Archive for the 'Economics' Category

Here we go again: the Times Education Supplement calls for the creation of ContactPoint 2.0

Monday, February 21st, 2011

The Times Education Supplement is wrongly named.

It should in fact be called The Times School Supplement. The people who work there believe that education can only happen in a school.

Of course, they are wrong, but their whole economic and ideological ecosystem revolves around children being in schools, and children being educated outside of schools means that the TES and the teachers and companies that are connected to it in one way or another by six degrees of separation, will no longer have forced access to other people’s children and stolen money from the State, which is both how they earn their living and the substrate upon which they base their every thought.

In an attempt to increase the power of the Sate and to make sure that every child becomes a profit stream for the TES and teachers, ‘journalist’ Kerra Maddern has written a thinly veiled attack piece on home education, parents, the family and anyone who rejects the idea that education can happen outside of school.

I am now going to pull it to pieces.

Analysis: Without a national system local authorities are failing to keep track of children who drop out of education, sparking fears that they may be at risk of abuse. Kerra Maddern reports

This analysis is flawed. What this woman means by ‘national system’ is a successor to the paedophile catalogue ContactPoint, the nightmare central database where all eleven million children in the UK were to be registered by force (a ‘national system’) that over one million government workers were to be given access to, and from which celebrities, the ultra rich and MPs were to be exempted.

We wrote about ContactPoint many times, pointing out the lies, faulty reasoning, computer illiteracy and immorality of it. It seems that Kerra Maddern is on the side of those sick and stupid people.

Almost 12,000 children are officially “missing” from education, a TES investigation has revealed, with many at “serious risk” of physical, sexual and mental harm.

The thinking behind this number is flawed. Just because the State does not know what a child is or is not doing, this does not mean that they are ‘missing from education’.

The whole premiss of this article starts from the incorrect position that children are the property of the State, which of course, they are not. The State has no right to know what every child is doing and where it is at all times. Only fascists and paedohiles desire such information.

Similarly, just because the State does not know where a child is, it does not immediately follow that those children are at any risk of anything whatsoever. Only in the sick minds of the statist does ‘unknown to the State’ immediately translate to ‘in potential danger’. In fact, children in the care of the State are more likely to be abused than those that are not.

Leading children’s charities and Ofsted

Ofsted, which should be abolished, exists by making money off of children. They serve no useful purpose, as we and others have pointed out. Children’s charities, who are against home education to a man, also exist by making money off of children. All of these people make a living off of children. They will do and say anything to remove the responsibility for children from parents. They are in the Child Exploitation Industry and as far as they are concerned, the parent is their number one enemy, because parents have the power to cut off their streams of revenue – children.

say they are deeply concerned by the findings, which show that 11,911 children have fallen out of the education system and that schools and local authorities do not know the location of significant numbers of these young people.

Once again, the state not knowing about the location of a child cannot be extrapolated to anything whatsoever.

The last official estimate from the Government – made five years ago – put the total number of children missing from education at 10,000, suggesting that the problem has since deteriorated.

…or that it has improved; no one knows. Of course, it is in the interests of the Child Exploitation Industry to claim that everything is getting worse, because worse means more stolen loot (State ‘funding’, ‘grants’) for the exploiters; the charities, Quangos and the cronies of the State.

The TES statistics, obtained from every English local authority through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the challenges of trying to keep track of thousands of transient families who move between regions.

There is no ‘challenge of trying to keep track of families’; it is not now nor has it ever been the business of the state to keep track of families and children. This is a non existent problem looking for a solution; it is precisely this sort of bad thinking that caused ContactPoint to be developed. It was bad thinking then, and is bad thinking now.

Children classed as missing from education have not been taught in school for at least a month.

This is simply a lie. Education can take place anywhere, including to some degree, in a school. It is absolutely impossible that the author of this piece does not know about all the facts swirling around the Graham Badman Report; that scandalous and outrageous report that galvanised an unprecedented revolt amongst home educators. It is impossible that she does not know about what home education is, how it works (so well) and all the issues around it. For her to now say, without qualification, that children who are not in school are missing education, and to mean it, is not credible. She must be deliberately misstating the facts to bolster her faulty argument. Very shameful, shabby behaviour.

Some are victims of over-crowding in schools, with local authorities struggling to find them places. Some are being taught at home, while others are school “refusers”. But local authorities say more than 1,500 others are “untraceable”. This has prompted concerns for their safety.

Once again, just because they are ‘untraceable’ it cannot be assumed that they are not perfectly safe and well, and this is not sufficient cause to put every child in Britain in a national database like ContactPoint, which is what the author is suggesting.

Even if you did create a system like ContactPoint, there would be no way to police it, keep the records up to date etc, and of course, no database, ID Card or technological solution can keep anyone safe. This is the central flaw in the thinking of people like Kerra Maddern; they have a child-like magical belief in technology and the State; it is stupid, dangerous and expensive, both in terms of money and Liberty.

Large urban areas have the highest numbers of children missing from education. Experts from Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society say that not enough is being done to ensure that vulnerable pupils remain in school.

These two charities would of course say that not enough is being done, and that children belong in school. They are a part of the industry that exploits children. They are hardly going to say that they are not needed, since out of the eleven million children in Britain, a vanishingly small number are at risk, and most of these are discovered and dealt with by the systems that are already in place. Why, if they were to say that, they would be out of a job, and could not extract more stolen loot from the State.

The Children’s Society claims that they are motivated by their Christian values. On the page describing this and the one that follows it, the word ‘parent’ does not appear. You can make of that what you will; the fact of the matter is the coalition ‘austerity’ measures are cutting off the funding from these ‘charities’ and they are desperate to justify the money they are getting. That means they have an interest in spreading fear about children – the source of their income – as far and as wide as possible. That is why we have seen a spate of questions in the House of Commons recently, and an article in the bird cage liner The Independent, which, mysteriously, quotes the exact number of ‘missing children’ that the TES does. Did the TES do its own investigation, or have they been given this number and the ‘facts’ by a PR company?

Make no mistake; these articles, questions in the house and what is to follow do not appear by coincidence or accident; someone is paying a PR company or staffer to coordinate all of this propaganda. You can tell by the similar wording in each article, the similar numbers and the similar conclusions in each article.

While each local authority has to keep a census of how many children are “missing” in their area, there is no national system for tracing children or transferring information between councils when they move.

Yes, that is correct. ContactPoint was proposed as that system, and it was rejected as inherently immoral, impossible to secure and a completely bad idea.

A legal duty to identify children missing from education was imposed on local authorities four years ago, but there is no requirement for parents to tell councils when they change address.

There should be no legal duty to identify children missing from education. Education is the duty of the parent, not the responsibility of the State.

The ID Card and NIR would have allowed councils to keep track of the location of all families; when you changed address, if you did not inform the State, you would have been fined £1000. The mass uprising against ID Cards caused that scheme to be abolished also. Kerra Maddern wants the paedophile catalogue and the ID Cards to be brought in so that her mythical ‘children missing education’ can all be rounded up and frog marched into school.

This woman is on the wrong side of history. And everything.

Leicester has the highest single number of children officially missing from education – a total of 2,611. Of these, 313 are waiting for a school place, but council officers are investigating why 2,298 are not attending lessons. Many attended state-run nurseries but have not moved into primary schools.

The fact of the matter is this; Leicester cannot run the schools it is already in charge of. They do not have enough places for all the students that desire one. If they find all these phantom children, where are they going to put them?

This is a perfect example of the illogic of the State and people like Kerra Maddern. The State system is hopelessly broken, and yet, they want everyone to be forced into it. They decry the decline of society, the feral children running wild, but do everything they can to undermine the authority of the parent and the central role of the family.

These people are completely insane.

The city council says its high numbers are the result of a “ruthless” process to trace the whereabouts of all children. “If we don’t know where they are, we do everything we can to find out where they have gone,” says head of behaviour and attendance John Broadhead. “Other local authorities do not do as much, but we treat this very seriously.”

Unbelievable. They are ‘ruthless’ in tracking down their prey. Remember there is no evidence whatsoever that the people they are hunting are in any danger of any kind. The only crime they have committed is that they once lived in or went to school in Leicester, and then stopped living or going to school in Leicester. These people spend stolen money and resources to hunt perfectly innocent people down, whilst for years their schools have been falling apart. Other local authorities have better schools, perhaps, because they spend their time and resources on teaching instead of playing at bounty hunters.

The council employs one member of staff just to track down missing children, assisted by 20 education welfare officers. Headteachers can alert the local authority to pupils who cannot be tracked down via a live database, introduced five years ago.

Absolutely astonishing. Twenty one people are paid a salary to track people down, whilst the schools are failing. They spend money on a database to track children, instead of spending money on pupils. Of course this is exactly what happens when you are spending other people’s money. In a properly functioning country where Liberty exists, these people would not be able to misallocate other people’s money, and the schools would be highly efficient and entirely productive places.

You couldn’t make up this insanity if you tried… unless you were from Leicester. You must realise also, that this spending is discretionary, “Other local authorities do not do as much, but we treat this very seriously.” that means they are choosing to spend money on this rather than the education they are providing in schools.

The TES investigation shows that a total of 67 local authorities claim they have no missing children and 29 have fewer than 20. But Kent County Council is unable to trace 618 children, Leeds reports 558 and Camden more than 100 (see tables, right). Because there is no national system, different authorities record children missing from education in different ways, making it difficult to understand the reasons so many have fallen out of the system.

This is the ‘problem’ that ContactPoint was going to solve. Once again, this is the discredited ‘national system’ that everyone came to understand as an unacceptable intrusion into the lives of the British people. Clearly Kerra Maddern didn’t get the memo. Or perhaps the contractor who got paid to develop ContactPoint is trying to drum up business for ContactPoint 2.0 through Kerra Maddern and her ‘journalist’ friends?

Who knows?

Someone is paying for this PR, that is for certain. Follow the money; see who is buying all these articles and then you will find out who is pushing for this.

Former Barnardo’s chief executive Martin Narey says the situation is “deeply troubling”. “School is somewhere that every child needs to be every day,” he says. “For many of our most vulnerable young people it is the only stability they know, the only time when a little chaos is taken out of their lives, the only time when they are required to behave reasonably.

We already know that Martin Narey thought that the peadophile’s dream database ContactPoint was a good idea:

It has been welcomed by children’s charities and organisations, including Barnardo’s, KIDS and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. Martin Narey, chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said it [ContactPoint] “would make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services”.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1747

School is NOT a place where EVERY child needs to be every day. This is just simple minded NONSENSE, and Martin Narey knows it. There are only a small number of reasons why he would say something that he knows is completely wrong. He is either deliberately setting out to deceive, or he is completely incompetent.

Everyone and their dog is sick of the lying, spinning, sickening child exploitation industry. The light at the end of the tunnel is the economic collapse, which will hopefully sweep these parasites away once and for all.

“It is the one place where poor life expectations can be reversed. So for thousands of children – inevitably those most in need of education – to be missing from school is deeply troubling. We need to keep children in school or, when removal is necessary, as it sometimes is, ensure alternative provision is always made available in a timely manner.”

No. Charities need to be funded only by charitable contributions from the pubic, and never from stolen money supplied by the State.

The job of a charity, in the case of education, is to facilitate education, either in school or in other places where it may take place. It is not the business of charities to force children to go to school, or to lobby the State to force children to go to school or to do any of those things that involve coercion.

This is why the charities that exploit children are fundamentally immoral; they use stolen money and attempt to coerce people into doing things that they would rather not do, instead of restricting their activities to helping people. These are not charities at all, but are instead, Crony Charities, similar to the Crony Capitalists that operate in serpentine symbiosis with the State.

Children’s Society policy director Enver Solomon says: “It is vital children don’t disappear from the school roll. There’s a danger this could happen to vulnerable pupils if schools just focus on attainment and their welfare is overlooked.

The school is not the parent. The State is not the parent. Schools should only focus on attainment; that is what they are for. Parents and families are solely responsible for the welfare of children.

“The most marginalised children have the most complex needs: they must be given additional help to remain in education.”

