of the old system, “when it was strictly verboten, and home-schoolers were prosecuted and stuck in jail.”

The former compulsory education law (for white, mixed-race and Asian children — but not black children) became unconstitutional in 1994, but it wasn’t until a universal compulsory education law was proposed in 1996 that Mr. Van Oostrom and other home-schoolers could lobby parliament to recognize home-schooling as an issue of human rights, establishing home education as a legal option in the nation.

Despite this, provincial governments have placed numerous unconstitutional requirements on families who wish to register as home educators, so “some 90 percent of home-schoolers do not register because of these unlawful preconditions,” explained Mr. Van Oostrom in a recent interview.

In 1998, inspired by the Home School Legal Defense Association in the U.S., Mr. Van Oostrom created the Pestalozzi Trust, (named after Johann Pestalozzi, an 18th-century Swiss educational pioneer) to promote parents’ rights to educate at home and to defend against incursions on those rights.

“I hope that one day we shall be able to show that home-schooling is indeed, as Pestalozzi claimed, a powerful method of developing entire communities among disadvantaged people. I think South Africa has the kind of population mix where that can be done,” Mr. Van Oostrom explained. “Pestalozzi’s idea is that home-schooling uplifts the mother, which uplifts the family, which uplifts the community.”

The goal of “each one, teach one,” he contends, is necessary, in which every person in a society is sharing knowledge, regardless of whether they are trained as professional educators.

While societal change may be a viable long-term goal, most South African home-schoolers just want a good education for their children.

“Esther De Waal found in her doctoral research in 2000 that the single most important reason [South Africans chose to home-school] was to obtain better education than is available in schools. Second was to educate children in an environment compatible with the family religion or philosophy. Third was to protect children from violence and a culture of drugs, sex and obscenity,” Mr. Van Oostrom reported.

[…]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/26/home-schooling-making-progress-south-africa/

So, now we have TWO evil governments that banned Home Schooling, both of them overtly fascist. Birds of a feather, flock together.

I have a simple answer to any Swede that wants to challenge this absurd, inhuman and rather disturbing proposition.

What the Swedish legislators have to answer, announce and confirm, openly, is the following; are they in favor of the law Hitler passed outlawing Home Education and will they pass their own law so that they are in line with the Nazi philosophy? Are they in favor of passing a Swedish law against Home Education so that their government is on a par with the racist Apartheid regime?

They must answer these questions, because that is exactly what they are doing with this law.

They cannot have it both ways. They can either say that, “Hitler was right about banning Home Education, and we are following his lead; in addition Apartheid was right, and we are following their lead in banning Home Education.”

OR

They can say “Sweden will not emulate two of the most monstrous governments the world has ever seen. The Swedish have rights, and we respect and defend them as is our sacred duty.”

This is an unwarranted, unprovoked and purely evil attack on Swedish families. Its the sort of attack free people living in a free country should never expect or have to put up with. Being secure in your freedom, not having to worry about some petty fascist destroying your life every time the legislature sits is a part of being free – freedom from harassment you could call it.

So much for their ‘Utopia‘ its a COMPLETE SHAM.

Take a look at this, “Godfrey on Home Education”:

“An attack on home educators is?an attack on all our Liberties. They must be defended from an all powerful state.”

“What is it that they are so afraid of?” asks Godfrey Bloom, UKIP MEP.

If you read BLOGDIAL, you already know what it is they are afraid of:

[…]

What is worse, is that where there are data on how Home Education performs, the pupils that are measured outperform the state fodder in every way. The top universities are bending over backwards to recruit these exceptional students, taking places away from the state educated ‘customers’. Once they see this trend increasing, the immediate reaction of the state is to imagine a worst case scenario, where there are hundreds of thousands of Home Educated children in the country that will eventually emerge as a superclass that will dominate everyone like the old public school boys did (and still do).

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1818

They are terrified that a superclass of people are being created, that will number over 100,000 in a very short number of years. These people will be independent thinkers, who have been properly trained in ways that produce (and that historically have produced) the greatest minds. They will be capable, unflappable, unprogrammable, steadfast, quick witted and very very powerful.

