Take a look at this:

http://youtu.be/McNo62gpw6M

Stephan is a great thinker, but it seems that what he cannot do is empathise with other people.

While he is sipping coffee in his house in Canada, Hillary Clinton and Obama are at this moment concocting another lie / pretext to unleash mass murder on people, namely Iran:

http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/12/the_very_scary_iranian_terror_plot/singleton/

Canada, which he funds with his taxes by his own admission, will no doubt be a part of this criminal act.

Should Ron Paul become president before they are able to launch this mass murder, he will be able to prevent it.

For this reason alone, Ron Paul should be supported. Its all very well sitting in the safety of your own home in the empire, and paying taxes to support it, complaining that Ron Paul doesn’t want to dismantle the state, while your money is being used to kill Iranian children. Read the rest of this entry »

The Grauniad has an astonishing report of a newsletter published by Belgravia police station, where people are advised to report anarchists to the police.

I’m not making this up:

Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police
Islamist terrorists also mentioned in briefing, as anarchists complain of being criminalised for their beliefs

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door?

[…]

the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately.

This was the surprising injunction from the Metropolitan Police issued to businesses and members of the public in Westminster last week. There was no warning about other political groups, but next to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police’s “counter terrorist focus desk” called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

What the HELL?!

The note was issued from Belgravia Police Station as part of Project Griffin which aims to “advise and familiarise managers, security officers and employees of large public and private sector organisations across the capital on security, counter-terrorism and crime prevention issues”.

Grauniad

Here is a page that has the actual report linked from it. The Grauniad didn’t think you should actually read the report for yourself:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/07/31/met-counter-terrorism-office-report-anarchists-to-the-police/

The first thing that is interesting about that document is (apart from its appalling graphic design) that there is no named author.

What public servant was responsible for this gaffe, who told her to write this and why is she not accountable? You KNOW why.

Now lets think about this carefully.

Why has some uneducated person put this nonsense into that document?

From their point of view, the only exposure to ‘Anarchism’ they have had is the agent provocateurs who routinely smash up McDonalds and bank windows. They equate this criminal behaviour with Anarchism because the people who do that violence say that they are Anarchists.

In fact, the truth is those people are not Anarchists, but are in many instances members of the police, sent out to cause trouble. This is a well established fact.

Now, not all the police are aware that their own force is being used as a tool in this way, and I imagine that they would be shocked, SHOCKED to find out that this was so; nevertheless, these compartmentalised, unnamed people are playing right along in their roles, obeying orders without any care or concern for their duties or the truth.

And they wonder why the ideas of Libertarianism are spreading like wildfire. All anyone has to do is read this Grauniad article to be completely outraged, as all of the comments on that article demonstrate.

Grauniad readers are staunch anti-Libertarians to a man, but they are not not stupid, and can tell right from wrong where their own rights overlap with the rights of others when it comes to free speech. They know that this statement is only one step away from applying directly to them and their ideas.

Thinking once again, from the point of view of an uneducated, low IQ man, how can you spot an anarchist? More importantly, how can you spot who is not an anarchist?

There is one easy way to tell who is or who is not an anarchist; anarchists are:

1/ Non violent: Anarchists do not use violence to achieve their goal of a stateless society.

Thats pretty much it. Anyone who smashes a McDonalds window, or who engages in any violence of any kind is not an anarchist by definition. The people who do that are CRIMINALS, not anarchists.

And for the record, the goal of a stateless society is a completely logical, moral, realistic and just goal, and that police report is correct in this single aspect;

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police.

Lets do this.

Anarchism is a political philosophy.

CORRECT.

which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful,

WRONG.

Anarchists can PROVE, through logic, ethics and history that the state is harmful, unnecessary and undesirable. This is not something that anarchists consider or is something that is mere opinion, any more than people ‘consider’ that the sky is blue; the state IS evil, is not needed and is toxic to humanity and that is a fact, not conjecture, a belief, an article of faith or any of those things.

Now, taking all of this into consideration, that the ‘anarchists’ who attend demonstrations and smash things to pieces are not anarchists at all either because they are not philosophically anarchists or because they are agent provocateurs and given the fact that anarchists are non violent, and have the right to publish and espouse anything they like in writing or by any other means, if someone was to report an anarchist to the police at Belgravia station…

What are they going to do?

Arrest someone for reading a book? Or publishing a pamphlet? Or writing a blog?

Whoever they did that to, would be in line for MILLIONS OF POUNDS in compensation, after a sensational, high profile trial, which would be taken on a contingency basis by a line of Britain’s top law firms, who would queue around the block for a chance of easy money. Academics from all over the world would submit amicus briefs on behalf of the defense.

They would have a snowballs chance in hell of getting away with it.

I simply cannot believe that the police in Belgravia have so much time on their hands that they can even be doing this sort of infantile nonsense. No one wants these ridiculous, meaningless scaremongering reports. They do not prevent crime, cannot prevent crime, waste time and money and bring the profession of policing further into disrepute.

Of course, Libertarians have an answer to this.

Libertarians understand that the State should not have a monopoly on security. Security is a service that should be produced by the market:

The market and private enterprise do exist, and so most people can readily envision a free market in most goods and services. Probably the most difficult single area to grasp, however, is the abolition of government operations in the service of protection: police, the courts, etc. — the area encompassing defense of person and property against attack or invasion. How could private enterprise and the free market possibly provide such service? How could police, legal systems, judicial services, law enforcement, prisons — how could these be provided in a free market? We have already seen how a great deal of police protection, at the least, could be supplied by the various owners of streets and land areas. But we now need to examine this entire area systematically.

In the first place, there is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire, that the government must supply “police protection,” as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all. But in actual fact there is no absolute commodity called “police protection” any more than there is an absolute single commodity called “food” or “shelter.” It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth. In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute “protection.” How shall the police allocate their funds which are, of course, always limited as are the funds of all other individuals, organizations, and agencies? How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment? fingerprinting equipment? detectives as against uniformed police? patrol cars as against foot police, etc.?

The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires or whether it is doing so efficiently. The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free, competitive market. In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wish to purchase. The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand twenty-four-hour bodyguard service. On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it. A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses, and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers. Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear.

One big problem a government police force must always face is: what laws really to enforce? Police departments are theoretically faced with the absolute injunction, “enforce all laws,” but in practice a limited budget forces them to allocate their personnel and equipment to the most urgent crimes. But the absolute dictum pursues them and works against a rational allocation of resources. On the free market, what would be enforced is whatever the customers are willing to pay for. Suppose, for example, that Mr. Jones has a precious gem he believes might soon be stolen. He can ask, and pay for, round-the-clock police protection at whatever strength he may wish to work out with the police company. He might, on the other hand, also have a private road on his estate he doesn’t want many people to travel on — but he might not care very much about trespassers on that road. In that case, he won’t devote any police resources to protecting the road. As on the market in general, it is up to the consumer — and since all of us are consumers this means each person individually decides how much and what kind of protection he wants and is willing to buy.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p215

I don’t know anyone who does not think that there are not enough police on the streets. If the police had any sense, they would understand that in a Libertarian system, there would be more of them, doing real police work for better money and conditions, and they would not be wasting their time writing silly pamphlets and enforcing laws that outlaw victimless crimes like the statues covering the current round of insane prohibition. Even the police are starting to wake up about that particular corner of the insane asylum.