If you want to help them, stop taking stolen money from the state and help them. Stop trying to undermine the family and destroy home education.

Ofsted has also been critical of local authorities for failing to work together in identifying and helping children who drop out of school (see box, opposite). Patrick Leeson, the inspectorate’s director of education and care, says: “Children and young people who are not receiving education are at serious risk of under-achieving and falling behind. When their whereabouts are unknown they may be particularly at risk of physical, emotional and psychological harm.

This is of course, a lie. Ofsted is in danger of being abolished; they are flailing around their tentacles trying to insert them into every aspect of life that involves children, and with their sharply toothed suckers, attaching themselves so that they cannot be removed. They already provide useless ‘inspections’ of all schools; if they could somehow wiggle their way into home education and children missing education, the stream of salaries would be ongoing and enormous.

“Ofsted inspectors have found that local authorities, schools and partner agencies need to share information more effectively and systematically to identify children and young people who are missing from education, particularly when their whereabouts are unknown, and to take concerted action to remedy the situation.”

Ofsted’s brief does not include inspecting children who are not in school. They exist to inspect schools and generate reports. All of these disparate groups, that have the exploitation of children in common, fake charities, Ofsted, the TES, Local Authorities, all have a vested interest in getting information on children and then sharing that information. Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that all of these different groups, all with a profit motive, are all calling for the reinstatement of something that has been roundly denounced?

New arrivals to the country account for a substantial group of those missing from education, according to councils. In Sheffield, for example, 460 children without places are from Slovakia, and are receiving council help in applying for school places.

Then these people are not ‘missing from education’ they are waiting for school places. No ‘national system’ like ContactPoint will help them get school places, and they are not in any danger by Kerra Maddern’s own definition, since they are known to the State.

Other children are not in school because their parents refuse to send them.

And that is their ABSOLUTE RIGHT. and sometimes its their DUTY also.

In Peterborough, 248 pupils are missing from rolls having turned down offers of places, mostly because the schools were too far away from their homes.

So these people will also not be helped by a national system either; they have been offered places in schools that are too far away; they are known to the state, the parents want their children to attend schools and the State could not accommodate them. These children are not in any danger whatsoever either.

This article, by listing the types of children missing, is whittling down the numbers considerably. If they did the rest of their homework, they would find that the number of ‘children missing education’ who were also in danger is vanishingly small in proportion to the eleven million children in Britain. There is no money in that calculation however.

Children from the traveller community are at particular risk of vanishing from the education system.

The traveller community, as has recently been seen, contains children that are perfectly safe, girls who are chaste and very strong families where divorce is a rare exception. Look at the phrase ‘traveller community’; these people are a community of the type that the rest of Britain so badly needs; one made up of strong, self reliant families made up of people who know who they are and who are not ashamed of who they are. They know their own minds, are not afraid to speak their minds and are perfectly happy just as they are. They do not want or need your ‘education system’ or anything else that your ‘culture’ has to offer.

Linda Lewins, vice-president of the National Association of Teachers of Travellers, says it is “vital” that traveller education services are maintained by local authorities. “Children from the gypsy and traveller community are much more likely to miss school,” she says. “Many families notify teachers they are leaving, but the local authority often finds it difficult to discover where they have gone.”

The National Association of Teachers of Travellers is a group established in 1980, “in order to address the isolation of teachers of Travellers and to support and encourage their work”. In other words, they have a vested interest in keeping track of the children of Travellers, so that they can get access to them and receive a salary. If Travellers and their children cannot be tracked, then the numbers of traveller children attending school by force will drop, and this is bad for business.

All you need to know about this group is summed up in this paragraph from their site:

NATT+ is now the nationally recognised voice of Traveller Education Services. It represents and supports members at a national level by addressing Gypsy, Roma and Traveller issues with a number of organisations including the DCSF and other government departments.

My emphasis. Birds of a feather, flock together!

A Department for Education spokeswoman said it expects local authorities to identify children missing from school and to allocate places as quickly as possible.

An unnamed spokeswoman, who doesn’t know what she is talking about.

But with no plans to put in place a robust national system to track and identify missing children, a rapid decline in their numbers appears unlikely.

ContactPoint is not coming back, should not come back, and is not needed. If you want to send your child to school, you can do so, though there may be a waiting list in some places, and you might not get the school you want or one that is close to your home.

If you do not want to send your child to a government school, or any school at all, that is entirely your business, and the State should not take any interest in you or your problems, or successes.

SAFEGUARDING – Families are strangers to councils

Ofsted inspectors found in a report published last year that many councils were failing to fulfil their safeguarding duties because they did not know enough about children in their areas.

Here we go again with the Orwellian doublespeak

It is clear that something is most definitely ‘up’.

These paid PR pieces appearing in different newspapers is a coordinated campaign to introduce ContactPoint 2.0, which is the only solution to this non-problem.

It will mean that mandatory registration of home educators will be back on the table at some point, under the absurd pretext of ‘safeguarding’.

Thankfully, all the arguments against this have been thoroughly explored and documented. If you have anything to say about it, it will be possible to refute any of Kerra Maddern’s and the other propagandist’s untruths by referring to the many documents that were generated in the last three years and that are on line.

It is nauseating that Kerra Maddern, the lazy editors who reprint press releases verbatim don’s have the intelligence to think about these subject clearly. Its also nauseating that they have no moral centre, no understanding of rights or the proper role of government. Finally, its nauseating that we have to go over this again, when it seemed like the tide had turned and everyone except the unrepentant monsters in the shadow cabinet finally understood just how evil the Big Brother nanny State was becoming.

It seems, once again, that some people like Kerra Maddern didn’t get the memo. This can be forgiven; not everyone is paying attention to everything or is born intelligent.

As for the others who exploit children for money….

Non-dom exodus costs London restaurant trade 1/4 billion

Friday, January 14th, 2011

As we explained in detail some time ago, Britain changing the rules for non doms is, to put it lightly, not cricket.

Now, thanks to a FOIA request, we have a number to juggle with:

UK sees non-dom ‘exodus’ as £30,000 levy hits home
The number of UK “non doms” has fallen by almost 16,000 after a £30,000 levy was imposed on offshore earnings, official figures show.

HM Revenue & Customs said the number of UK residents escaping tax on income or capital gains held in offshore bank accounts had declined from 139,000 to 123,000 in the year prior and after the launch of the £30,000 remittance basis charge in April 2008.

The 11.5pc decline was the first for five years and is likely to have been repeated in 2010 as more long-term non-dom residents become liable to the change, lawyers said.

McGrigors, the law firm which secured the figures under a Freedom of Information request, said the “collapse” in numbers of non-doms should be a warning to the Government not to tighten the rules on how offshore wealth is taxed.

The Coalition has pledged a review to assess whether non doms were making “a fair contribution to reducing the deficit” and a Treasury spokesman said last night that the review was “ongoing”. “A further announcement will be made at the appropriate time,” he said.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8255860/UK-sees-non-dom-exodus-as-30000-levy-hits-home.html

These people leaving the UK is a rational, and predictable response to the threat of theft; take a look at the details that were published outlining the new, byzantine and insane rules that were being mooted. Even if all of them were not implemented, the threat of them would have been enough for people to get out while the getting was good. But I digress.

What does this 16,000 number mean? What impact will it have on the people who are left behind?

To take just one example, it means that the restaurant visits these people will make in London will now not be made.

If these non-doms eat at a restaurant twice a week, which is very likely, and each of these meals costs £150, which is a perfectly reasonable assumption given the bracket these people are in, we can multiply the number of non-doms by the cost of these meals by two, which is:

16000*2*150 = £4,800,000

Four million, eight hundred thousand pounds, per week, taken away from the London restaurant trade.

That is £249,600,000  taken out of the restaurant trade in a single year, just shy of a quarter of a billion pounds; and remember, the number of non doms escaping this insanity is increasing. Bear in mind also, that this is just the restaurant trade. Every day non doms are in the country, they are spending money just being alive, on a myriad of other goods and services. That money too, is now gone forever.

None of this factors in the connections, future connections, future investment and everything else non dom entrepreneurs and high grade workers bring would have brought to the UK that would have been the seeds of future growth, that will now be planted in more fertile ground.

This is exactly the opposite of what HMG should be doing if they want growth to accelerate in the UK.

But you know this!

LOIC, Wikileaks, boycotts, Bitcoin and game changing

Friday, December 10th, 2010

If you have been paying attention at all, you will have read about the mass manifestation, the acephalous Anonymous and their successful attacks on MasterCard, Visa and PayPal:

What is interesting about all this is not that the sites of these large organisations have been bumped offline, but the slick consumer grade tools that are being used to do it.

LOIC is an acronym for ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’. It is a piece of software that runs on Windows Mac and Linux, and every instance of it presents the user with this simple interface:

It is easy to install and run, and when you run it, the twenty five people who direct the Botnet created by thousands of installations of LOIC can pour traffic onto any website they desire.

What is interesting about this is that LOIC, which does a sophisticated job in an interface that a child can use, is now spreading everywhere because one man, Joe Lieberman, made a public statement attacking Wikileaks, where he claimed that anyone who helped the site could be committing a crime.

Glen Greenwald dispels this lie very efficiently here:

With his single act, Lieberman’s words have had the unintended consequence of spreading the knowledge of how all of this works and LOIC itself into the machines of many tens of thousands of irate, dedicated internet users and the knowledge into the minds of millions of people who previously didn’t know anything about the workings of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Indeed, I didn’t know what LOIC was until this event took place. So many people are talking about it, Google has a realtime results box on the main results page for the search term.

The perfect storm of this consumer grade DDOS tool, social media, Wikileaks, Joe Lieberman and the cowardice of the online payment systems has spawned a game change in how the internet is going to work in the future.

These tools and the ones that will surely follow, can never be stopped. In a perfect world, where companies like MasterCard, VISA and PayPal work only in the interests of their customers, these tools would not not be used to pop them off of the internet, if they existed at all.

But that is not what is really interesting.

Its clear that there is a problem with the way payment systems on the internet are structured; they are top down in shape, with a single point of failure, forcing two parties that want to transact to use the services of a third party.

This point of failure is a problem if you are like Wikileaks and have your account frozen and your ability to receive and send money stopped. It is a problem if you want to donate to a cause the state would rather see die. Its also a problem if copycat groups styling themselves on Anonymous decides that you are evil and that you should be ‘punished’.

With a single point of failure, both the customers and the companies that run the payment services are at risk of having their business disrupted.

The same is true for DNS; the state is arbitrarily, without warrants, charges or any legal process at all, seizing domain names to shut down access to websites. Clearly DNS and the way it works is a huge problem, especially when we are talking about Wikileaks and the sites like it that will surely follow. There are already plans afoot to create a distributed DNS system; hopefully it will be robust enough to protect everyone and their domains.

As for the question of money, a system like Bitcoin is a possible solution to the problem of companies like MasterCard, PayPal and VISA who do not have the best interests of the customer uppermost in their minds:

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency. ”Peer-to-peer” (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or to keep track of the transactions. Instead, those tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. ”Anonymity” means that the real world identity of the parties of a transaction can be kept hidden from the public or even from the parties themselves.

[…]

http://www.bitcoin.org/faq#What_is_Bitcoin

This sounds good. In the Bitcoin system, there are a limited number of ‘coins’ the number of which cannot be increased; when the system is twelve years old there will be 21,000,000 coins in circulation:

New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain calculational problem (i.e. creates a new block), for which an average solution time can be calculated. The difficulty of the problem is adjusted so that in the first 4 years of the Bitcoin network, 10,500,000 coins will be created. The amount is halved each 4 years, so it will be 5,250,000 in years 4-8, 2,625,000 in years 8-12 and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21,000,000 over time.

This is very interesting indeed. It means that there is now a greenback style currency that the state can have no control over, cannot monitor and which people can use to exchange goods. It seems to take the best parts of Chaumian e-Cash, whilst removing the bad parts, i.e. centrally controlled mint in a centrally controlled location, owned by a single corporate entity, constituted under the laws of a state. It does have some serious flaws however, one being that everyone can see your transaction history if they have your address… yikes!