100,000 people is an army. The Home Educated army of the future will be, at the very least, able to totally dominate society. They will ascend to all the highest positions in industry, finance and politics, completely shutting out everyone else. And by the way, everyone else will be so dumbed down and brainwashed that it will be easy for even the weakest Home Educated child to shine like Einstein in comparison.

That is a real and present danger to the people whose aim it is to create a docile, pliable and unthinking population.

As it is today, they have partially succeeded. There are very few people in the western world coming out of the state school system who understand the scientific method. This is why it has been so easy to sell the Global Warming Hoax to the masses; and of course the most dangerous people, legislators, are unable to tell the difference between science and junk science. Had the legislatures of the west been filled with Home Educated people, Cap and Trade (for example) would never have been brought to the legislature for consideration.

Which brings us back to the Badman report. AHEd have released a briefing paper in response to the Elective Home Education Review Report and Recommendations. It is a great piece of work, and it calls a spade a spade:

The freedoms threatened by these proposals are freedoms necessary to every family and not just home educators. To put it simply, the party currently in power does not trust parents to raise their children and wish instead to control all aspects of our lives to ensure they are in line with a centralised agenda.

Anyone who thinks that undermining the homes and families of children in this way will not destabilise children and deprive them of a sense of security is wrong.

Anyone who thinks that forcing children to exhibit to strangers their educational attainment and progress will not disrupt and undermine their education is wrong.

Anyone who thinks that obliging families to undergo forced access to their home and forcing children to allow stranger access to their person separated from parents, will not make children confused and vulnerable to illicit approaches by other adults is wrong. It is child abuse.

The officials who agree to carry out such state sponsored grooming of school age children may do so in a gentle voice and with a big smile on their faces, but that will not change the nature of what they are doing. It is child abuse.

The purpose of forced registration, home visit inspections and compulsory interview of children separated by law from parents is control. For what?

[…]

http://ahed.pbworks.com/BriefingPaperHEReview

AHEd have hit the nail on the head, and their conclusion is completely correct. What the report’s proposals are advocating is child abuse nothing more, and nothing less.

Like the title of this post says, this is deeply, deeply sinister.

Alex Jones has been investigating this for over fourteen years.

A broad spectrum of opinion on this matter has been delivered in many places, from people in all walks of life. These proposals are most definitely WRONG, and they should be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. It is abundantly clear that there are enough safeguards and checks in place and that the law is already adequate.

If these proposals are not dropped, then harm will come to families and children in this country. Harm is the only thing that can come out of this unless the report fails and no changes are made and the status quo is solidified by virtue of the report being utterly condemned.

Today, we read three blog posts that describe perfectly 'the problem with Britain'. There are people in this country who can only be described as a disease; they are the cancer that is killing Britain.

The first example of this human cancer is the utterly loathsome Beatrix Campbell:

Vetting: it should happen to an author

Philip Pullman and fellow writers are up in arms about a new child protection scheme for school visitors. What's their problem?

Philip Pullman is fizzing… dark antibodies are fighting his freedom of speech. He is one of a clutch of esteemed children's writers and illustrators protesting against a vetting scheme that would extend to writers what already applies to anyone working with children in schools: a vetting scheme.

They protest that they're never "alone with children", so why should they be vetted. They've been going into schools for years, they say, so why now? Pullman, in particular, feels that vetting is "demeaning and insulting", another index of "corrosive and poisonous" state intervention.

What on earth is their problem?

Any writer-in-residence working with young people in schools, prisons and care facilities is vetted – I have been, several times – whether or not they work with crowds, groups or individuals.

We should be glad to do it if it confirms childrens' rights to safe access to adults. The gesture – so slight, after all – should signal to young people that their school thinks their bodily integrity matters; and that it matters more than a minor interruption of adults' privacy.

This institutional promise should exact no less commitment from us than our routine surrenders to scrutiny in the name of public safety. Why are these writers threatening to withdraw from schools and children when, presumably, they submit to the plethora of surveillance systems that are proliferating across public space?

Whether we agree with passports, identity cards, frontiers or road safety, we generally assent to their impact on our individuals freedoms. Liberty, the civil liberties and human rights guardian, was taken by surprise when it conducted a survey of public attitudes to CCTV in the streets – most people approved.