While we are at it look at this:

Police to carry out on-the-spot fingerprinting in the street even for minor traffic offences

Police are now armed with a device that can scan fingerprints so they can correctly identify suspects who lie about their details.

In what sounds like something out of George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, suspects can now be finger printed in the street thanks to the new hand-held police gadget.

The mobile identification service scans a print, then checks it by trawling through a national database for the details.

[…]

Daily Mail

Sound familiar? It should; we told you about this many years ago.

There appear to be some people who are awake. Look at this top comment on the Daily Mail article:

If you have never been finger printed by the police, and the vast majority of the population have not, then how can this device tell a roadside copper if you are lying or not?

Which is exactly the point that we make in this article, and what we repeated over and over in different variations for a decade.

These devices exist not to protect you from criminals, but are there to make money for the vendors that manufacture them. Each one is connected to a Blackberry, and then there is the cost of the bespoke scanner attachment and the management of the database. This is nothing more than fleecing the population.

But I digress.

What these people are saying is that if you read a book and then agree with what is in it, you are a criminal, a ‘terrorist’. Its completely absurd of course, but it is an indication of a fundamental shift that is taking place.

These people are scared. They are scared of ideas. If these people are so terrified by ideas the whole edifice must be crumbling invisibly before our very eyes, and in fact, this is a very clear sign of that happening.

A society that is secure in its beliefs and values, in this case, the right of free speech and the right to believe whatever you want to believe, has no cause to turn against its own fundamental principles in order to ‘protect itself’. The fact that they are now (and have been for over ten years) turning against the core values of their ‘society’ is a clear sign that the system is slowly moving into panic mode. The problem for them is that they will not be able to stem the tide.

No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. The reality is that all the violence is coming from them and the majority will do nothing while the edifice collapses. Then, one day, as it happened in East Germany, the State will simply cease to exist, only this time, there will be no ‘West Germany’ to take the place of the dead State. The world will not end, violence will not break out, there will not be chaos or a breakdown of order. There will only be a end to coercion by the State.

Depending on who you are and what you have come to know is the truth, this is either a very good thing or a very bad thing. You cannot un-know a truth; Libertarianism cannot now be un-seen or un-read or un-published. The ideas are out there, anyone who encounters them, because they are crystal clear in their truths, observations, analysis and logic, is converted to them. The economic collapse, predicted by the Austrians and the anarcho-capitalists is coming true like clockwork. They have the only correct explanation for it, and when you expose people to the fundamental principles of it, that are undeniably true, lo and behold, they understand and change their broken thinking.

This is inevitable, and will no doubt accelerate as a pound of butter goes to £5 in the supermarket.

Real anarchists do nothing except tell the truth day in and day out. As the State destroys itself with its Keynesian heroin, the State itself is going to abolish the State without any help. Real anarchists only document what is happening, and shake their heads in disbelief at the logical fallacies, the economic illiteracy and penchant for self immolation that Statists exhibit. Look at this for an example of how, even now, they want more insanity and not less.

The story of this newsletter is spreading virally across the internets as we speak. If the people who wrote this have any sense or decency left they will firstly identify who the author was and then apologise and revise their statements.

Or not.

It will not change the final outcome one iota.

In today’s Telegraph, we read, with not too much surprise, that The Coalition is quietly bringing in ID Cards for all, only this time, it will be ID Cards 2.0 and not Labour’s centralised NIR powered ID Cards 1.

All of the problems of the old ID Card remain however, and some new ones are introduced, which I will point out right now.

Coalition builds new national identity system

The Coalition has quietly begun work on a new national identity system, less than a year after it scrapped Labour’s derided ID cards.

Didn’t take long did it? And this latest attempt had to happen at some point, since HMG refused to rule out ID Cards for Foreigners, meaning that eventually everyone in the UK would have to be in the system because targeting only foreign looking people is racist and irrational, as we said before.

A prototype of the new system is due to be in place as soon as October this year. It will aim to reliably identify users of government websites, as part of plans to deliver more public services via the web.

This is a lie. The new system is a prototype of ID Cards for everyone. It is not just for accessing government ‘services’. ID Cards always lead to feature creep whenever they are widely deployed, for a variety of reasons; for example, so that people who sell alcohol, cigarettes, aspirin and scissors, can prove that they did a proper ID check before making the sale, the information being stored on their database, indemnifying them from prosecution. This is what it would look like:

the devil really is in the details:

This time, the receipt will not say NIR but will say ‘assured identity’. You will not be able to buy anything on the list of ‘verify before buy’ items without either showing your VISA or paying by VISA.

George Osborne believes the shift online will cut Whitehall administration costs and so help soften the blow of spending cuts over the next few years.

Several private companies that already hold personal data, including credit card providers, will be involved in the system.

There is the big difference, and the new moral problem. Previously the liars of New Labour claimed that ID Cards mandated by the state were OK because, “private companies already have much of this data”. This is a classic fallacious argument of course, and now the coalition is re-imagining it to justify ID Cards 2.0.

If you volunteer to interact with a company so that they can provide you with a service, that is one thing (and its a good thing) but when companies join with government where you will be compelled to use their services, that is fascism.

The government compels you to pay for and use it ‘services’; they are not voluntary. By partnering with VISA and other companies to identify you, and mandating that you use VISA to access their systems, they are forcing you to use the services of a company.

This is completely immoral and unjustifiable.

If government cannot deliver services on budget, then they should not be offering those services. Savings of money are not a sufficient excuse to introduce ID Cards.

Such firms have already verified their customers’ identities, so privacy campaigners hope government will not itself collect personal data, in contrast to the National Identity Register that was to be the basis of ID cards.

This is straight out of a PR pack I imagine. The laws of the universe, having not changed since the death of Labour’s ID Card, mean that when you identify yourself to the state in this new system, you will be issued a unique number by them, or by the issuer of the card.

That number will travel with you from the moment you sign up till the day you die. That number will act as a primary database key to track all of your purchases, interactions, money transfers and every time you show the card.

It is exactly the same problem that the old ID Card system had, except this time, the financial and technical burden of running the system is being outsourced to VISA, Nectar and the other crony capitalist, fascist companies that are selling their customer databases to the state.

You will have no opt out in this. Even if VISA require that you consent to having your card used to identify you at a government portal, and they are not compelling you to use a VISA ID Card 2.0 service, the fact of the matter is that you will be compelled to interact with them because the state will mandate, backed with violence, that you identify yourself using the new system.

Visa is known to be involved in the plans and is conducting trials that would allow its customers to log in to government websites using credit card details.

This is yet another step in the transition to a completely corporate state, where companies overtly are in charge of the government at every level.

“Currently customers have to enter multiple login details and passwords to access different public services, sometimes on the same website,” said Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the cross-government plan.

“This involves significant duplication, is expensive to operate and is highly inconvenient for users.”

If that is the only problem, then switch to Open ID; one login for all your websites. Or stop using the web to deliver ‘services’. These justifications are paper thin transparent nonsense.

He also claimed the new scheme, dubbed “identity assurance”, would also make it more difficult for fraudsters to dupe the benefits and tax systems.

This is a lie. If it is not a lie, then he needs to say precisely why this is so. Credit card fraud is rampant, and using credit cards to interface with the state will allow everyone with a fraudulent or duplicated credit card to masquerade as someone else when identifying themselves to a government portal.

Look no further than the recent SONY breach where the credit card details, dates of birth, names and addresses of SEVENTY MILLION people were copied.