The source for Bitcoin is available, so if you are minded to do it, you can set up your own identical network. Its all very intelligent, and it costs you nothing to try it out. You could even fix its flaws and release an improved version.

This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be done to solve the problems sketched out above.

Using LOIC to knock websites off the internet doesn’t pass the BLOGDIAL demonstration test; once the act is over, just as in a demonstration, all the problems are still there:

  • Wikileaks can’t receive donations.
  • Wikileaks is still having its websites attacked by the state.
  • The online payment systems still cut anyone off with only a phone call from the state as a reason.
  • Other websites still capitulate without a phone call; a television statement will be enough.

All of this is predictable from the beginning, and so, using LOIC ‘to make a point’ doesn’t make sense in the long run.

It is however, and hopefully, an iteration. Once the futility of DDOSing sites dawns on Anonymous, they might turn to writing pieces of software like Bitcoin, or simply running the Bitcoin client to help the creation and spread of the currency. Or as has just been announced something else.

They might get the millions of people who are following them to contribute financially to the effort to create a distributed DNS. They might even reproduce the work of Operation Clambake where the ‘Sacred Documents’ of Scientology were so extensively mirrored on the internet that if you search for OT3 Operating Thetan you can read it all – which is exactly what the Scientologists do not want.

MasterCard, VISA and PayPal have made a massive long term business error. In their knee jerk response to appease Joe Lieberman, they have awakened millions of people to the fact that their money and access to goods on the internet is not guaranteed if you use their services. They have awakened a software developer somewhere who is going to write the equivalent of ‘Bittorrent for Money’ that will completely eliminate their dominance of the online payments market; remember; credit cards are a 1970’s idea that has been superimposed onto the internet. It is inevitable that this system of cumbersome numbers married to plastic cards is going to be superseded. Bitcoin might be this system, it might not be. It might be one of several replacements. Either way, these new systems are coming now, guaranteed, and there will be nothing that anyone can do to stop it.

Think about this; imagine that Bitcoin is huge, with millions of users. It is running not only on laptops and desktops, but on mobile phones. It is integrated into tens of thousands of websites through its API. Some of those users run exchange services; they sit in Cafes or in dorms or offices, and they will trade ‘street money’ for bitcoins. Social networking brings these parties together to transact. Now there is an interface between the real world and the Bitcoin ecosystem that will be impossible to shut down or even monitor. You might be able to pick off one or two of the people who provide this service, but for all intents and purposes, it will be as impossible to stop this Bitcoin economy as it has been for the state to stop the illicit drug economy in its ridiculous ‘war on drugs’.

Had MasterCard and its like taken a stronger stance against the state, they would not face this inevitable circumstance in the near term, and might have been able to transition to the new styles of online payment; now it is too late – no one trusts them.

Finally on to the subject of boycotting Amazon for kicking Wikileaks off of its hosting service.

Amazon, being the rightful owner of its servers has the absolute right to refuse to serve anyone. The consumer has the absolute right to refrain from using Amazon services for whatever reason.

Think about this; imagine if Amazon was knowingly selling sex slaves or ‘murder to order’ through its service, ‘because it could’. This reprehensible and unambiguously immoral trade would be enough to cause you to boycott them. On the other extreme, because Amazon sells pornographic novels, there are some who would not use them by virtue of that taint.

Somewhere between those two poles is the Wikileaks case.

Wikileaks, by exposing the lies of the mass murdering, thieving and destroying state is a benefit to you directly. Amazon, in the act of kicking them off of their service, without being forced to do so, i.e. voluntarily, is wilfully aiding and abetting the state in its aim of covering up its deception, mass murder and theft. That means that Amazon is working directly against your interests as a human being.

Amazon is not a victim of the state, and I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few days; they are a willing participant in covering up the evil of mass murderers. They acted without a court order, national security letter or any other direct attack from the state. Had they received such an attack, they would be victims of an attack, but since no such attack came to them, they are and were not under direct threat.

In this instance, a boycott is justified in my view; these people are directly attacking me and everyone else by arbitrarily deleting the Wikileaks site; and it must be pointed out that they did not delete the site during the previous Wikileaks expose ‘Collateral Murder’.

Once again, if they want to delete Wikileaks, they have the right to do so; its their property. What you cannot claim is that Amazon is a victim, because that simply is not true.

Its been a very interesting week. Whatever the truth is behind Wikileaks, there have been unintended consequences that will change the internet in ways that the state has not factored in to its responses or plans, depending on what you think about the origin of Wikileaks and the people who run it.

The state is not all powerful. They cannot predict what people will do with software, and that is the truly profound game changing factor. LOIC is just the latest in a long line of pieces of software that change the way people think; Napster, Gnutella, Bitorrent, are all predecessors of this trend, Bitcoin is a new one and there are others in the pipeline. One thing is certain; the state cannot keep up with all of the developments, because there are too many people out there developing the tools and using them once they are deployed.

When the next perfect storm of software and a cause comes around the effects will be even more intense and more unstoppable; this is the trend that the state cannot resist. As they clamp down harder, the internet pushes back with an exponentially greater force.

The sound it makes is the sound of inevitability.

Finding time for morality and ethics

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Every once in a while, you come across something that is so infuriating that you are compelled to try and set it right.

The other day, I came across a man’s plea to a government to tax all its people so that the ‘creative’ among their population can be ‘fairly remunerated’ with the collected monies.

Obviously, to a Libertarian, this is anathema.

It is a call for theft through violence on behalf of a special interest group. It is entirely illegitimate, unethical and immoral. I sent an email to try to start the process of showing this man that stealing is immoral.

Part of this man’s plea for theft included the claim that the state has the ‘right’ to tax one group to redistribute money to another. I pointed out in the email that states do not have rights, only man has rights. This error of attributing rights to states was fobbed off in his reply as ‘a figure of speech’, and that he, “would say that ‘persons have rights'”.

Finally his reply ended by saying that he thinks taxes are legitimate, and that the money can be spent in good ways or bad ways.

He then ended by saying, “I don’t have time to think about this”.

What?

This is like a ship owner, upon being told that his boat is being used to smuggle human beings without his knowledge, saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.

It is like a man committed to non violence who unwittingly is supplying tools and supplies to torturers saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.

This sort of attitude is completely unacceptable to decent people.

By all means, if you agree with paying taxes, you can do so voluntarily; but to call for a nation to forcibly steal money from its entire population, simply because you believe it would be a good idea is beyond passive support for the regime – it is initiating a new form of theft on a massive scale, and famous people (like this man is) have the power to make these bad laws come into force by virtue of their reputations. These people are actually dangerous.

If you are informed that what you are proposing is in fact immoral, you are duty bound as a human being to think about it and to be absolutely sure that you are not doing evil. You cannot blithely say that you ‘do not have time’ to consider the ethics of what you are doing, when two hundred million people could be violated.

The attitude displayed by this man is quite frankly, disgusting.

It seems that there is alot of work still to be done to educate people about the true nature of the state; there are still people out there who are fast asleep, or at the least, so focused on what they are doing that if the whole world ended as a result of their passive action or inaction they would shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t have time to think about this”.

The fact of the matter is, you must find time to think about this, now more than ever, because the world is actually changing at a rapid pace, towards a worst possible case dystopia scenario.

Having said all of this, its important to bear in mind that only five percent of the population was actively involved in the American Revolution. The rest of the people just went along with what was going on, probably because they ‘didn’t have time to think about tyranny’. We do not have to wake up everyone in order to be successful.

Today, many millions of people are awake, world-wide, and are actively repelling the advances of the criminal, mass murdering thieving state.

Thinking purely tactically, we only need to wake up the people who are capable of being woken up, the rest will simply follow along; and judging by their subhuman response to a direct threat, we could, if we were violent, even destroy them without them lifting a finger in response.

Luckily for them Libertarians are not violent, because we are going to win, and there is no doubt about this.

There are however, many people who are violent, and who are willing to destroy to preserve their ability to steal from you.

These deluded, misguided and violent people are surely to become the first great challenge of any newly emerged free society; how are we, the free people, to deal with the violent socialists and statists who want to restore a system of organised criminal theft and mob rule for themselves and their clients through violence?

It will mean putting to the test the very idea of having a free and purely voluntary society, where everyone voluntarily pays others (or does it themselves) to protect their property from the violent socialists.

It will almost certainly end in people being killed. This will be entirely the fault of the socialists and their brain dead followers who are hell bent on controlling other people, invading their property and stealing from them. They will not listen to reason, understand only force, and even those violent types who have the intellectual capacity to come to the correct conclusion, “don’t have time to think about it”.

Libertarians have the truth on their side, and the truth always triumphs over lies.

An army of non violent volunteers, backed by people with an economic interest in bolstering them will present an unstoppable defensive force for the preservation of Liberty in any future battle between the violent statists and free people.

As time wears on, and prosperity spreads like wildfire, the idea of statism and violence will become completely discredited, to the point that the people who try and rally troops for initiating violence will find that their prospective thieves and killers saying…

“I don’t have time to think about this”

Bank Run 2010, Eric Cantona forces the tipping point

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

As we wrote recently, there is going to be a massive, Europe-wide bank run on December 7th.

This is entirely a good thing, and it is precisely the sort of action that BLOGDIAL has advocated for years; we have been saying over and over that demonstrating in the streets is completely pointless, and we were and are completely right.

This call for a bank run has people in ‘authority’ very worried:

Valérie Ohannesian, of the French Banking Federation, said she thought that the appeal was “stupid in every sense” and a charter for thieves and money-launderers.

“My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic,” she told the Observer. “One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought.”

Grauniad article on the bankrun and Cantona

If that is all they can come up with, they must be shitting their knickers.

For a start, everyone now knows that ‘money laundering’ laws are not there to catch ‘criminals’ but are instead for the ordinary people who are trying to protect their money from the ravaging, rapacious state.

She goes on to very stupidly mock the idea with the fact that Cantona would need ‘several suitcases’ to withdraw his money. Of course, he would not need suitcases to withdraw his wealth if the money in his account was worth anything in the first place.

The hollow sound of desperation in print.

As we posted before, this bankrun is an entirely good thing, but what has to happen is a complete exposure and defining of the problem, before it can be fixed.

It seems that the people behind this bankrun are highly intelligent, media savvy people; lets go through this statement from the Bankrun 2010 site.

Dear media,

For a short time, the international press reported the call for a bankrun that we launched on Facebook to invite all those who wish to follow us to withdraw their money from their accounts on the 7th of December, 2010.

Since the publication of our call, people around the world mobilized to translate the text into their language to recreate the event in their country, to promote our initiative by all possible means and invite their contacts to do the same. Our call has met with a success that we did not dare to hope for. We are very happy about it and thanks to the personal investment of all those who, like us, want to enjoy a healthy banking system, equitable, affordable and accountable, we hope that over the weeks we can convince enough people in the world to finally be heard by our respective Governments.

Good. There is only one problem however; a healthy banking system cannot be equitable; a bank exists to hold your money for you and to facilitate transfers for you and to do other services that you require of it, in return for fees. What those fees are is a matter of negotiation, since you are entering into a private contract with a company or an individual.

This is why it is not smart to ask for an ‘equitable’ or an ‘affordable’ banking system; market forces produce the best possible banks, and therefore, banking should be left completely up to those forces, in the same way that the operation of self storage units are left to the market.

The problem with banking is not deregulation, it is regulation and interference from the state.

For clarification purposes, we do not speak on behalf of any political party or from any labour union or religion. Our action is a civic involvement that keeps its distance from any form of hate or conspiracy theories that could be made on behalf of our movement, by others during their interventions on any areas of discussion, which is beyond our control. We only speak for ourselves and for no other organisations. We do not seek to harm anyone in particular. It’s towards a corrupt, criminal and deadly system that we decided to oppose, as far as our ability our determination and respect for the law are concerned.

Very good.