We give ourselves up to body checks when we travel by Eurostar and when we take a plane. Do these same authors refuse to travel other than by their own bicycles or cars on the grounds that such searches of our property and our persons imply a "demeaning" suspicion that we're all terrorists?

Custom officers now check your eyes when you cross our national frontiers. Do the writers boycott foreign travel?

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/16/children-childprotection

This caricature of a human woman… oh dear me.

We have been over this for almost a decade, so there is no need to refute her ignorant garbage line for line. If you read BLOGDIAL, you will be as ready to puke over your keyboard as any person with a single working brain cell is.

I will say this however… this monsters argument is completely destroyed by recent examples in the news about nursery perverts who were ALL CRB CHECKED. That jackass, Beatrix Campbell, couldn't think her way our of a wet paper bag.

Now for the second example. It is from a blogger whose piece was dropped in by a lurker:

False Positives and the Database State
There is, in the UK (as elsewhere) a prevailing climate of paranoia about adults interacting with children.

In an attempt to be seen to Do Something, in the wake of a particularly gruesome multiple murder, the British government established a new agency, the Independent Safeguarding Authority, "to help prevent unsuitable people from working with children and vulnerable adults." Working with the Criminal Records Bureau, the ISA "will assess every person who wants to work or volunteer with vulnerable people. Potential employees and volunteers will need to apply to register with the ISA." For a fee of £64 you apply to the ISA for a background check. They then certify that you're not an evil paedophile and a threat to society, and issue you with a piece of paper that says you're allowed to interact with children in a specific role. Want multiple roles — driving kids to school in your taxi, and teaching them karate in the evening? — get multiple certificates.

Authors need to get a certificate before they can visit schools to deliver readings. MPs need a background check, it seems, before they can visit schools. (Usually the employer is responsible for getting the certificate; hilarity ensues when it transpires that MPs aren't actually employed by Parliament …)

As you can imagine, the authors are upset. As Philip Pullman puts it, "It seems to be fuelled by the same combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation," the author of the bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy said today. "When you go into a school as an author or an illustrator you talk to a class at a time or else to the whole school. How on earth — how on earth — how in the world is anybody going to rape or assault a child in those circumstances? It's preposterous."

He's completely right, in my opinion. But the situation is worse than he imagines. I'm not going to apply for a CRB check — ever. And not because I'm a criminal. (My sum total of negative interaction with the law over the past 44 years has amounted to two speeding tickets, most recently six years ago.)

Nor am I outraged at the privacy thing. (I'm used to the idea that we live in a panopticon.)

What I'm worried about is the problem of false positives.

Even the simplest of databases have been found to contain error rates of 10%. (The HMRC database in this study contains merely first, second and surname, title, sex, data of birth, address and National Insurance number — nevertheless 10% of the records contain errors.) Other agencies are even more prone to mistakes. For example: my wife recently discovered that our GP's medical records showed her as having been born outside the UK rather than in an NHS hospital in Manchester. We don't know why that error's in the system, and we've got the birth certificate and witnesses to prove that it is an error, but imagine the fun that might ensue if the control freaks in Whitehall decided to enforce record sharing between the NHS and the Immigration Agency …! (Hopefully they're not that stupid, but who can tell?)

The point is, if 10% of government database records contain an error, than the probability of a sweep of databases coming up with an error rises as you consult more sources. And there are a whole bundle of wonderful ways for errors to show up. If your name and date of birth are the same as someone with heavy criminal record, a CRB check could label you as a bad guy. If your social security number is one digit transposition away from $BAD_GUY, see above. If the previous owner of your house was a child abuser, see above. If your street address is one letter/digit away from a street address occupied by a criminal and some bored clerk mis-typed it, you can end up being conflated with somebody else. And the more sources the CRB checks, the higher the probability of a false positive result — that is, of them obtaining a positive result (subject is a criminal) when in fact the subject is a negative.

[…]

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/false_positives.html

Did you catch that?

“Nor am I outraged at the privacy thing. (I'm used to the idea that we live in a panopticon.)”

Finally, for the examples, (and this one can be compared to a melanoma spot on an otherwise healthy body, whereas Beatrix 'The Beast' Campbell is final stage Leukemia and Charlie is a testicular lump) here is a final specimen:

Arse.