The population of Britain is 61,838,154 – 2009 That means that a number of people, larger than the population of Britain had their credit card details copied.

It means that if such a thing happened in the UK, every single person who identifies themselves to the state with their VISA could be impersonated with ease. This means more benefit fraud, GUARANTEED.

The government has informed privacy campaigners such as the pressure group NO2ID about the plans, in an attempt to avoid the civil liberties outcry that ultimately destroyed ID cards.

This preemptive strike will not work. The genie is out of the bottle about the dangers of ID Cards.

But Guy Herbert, NO2ID’s general secretary warned that “the devil will be in the details and especially the legal details” of the new scheme. He said the Cabinet Office had not yet offered details despite its tight schedule.

“It’s not a bad thing in itself to check that the person you are talking to is the person you want to talk to,” Mr Herbert said.

“But whatever the good intentions at the outset, the fear will always be that the bureaucratic imperative to collect and share more data about the public will take over.”

And that’s not the half of it. I’m sure that he said much more that was not quoted in this piece.

Identity assurance will be implemented from August next year as part of major government initiatives such as forthcoming radical reforms to the benefits system and improvements to online tax assessments.

They will use your credit card transaction history to ensure that you are not spending more than you should be according to your tax return. This is a part of the move to ‘real time taxation’ that was quietly mooted recently. It doesn’t get any more sinister than this.

It will then gradually be extended so users will be able to use the same login for all public services online.

Telegraph

Once again, there is no need to use credit cards to do this; Open ID will suffice if this is the real problem, which of course, it is not.

Personally, I think that most credit card holders, after having been educated about online fraud for years, and instilling in themselves a healthy paranoia about putting their card details into a form online, will understand exactly what it means to identify yourself with your VISA or MasterCard. They will understand immediately that this is a threat, because credit cards are money and people guard their money more jealously than they guard their privacy.

Of course, this has some other side effects.

What about the people who do not have credit cards? Either they will be excluded from receiving government services to which they are entitled (and they are the ones who use them the most), or VISA will be made to issue everyone with a VISA card hastening the death of cash, that other project hight on the agenda of the State.

It is a win-win deal for both VISA and the state:

• The State gets an ID Card system they do not have to manage
• The State eliminates cash which is untraceable and un-taxable
• VISA gets to run the de-facto new electronic currency of Britain

In the mean time, it is only the productive, credit worthy tax payer who is going to be guinea pigged, fleeced, max-taxed and tracked as he dutifully interfaces with this new system… if he doesn’t have any brains.

This is the wrong time, societally, to introduce this. The biggest ever act of civil disobedience has just happened, people are fed up to the teeth with crony capitalism, inflationism, bailouts warmongering and corruption.

Go ahead. Keep pushing.

Make sure that you have no coffee next to your keyboard, or in your mouth, because if you do, you WILL splutter or spill over your keyboard it as you watch this unprecedented, foul, loathsome and appalling display of inhuman nastiness:

As you all know, we do not have any time for protesters, demonstrators or people who are for the State its theft and wealth redistribution, but for the love of everything decent in the world, this man with Cerebral Palsy is a total hero for sitting calmly whilst being subjected to one of the most disgusting displays of vile behaviour that I have ever seen in my entire life.

All of you who still believe that the BBC is a ‘fair’, necessary, unbiased, professional and beneficial organisation, take note; what you have just watched is a manifestation of the true nature of the BBC and the people who control it.

This is what they are really like, right to the bone. At all other times, they are merely pretending to be human beings, with soft voices, seemingly reasonable opinions and lack of bias.

You are paying for this. Literally and figuratively. You pay this man’s salary. You pay for the whole sick and twisted organisation. You paid for this presenter and his attempt to humiliate and vilify a man who cannot even push his own wheelchair.

And they have the GALL to ask for the ‘License fee’ to be INCREASED.

It should be ABOLISHED Period, the BBC should encrypt its signal and anyone who wants to pay for this sort of trash can do so if they like seeing human beings treated like this. Anyone who does not concede that the BBC has GOT TO GO is FOR what we have just seen.

Absolutely UNBELIEVABLE.

Lew Rockwell has a great article about the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?

Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that speaks to who is in charge: the state or individuals.

We live in anti-liberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can’t even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have travelled from the Age of Reason to our own times.

Referencing the great controversy about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Karen De Coster put the issue to rest by turning Rachel Maddow’s question on its head. She demanded to know whether a white businessman has the right to refuse service to a black man. Karen asked: does a black businessman have the right to refuse service to a Klan member?

I don’t think anyone would dispute that right. How a person uses the right to associate (which necessarily means the right not to associate) is a matter of individual choice profoundly influenced by the cultural context. That a person has the right to make these choices on his or her own cannot be denied by anyone who believes in liberty.

The right to exclude is not something incidental. It is core to the functioning of civilization. If I use proprietary software, I can’t download it without signing a contractual agreement. If I refuse to sign, the company doesn’t have to sell it to me. And why? Because it is their software and they set the terms of use. Period. There is nothing more to say.

If you run a blog that accepts comments, you know how important this right is. You have to be able to exclude spam or ban IP addresses of trolls or otherwise include and exclude based on whether a person’s contribution adds value. Every venue on the internet that calls forth public participation knows this. Without this right, any forum could collapse, having been taken over by bad elements.

We exercise the right to exclude every day. If you go to lunch, some people come and some people do not. When you have a dinner party, you are careful to include some people and necessarily exclude others. Some restaurants expect and demand shoes and shirts and even coats and ties. The New York Times includes some articles and excludes others, includes some people in its editorial meetings and excludes others.

When business hires, some people make the cut and others do not. It is the same with college admissions, church membership, fraternities, civic clubs, and nearly every other association. They all exercise the right to exclude. It is central to the organization of every aspect of life. If this right is denied, what do we get in its place? Coercion and compulsion. People are forced together by the state, with one group required at the point of a gun to serve another group. This is involuntary servitude, expressly prohibited by the 13th amendment. One presumes that a freedom-loving people will always be against that.

As Larry Elder says: “This is freedom 101.”

What about the claim that government should regulate the grounds of exclusion? Let’s say, for example, that we do not deny the general right of free association, but narrow its range to address a particular injustice. Is that plausible? Well, freedom is a bit like life, something that is or is not. Slicing and dicing it according to political priorities is exceedingly dangerous. It perpetrates social division, leads to arbitrary power, mandates a form of slavery, and turns the tables on who precisely is in charge in society.

[…]

And this is precisely why racialists, nationalists, and hard-core bigots have always opposed liberal capitalism: it includes and excludes based on the cash nexus and without regard to features that collectivists of all sorts regard as important. In the imagined utopias of the national socialists, the champions of commerce are hanged from lampposts as race traitors and enemies of the nation.

That’s because the market tends toward an ever-evolving, ever-changing tapestry of association, with patterns that cannot be known in advance and should not be regulated by federal masters. In contrast, government’s attempts to regulate association lead to disorder and social calamities.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/freedom-of-association145.html

Indeed; all of this is absolutely true, and I agree with it.

Government has no business forcing association or preventing association by law. Which puts into sharp relief the next part of this post.

It seems like the arguments questioning the logic of forcing anti discrimination by asserting that the state does not force people to enter restaurants or forbid people from engaging in boycotts are deflated in one aspect. It is indeed illogical that the state forces restaurants to serve but does not force patrons to enter… actually, they DO force people to trade with each other, and forbid boycotts.