Why have we launched this action?
First of all, we wanted to raise public awareness on the functioning of the monetary system.
The overwhelming majority of holders of a bank accounts, savings accounts or even a pension plan, are unaware the way money is created or what the banks are doing with the money that ‘they are given. They know nothing about the principle of money as debt. They do not know the reality behind words like “asset bubbles”, “Treasury bills”, “Hedge Funds” or “securitization”. Hence the media in general make little effort to inform in an objective, transparent and accessible way to all. The only thing the public really understands is that most major financial crimes and insider trading remain mostly unpunished, but they are the first to pay the consequences.

True. People are almost completely ignorant of what money is, how banks work and what the current role of the state and central banks is. They cannot define inflation, do not understand that it is deliberately caused, do not understand that the money in their accounts (so much as it even belongs to them) is worthless and that this is all by design.

Not only do we deplore how many questions posed by ordinary citizens on the economic situation remain without clear answers in your columns,

There are highly intelligent commenters who regularly destroy the nonsense some ‘journalists’ peddle about all of this. We are past the tipping point; its GAME OVER for this immoral system.

We do not need journalists anymore; what we do need is a free internet, millions of awakened people and one or two very famous people to stand up and push the snowball down the hill.

It has finally happened.

but we also regret your lack of zeal in denouncing the measures that have allowed the global economic situation get to the point where it is today: a situation that has bought our heads of states and Governments to their knees before the rating agencies, trembling with fear at the idea that our currencies are deteriorating.

Our politicians can’t meet both the interests of financial markets and those of its citizens. So, it is time to remind them who they were elected to serve.

Strikes and demonstrations are no longer useful because whatever we do, we are not heard. And whatever they do, we are not consulted. So we decided to hit the system at its core – THE BANKING SYSTEM

MY EMPHASIS!!!!……

At long last, they are beginning to understand!

For YEARS we have been saying this; demonstrations DO NOT WORK, and you are an ignorant PART OF THE PROBLEM if you call for them, or a GATEKEEPER in service of the STATE and THE WAR MACHINE.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

This is true about everything, including demonstrating to stop war or to make government do what you want it to do. You cannot keep calling for demonstrations and expecting the bad things to stop, when it fails to work; doing so is irrational and stupid. Demonstrations and violence are failure tactics, and the idiotic students who smashed Tory HQ are completely wrong in every way you can be wrong.

Think about it; 50,000 students, all of one mind are an army and huge potential financial force that could make a huge change; on the most basic level, that many people could buy a full page advertisement in a national newspaper once a month for ONE POUND EACH.

That would be far more effective in getting a message across, rather than marching in the streets like animatronic showroom dummies.

But enough of that…

Are we aware of the economic consequences that would result from the success of our action?

We are especially aware of the consequences that the deregulated and uncontrollable global financial system will have on our jobs, our health, our education, our pensions, our industries, our environment, our future, our dignity, the dignity of the citizens of countries that the system has enslaved by debt that they will never be able to repay to better appropriate their resources. This is the fate that awaits people if we in the West do not take ourselves in hand.

We are aware of the role this system plays in the prosperity of industrial empires whose interests depend on armed conflicts, diseases, food shortages and poverty prevailing in the countries that provide labour and natural resources at minimal cost. We are aware that this system will never have anything to gain from a world of peace and prosperity and that continuing to entrust our hard and honestly earned money to this sick system, we make ourselves accomplices of its thefts, for its crimes, its wars and the misery war generates.

Beautiful; they can actually see!

The only problem here, is that they are talking about deregulation being a problem when it is not. If these people were able to form their own bank, and run it however they please, they would be an international force unparalleled in its size and transparency, as everyone moved all their money to it en masse.

The reason why they cannot have their bank is because the state regulates banking so that the war machine can be run. They stop anyone honest from running a bank, and they use legal tender laws to prevent honest money from emerging. Once again, the problem is not deregulation, but regulation by the state.

There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. What is wrong is the wealthy using the state to murder people with its war machine. This is called Crony Capitalism, which is very different from Capitalism.

What do we want?
We, the citizens of the 21st century, heirs of generations who have sacrificed so that we may live free and dignified, demand the creation of a CITIZENS BANK- serving citizens, a bank that would put our money away from speculative fever, free of all financial bubbles designed to burst one day, free of operations that transform our loans & assets and use our debt to buy other assets.

This is a very good idea. The only thing stopping you from creating this bank is the state. Remove the state’s ability to regulate banks and then you can have your ‘Citizens Bank’, and you will be able to run it in any way that you like.

We want banks that lend only the wealth they have. Banks that help small and medium enterprises to relocate jobs, & bank lending at zero rate. (*) Banks that support projects that benefit citizens rather than the “market”. Banks where we can deposit our money, which will then create a peaceful conscience within ourselves. Banks we will not have to be worry about. Banks whose success will sound the death knell of the merchants of death, disease and slavery. On the ruins of the old system, we want to build a banking system that will no longer sacrifice more human dignity on the altar of profit.

This is error.

You want ‘banks’ that only lend the money they have; NO, you must make your own bank that does that; you cannot force people to run their businesses to serve you. Your only recourse, as it should be, is to remove your money from banks that are evil and to put them into an honest bank. You cannot on the one hand, say that you want a world free of violence, and then at the same time, call for the state to do your bidding via violence on others. Start your own bank, and if the state tries to stop you, confront them. You can be sure that the existing banks will be pushing for the violent suppression of you and this bank run right now; that is all they have left to fight with; the apparatus of the police state.

You will be able to set your own interest rates, lending requirements and ultimate purpose. There is a desperate need for such a bank, and you have a captive population of over one hundred million to start with.

I’m afraid that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. You are in the trouble you are in now because you trusted the existing banks and the state to take care of you, and like the predators they are, they fed on you. You will never be able to not worry about banking.

As for the ‘altar of profit’ this is just total nonsense; there is nothing wrong with profit, and you are conflating profit with Crony Capitalism and its evil practitioners. Profit, price signalling and all the other elements of real economics are essential to bringing into existence the prosperity, freedom, peace and the kind of bank that you want to be able to use. You cannot deny the laws of nature, and economics is governed by rules that are as firmly set as the laws that cover physics. Learn these rules, and you will make a bank that is more likely to be a long term benefit.

Finally, the old system must be swept away completely. There is absolutely no reason why a new, clean, moral bank should be set up on the ‘ruins of the old system’. If your plan is that you are going to start with a bad foundation, you might as well not even begin.

Dutch lawmakers have already considered laws to outlaw calls for bank runs. The state and its Crony Capitalist masters are going to use everything they can to destroy you so that they can continue with their insanity.

It is only through peaceful voluntarism that you will ever get a lasting solution to this problem. Forcing banks to obey you by using the state makes the state more powerful, and it is the state that is the true enemy.

We, the people have finally been awakened by poverty and despair afflicting the most vulnerable among us – pensioners, welfare recipients or working poor – and is now threatening what remains of the middle class & entrepreneurs. Even these are exploited as milking cows, and we now simply want the cancellation of the public debts generated by the sick system that we no longer want.

Once again, this is true; this debt belongs only to the people who authorised it; you cannot be made liable to a debt incurred by a third party, without your written consent, and NO, voting in an election does not constitute consent to be made a debtor.

We do not want our taxes, our efforts, our resources to continue to feed this bottomless pit.

Oops, its not ‘your money’ once you have payed it to the state; this is a common error that people make; they believe that the state, “works for them”, and that, “its our money”. It is not. You have no claim whatsoever over that money once you pay it. Its gone, toast, spent.

If you want your money to be used for good purposes only, you have to stop paying it to the state. Period. And I and others predict that that is the next psychological breakthrough that these people are going to make, very soon!

We want to regain the power to coin money and free ourselves from the guidelines imposed on us by the European Union, which was built against the consent of the majority of people consulted by referendum, not to mention those whose country of origin have no organized popular consultation.

This is absolutely key to the entire problem; without the power to decide what money is best for you, you are nothing more than a slave to the European Central Bank, the Private Federal Reserve and all other central banks, who steal money via the inflation tax.

Everyone who understands money knows that the best money is gold and silver coins, held and used directly by the people who transact with money.

Gold and silver money cannot be inflated, controlled or used against you by a central bank, and of course, central banks themselves should be abolished, and would be if this Citizens Bank took off; there would be no need for central banks if every country had its own Citizens Bank, working in cooperation with other similar banks around the world, only for the benefit and convenience of the depositors.

This is why its crucial to:

  • remove the power to make money from the state
  • remove the power to regulate banking from the state

Without these two in place, it will be impossible to get to the place that the stopbankque organisers want.

(*) What the Islamic banks to successfully achieve by refusing usury for religious reasons, we can do for civic reasons.

Oops, ‘Islam was right’?! Don’t tell Geert Wilders!

To conclude
We draw your attention to the fact that even if we manage to relocate jobs, advanced technologies and machines have replaced human labour in a growing number of areas. They can produce more, faster, cheaper, and for these reasons, they create fear to those who wonder how they will earn their living tomorrow. This is unfortunate because since the invention of the wheel, technology is meant to improve the living conditions of mankind. If progress was meant to serve citizens rather than serve the market, we could make a quantum leap in technology development today paralyzed by special interest groups that are the primary beneficiaries of this system.

This is completely wrong; technology does not put people out of jobs, this is The Luddite Fallacy.

Progress serves citizens though their freedom to choose one service over another. Sadly, Europeans are still steeped in the sticky, hallucinogenic treacle of socialist thinking. They want the state to continue its tyranny unabated, only with them at the helm. Sorry guys NO $A£€!

We already have the knowledge to free humanity of its needs in fossil and nuclear fuels and to produce and deliver drinking water throughout the planet at a lower cost, to produce fruits and vegetables, from ice fields to the desert. Poverty only exists on our planet because of the lack of political will of industrialized countries, subject to market forces. Pollution and waste of resources are the sad consequences of this obsolete system which we must put an end to.

Sigh…You cant have it all it seems… Market forces are the only way to eradicate poverty. The state, and ‘political will’ will NEVER do it, and if they try, it will mean giving up the very rights that the stopbankque people are calling for.

As for pollution, we know about that don’t we?

We, the inheritors of chaos, we have a world to rebuild. A world where work is no longer seen as slavery, and lack of work as a tragedy because we have been able to rethink how mankind of tomorrow will ensure its survival, education, well-being and old age.

In order for work not to be slavery, you need to be able to keep the fruits of your labour, that you voluntarily contract for. If the state takes even a penny of it by force, you are reduced to the level of a slave. Everything they do with your money after that, is insult added to injury.

We invite all those who want to follow us on this path – including you, dear journalists – to overcome their fears of the unknown and to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the system that will replace the current one, which with or without us, will eventually collapse when it has taken everything from us. We prefer not to wait until it arrives, or even worse, if in order to save the economy a new war would be declared.

We thank the footballer Eric Cantona for having instilled the idea that we have taken literally. The die is cast. Time will tell whether we were right. (07/11/2010)

http://www.bankrun2010.com/

Don’t hold your breath for the journalists to come on board; they are in the pay of the newspapers that are owned by the same people or colleagues of the people who own the war machine; why do you think these evil scribblers are for war with Iran? They are for war because they are being told to write pro war pieces. They cannot be relied upon or trusted – thankfully we do not need them. We have the internet, we have myriad ways of spreading information that does not include their channels. These new channels are being put to good use, finally, now all that remains is to formulate a plan and then execute it.

This means:

  1. setting up a bank that is outside the control of the state
  2. buying gold en masse with all the worthless paper money that has been withdrawn from the system
  3. depositing that gold in the new bank

The honest money that you require already exists; GOLD.
The forms of banking you require already exist 100% RESERVE BANKING

Like we told you, someone is already doing it.

First things first; DESTROY the system through peaceful disobedience, starting with the money!

Economics with Punch and Judy: Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

If you watch any documentary this year, it absolutely must be ‘Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story’ http://bit.ly/9ICXTi.

Where the problem of Britain’s money is laid out so simply and effectively that even a child could understand it.