This guy is only a melanoma spot (treatable with simple excision) because he is calling himself a Libertarian and seems to have a little sense, even though he has not worked it all out yet… still he has been touched by THE CANCER THAT IS KILLING BRITAIN.

My friends, this is the cancer, this is the creeping disease, the battery chicken, inured to slavery attitude that is literally KILLING Britain.

These diseased people and their 'thinking' are the problem.

It would be better for us all if they did not exist; in fact, they are far more dangerous than the statistically insignificant number of perverts out there or the even more rare serial killer.

The harm that these cancer spreaders do affects millions of people; and they spread the disease merely by existing. They literally can kill an entire country and way of life by just being. They are the physical embodiment of, and the vector of and the multiplier of cancer, of the debilitating, destroying and horrible disease that before our very eyes, has turned Britain into a dystopia.

Thankfully, there is a fool proof form of radiotherapy. Did I say, 'fool proof'? I'm sorry, it's not fool proof… there are too many fools following too many rules… and they are The Cancer That is Killing Britain®

No, this radiotherapy is fail proof.

Philip Johnson writes in the Telegraph about ‘the database state’ and how evil it is. It feels like he has had a whiff of coffee and is waking up. What he REALLY needs are some smelling salts:

Beware Labour’s quest for a database state

There’s no reason why the Government should know so much about us, argues Philip Johnston.

By Philip Johnston

Here is a good idea. Instead of handing over personal information to the state, why don’t we keep it and control it ourselves?

Indeed. That is a really good idea. I have another one. Why not, instead of handing over all your money to the state, why dont you keep it and control it yourself Philip? If you do that, then they would not have the means to build the database state that you are so rightly frightened of.

Simple, eh? For a start, it means the state would not be able to get its hands on these data, which most of us would consider a good thing, not least when they get lost. It would also be significantly cheaper than the industrial quarrying of private information to be held on vast central government databases, which is estimated to cost a mind-boggling £16.5 billion a year, a lot of it spent on repairing IT projects that have failed to work properly.

Exactly. And the cost of keeping this data would be spread to each and every person. They would keep what they want, store it how they want (on hardware or on paper or in the ‘white meat’ between their ears), and share it with whom they like on whatever terms they care to agree with.

Anyone who has the temerity to suggest that the database society may have a flaw or two is often accused of neo-Luddism, usually by those who have a vested interest in its expansion. No one is suggesting that we should not exploit the extraordinary benefits of storing data.

I have to say, in the eight years of BLOGDIAL I have NEVER heard people who are against ID Cards or invasive databases being called ‘luddites’. And once again, who is the ‘we’ in this section? Who is it that decides what is or is not a benefit? This is central to the problem; what is the proper role of government.

But there is a similarity here with those who raged against the machines in early 19th-century Yorkshire – a feeling of powerlessness, an inability to control something that can have an enormous influence on our lives.

No, its is not that at all.

The luddites did not understand how business and innovation work. They (and you) would have been well advised to read ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen‘.

This is one of the great subjects of our times because it is the same one that has exercised the minds of political philosophers since Plato: to what extent should the state be able to control the individual?

Ummm, you mean should there be a state at all? Its like asking, “should people be robbed every other day of the week starting Mondays or Tuesdays?”

Doesn’t work does it?

In this age-old battle, one thing is clear – information is power, and the state is now in a better position than at any time in history to possess it and access it easily. It does so, it says, for our own good.

Information is not power. Cooperation transferees the illusion of power. Information by itself is not enough to compel obedience. The fall of East Germany and the Soviet Unions are proof of that. Those were two societies with deeply invasive and all pervasive surveillance systems that could not withstand the pressures that caused them to collapse.

Under Labour, a programme, known as Transformational Government, was established a few years ago to develop the database society and to obtain what the policy papers call “a single source of truth” about the citizen, based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights. Why should the state want to have “a single source of truth” about us?

Links or it didn’t happen.

In a lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, in London this Wednesday, Damian Green, the Tory frontbencher, will tackle this question head on; and it is heartening to see that the Tories, in opposition at least, have understood the dangers here. Government, says Mr Green, can do harm even when it is trying to do good,

Some people say that government can only do harm.

though I am by no means convinced that it really is seeking “to do good”. All states collect information on their citizens.