In the USA, the Federal Government has enacted a law that forbids people from boycotting Israel.

What they are saying is that american firms are FORCED to deal with people that they may, for whatever reason, prefer not to deal with.

From the ‘Bureau of Industry and Security’, a department with a distinctly un-American name:

Antiboycott Compliance

The Bureau is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain Moslem countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott. Compliance with such requests may be prohibited by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and may be reportable to the Bureau.

Boycott Alert

U.S. companies continue to report receiving requests to engage in activities that further or support the boycott of Israel. U.S. companies may receive similar requests in the future. If you have questions, please call (202) 482-2381 and ask for the Duty Officer or you may contact us by email.

This is a law that forbids private companies from refraining from association.

Antiboycott Laws:

During the mid-1970’s the United States adopted two laws that seek to counteract the participation of U.S. citizens in other nation’s economic boycotts or embargoes. These “antiboycott” laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). While these laws share a common purpose, there are distinctions in their administration.

Objectives:

The antiboycott laws were adopted to encourage, and in specified cases, require U.S. firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction. They have the effect of preventing U.S. firms from being used to implement foreign policies of other nations which run counter to U.S. policy.

Primary Impact:

The Arab League boycott of Israel is the principal foreign economic boycott that U.S. companies must be concerned with today. The antiboycott laws, however, apply to all boycotts imposed by foreign countries that are unsanctioned by the United States.

Who Is Covered by the Laws?

The antiboycott provisions of the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) apply to the activities of U.S. persons in the interstate or foreign commerce of the United States. The term “U.S. person” includes all individuals, corporations and unincorporated associations resident in the United States, including the permanent domestic affiliates of foreign concerns. U.S. persons also include U.S. citizens abroad (except when they reside abroad and are employed by non-U.S. persons) and the controlled in fact affiliates of domestic concerns. The test for “controlled in fact” is the ability to establish the general policies or to control the day to day operations of the foreign affiliate.

The scope of the EAR, as defined by Section 8 of the EAA, is limited to actions taken with intent to comply with, further, or support an unsanctioned foreign boycott.

What do the Laws Prohibit?

Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under the EAR includes:

• Agreements to refuse or actual refusal to do business with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
• Agreements to discriminate or actual discrimination against other persons based on race, religion, sex, national origin or nationality.
• Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about business relationships with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
• Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about the race, religion, sex, or national origin of another person.

Implementing letters of credit containing prohibited boycott terms or conditions.

The TRA does not “prohibit” conduct, but denies tax benefits (“penalizes”) for certain types of boycott-related agreements.

Note the double talk, the act does not prohibit conduct, but penalises for agreements. Later on the page says:

Penalties:

The Export Admnistration Act (EAA) specifies penalties for violations of the Antiboycott Regulations as well as export control violations. These can include:

Criminal:

The penalties imposed for each “knowing” violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 or five times the value of the exports involved, whichever is greater, and imprisonment of up to five years. During periods when the EAR are continued in effect by an Executive Order issued pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the criminal penalties for each “willful” violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 and imprisonment for up to ten years.

Administrative:

For each violation of the EAR any or all of the following may be imposed:

• General denial of export privileges;
• The imposition of fines of up to $11,000 per violation; and/or
• Exclusion from practice.

Boycott agreements under the TRA involve the denial of all or part of the foreign tax benefits discussed above.

When the EAA is in lapse, penalties for violation of the Antiboycott Regulations are governed by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The IEEPA Enhancement Act provides for penalties of up to the greater of $250,000 per violation or twice the value of the transaction for administrative violations of Antiboycott Regulations, and up to $1 million and 20 years imprisonment per violation for criminal antiboycott violations.

[…]

http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm

Amazing isn’t it? It does not prohibit conduct, but puts you in GAOL for doing it, removes your ‘export privileges’ (doing business is a privilege?), imposes incredibly large punitive fines, and finally (I presume) can revoke your license too practice your trade.

Absolutely immoral and illegitimate.

On the other hand, you have many states that enforce a boycott of Israel, which is an illegitimate and immoral denial of the right of association.

Not only do all of these countries violate the right of association, but they are violating the right of individuals to freely enter into contracts.

If someone wants to draw up a contract that contains a boycott clause, it is the absolute right of the parties to agree to this. Period. Obviously, the mandating of the insertion of such clauses is a clear violation; you should be able to remove or add clauses as both parties see fit.

Take a look at a representative sample of the clauses:

Office of Antiboycott Compliance

Examples of Boycott Requests

Following are recent examples of boycott requests that have been reported to the Office of Antiboycott Compliance. These examples are illustrative and not exhaustive. Companies should call our advice line (202) 482-2381 with questions concerning these or any request to comply with restrictive trade practices or boycotts.

BAHRAIN

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Purchase Order:

“In the case of overseas suppliers, this order is placed subject to the suppliers being not on the Israel boycott list published by the central Arab League.”

Reportable boycott condition in an importer’s purchase order:

“Goods of Israeli origin not acceptable.”

Reportable boycott condition in a letter of credit:

“A signed statement from the shipping company, or its agent, stating the name, flag and nationality of the carrying vessel and confirming … that it is permitted to enter Arab ports.”

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Contract

“Israeli Clause:
The Seller shall not supply goods or materials which have been manufactured or processed in Israel nor shall the services of any Israeli organization be used in handling or transporting the goods or materials.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Contractor shall comply in all respects with the requirements of the laws of the State of Bahrain relating to the boycott of Israel. Goods manufactured by companies blacklisted by the Arab Boycott of Israel Office may not be imported into the State of Bahrain and must not be supplied against this Contract. For information concerning the Boycott List, the Contractor can approach the nearest Arab Consulate.”

Prohibited Condition in a Letter of Credit

“Buyer shall in no way contravene the regulations issued by Bahrain Government and or Israel Boycott Office. Buyer shall not nominate a vessel blacklisted by the said office.”

BANGLADESH

Prohibited Boycott Condition in instructions to bidders on a contract

“No produced commodity shall be eligible for … financing if such commodity contains any component or components which were imported into the producing country from Israel and countries not eligible to trade with … the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The equipment and materials must not be of Israeli origin. The supplier/bidder who are not black listed by Arab boycott of Israel will be allowed to participate in this bid.”

IRAQ

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Questionnaire

“1. Do you have or ever have had a branch or main company, factory or assembly plant in Israel or have sold to an Israeli?”

“2. Do you have or ever have had general agencies or offices in Israel for your Middle Eastern or international operations?”

“3. Have you ever granted the right of using your name, trademarks royalty, patent, copyright or that of any of your subsidiaries to Israeli persons or firms?”

“4. Do you participate or ever participated or owned shares in an Israeli firm or business?”

“5. Do you render now or ever have rendered any consultative service or technical assistance to any Israeli firm or business?”

“6. Do you represent now or ever have represented any Israeli firm or business or abroad?”

“7. What companies in whose capital are your shareholders?” Please state the name and nationality of each company and the percentage of share of their total capital.”

“8. What companies or shareholders in your capital? Please state the name and nationality of each company and the percentage of share of their total capital.”

“N.B. The above questions should be answered on behalf of the company itself and all of its branch companies, if any.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Contractor shall, throughout the continuance of the Contract, abide by and comply in all respects with the rules and instructions issued from time to time by the Israel Boycott Office in Iraq.”