If you still believe in:

  • ‘Benefits’
  • ‘Grants’
  • ‘Funding’ the arts
  • Councils to do everything
  • State funded education
  • Government ‘subsidies’ of anything
  • Government ‘investment’ in anything

Then you need to watch this programme. After having watched it, if you STILL think that these things are not immoral, unethical and insane then you really are lost.

Every once in a while, someone writes something that is so clear and efficient at dispelling commonly held beliefs and myths that it changes everything. This television programme is one of those things. The first twenty three minutes alone are enough to expunge all of your false ideas about the true nature of government spending.

What is for sure is that democracy will inevitably lead to absolute socialism, and this documentary proves it. The clients of the giant state, who all have a vested interest in keeping the monster alive, will always be disinclined to vote for liberty and a smaller state, as they will be cutting off the teat that is feeding them. As the programme says, there are places in the UK where 70% of the economy is made up of state feeders; none of those people are going to vote for a smaller state. Ever.

Taking all of this into account, its clear to see that there will not be many more chances for Britain to escape the nightmare of total socialism; if this lot do not unleash the forces of capitalism immediately, subsequent elections will turn this country back towards socialist totalitarianism; there will simply not be enough people left to vote for anything else.

The only way this can be prevented is if the economy is returned to sanity in a very short amount of time, so that the people who used to rely on the state, will be able to find places in the real economy. They will then be disinclined to vote for socialists who will destroy their prosperity. If this is not done quickly, and people are languishing for too long, a reversal will be much more difficult.

Whoever is in charge, if they understand economics at all (fat chance) should be thinking about secondly reducing the size of the state, and firstly, removing all obstacles to capitalism, like the minimum wage, all regulations on hiring people (and everything else), abolishing VAT etc etc.

If this is not done immediately, then there is going to be… trouble.

A failure to unleash capitalism (to ‘go Hong Kong’) will mean that either the system will have to be brought down by some other means, or it will turn to socialism. Which is the most likely outcome? Who knows? The choices are clear however, and there is still alot of educational work to be done, what with all the totally delusional Keynesians, Socialists, Statists and Global Warmistas debating wether or not gravity holds you down: http://j.mp/9Ttwpi whilst it does precisely that. If otherwise intelligent people persist in their wishful thinking, wilful economic illiteracy and statism, then it is going to take nothing less than a wholesale withdrawal of support from the productive to engineer the change to reality based living that is so desperately needed.

Once again, its Libertarianism that is the key to real prosperity of the sort that made Britain great; property rights are the ultimate right that not only protects you personally, it also protects your family, your money, your future, your security and allows you to fulfil your maximum potential.

UPDATE!

An intelligent person at Home Ed Forums said:

barrybloye

Channel 4: Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story

It’s surprisingly digestible, but reveals some shocking facts about the UK’s debt and the burden that heavy taxes and bureaucracy have on the country.

Can you believe that the UK Government controls 53% of the British economy (compared to 28% in China)!?

I think it has massively redefined my idea of Britain’s place in the World, almost as much as the Balls–Badman affair.

Clips:
UK public sector is crippling UK economy
Lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue

Hat-tip to Blogdial.

Indeed.

We have been talking about this for several years now. Anyone who takes what we say seriously (and there are many that do, resulting in profound changes to their entire personal philosophies) will have already read ‘For a New Liberty’.

You need to read that book. I am not just saying that to be saying it; I REALLY MEAN IT. Surf to mises.org and BUY IT. NOW. It is one of the most important books you will ever read. After reading it, you will be left with the choice of being an irrational, imbecillic, violent moron, or an ethical, rational real human being, with a deep, morally based concern for the welfare of your fellow man.

I’m not making that up. I’m not saying it for effect.

If you think that this documentary is digestible, revealing, shocking and redefines your ideas about Britain’s place in the world, you are in for a BIGGER SHOCK. ‘For a New Liberty’ is 1000 times more profoundly life changing than this documentary, because it deals with every part of your life, and not just money alone.

Its great to have a small part to play in spreading these ideas. Its through their spread that we are finally going to be rid of the state, so at the very least our children can live like real human beings instead of cattle.

Universal Credit will cause the introduction of ID Cards

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

Here we go again.

Ian Duncan Smith and his Tories are set to reintroduce ID Cards.

How do we know this? They are attempting to scrap the byzantine system of ‘benefits’ in favour of a single ‘Universal Credit’ that will be able to take into account what your circumstances are on a month to month basis.

Has an alarm bell rung in your head yet?

The Workers Revolutionary Party website (of all the people) reveals the crucial details:

Defend benefits! down with ‘universal credit’!
THE announcement yesterday that the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, had won his battle with the treasury over bringing in a single ‘universal credit’ has rightly been described as the ‘bonfire of the benefits’.

Under his scheme, every single benefit available to the unemployed, elderly, low paid or incapacitated – about 50 benefits in all – will be scrapped overnight and replaced with a single universal credit.

Due for the chop are housing benefit, incapacity benefit, the tax credit system for low-paid workers and single mothers as well as the job seekers allowance.

According to Smith, bringing all these benefits together is now possible due to computer technology that would even enable benefits to be varied from month to month depending on changes to a claimant’s circumstances.

This means that there will need to be an ID Card, tied into a system that Ian Liddle-Grainger MP hinted at, ‘real time taxation’, which translates to ‘total realtime financial surveillance’.

[…]
Nobody in their right mind will believe the nonsense being put about by Smith that these huge amounts can be obtained through efficiencies being made by collapsing the 50-odd benefits into one single universal credit, that can be varied according to changed circumstances.

Efficiency savings have never been made on this vast a scale by any government.

This is true. The system that IDS and Liddle-Graiinger are describing would be bigger, more complex and intrusive than the doomed UK ID Card system, and of course would be even more immoral and unethical, quite apart from being undoable as all UK government IT systems have proven to be.

On every level none of this should be considered seriously. And remember, this job will be contracted out to Lockheed Martin, Capita or some other company, that will have access to all private and company bank accounts in the country.

The very idea is beyond absurd.

In truth, these savings can only be achieved through savage cuts in benefits, by repeated means testing, and by a constant state policing of the former benefit holders, with punishment for those who do not report changed circumstances.

The means testing will be built in comrades; they would have real-time access to your bank account, cash would be outlawed, and they would adjust your ‘benefits’ by a series of programmed break points that are automatically triggered by the amount of money flowing into your account. Theoretically.

[…]
These proposals are not about efficiency, cutting out so-called ‘benefit fraud’ or targeting the really needy, they are simply about smashing all benefits, in order to prop up the bankrupt capitalist system and its bankrupt bosses and bankers.

I just cut out all the nauseating socialist Santa Claus Money Thinking. This section is factually correct however; this is about slashing ‘benefits’, that is true, but it is also about setting up a system whereby not a single penny of money that you earn or spend is outside the scrutiny of the state.

This is about propping up the system of crony capitalism (NOT capitalism, perfect examples of crony capitalists being Lockheed Martin and Capita) and the people who benefit from it; and I use the word ‘benefit’ deliberately in this context, because crony capitalists receive benefits from the state in the same way that the so called scroungers do. They are no different from each other save in the scale of their theft.

[…]
And what is the significance of the title ‘universal credit’ in place of ‘benefit’. A benefit, of course, is something that a person is entitled to by right. A ‘credit’ is basically a loan for which one has to beg, and which must be repaid at some time in the future.

No doubt we will be clarified shortly concerning the issue of repayment.

The TUC must not allow current benefit holders to be turned into beggars. The coalition must be told that any attempt to abolish benefits in favour of a credit will be met with a general strike to bring them down.

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/5696

Very perceptive comrade. Of course, the state cannot create rights any more than it can create jobs. I would say also, that the word ‘universal’ is used in the literal sense; everyone in Britain will be ‘entitled’ to this credit; you will receive an amount ranging from a negative number (taxation, which is theft) to a positive one (‘benefit’, which is redistribution of the stolen money). Of course, you will not be able to opt out of this system, the taxation part being the real-time taxation system hinted at by Ian Liddle-Grainger.

Clearly the only way that such a system can be implemented is with a compulsory ID Card for every economically active person, without which it will be illegal to operate a bank account.

Each ID Card will be linked to your account number, and the state will be able to check a list of your transactions remotely through realtime backdoor access.

It will be forbidden for you to make any cash transaction over an arbitrary limit, to stop the emergence of an underground economy of the size and scope that Russia Greece Spain Italy have for example.

Of course, the ID Card will have all the other side effects and secondary uses that we have been writing about since 2001.

There are no two ways about this. Either they introduce an ID Card for all economically active UK persons (and that means everybody if cash is severely constrained) or they drop the idea of real-time taxation and Universal Benefit in its nascent incarnation.

Finally, Labour are for the idea of a Universal Credit. That should tell you all you need to know about these ideas.

They know it means the introduction of the ID Card and the creation of a system of invasive police state socialism, where once they become the government again, they will have complete control of all the people and everything they do. It will mean the completion of the New Labour project that came to a halt because they ran out of other people’s money and patience with the nanny state.

If you think that life was bad under New Labour, wait till they take the reigns again once this system of complete control is in place. The thirteen years of Blair and Brown will seem like a picnic in the sun.

Obviously, none of this is a done deal, and there are infinitely better ways to secure the social safety net that do not rely on crony capitalists, immorality, faulty economic models and violence.

Hopefully, if the United States turns 180° and returns to its roots, this will cause a huge brain drain from the UK and Europe, causing them to think again.

Already, some of ‘Britain’s’ biggest companies are getting out of dodge for fairer climes. You can expect this trend to continue, especially in the internet business, where moving a company is as simple as running rsync, changing your DNS settings and buying hosting in another jurisdiction.

Britain boasts an internet economy of £100 billion per year. This will shrivel up should the tories introduce this invasive police state system. No one will host here, no one will develop here, no one will use transaction services based here; they will all flee to a restored USA, and other jurisdictions where Libertarianism flourishes.

Mark my words.

UPDATE

We have had some mail…

This is what you need to consider; if all benefits are going to be replaced by a single Universal Credit, in a monolithic system, that takes into account your circumstances automagically, they are going to need to following at a minimum:

  • A database with every British person in it, each citizen having a unique ID (National Identity Register)
  • Each child that is born would need to be in this database, with their relation to their parent or guardian, to calculate the Child Benefit component of the new Universal Credit (ContactPoint)
  • A connection to the medical database so that the disability benefit component of the new Universal Credit can be calculated (NHS Spine)
    A new Universal Credit system (database and business logic) that is integrated into all bank accounts and which, PayPal style, can pay and withdraw monies from your bank account.

That is what is required at a minimum, to pull off what IDS is proposing, and of course, none of it can possibly be optional. It is not possible to do what they are thinking about without tying everything together into a single system that has the citizens unique identifier as the key.

As we say above, this is much worse than the original ID Card, and of course, when we say ID Card, we really mean NIR. This proposal brings together all the worst elements of the database state, and unifies them into a system of total control and surveillance.

The December 7th Bank Run versus the force of entrepreneurial genius

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

This video ‘Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America’:

Describes on many levels, why the collectivists, the socialists and all the brainwashed people who believe in ‘democracy’ are nothing more than human cattle.

On the first level, there is a story in this video about how three women living in the same town save and borrow money.

Ms Fitts describes how, with a simple piece of software, it is possible to cut out the bank that is massively charging one of the women a high interest rate, by connecting these three people locally.

This is the sort of thing that entrepreneurs do, and which the socialists cannot even begin to imagine.

The socialist will blame the bank for the ‘problem’ of high interest rates, and then call on the violent state to force the bank to charge less.

The entrepreneur is smarter, and more importantly, ethical.

She understands the true nature of the problem and solves it in a way that not only is better for the consumer, but which has the side effect of completely destroying the business model of the bank. All without any coercion or violence of any kind, all done on the back of the power of human imagination, and voluntary exchange.

As you may have heard, there is a call for a bank run throughout the EU on the 7th of December:

French stop banque Facebook page

German stop banque Facebook page

Italian stop banque Facebook page

Greek stop banque Facebook page

English stop banque Facebook page

Dutch stop banque Facebook page

[…]

http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/starve-the-beast/

This is a good idea, but what is going to happen after the run is over?