‘Their’ is used here in the form that suggests that people are the property of the state. This reflexive use of language to describe people as the property of government is everywhere. It is a testament to the effectiveness of brainwashing over decades. Free people are not the property of anyone. Free countries do not have citizens; in a free country, the citizens have a free country, the citizens own the government… etc etc.

However, the amount they are able to collect depends upon the technology, which is clearly available nowadays, and the constraints placed upon its capture by the legislature. Such constraints are remarkably few in the UK compared to other democracies. How have we gone so quickly from being the country you would most expect to resist these tendencies to the one that adopted them so meekly?

It is simple. The abuse of language. Fascism is renamed ‘Transformational Government’. Journalists talk of ‘a country’s citizens’ as if people are the property of the state. They talk of ‘the social contract’ which is a fantasy. They refuse to address the true nature of anything, especially money, self ownership, ownership of property. To sum up, they absolutely refuse to be serious and question the core assumptions of their lives and ideas.

Mr Green has identified 28 state databases on which personal information is kept, from the obviously necessary, such as the PAYE collection system

And here is a perficio exempoator of what I just described above. Philip Johnston says it is ‘obviously necessary’ that the PAYE system collection should exist.

to some that are impossible to justify, like ContactPoint, which will hold the details of everyone under the age of 18 in England.

And again. This description of ContactPoint is very poor. ContactPoint is the compulsory database of all eleven million children in the UK, that will be accessible by over one million government workers from council workers on up. You see? by describing ContactPoint as something that ‘will hold the details of everyone under the age of 18’ you deny access to the true nature of the beast, thus preventing people from the vital starting point that will allow them to come to the correct conclusion; that ContactPoint is one of the most evil things ever created by a British Government.

The Conservatives have promised to scrap or modify many of these if they win power; but they might find in office that the temptation to hang on to the data is too tempting.

True. Nevertheless, whatever government is in place, none of these databases mean anything in the absence of cooperation. This is what Johnston misses entirely. He means well though…

What is needed is a complete reversal of the assumption that our personal data is the state’s to possess.

True.

Why should it?

It should not. And it should not do many of the other things that it does that you do not yet accept that it should not do.

This is the question that should be answered by the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” brigade. It is not as if letting the Government handle all of this information is secure, cheap or efficient. More importantly, it is inimical to any notion of individual freedom that a central bureaucracy should possess so much personal information about us; and, no, giving private data to the state, which has the power to misuse it to our considerable disadvantage, is not the same as having a Tesco Clubcard.

The smell of coffee… finally.

Mr Green puts forward a number of proposals for reform, including US-style security-freeze laws, which allow people to lock access to their data;

The only word that should be applied here is DELETE. No one should have data about them stored without their permission. PERIOD. Just as you should not be compelled to be a party to a contract without your consent, you should not have data stored about you that you do not consent to have stored, or even worse, shared.

an “open source” system which does not dictate the technology adopted by users from the centre;

Nice try, but open source is not the problem here. To collect and store or not to collect and store is what we are discussing. The operating systems and file formats can be discussed later.

and a right to see who has accessed personal information, the so-called audit trails.

Once again, having the ‘right’ (another misuse of English by the way) to see who has violated you and when is not the issue; that you should not be subjected to violation at all is the entire point.

Health records, for instance, would be better kept by GPs and by us as individuals.

True. And despite what Stephen Glover says about Google storing your health records, they would in fact, be a perfect solution.

Google could store your health records, uploaded by you under a pseudonym known only to you and your doctor. Google would know that your pseudonym was a diabetic for example. They would display ads for diabetic related goods and services right in your account, without knowing who you are. You get highly efficient, completely private, secure hosting of your medical records, that you can ‘take with you’ wherever you go, advertisers get highly targeted adverts to precisely the people who need to hear from them… and you have to pay NOTHING for the service.

Sadly, journalists are for the most part computer illiterates. And Stephen Glover really is like the Luddites Philip Johnston describes above in this particular instance; Glover cannot see how Google storing his health records could possibly be a good thing, because he does not understand how Google works, how anonymity works, how the internets work, and he cannot imagine several steps down the line in a hypothetical scenario thanks to this missing information.