Prohibited Condition in a Trademark Application

“Requirement for the registration of pharmaceutical companies:

Certification letter regarding the boycott of Israel (i.e., do not comprise any parts, raw materials, labor or capital of Israeli origin).”
“Requirement for the Registration of Medical Appliances, Disposables producing companies, and Laboratory diagnostic kit manufacturers:

Certification letter regarding boycott of Israel.”
Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“Supplies of our purchase order should never be consigned or shipped by steamers included on Israel Boycott list.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The bill of lading shall bear a note that the vessel delivering the cargo is not on the “Black List” and does not call at Israeli ports.”

KUWAIT

Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Custom’s document

“[The vessel entry document asks the ship’s captain to certify that,] no goods, dry cargo, or personal effects listed on the document of Israeli origin or manufactured by a blacklisted firm or company are to be landed as they will be subject to confiscation.”

Prohibited Boycott Condition in Letter of Credit

“We hereby certify that the beneficiaries, manufacturers, exporters and transferees of this credit are neither blacklisted nor have any connection with Israel, and that the terms and conditions of this credit in no way contravenes the law pertaining to the boycott of Israel and the decisions issued by the Israel Boycott Office.”

Reportable Boycott Condition in Letter of Credit:

“Importation of goods from Israel is strictly prohibited by Kuwait import regulations; therefore, certificate of origin covering goods originating in Israel is not acceptable.”

Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“All shipments under this order shall comply with Israel Boycott Office Rules and Regulations.”

Prohibited Condition in a Purchase Order

“Goods must not be shipped on vessels/carriers included in the Israeli Boycott list.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The vendor (as person or organization) or his representatives should not be an Israeli national. So the vendor should not be owned, managed, or represented by any companies that carry an Israeli nationality and there should not be any sub-contractors that carry Israeli nationality.

The vendor should not involve any person or representatives that carries the Israeli nationality in importing or exporting the software or hardware mentioned in this contract and its appendices and the vendor should provide all documents that support the above information.”

LEBANON

Prohibited Boycott Condition in Power of Attorney from Lebanese firm

A Lebanese firm sent a power of attorney affidavit to appoint a local agent in Iraq to a U.S. firm. The affidavit asked that U.S. firm answer a series of questions concerning the Arab boycott. These questions included whether the firm had a plant in Israel, has sold to Israel, had offices in Israel, owned shares in an Israeli firm, had provided services for an Israeli firm, or had granted any trademarks, copy or patent rights to Israeli persons of firms.

Reportable Boycott Condition in letter of credit:

“Certificate issued by the shipping company or its agent testifying that the carrying vessel is allowed to enter the Lebanese port…”

LIBYA

Prohibited Condition in a Letter of Credit

“Original commercial invoice signed and certified by the beneficiary that the goods supplied are not manufactured by either a company or one of its subsidiary branches who are blacklisted by the Arab boycott of Israel or in which Israeli capital is invested.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“The Second Party shall observe the provisions of the Law for Boycott of Israel or any other State which the provisions for Boycott are applicable and shall ensure such observation from any other sub-contractor. In case of contravening this condition, the First Party shall have the right to cancel the contract and confiscate the deposit by mere notice by registered letter without prejudice to his right of compensation.”

Prohibited Condition in a Contract

“Boycott Provisions:
The Contractor shall observe and comply with all the provisions and decisions concerning the boycott to Israel or any other country the same is valid. The Contractor shall secure the respect of such boycott by any other party he might have subcontracted with him.”

Prohibited Condition in a Certificate of Origin

“The goods being exported are of national origin of the producing country and the goods do not contain any components of Israeli origin, whatever the proportion of such component is. We, the exporter, declare that the company producing the respective commodity is not an affiliate to or mother of any company that appears on the Israeli boycott blacklist and also, we the exporter, have no direct or indirect connection with Israel and shall act in compliance with the principles and regulations of the Arab boycott of Israel.”

[…]

http://www.bis.doc.gov/antiboycottcompliance/oacantiboycottrequestexamples.html

Did you know that if you have a stamp from Israel in your passport, none of these countries will issue a VISA?

In the USA, it is clearly illegal for a greengrocer to require a wholesaler to only provide products that do not come from Israel. The law says that it is illegal to participate in foreign boycotts, but how can anyone separate a foreign boycott from a USA led boycott? If the terms are exactly the same, and a foreign boycott started first, then how could you prove that your domestic boycott is not an extension of a foreign one?

The people who drafted this law knew that the constitutionality of this law would have been challenged immiediately if it had been an outright ban on boycotting, so they put it in the context of foreign boycotts to get around that pesky piece of paper.

It’s an interesting question.

There are certain trades, like the gem trade, where people from these two supposedly separate spheres, who publicly are unalterably opposed, do business together as if they were members of the same family.

They make agreements on a handshake, where vast amounts of money are involved, and everyone behaves like rational human beings.

This is what happens when you remove the malevolent influence of the state. Without the state interfering, on both sides, people behave rationally and manage to live together without conflict.

This is the truth, it always has been the truth, and the only people who are against the sort of peace that we all expect are the statist collectivists who, with their foul and artificial divisions of humanity, cause every act of violence in the world.

This astonishing document is snarfed from the TPUC site:

+++++++

This is taken from nocounciltax.com

OK – so now the cracks are really beginning to appear.

I am indebted to my good friend and fellow Freeman on the land, for allowing me to use his documentation for this:-
Let me fill you in on the background so you have the case history:-

“Jim” (As we will call him”) is a Freeman on the Land along with us (More on that here www.TPUC.org & www.thinkfree.ca) – and a few months back he decided (Like many of us) that he wasn’t going to pay the UNLAWFUL Council tax that they were trying to enforce upon him via thier unlawful statute legislation. So he stopped paying:-

In due course he started receiving the threatening letters until one day the “summons” appeared on his doormat. (Note: A summons is merely an invitation to attend their place of business to discuss a punishment – its an offer – Read more – just as the Council Tax Bill is an offer to contract with them – read more on this)

The “invitation” was to appear before Wirral Magistrates Court for a hearing concerning the issuing of a liability hearing. Now as we all now ALL magistrates courts are merely a trading styles of the “run for profit” company called “Ministry of Justice” – see below and you can get a copy of the document I have acquired clearly showing:-

1. The corporate status of the Ministry of Justice
2. The Directors (Lord Falconer of Thoroton & Others)
3. The fact that Ministry of Justice has County Court Jugements against it
4. The trading styles of MOJ (Top right – which includes “Magistrates Courts”

MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IS A BUSINESS

Now call me blonde but I would say this is pretty damned conclusive that we are dealing with a corporate court convened by a corporation to simply lift money from you and I.

So … “Jim” jotted the council a little letter which is shown below:-

FIRST LETTER TO WIRRAL COUNCIL

Jim sent this letter about THREE WEEKS before the date that the hearing was due to be heard on.
So … the DAY BEFORE the hearing, Jim received a phone call from the Wirral Council LEGAL DEPARTMENT and what they said was staggering …

THEY WERE GOING TO WITHDRAW THE APPLICATION FOR A LIABILITY ORDER!

1. Now this is incredible that on the back of one letter they decide to withdraw and more importantly confirms the following:-
2. Council tax is UNLAWFUL, as you and I well know that if these leeches had once ounce of a lawful case for taking this money then they would fight it to the death

They KNOW Council Tax is unlawful and are simply robbing those who haven’t woken up to the facts yet to the tune of £140,000,000,000 per annum (thats 140 BILLION of our money!)
So, Jim being the experienced fellow he is – asked them to email him with confirmation that they were going to withdraw and printed below is their email.