The socialist wants to destroy, but he cannot create. He wants to hurt the system, but he wants to leave it all intact so that he can sit in the seat of power and run everything to his own bitter taste.

This is the difference; the freedom loving entrepreneurs who create and benefit everyone, versus the socialist control freaks who are inherently evil and destructive of capital and human life.

Had all the people now going berserk in France taken the opportunity to form their own banks that run on rules they fix for themselves, on a purely voluntary basis, none of them would have the need for what they are doing right now.

One thing is for sure; with all of those people withdrawing their money from the banks, this is an great opportunity to start just the sort of bank that the organisers of this bank run would want to see and use… do they have the brains to do it?

Naïve simpletons are infinitely malleable

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Thanks to the wise Preuss, we have a nifty little pair of articles that demonstrate once again why the people who think that democracy is a good way to organise the affairs of groups of people are spectacularly naïve.

The unethical long winded men who believe that, “the only legitimate way to have a process is if everyone has their say” would do well to consider the implications of these articles, but then, if they had the capacity to understand what the implications of this are, they could not hold the unethical views that they do:

The ‘politics of the brain’ is a threat to choice, freedom and democracy – which is why spiked is declaring war against it.

Quote:
In earlier eras, the revelation that there was a Behavioural Insight Team at the heart of government, dedicated to finding ways to reshape the public’s thoughts, choices and actions, would have caused outrage. It would have brought to mind some of the darker antics of the Soviet Union, which treated certain beliefs as mental illnesses to be fixed, or maybe O’Brien, the torturer in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who boasts that the human mind is ‘infinitely malleable’.

Yet the news that David Cameron has a Behavioural Insight Team inside Downing Street, and what’s more that it is increasingly influential within the Lib-Con coalition, has been treated as if were a perfectly normal, even admirable thing. Have we lost our minds?

The Guardian article refered to gives us another prime example of how it doesn’t matter how you vote the government still get in.

Quote:
A “nudge unit” set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.

The unit, formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, is being run by David Halpern, a former adviser in Tony Blair’s strategy unit, and is taking advice from Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor generally recognised as popularising “nudge” theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society.

Thaler was in London for three days this week advising ministers, and in a speech urged the government to adopt longer term horizons. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he believed the unit could change the way citizens think.

And so, there you have it.

There are people in the employ of government whose work is to manipulate the thinking of the population. These people have the power to coercively use economics to alter the behaviour of the population, and of course, they also abuse the English language to do it.

Why do you think that the word ‘fair’ and all its derivatives are now on the lips of every Tom Dick and Harry? Do you think that it is merely by accident that everyone is measuring policy, laws and everything that comes out of government and which is related to ‘society’ is measured against this idea of ‘fairness’?

It is absolutely deliberate, and a direct result of this Behaviour Modification group at the heart of government.

Anyone who believes that democracy is beneficial or ethical is completely insane.

Anyone who believes that “having your say”, or “getting your points heard” legitimises government processes or democracy itself is also completely delusional, insane, Naïve and very very stupid.

It is clear that the frames of reference within which all the problems and non problems (like Home Education and its practitioner’s relationship to government) you face are nothing more than elaborate traps, created by this and other social engineering groups.

The Behavioural Insight Team and its predecessors, by creating the boxes within which you are allowed to address a problem have complete control over you from the outset, and because you are retarded, you cannot see that everyone having their say really does not legitimise anything.

This is why the only response to anything that is unethical should be point blank refusal. As soon as you enter into a discussion on their terms, you are thinking inside their frame of reference and all is lost.

This is why it is not irrational, confrontational or counterproductive to take the Libertarian stance when you are confronted by these persistent pests, but the complete opposite; a rational, ethical and productive thinker does not concede for a moment that the state usurping the role of the parent is legitimate. For example.

Its also why it is so important to use English words correctly:

While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is [p. 25] Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

[…]

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

All true, and if you have not yet read that book, go and do so immediately.

These are the facts:

‘Taxation’ is actually theft.
‘Conscription’ and ‘National Service’ are in fact a form of slavery.
Government ‘Grants’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
Government ‘Subsidies’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
‘Subsidising the arts’ is in fact redistributing stolen money to cultural gatekeepers.
Central Bank ‘Quantitative Easing’ is in fact Money Printing.
Government ‘investment in industry’ is in fact economy destroying redistribution of stolen loot and crony capitalism.

All of the above have one root thing in common; violent coercion. If you disobey the state, violence is used against you to force you to comply. This is even true in the case of Quantitative Easing, where if you attempt to escape from the criminal and inflationary central bank, you will be arrested and gaoled and your goods confiscated.

It is in no way ‘fair’ to tax people based on the level of wealth they have accumulated; taxation itself is immoral theft. It is in no way ‘fair’ that graduates should pay a tax so that others can receive a university education, or that money is stolen from you for any purpose whatsoever, no matter what the need is or what the money is to be used for.

If you use the language of the state as your frame of reference, you instantly become their prisoner, and this can have consequences that will touch every aspect of your life, quite apart from making you sound like a complete zombie.

While we are at it, what is an example of something that actually is fair?

If there is a piece of cake in a household, and two family members both want a slice, the two can agree that one can cut and the other gets to choose the first piece.

That is fair, since both of the parties have voluntarily agreed on how the cake that belongs to them both should be divided.

Dictionary says:

fair – 9 dictionary results

adjective, -er, -est, adverb, -er, -est, noun, verb

–adjective

  1. free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge.
  2. legitimately sought, pursued, done, given, etc.; proper under the rules: a fair fight.
  3. moderately large; ample: a fair income.
  4. neither excellent nor poor; moderately or tolerably good: fair health.
  5. marked by favoring conditions; likely; promising: in a fair way to succeed.
  6. Meteorology .
    1. (of the sky) bright; sunny; cloudless to half-cloudy.
    2. (of the weather) fine; with no prospect of rain, snow, or hail; not stormy.
  7. Nautical . (of a wind or tide) tending to aid the progress of a vessel.
  8. unobstructed; not blocked up: The way was fair for our advance.
  9. without irregularity or unevenness: a fair surface.
  10. free from blemish, imperfection, or anything that impairs the appearance, quality, or character: Her fair reputation was ruined by gossip.
  11. easy to read; clear: fair handwriting.
  12. of a light hue; not dark: fair skin.
  13. pleasing in appearance; attractive: a fair young maiden.
  14. seemingly good or sincere but not really so: The suitor beguiled his mistress with fair speeches.
  15. courteous; civil: fair words.
  16. Medicine/Medical . (of a patient’s condition) having stable and normal vital signs and other favorable indicators, as appetite and mobility, but being in some discomfort and having the possibility of a worsening state.
  17. Dialect . scarcely; barely: It was just fair daylight when we started working.

-adverb

  1. in a fair manner: He doesn’t play fair.
  2. straight; directly, as in aiming or hitting: He threw the ball fair to the goal.
  3. favorably; auspiciously.
  4. British, Australian . entirely; completely; quite: It happened so quickly that it fair took my breath away.

–noun

  1. Archaic . something that is fair.
  2. Archaic .
    1. a woman.
    2. a beloved woman.

–verb (used with object)

  1. to make the connection or junction of (surfaces) smooth and even.
  2. Shipbuilding .
    1. to draw and adjust (the lines of a hull being designed) to produce regular surfaces of the correct form.
    2. to adjust the form of (a frame or templet) in accordance with a design, or cause it to conform to the general form of a hull.
    3. to restore (a bent plate or structural member) to its original form.
    4. to align (the frames of a vessel under construction) in proper position.
  3. to bring (rivet holes in connecting structural members) into perfect alignment.
  4. Obsolete . to make fair.

—Verb phrase

  1. .fair off / up, South Midland and Southern U.S. (of the weather) to clear: It’s supposed to fair off toward evening.

—Idioms

  1. bid fair, to seem likely: This entry bids fair to win first prize.
  2. fair and square,
    1. honestly; justly; straightforwardly: He won the race fair and square.
    2. honest; just; straightforward: He was admired for being fair and square in all his dealings.
  3. fair to middling, Informal . only tolerably good; so-so.

Origin: bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fair

That pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of ‘fair’ in the Nick Clegg Orwellian sense; taxation is dishonest and unjust. It is illegitimately sought, given and pursued money. And so on.

The same can be said for ‘paying your fair share’ or ‘greed‘, ‘capitalism‘, ‘rights‘ and many other crucially important words that are routinely and deliberately misused to steer you into the squeeze chutes. You need to get a grip on these words, restore their true meanings in your mind, so that when someone tries to steer you and frame your thoughts for you it will be easy to deflect their nonsense. In particular, when some disgusting, unctuous and deeply sinister bureaucrat tries to justify why he should have access to your children, you will not even begin to discuss the subject, because you know that it is illegitimate.

Rather than do this by making a list of words and then re-defining them one by one, you would be well advised to read this book by Murray Rothbard. It will train you to think in such a way that words you have been misusing will automatically find their correct meaning, by virtue of your newly found ethical basis of thought. Once you finish that book, no matter what word they try and hijack as the new rallying cry for collectivism, the principle itself, having been disempowered in your mind, will be unacceptable, and the word in its new usage will cause you to bristle and your hackles to rise.

This is the place that your thinking needs to be in; a place where you are immune to the nefarious work of the ‘Nudge Group’ and the ‘Behavioural Insight Team’. Where no matter what they do, you will NEVER give up your dignity or your rights no matter what they or anyone else says.

Finally, ‘choice, freedom and democracy’; choice and freedom are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from democracy!

Pledge money now to see Paul Krugman debate a real Economist

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

From Lew Rockwell’s blog:

Many Austrians have tried to get Krugman to debate business cycle theory. He’s too busy and too sophisticated to debate an Austrian, of course. Until now.

Economist Robert Murphy has come up with a clever way to make this happen. Through a website called The Point, people can pledge an amount of money to make the debate happen. Not one cent is charged to them until it does happen. The money will go to a charity for the hungry in New York. So if it hits, say, $100,000, Krugman will have to explain why getting $100,000 to New York’s hungry isn’t worth one hour of his time. Brilliant. I’ve already pledged. Bob is up to around $5,000 already.

Here’s his video promoting it (it looks like the law school one from the other day, but it’s a different video).

We have $25 down on that particular pledge.

BURN WITCHDOCTOR BURN!

RIP Benoit Mandelbrot

Saturday, October 16th, 2010

The great, insightful, genius mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot is gone.

His revolutionary work can be and is now applied everywhere, including economics:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1465

Image compression.

And so much more….

The object that he is best known for in popular culture, The Mandelbrot Set is iconic, profound and beautiful all at the same time.

Merci professeur!

When scientists attack

Sunday, October 10th, 2010

Its been a rather good week for real scientists, clear thinking and men with balls.

First, watch this scientist (Dr. Art Robinson — homeschooler, a former assistant to Linus Pauling) take apart the appallingly irrational, hysterical, sarcastic lie repeater Rachel Maddow, who has her  flesh flayed from her bones and scorched by this very satisfying encounter:

Visit msnbc.com for the latest lies, State Propaganda, and Keynesianism

Savour the sapor of her roasted flesh.

And now for the next course; read the resignation letter of Harold Lewis (Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara) to Curtis Callan, President of same:

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

  1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
  2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
  3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
  4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
  5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
  6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Well, that certainly is refreshing!

Of course, many people understand that the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming is nothing more than a lie and a scam, and now it seems that the taboo is wearing off, and the floodgates of real scientists with either nothing to lose or real integrity no matter what have opened. This is a classic post tipping point event.

Now there are at least two things to consider.

We still have the American Physical Society in place and intact, as well as many other fatally compromised organisations, all parroting AGW and other dogma. The scientists who are real scientists, need to group together to form new associations that are strictly and purely scientific in function. If this is not done, then the organizations that dominate the making of bad policy will continue to rape, rob and pillage.

Which brings us to the cause of all these problems; The State.