Oh yes, and I forgot; with Google, you would be able to delete your medical records with the press of a button and would be able to control with absolute precision, who can and cannot access your medical records.

There are personalised electronic card systems available which can hold our medical details without them being available to government agencies, yet which are accessible by hospitals when we need them to be. This would eliminate the need for the NHS database and be practically cost-free. Instead, we are spending upwards of £12 billion on a centralised data system that hardly anyone wants.

There you go again with the ‘we’.

And BLOGDIAL has been talking about there being no need for centralized databases for some time now.

There is now an assumption that the state should know everything about us and be able easily to access that information.

And this assumption, like all the others, needs to be countered actively. You go second.

This is justified as being good for us because it facilitates the provision of services that may be to our advantage,

It is not good for ‘us’ it is only good for THEM, and it is only to THEIR advantage.

and on the grounds that anyone who is unhappy with the prospect must be concealing something nefarious. It is time we took back control over our own lives.

[…]

Telegraph

True. Next time, watch the pronouns.

Michael Moore Gets It Wrong
Michael Moore has been working on another documentary. This time, he’s taking on capitalism:

“The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth. They wanted more — a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money.”

How ridiculous is that? The wealthy, and everyone else, almost always decide that they don’t have enough wealth. People ask their bosses for raises. We invest in stocks hoping for bigger returns than Treasury Bonds bring. “Greed” is a constant. The beauty of free markets, when government doesn’t meddle in them, is that they turn this greed into a phenomenal force for good. The way to win big money is to serve your customers well. Profit-seeking entrepreneurs have given us better products, shorter work days, extended lives, and more opportunities to write the script of our own life.

On Thursday, Moore announced the title of the movie: Capitalism: A Love Story.

It’s a title I might have picked to make a point opposite of what I assume Moore has in mind.

Moore also fails to understand is that it was not “capitalism” run amok that caused today’s financial problems. In reality, it was a combination of ill-conceived government policies and an overzealous Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates to fuel a bubble in the housing market. Then it was government that took money from taxpayers and forced banks to accept it.

Moore ought to understand that, because he makes a good point when he says his movie will be about “the biggest robbery in the history of this country – the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions.”

That is indeed robbery. It sure doesn’t sound like capitalism.

[…]

http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/michael-moore-gets-it-wrong.html

Let us go further with this.

Michael Moore believes that people have the right to make the movies that they want with their own money, and that they also have the right to distribute them, and that people have the right to watch whatever movies they like, and to pay a price that they are willing to pay to see movies in theaters and buy DVDs of them.

This belief has made him more than one hundred million dollars.

Like all delusional people, he believes, for example, that his morality applies to everyone but him. Its OK for him to make $100,000,000 dollars out of his films, but when someone else makes money from what they do then that is ‘greed’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘fleecing the American people out of their hard-earned money’.

This smells like more than simple hypocrisy; I am guessing that it is something very different, and psychological in nature. This man almost certainly has an autistic spectrum inability to empathize with other people. Other people are not real; only MICHAEL is real, and only MICHAEL is good. When MICHAEL makes a hundred million dollars, its OK because “its ME”, “I am good. I am not a greedy person”. When I sell movie tickets, I am not fleecing the American people out of their hard-earned money, I am ‘just selling tickets’. Selling tickets and making a profit on my movies is not ‘capitalism’ its FAIR…. BECAUSE ITS ME, because I am GOOD and not EVIL and GREEDY like those capitalists.

Look at the last part of this episode of 20/20. Private health care, for profit is EVIL… but if it is ME (MICHAEL) who needs am urgent visit to a private fat farm (health clinic), then it is not evil… BECAUSE ITS ME!

Michael Moore is a capitalist. He uses capital (either his or someone else’s) to make movies, speculating that people will want to buy tickets to see his work in cinemas and buy DVDs of them. If no one watches his film, then he loses his money, his capital investment, and no one is there to foot the bill but him. If many people watch them, then he alone (and his distributors) make a fortune as the same work is played over and over and people pay tickets to see it and buy copies of it reproduced hundreds of thousands of times on DVD.