WIRRAL COUNCIL CONFIRMATION OF WITHDRAWAL BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO LAWFUL CASE

Jim then asked for further clarification in a formal letter and here is the letter that they sent!

LETTER FROM WIRRAL COUNCIL CONFIRMING THEIR WITHDRAWAL FORM COUNCIL TAX LIABILITY HEARING

Then Jim asked them to confirm in writing that because there was now NO LIABILY that the council tax was no longer due
This is the letter they and this is probably (in my opinion) one of THE single most important documents in the fight against Council Tax as it PROVES beyond ANY DOUBT that we DO NOT HAVE TO PAY this UNLAWFUL COUNCIL TAX.
Look at the bit in red!

LETTER FROM WIRRAL COUNCIL CONFIRMING THAT COUNCIL TAX DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PAID

So not believing a word of the Council or the courts Jim rocked up to the court on the morning of the Liability hearing and standing as a Freeman on the Land asked the Judge to confirm the withdrawal of the other side which the Judge duly confirmed. The judge then told Jim that he needn’t have turned up and then Jim hit with it.
“I know that sir, but there is the small matter of mys costs”

BAM! – They were not expecting that one!

So, Jim has now duly entered a claim for costs of £1,400 against Wirral Council which is still ongoing at this time as the courts are trying to play silly buggers with Jim – he has even had one judge step down and refuse to adjudicate in favour of his costs – as you can see – its a stitch up!

Anyway – Jim has some other things planned and I will keep you abreast of developments but there you have it.
A UK Council running away from a court hearing because they KNOW they dont have a LAWFUL leg to stand on and the whole Council Tax is a scam to relieve you and I of money.

+++++++

Now. After having read that, and caught your breath after having counted from one to ten slowly, you need to ask yourself two questions.

These are questions you have to answer for yourself before you consider ‘registering’ with them, accepting delivery of an SEO, or engaging with these creatures in any way whatsoever.

If I were you, I would have a close read of the articles at TPUC, and then try and explain to yourself how it is possible that these people can do what they are doing.

We hear from Ralph Lucas, the following:

Ofsted inspects provision for Home Education
Ofsted are setting out to inspect home education in 15 local authorities. As part of this exercise they will be approaching some parents.

I trust Ofsted to keep whatever they are told in confidence, and not to pass it on to the LA ever, at all, in any way.

I am not happy though with the secrecy with which Ofsted is surrounding its investigation – which LAs, which parents will be talked to, etc. I have put down some questions to see if I can open them up. Nor am I confident that Ofsted understands home education – but talking to more HE parents and children should help.

[…]

http://daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/

Secret inspections?

The most sick part of this is that it is no surprise. That is how far everything has sunk.

Of course, Ofsted has no remit to inspect and monitor PRIVATE PEOPLE IN THEIR OWN HOMES. Lets look at their ‘about’ page shall we?

Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. We regulate and inspect to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages.

Standards in education really means standards in the provision of education in schools. The activities of Home Educators are beyond their remit.

Parents are also nothing to do with ‘Children’s services’ parents do not provide a ‘service’ to children. This is all just TOO ABSURD.

They conspicuously leave out WHAT they regulate and inspect; it should say that they inspect schools and other orgainzations that provide education.

We want to raise aspirations and contribute to the long term achievement of ambitious standards and better life chances for service users. Their educational, economic and social well-being will in turn promote England’s national success.

They are pretty much failing in all of this, as is evidenced in the epidemic of illiteracy and innumeracy that is plaguing the UK. They are not raising aspirations, they are not contributing to the long term achievement or ambitious standards and better life choices of an army of failing students.

To achieve this we will report fairly and truthfully; we will listen to service users and providers; and we will communicate our findings with all who share our vision,

And they will not communicate with those who do not share their vision. This is why they are conducting these inspections in secret.

from service providers to policy-makers. We do not report to government ministers but directly to Parliament (and to the Lord Chancellor about children and family courts administration). This independence means you can rely on us for impartial information.

If this is really the case, and their independence and impartiality can be relied upon, then they should immediately come clean about these secret inspections.

• Who ordered them
• Who authorised them
• How they are selecting families to speak to
• What is the aim of the exercise
• Why was it kept secret

For a start.

The Education and Inspections Act, which established the new Ofsted, specifically requires that in everything we do we should:

promote service improvement

Nothing to do with Home Education, which is not a service.

ensure services focus on the interests of their users

Nothing to do with Home Education; children are not users and nor are their parents.

see that services are efficient, effective and promote value for money.

Nothing to do with Home Education the efficiency, efficacy or value for money of Home Education is nothing to do with Ofsted or the state in general.

We carry out hundreds of inspections and regulatory visits each week, publishing our findings within the Inspection reports area of this website. Our themed and subject specific findings and recommendations on wider issues within the care, learning, and skills agenda, as well as statistical information, can be found in the Publications and research area.

Nothing to do with Home Education.

And you can find more detailed explanations of which services we inspect and regulate, and how, and the latest guidance documents in the Forms and guidance area.

Who we are and what we do
To find out more about what we do and how our work is helping to improve outcomes for children and learners, please see the Ofsted: who we are and what we do leaflet and the two Raising standards, improving lives booklets available via links on the right.

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/About-us

No thank you.

Putting on our ‘what if’ hat, we can speculate that Ofstead wants to get a new role as inspector of Home Educators in the new totalitarian regime designed to crush Home Educators. Because they already have ‘hundreds of inspections each week’ perhaps they think they can tack on the task of forced invasions of people’s houses.

No matter what agency they throw at Home Educators, the response remains the same. You may not enter a Home Educators home, Home Educators will not communicate with, respond to or in any way acknowledge or engage with anything or anyone that attempts to violate and monetize their children and lives.

We now hear that Iran has some ‘secret bases’ where they are developing technology… in secret.

Last time I checked, developing weapons in secrete (yes ‘secrete’) is not illegal, and of course, other countries have secret underground labs where they are doing things so incredible that no one would believe them if they were told flat out.

Of course, people who do not believe these things are DUMB.

Here is an old post from the old BLOGDIAL about Iran and the constant threat against them:

the difference is barely there.

The difference is in the history. Murder Inc. and its wholly pwned subsidiary has a long history of invading, pillaging and disturbing these people. They have no history of disturbing the west…. Until now.

aQ telling MI that when it gets out of the affairs of the middle east everything will stop is not propaganda. Propaganda is:

…a specific type of message presentation aimed at serving an agenda. At its root, the denotation of propaganda is ‘to propagate (actively spread) a philosophy or point of view’. The most common use of the term (historically) is in political contexts; in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments or political groups.

Purpose of propaganda

The aim of propaganda is to influence people’s opinions actively, rather than to merely communicate the facts about something. For example, propaganda might be used to garner either support or disapproval of a certain position, rather than to simply present the position. […] http://www.answers.com/

What aQ do when they make their statements is initiating negotiation. They are laying out the terms for a cease fire; “get out of our affairs and we will cease all activities” is the opening bid. What MI do when they speak about what is happening is pure propaganda. They use language to distort the true situation; calling this a ‘war on terror’, a ‘clash of cultures’, the beliefs of the ‘enemy’ an ‘evil ideology’, claiming that the attacks have nothing to do with the illegal invasion of Iraq, re-writing history…and so on and so on. This is the essential difference between what comes out of the mouths of OBL and Bliar/USUK/Murder Inc.