It is the entirely corrosive influence of the state that has caused these scientists to lose their way, and even their souls. Without a state to steal money from people to fund boondoggles like ‘Global Warming’, ‘Climate Change’ and whatever else they decide to change the name of the cause to, there would be no financial incentive whatsoever to collude in fraudulent work in order to garner a salary.

There would be no incentive for scientists to push for public policies that in turn feed back into their lies, be they AGW or unnecessary vaccines.

The problem of the state is not just about money; it is a problem that reaches into every corner of human life, from your health, right up to and into your mind, where lies are implanted at its behest.

Thanks to the state, the practice of science is being corrupted to such an extent that human progress is being derailed; it may or many not be possible to catch up to where the collected knowledge of man might have been had there been no state… who knows? What is for certain is that if the state is not stopped, then its evil and retarding influence will continue to hold everyone and everything back.

Scientists who are thinking clearly (as opposed to those who can barely think at all) turn to Libertarianism as the only way to ensure that real science can be done, without the distorting influence of the inherently evil state.

Until this destructive state of affairs is brought to an end, resignations and one or two scientists running for congress will not be able to stop the juggernaut that is the state, and of course, if the state were run entirely by scientists that would be a bad thing, since this is not a problem of the right people being in charge of the machine; the machine itself is the problem.

Thankfully, the economic collapse is coming, and this may give great impetus to the final destruction of the state. With this collapse we can expect at a minimum, for the scope and reach of the state to be drastically limited.

Now is the time for scientists and Libertarians to build the foundations of new voluntary, ethically based organisations to replace the broken, corrupt, venal, unscientific, discriminatory and evil institutions that currently spread lies and misery.

Honey, there is no spoon!

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing – what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/lira7.1.1.html

Can you smell that?

Its the smell of someone waking up. Its the smell of fresh air after years of living in the city.

Can you feel it?

Its the feeling you get when you realise that there is no noise, after living in a large city for years. You are actually ALIVE.

If you have ever had a ‘eureka moment‘, where something that made no sense, or was clouded over in complexity, suddenly becomes crystal clear, and you feel a tingling on your neck, and you say…. YES!

The eureka moment here, the smell in this case, the feeling here is the understanding that all along, the ‘crooks’ and ‘criminals’ were in fact right in almost every way.

And by ‘crooks’ I mean the people who didn’t hurt anyone or steal from anyone and who disobeyed every rule out there, and got away with it.

The people in the story linked above are the form fillers, the dutiful, brainwashed good people who believe all the big lies and who paid through the nose in every way.

My sincere hope is that all of these people finally wake up and stop being so insufferably STUPID, all at the same time.

We will then, finally, see the end of the police state, just like the East Germans saw the end of theirs; only this time, there will be no wall to cross anywhere but in the minds of the people who have been shaken from their hypnotic trance.

You know who I am talking about, the robotic, brainwashed, simpletons who think that restaurants must be licensed, that the state should be negotiated with when it comes to the ‘rights’ that they ‘give’ you – the irrational people whose thoughts are wildly incoherent, who get from A to E, again avoiding C, D, and B… you know who I mean… THE PROBLEM!

When these people, these intransigent folk who have based their lives on lies for decades and who simply refuse to accept the truth because it hurts too much, right up until the moment that they are being hauled away to the camps, as they wake up and get really really angry there will be no turning back.

You think its bad now, wait until the dollar collapse happens. The people who were manning the controls of the machine will live in fear of their lives.

And that is an entirely good thing.

You Might Be a Fascist

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

August 28th, 2010 by Militant Libertarian, Originally published on March 9, 2004.

by Russell Madden

Fascism: a political-economic system in which citizens retain title to their property but in which the government determines how that property may or may not be used.

    You might be a fascist if you …

  • believe that the proper way to decide whether a casino should be built in your hometown is to vote on the idea.
  • object to individuals gambling in their homes unless they’re playing the state-run lotto.
  • think that your neighbor needs the blessing of the historical commission in order to renovate his aging home.
  • feel the urge to report the guy down the street who has a painting truck parked in his drive but no orange building permit stuck to a front window.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • experienced a sense of glee when Microsoft had to spend millions in legal fees and was convicted of monopolistic policies.
  • see nothing wrong with your city government awarding a single cable franchise while those guys who sell dishes must charge extra to customers who wish to receive local broadcast channels.
  • are grateful that the FCC dictates to cable and phone providers how they can do business because you are afraid that otherwise the big media companies would have too much power.
  • would rather have the government pass a law and set up another bureaucracy to restrict telemarketers than spend fifty bucks of your own money to purchase a screening device.
  • do not object when others are forced to pay more for their goods so you can earn a higher income while your trade restrictions put other citizens out of work.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • nod in agreement that individuals must show proof of identity in order to open a bank account because otherwise the terrorists will win.
  • don’t object to money laundering laws that make snitches of your banks so the drug dealers and the terrorists won’t win.
  • never complain about airport security checks and bag screening and weapon confiscation in order to keep the terrorists from winning.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • tremble at the thought that the person sitting next to you in the restaurant might be carrying a gun without a license.
  • want to eliminate and confiscate all guns in private hands in order to be safe since guns cause violence, unless the cops are the ones carrying the guns.
  • applaud extra taxes on guns and ammunition, prohibition of sales between private parties, licenses for gun dealers, limits on the number of firearms someone can own or buy, and bans on brass knuckles, nunchucks, pen knives, big knives, pepper spray, stun guns, sword canes, or anything else that can be used to defend against a criminal.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • laughed when an aging hippie comedian who sold drug paraphernalia via the Internet was thrown in jail but thought a well-known talk show host addicted to painkillers should receive rehab.
  • accept the widespread drugging of young boys but recoil in horror from the thought of adults receiving pleasure or relief from illicit drugs.
  • champion zero tolerance for children who bring toy soldiers to school but think the heroes at Ruby Ridge and Waco got what they deserved when they were promoted for killing women and children.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • think that taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
  • smile when the rich have to pay an even greater proportion of taxes than they do now.
  • kid yourself that Social Security and Medicare taxes are investments or premia rather than a way to pay for more welfare for old people.
  • maintain that you have a right to health care, housing, retirement income, food stamps, or government-guaranteed student loans.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • squint your eyes at the idea of parents educating their children at home.
  • want child-free people to pay for your offspring’s schooling because everyone benefits.
  • question the ability of parents to decide what their children should study, whether those youngsters should go to school at all, or how they should learn to make their own ways in the world.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • seek assistance from the government to protect you from your own mistakes.
  • ask the government to protect other people from what you believe are their own mistakes.
  • abhor the thought of foreigners flooding your country and taking jobs you don’t want at wages you would refuse to accept.
  • contend that you have a right to a job but an employer does not have the right to fire you because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a woman, a racial minority, fat, or handicapped.
  • think SUVs should be banned, seat belts and airbags required, gas mileage minimums enforced, gasoline formulations determined by the feds, and that more money should be spent on light rail systems that no one uses.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • see all lawyers as heroes.
  • hope to win the lawsuit lottery.
  • refuse to accept that legal questions can be properly answered by anyone other than a state-accredited lawyer.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • like the notion of mandated low-flow toilets and shower heads but see no problem with subsidized water so farmers or residents can work and live in deserts.
  • rejoice that grease monkeys can no longer put Freon in your air conditioner.
  • sneer at anything smacking of price gouging during disasters such as floods or hurricanes and would rather have shortages of goods than see someone make more than what you believe is a fair price.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • promote the idea of the government owning even more wilderness land.
  • are appalled that oil companies might drill offshore for natural gas.
  • wonder what all the fuss is when homeowners are forced to abandon their houses in the woods when the government destroys the access roads.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • support sending our troops to a foreign country that poses no imminent threat to us in order to liberate the natives and engage in nation-building.
  • declare that foreign aid helps the average citizens of those countries that receive it.
  • want others to pay for your humanitarian impulses.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • would rather police focus their efforts on arresting ticket scalpers and prostitutes than on tracking down, convicting, and incarcerating violent criminals.
  • want to impose your moral code on strangers.
  • itch to make other people act as you believe they should act.
  • do not accept that we still have involuntary servitude in this nation.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • operate from the premise that morality is relative.
  • condemn logic, reason, and objectivity as tools of white male oppression.
  • equate non-coercive choice and actions of which you disapprove with fascism.

You might be a fascist if you …

  • object to the examples in this essay.
  • think you are free.

Originally seen here.

Brent Council and ‘compulsory’ recycling

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Old Holborn has an interesting post about rubbish collection:

When I purchase something with money I have earned, I was under the impression that it belonged to me, to do with as I wished. It is my “property”.

Apparently Brent Council do not agree. With recycling now being big business, the London Council has decided if you don’t want it anymore, it belongs to them and failure to hand over valuable aluminium, glass and paper will see you the recipient of a £1000 fine. No, really.

http://www.oldholborn.net/2010/08/rubbish-police.html#idc-cover

Old Holborn then goes on to repeat the sanctions the council will use for those who refuse to recycle their garbage, which include surveillance, hand delivered letters, visits from ‘officials’ and ultimately a fine of £1000.

The answer to all of this is simple, and Old Holborn’s impression is completely correct.

The things you buy really do belong to you; that means the packaging that they were delivered in and all the goods you do not consume that become your waste.

When you throw your waste away, you should contract with a private garbage collector to remove it.

You then do not have to deal with eco loon control freak socialist councils and their absolute nonsense. I say its absolute nonsense because it is:

RUBBISH: In Palo Alto, California, citizens are ordered to separate their trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

In Mountain Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the government has just ordered the same recycling program, increased taxes 53% to pay for it, and enacted fines of up to $1,000, and jail terms of up to six months, for scofftrashes.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made sense – economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship – we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast- food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always impressed me as malarkey. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 % was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. The real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do – they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can’t know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/anti-enviro.html

From the priceless ‘Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto’. And of course, once you have your own garbage collected privately, you can deduct the amount that that council is charging you for their ‘service’ since you do not avail yourself of it. Old Holborn already does this for the services he does not require from his council.

Once again Libertarian principles, specifically the property right you have in things you have voluntarily exchanged for, offer the best solution to a problem as opposed to the inherently immoral solutions put forward by collectivists, coercion the state and its insanity.

But what about the economics of it all? If garbage has a value after it has been collected, then someone will sort it and extract what is valuable. This is what it looks like:

The problem with this system is that it is entirely efficient. If private enterprise sorted garbage like this, the loony left salary addicted control freaks at Brent would not be able to justify going out to people’s homes and threatening them.

Furthermore, have you ever seen a garbage compactor in the kitchen of a UK household:

One of the consequences of people having to pay private contractors to remove their waste is that normally you are charged by volume for what you have removed from your household. If you have less volume of garbage to remove, the cost of removing it is less, so there is a great incentive to squeeze as much trash as you can into the smallest possible space.

That is why in many American kitchens, you find garbage compactors; an under the counter machine that you throw your waste into day after day, that compacts it all into a very small shape that is easy to handle and which dramatically reduces your waste disposal costs and storage hassles.

These compact cubes of refuse greatly increase the efficiency of garbage disposal; trucks can carry more garbage, make fewer rounds, you use less bin liners, put garbage into external bins less often and into fewer bins etc etc.

All of this efficiency is lost thanks to the crazy as a coot collectivist crap of councils like Brent.

Even fast food restaurants use them:

The side effects of the free market in terms of efficiency are always beneficial. Other desirable side effects are that the need for nosey parkers sniffing around in your trash is completely eliminated.

That is why the statists hate private enterprise. Sadly in the UK, people are so inured to the idea that ‘the council’ is in charge of everything, from leisure to garbage collection, that it appears that they cannot imagine even the most simple solution to everyday problems without invoking the state in some way as facilitator.

A call to action from the Coalition of Thieves

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Tony Benn, war enabler and thief has a piece over in the Grauniad that simply cannot be allowed to stand:

The time to organise resistance is now
We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight

Gravity is not an ideology, it is a fact. In this matter, the fact is that the state is STEALING money from the productive to disburse as it sees fit. This is theft, pure and simple. It is immoral and unacceptable to decent people.