Michael Moore’s right to make movies and sell them is no different to the right of a farmer to sell his fruit, or a butcher to sell his meat, or of a car manufacturer to sell his car, or a watch maker to sell watches or any manufacturer of goods to sell their goods.

He cannot have it both ways; he cannot say that it is good for him to make a vast fortune out of manufacturing films, and that it is bad for others to interact with people freely with each other.

What these sorts of people never like to look at are difficult subjects like the actual nature of money, and how the American people are being fleeced – literally – by the Federal Reserve and their worthless fiat currency. They are the same types that put the cause of the ‘financial crisis’ down to ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ when in fact it has nothing to do with either.

They are the same types that are against war, but who stubbornly refuse to look at the root cause of it. They blame guns for violence, blame businessmen for unemployment, think that wages come from capital and not production and on and on and on.

Appalling!

“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?

South Carolina, it seems, is finally beginning to see sense. When the police start talking like this, its clear that we are post tipping point on this subject, and that the age of, or should I say, the second age of prohibition is nearing its end:

Dillon – State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) agents, flanked by police chiefs from the state’s largest cities joined 16 elected sheriffs today at South of the Border to announce their support for legalizing and taxing marijuana.

“Weed is good. Weed is right. Weed works,” said Dorchester County Sheriff B.D. Squire, spokesman for the group.
The event marks a turnaround for the state’s law enforcement officers who have counted on weed-related fines and confiscated drug money to fund their militaristic uniforms and ‘SWAT’ like attitude towards the state’s marijuana users and sellers. The officials would like to see South Carolina enact legislation to legalize and tax weed and corner the southeastern market in a way similar to the way Georgia’s lottery siphoned valuable revenue from the state’s coffers and in a way similar that our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax brings customers all the way from the northeast.

Democratic and Republican leaders from the general assembly are intrigued by the idea.

“This is perhaps one of the no-brainers in terms of bringing us back to fiscal health,” said Hugh Leatherman, the senate finance chairman.
“There was a half-million dollar bust a couple weeks ago in Berkely County,” said state Agriculture Secretary Hugh Weathers, “if that pot was taxed at anything near the rate of tobacco… well that would be about $500 million straight into the state coffers. Can you imagine what kind of income we’d pull in if it was planted on proper farms and not just in little patches in the woods? We wouldn’t be having a ’stimulus’ debate because we wouldn’t need the money.”

“The effects of this would be enormous,” said University of South Carolina Economics Professor Lester Nestman. “Obviously tax revenue would be huge, but we’d likely also see a surge in tourism all over the state, you’d have all manner of stores springing up at every border crossing, and I can’t even imagine how popular farmers’ markets would become. On a related note, just the mention of this possibility has caused an overnight jump of 38% in undergraduate applications to the university.”

Reactions in the business community were mixed. Cigarette executives were outwardly dismissive of the idea, but a source at RJ Reynolds speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the company was actively looking for land to build a Marijuana packaging facility outside of Latta, near the North Carolina border.

Gregg Propps, a Charleston-area distributor for Little Debbies brand snacks was less reserved in his response.
“Are you kidding me? Holy crap, this is awesome. This is going to put my kids through college… but maybe I’ll send them to school in another state.”

http://thediscust.com/?p=573

Now that really is astonishing news. After all that wasted money, all the people put in gaol for no reason, people killed, lives ruined, the police say, “we are bored with playing SWAT, lets make some money!”.

We call it ‘Idiocracy‘.

EDM 1794 HOME EDUCATION 01.07.2009

James, Utterson

That this House recognises that an estimated 45,000 to 150,000 children are educated at home; believes that the mammalian mating structure is centered around the family, and that what a family is should not be defined by or interfered with by this House, and that parents should have the right to home educate without any interference from this House; notes with concern and disdain the proposals put forward in the recent Badman Review; expresses particular disgust at the lack of consultation involved in conducting the review; considers it unacceptable that local authorities are to be given unprecedented powers to enter the homes of citizens; rejects the need for a system of support to ensure that home educated children receive a good quality of education and rejects the creation of an excessive and damaging extension of bureaucracy; and calls on the Government to enshrine the rights of parents to give their children the widest possible educational opportunities and thereby ensure that all children receive a well-rounded education.