I know under which rule I would rather live. I have said this before. What is true however, is that the side of right is on one side only in this case, and the people who are responsible will not back down and put an end to this absolute nonsense.

The “Plan for Iran” is coming into focus. To its eternal shame, even Canada is getting in on this plot to attack Tehran. I mention this due to the lines below talking about how MI could ease our dependence on oil if only the monies were diverted from nonsense to science.

The same has to be said about Iran. That place is soaked in sunshine. These people have no imagination whatsoever, and they are completely infuriating in this respect. Imagine if Tehran had spent the BILLIONS that they have wasted on nuclear technology on making their universities the greatest on earth; the place where every physics student is desperate to study. And yes, they really have spent that much money and probably more:

By 1975, The US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had signed National Security Decision Memorandum 292, titled “U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation,” which laid out the details of the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran projected to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue. At the time, Iran was pumping as much as 6 million barrels (950,000 m³) of oil a day, compared with an average of about 4 million barrels (640,000 m³) daily today.

President Gerald R. Ford even signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete “nuclear fuel cycle”.

The shah, who referred to oil as “noble fuel,” said it was too valuable to waste on daily energy needs. The Ford strategy paper said the “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.”[1] […]

not only would they have an R&D programme that was the envy of the world, but they would be well on the road to having a clean energy economy, the technology for which they would be able to export to everyone that is too stupid to spend money on R&D and universities. Rather than wasting the ignoble fule on daily energy needs by servicing that demand with nuclear power, they would have saved the same amount of oil with clean energy technology. No waste problems. No threat to any other country. They would also be proving that an Islamic republic was able to compete with every other country on an equal footing, instead of being places that are backwards, crippled and broken and perpetually the pitiful underdogs of the world. They have had the billions to do the job. They had the enthusiastic populations to pull it off. They even have some brilliant scientists to put it all together. Instead, they spent (and continue to spend) money on nuclear power plants, the albatross technology that everyone in the west wants to be rid of – its almost as if they live in the same paralell universe that Bliar does, where no matter what is happening in another country, they will simply continue as they have been doing, no matter what the cost.

These people need(ed) to recognise Israel, put all their oil money into education, universities and R&D and put all their energy into becoming….like Japan, who without the ‘blessing’ of oil or any cash cow, have managed to do very well since they have been forced to turn away from wasting money on pointless technology.

In the late 1970s Iran had the Japanese example to take inspiration from; “turn away from the war machine, and dominate“, but you need to have an imagination to be able to see yourself in the future with a high tech economy ruling the roost with your brains and ingenuity alone. Now they will pay the price for their lack of vision. And so will we, as they retaliate and everything spirals into this, “If someone had told me this in the 80’s I would have laughed out loud” future, which is beyond a nightmare.

[…]

BLOGDIAL August 2005

Clearly the Iranians do not play chess. Or they need to play chess more. They also need to understand money. If they played chess and understood money, they would be more safe from attack.

If they understood what money really is they would abandon their own bankrupt fiat currency system and go to an all gold system, financed by their oil revenues. That does not mean that they only accept gold for their oil instead of dollars; that would be ‘aggressive’. Instead they should take dollars, and immediately convert them into gold, which would then be used to replace their fiat currency incrementally. Sound money is the foundation of freedom and prosperity; with a sound currency, their population would thrive economically, and Iran could become one of the great financial centres of the world.

Adopting an all gold currency would force them to stop spending on insane boondoggles like Nuclear anything. They currently print their money to finance these operations, stealing the value of the people’s money through inflation. Gold money would install fiscal discipline on the government there, so that they wold not be able to engage in nonsense like Nuclear power which is a waste of money.

Nuclear weapons are not only a waste of money, but are a threat to the existence of Iran, wether they have a moral right to them or not. In chess you play to win, and building those weapons means they are going to LOSE. They are running to queen some pawns but they will not get there, because the whole board is going to be thrown onto the floor by the great satan.

If they had given up this nonsense, recognised Israel and put away the toys, no one would be able to say anything about them. These are all purely strategic moves to ensure that they survive and prosper; and it is not hard to beat the great satan and their slobbering followers, who are so violent, corrupt and insane that they are going to fall on their own swords very shortly.

Here is how it is done:

[Event "Human versus GNU Chess"]
[Date "2009.08.31"]
[Round "?"]
[White "White"]
[Black "GNU Chess"]
[Result "1-0"]
[BlackAI "GNU Chess"]

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. d4 Nf6
4. d5 Nb4
5. Bc4 Bc5
6. a3 Na6
7. b4 Bb6
8. Nxe5 Nxe4
9. O-O Qf6 
10. Ng4 Qxa1 
11. Nd2 Qd4 
12. Qe1 h5 
13. Ne3 O-O 
14. Nf5 Nxd2
15. Qxd2 Qxc4 
16. Ne7+ Kh8 
17. Bb2 d6 
18. Qh6# 1-0

The great satan is about to run out of money. He is going to bring down all of his allies with him. The population living under him has had enough and they are sharpening their pitchforks to tilt against his. Had Iran showed some common sense and imagination, they would be sitting on the sidelines, watching it all collapse with gold money in their pockets, a completely sound economy and everyone running to them as the new centre of the reshaped world.

But no.

They are going to be wiped out and their culture along with them, their country transformed into a basket case like Iraq… and for what? For precisely NOTHING.

SYWWBY

The title of this post comes from a chapter of The Incal, something that you should read if you get a chance. Here we have the members of the Church of Industrial Saints (commonly referred to as the Techno-Technos or the Technopriests, a technocratic cult which worships the Dark Incal) whipped up into a religious frenzy after hearing the words of the Techno Pope:

Which brings us to an interesting article by a medical student on circumcision from Lew Rockwell’s site.

Let’s see…

Circumcision for All; Free Choice for None

by Stephanie R. Murphy

I was shocked, surprised, and flabbergasted to hear it. I’m sure that you’ll never believe it, either. The federal government is – get this, readers – butting into your most personal and private business.

A good start!

[…] The CDC is now considering a campaign for universal circumcision in the US.

This is entirely wrong. It is wrong because the government has no right to tell you what you can put into or take off of your body, or your child’s body.

The reason for pushing this one-size-fits-all policy stems from the results of several studies, all done in Africa, which have demonstrated the benefits of male circumcision for reducing the transmission of HIV.

The studies on circumcision and HIV transmission are very interesting. They are large, randomized, controlled trials; the methodology is solid. They show, on average, a 40–60% reduction in the risk of a circumcised, HIV negative man contracting the virus from an HIV positive woman, as compared to an uncircumcised man. The precise mechanism of circumcision’s protective effect is unknown. […]

The rationale offered for circumcision in this case, based on a well designed scientific study, is entirely irrelevant. This is about rights and the proper role of government, not scientific data. If one day they discover that female students are not as proficient at medicine than male students are, should that be used as a basis for banning females from practicing medicine? I am sure that there are some people out there that would say yes. That does not make it right.

However, when considering the benefits of circumcision, there are some significant caveats. For one, circumcision is not a panacea; it does not completely prevent transmission of HIV, it just lowers the probability that a man will contract the virus during any given sexual encounter with an HIV positive woman. It should be noted that these studies only examined the effect of circumcision on transmission of the virus from an HIV positive woman to an HIV negative man. While this is a relatively common scenario in Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV epidemiology in the US is different. Overall rates of infection are lower. Also, HIV in the US is relatively more common among men who have sex with men (MSM). There is no evidence that circumcision protects against HIV acquisition in MSM. […]

All of this, once again, is irrelevant. Science can be used to demonstrate lots of things. None of them should form the basis of legislation.