It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services.

What has wrecked the lives of millions is SOCIALISM. The STATE is responsible for all the ills that have been suffered in the twentieth century, and thanks to the internet, everyone can now see that this is the case.

There is no such thing as ‘our jobs’ jobs are created by entrepreneurs, not the state. They are not collective property; they are the property of the people who create them. Pay is what is due to people who do work. The rate of pay is a private matter between employer and the employed. The state should have no say in that private contract whatsoever. Education is not the business of the state; it is not a right, but is in reality, a good like Health Care. Transport is also no business of the state, and niether is the delivery of anything, including the post, and any other service, like the internet, which some deluded people want to claim is a right.

The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers’ profligacy.

This is a straw man argument. It is completely wrong that anyone other than the shareholders and depositors in banks were made to bail out the banks. In a properly functioning country, no one would be forced to pay for a bailout, or other people’s food or anything else, and the fact that this has happened is no excuse for more organized theft by the state.

The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.

It is absolutely wrong that the state should levy a ‘value added tax’. This is an unjustifiable interposition in the private transactions of individuals. As for that shopping list of people who are going to suffer because of these cuts, they would not be suffering at all if everyone were free to interact economically with 100% of their money, and those that were left out would be take care of by charity.

One thing is for sure, Labour and socialism has utterly failed to produce the prosperity that they promise again and again, and they will never be able to produce it. All they can do is destroy capital, technology and redistribute wealth by force.

If their ideas were great, people would voluntarily finance them. The fact is that people who are creative and productive see their sham for what it is, and run from it like horses run from fire.

Women are expected to bear 75% of the burden. The poorest will be hit six times harder than the richest. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3 million job losses in public and private sectors.

The ‘public sector’ is entirely parasitic. Those jobs are not real jobs; they are invented by government and financed by people who are productive in the real economy.

What happens in the ‘private sector’ or the real economy, is not the affair of the state, and if the state had no power to interfere in the real economy, it would be many times more prosperous, with greater opportunities for both job seekers and entrepreneurs.

We reject this malicious vandalism and resolve to campaign for a radical alternative, with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece and other European countries.

You cant make stuff like this up.

This man is a representative of the most malicious, vindictive, destructive and anti-human philosophy ever known to man. They are violent thieves who steal money from the productive to give away to their friends and to finance their hair brained schemes.

What do they mean by ‘radical alternative’? What can it possibly mean other than more theft, more wealth redistribution, a return to Orwellian bureaucracy and everything evil that all the British are fed up to the teeth with?

These people understand NOTHING about economics and money. Even a child can be made to understand it if they read the right books.

And as for other European countries, Britain is not a European country. Everyone has had ENOUGH of Europe and its insane policies, and rioting like the Greek parasites will only destroy the infrastructure that you need to steal the billions you are craving for like the vampires you are.

I have a feeling that Tony Benn and his band of modern day Robin Hood criminals are going to find that everyone hates them, will not tolerate being stolen from by them, and will push back against them with such ferocity that they will be knocked over.

This government of millionaires says “we’re all in it together” and “there is no alternative”. But, for the wealthy, corporation tax is being cut, the bank levy is a pittance, and top salaries and bonuses have already been restored to pre-crash levels.

Like it or not, it is the millionares and everyone beneath them that owns and runs a business that creates all the wealth in any country. They should be cherished, free to operate their businesses as they see fit, without any interference from the state of any kind. If you want to start a union, that is entirely your absolute right; but the owners of businesses also have rights, and yours do not trump theirs.

This is the principle, that everyone has the same rights, that Tony Benn cannot accept. His position, in his mind, is one of superiority. His rights trump all others. The rights of his friends and followers trump the rights of all others.

He is DEAD WRONG.

An alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control, and raise revenue by increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abolishing the nuclear “deterrent” by cancelling the Trident replacement.

Banks are private property. What Benn is advocating is that the banks be nationalised, STOLEN from their owners if you will. Once again, the word ‘democratic’ is being used as a synonym for ‘fair’, ‘just’, ‘honest’, and ‘good’ when it is none of those things. Democratic control means control of the mob, against the wishes of the owners of property. That is THEFT, IMMORAL and EVIL.

Raising revenue by increasing tax for the rich is just theft. There should be no taxation by the state, full stop. The state should not be engaged in wars of aggression, no matter where they are being fought. And without a state, there would be no money for a nuclear deterrent unless everyone voluntarily wanted to pay for one, which I doubt would ever happen.

All of our problems come from the state, and people like Tony Benn, who control it.

An alternative strategy could use these resources to: support welfare; develop homes, schools, and hospitals; and foster a green approach to public spending – investing in renewable energy and public transport, thereby creating a million jobs.

Welfare is a soul destroying disease, and even those who deal with poverty have come to understand this.

    We commit ourselves to:

  • Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services.
  • Those workplaces do not belong to you, they belong to the people who created them you THIEF! The welfare services you claim are yours are financed by money you STEAL.

  • Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.
  • Fighting rising unemployment can only be done correctly by freeing business to do what it does best, creating jobs, capital and progress. We do not need you, or the state to make this magic happen.

  • Develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery.
  • There is no alternative to reality. Money and human nature are fixed. Go and read about it.

  • Oppose all proposals to “solve” the crisis through racism and other forms of scapegoating.
  • And no scapegoating of the people who create the jobs you want so badly, the ‘rich’!

  • Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.
  • No matter how many people you gather together in your bogus and immoral cause, you will still be bogus and immoral.

  • Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.
  • YES! please do that, after all its so very effective!

  • Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.

That sounds to me like a call to arms to all thieves. Absolutely appalling. They want more theft, more immoral redistribution of wealth, more tyranny, more bureaucracy, a bigger hungrier state, more control over business. Just how stupid can people be?

It seems that there is no limit.

We urge those who support this statement to attend the Organising Conference on 27 November 2010 (10am-5pm), at Camden Centre, Town Hall, London, WC1H 9JE.

Signed:

Tony Benn

Caroline Lucas MP

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/04/time-to-organise-resistance-now

And then there is a list of the usual, delusional suspects.

Thieves to a man, all rotten to the core, leeches, unproductive, insane, destructive, anti-human and all bad!

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard rides the D-Notice razor edge

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph about ‘The Death of Paper Money’. Anyone who has been woken up by Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and the Austrians knows that this is in fact inevitable, and in the end, is a good thing, because it means that government can no longer steal your money from you while you sleep, spending that money on mass murder:

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. “My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice,” said one well-connected woman.

“You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged — not in the streets — but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for.”

Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who — by luck or design — had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something.

A conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as “Judefetzen” (Jew- confetti), hinting at the chain of events that would lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.

While the Weimar tale is a timeless study of social disintegration, it cannot shed much light on events today.

[…]

My emphasis.

Cannot shed much light on events today?

This is so irrational, contradictory and ridiculous that we could be forgiven for concluding that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is working under the constraints of a D-Notice, preventing him from spelling out explicitly what is about to take place for fear of the disruption that would ensue, should the emperor’s naked state be publicly declared.

What he has done in this article is the next best thing; he obliquely spelled out the precise nature of what is going to happen in the USA, UK and all over Europe should hyperinflation suddenly kick in, and then put in a disclaimer right at the end of the section, to indemnify himself and get past the Telegraph editors.

That is the only explanation for this line. All of the factors are here for an inevitable hyperinflationary event. The parallels to the German hyperinflation are eerily similar, including the mass ignorance of what inflation is, what money is, etc etc.

So, what should you do to protect yourself from this coming hyperinflation? Evans-Pritchard tells you in this section:

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. “Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else,” said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

[…]

The message is clear; you need to hold currencies other than the ones that are about to go critical mass in a hyperinflationary spiral. You need to own gold. You need to own Swiss Francs. You should not own the Euro and under no circumstances, should you own the Federal Reserve Note (the ‘US Dollar’).

So what about the Pound Sterling? What are its characteristics, and why does Evans-Pritchard believe that it is immune from hyperinflation? Why has Evans-Pritchard completely (deliberately?) ignored the Pound and its nature in this discussion? He says:

This is not a picture of America, or Britain, or Europe in 2010.

Why not? What is the precise difference between the money used in the Weimar hyperinflation and the US Dollar, or for that matter the Zimbabwe Dollar (which no longer exists)?

The answer is that there is no difference.

Now, lets do what Evans-Pritchard is apparently forbidden from doing, using only the Google, and ask a fundamental question.

What is the Pound Sterling?

The pound is a fiat currency, supervised by the Bank of England.

The Pound is redeemable for nothing:

The contemporary sterling is a fiat currency which is backed only by securities; in essence IOUs from the Treasury that represent future income from the taxation of the population. Some economists term this ‘currency by trust’ as sterling relies on the faith of the user rather than any physical specie.

The bank of England has outsourced the manufacturing of its notes to the private company De La Rue:

De La Rue announces that it has been selected by the Bank of England to be its preferred banknote printing supplier. This follows an announcement by the Bank today that it has decided to contract out its banknote printing operations at Debden, Essex, to a commercial company. This will enable the Bank to lower the costs of the supply of its banknotes, while for staff it opens up the possibility of bringing in more work to Debden.

So. In five minutes we discover that the pound is worth precisely nothing. It can be printed at will in any quantity the Bank of England desires for any purpose that the state chooses, without any constraints whatsoever.

If you also factor in fractional reserve banking where UK banks are legally permitted to create money at will, you have a system, just like the one about to implode in the USA, the Federal Reserve System, that cannot possibly be immune to collapse.

If Sterling is immune from collapse, I would like to know precisely how it is different to every other paper money fiat currency that has ever existed.

Did you know that:

At heart, this economic crisis is in fact a currency crisis. Throughout history no paper currency (or “fiat currency”, since it is accepted as money by virtue of Government fiat or decree) has survived, and this time will be no different. The average lifespan of fiat currencies has been 16 years*. The present system is unique in that it has survived for 38 years and for the first time ALL countries throughout the world are on a fiat money standard. This means that the resulting crash will be on the scale of something the world has never seen.

[…]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/coming-financial-tsunami

My emphasis. Wether or not the figure of sixteen years is accurate, ALL fiat currencies eventually collapse. These are the countries that have already tasted it: Angola 1991-1995, Argentina 1975-1991, Austria 1921-1922, Belarus 1994-2002, Bolivia 1984-1986, Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1993, Brazil 1986-1994, Bulgaria 1996, Chile 1971-1973, China 1948-1949, Free City of Danzig 1922-1923, Georgia 1993-1995, Germany 1922-1923, Greece 1942-1944, Hungary 1945-1946, Israel 1970-1971, Japan 1948-1951, Krajina 1992-1993, Madagascar 2004-2005, Mozambique 1977-1992, Nicaragua 1987-1990, Peru 1988-1990, Philippines 1942-1944, Poland 1989-1991, Romania 1998-2005, Russia 1921-1922 and 1992-1999, Turkey 1990-1995, Ukraine 1993-1995, United States 1861-1865, Yugoslavia 1989-1994, Zaire 1989-1996, Zimbabwe 2004-2009.

All of the countries in this list experienced government created hyperinflation in the twentieth century. If each of these countries had not had government monopolies on the creation of money and legal tender laws, opting instead for a completely market driven commodity money system of currencies created by entrepreneurs whose business it is to manufacture money, they would not have experienced this problem. The sole exception in the above list in terms of the century of hyperinflation is the USA which had its experience in the nineteenth century, so they are about to have a second experience of it.

This is what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will not touch in his articles… and its understandable why he does not touch upon this matter. Why should he do anything that might precipitate the inevitable collapse of Sterling? What can he possibly gain from telling the truth that anyone who is reading his article, and who therefore can use the Google, can access for themselves? He will only be made a scapegoat for the collapse which is going to happen wether he writes about it or not. We have all seen how governments and the press will use anything and any person as scapegoat to deflect blame from the true causes of a ‘financial crisis’.

Pity is what you should feel for Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, knowing the inevitable, desperate to warn everyone but unable to do so, either because of orders from above or his instinct for self preservation.