Circumcision also has risks and demerits. My personal philosophy on medicine leads me to look skeptically at any procedure that removes a part of the body which is not causing harm, pain, or annoyance to the patient; in other words, don’t mess with success. […]

And here is where we encounter the truth of this matter. Some people have an opinion that circumcision is not right, and so they want the state to use violence to stop other people from doing it. Some people think that circumcision is good, for whatever reason, and they want to use violence to make people do it.

Both of these positions are WRONG. No one has the right to force you to do something that you do not want to do. Libertarians are against the use of force to make people do things, and they are against the use of collective force, which is as illegitimate as force employed by a single person.

As with any surgical procedure, infections and pain after circumcision are both possibilities that should not be ignored. Medical errors should be considered as a legitimate risk during circumcision, too. There are rare case reports of penile amputation that have occurred during botched circumcisions. There are also many more reports of less extreme, but still real, consequences resulting from circumcision mishaps.

This is all irrelevant. Medical mistakes happen. Doctors should study hard and practice their art so that they do not happen often. They should never do their procedures on people who are being forced to have something done to them.

Of course, the question on the minds of many who are considering circumcision is that of whether the procedure impacts sexual enjoyment and satisfaction. That question is, in my opinion, impossible to answer accurately. To distill the immense debate surrounding this issue to its barest essence, choice seems to play a significant role in how men view their foreskins (or lack thereof). Men who choose to get circumcised tend to be happy that they did so; those who did not have a choice in the matter because they were circumcised at birth are more likely to lament it.

It may or may not be the case that men who are circumcised lament it. Once again, this is irrelevant to the core of this, which is who has the right to use force against another person so that their personal opinion is the rule of law that everyone is compelled to obey.

That brings me to my main point in writing about the prospect of universal circumcision: the issue of choice. If my patient asked me about circumcision, I would discuss with him the information above. I would also encourage him to do his own research about the procedure if he felt interested. He would make his own decision about whether he wanted to have the surgery.

Correct.

By contrast, the CDC’s attitude demonstrates a lack of consideration for patient autonomy and consent, two essential elements in all medical decisions.

FALSE. And here we get to the center of this argument; is a child property or is it not property? In a very real sense, children are a special form of property. First, lets look at the unborn child

[…]

This brings us to the more complex case of abortion. For the libertarian, the “Catholic” case against abortion, even if finally rejected as invalid, cannot be dismissed out of hand. For the essence of that case — not really “Catholic” at all in a theological sense — is that abortion destroys a human life and is therefore murder, and hence cannot be condoned. More than that, if abortion is truly murder, then the Catholic — or any other person who shares this view — cannot just shrug his shoulders and say that “Catholic” views should not be imposed upon non-Catholics. Murder is not an expression of religious preference; no sect, in the name of “freedom of religion,” can or should get away with committing murder with the plea that its religion so commands. The vital question then becomes: Should abortion be considered as murder?

Most discussion of the issue bogs down in minutiae about when human life begins, when or if the fetus can be considered to be alive, etc. All this is really irrelevant to the issue of the legality (again, not necessarily the morality) of abortion. The Catholic antiabortionist, for example, declares that all that he wants for the fetus is the rights of any human being — i.e., the right not to be murdered. But there is more involved here, and this is the crucial consideration. If we are to treat the fetus [p. 108] as having the same rights as humans, then let us ask: What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite within some other human being’s body? This is the nub of the issue: the absolute right of every person, and hence every woman, to the ownership of her own body. What the mother is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body to be ejected from it: If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.

The common retort that the mother either originally wanted or at least was responsible for placing the fetus within her body is, again, beside the point. Even in the stronger case where the mother originally wanted the child, the mother, as the property owner in her own body, has the right to change her mind and to eject it.

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

[…]

I completely agree with this. A child has no ‘right’ to remain in its mother’s womb, otherwise, the mother becomes property.

When a child is born however, it becomes a human being with all the natural rights that human beings are born with. It cannot fend for itself in any way; it needs special care and nurturing. Since it is the creation of two people, those parents are, naturally, the people with the responsibility of caring for that child; the child is the ward of the parents.

Being a ward in this way is a special form of property. While you are in the care of your parents, they have total responsibility for you and can have procedures performed on you that they feel are for your benefit. Some parents circumcise their children. Many vaccinate them. Some parents have scars cut into their chldren’s bodies. When they are born, some parents allow silver nitrate to be dropped into the eyes of their children, and allow their children to be injected with vitamin K. All of these procedures, when done with the best interest of the child are completely legitimate, and no doctor, or do-gooder or moral crusader has the right to use force to compel a parent to do or refrain from doing any of them.

The CDC would like every baby boy born in America to be circumcised, no matter the opinion of his parents and, more importantly, without the boy’s consent.

Now there are TWO problems in this sentence. The first one is that the CDC wants to mandate a medical procedure. They have no right to do this. The second part of this that is completely wrong is the idea that an infant boy must give his consent to be circumcised. This is totally absurd, and contrary to common sense and the natural relationship between parents and children. This fallacious idea is a part of the move towards ‘children’s rights’ which is a back door way to allow the state to become the ultimate parent of all children, usurping the natural role of the parent. The UN is pushing for it, governments all over the world are picking up this fallacious reasoning as a lever to ban Home Education or even to stop people sailing around the world.

If circumcision were a medically necessary and life-saving procedure with no possible ill effects, things might be different.

This is false reasoning. What is or is not medically necessary, like vaccination or dropping silver nitrate in the eyes of newborns, or injecting them with vitamin K on the day they are born, is a matter of opinion, and it is up to the parent, not the state, or a PhD doctor with the coercive force of the state behind her to make these decisions.

In reality, it is a surgical procedure that is not essential for the health of a normal man;

Wether or not circumcision is essential is irrelevant; circumcision, like piercing the ears of girls is the personal business of parents, and should not be the domain of the personal opinions or prejudices of doctors.

furthermore, it has both risks and benefits.

Everything has risks; it is up to the parent to weigh the risks and make these private family decisions, not doctors or the state.

The relative importance of those risks and benefits is subjective. Every man may value them differently. For that reason, it’s essential that each individual be afforded the choice about what to do with his own foreskin.

FALSE. If we extend this logic, then no infant should be vaccinated, lest when he becomes an adult he should have a religious objection to it. I wonder how many doctors would agree with that?

To be perfectly blunt, I do not see any justification for removing a part of a baby boy’s body without his consent.

Then do not remove the foreskin of your son. If you have a son, I presume that you have not done this. If your husband has no foreskin, he might have had something to say about this. Either way, what you do with your own children is your own business. It is not your place to tell anyone that they should not circumcise their boys, or that what they are doing is wrong and it is entirely immoral to call for the state to stop circumcision.

The people who think that circumcision is correct think that YOU are dead wrong. Both groups can live side by side very happily, as long as one does not try and compel the other to do something, or refrain from doing something, that they do not want to do. This is the very core of Libertarianism. Understandably, emotionalism clouds the thinking of even the best people. When emotionalism and science are mixed together, you get a cocktail that is completely intoxicating; in a drunken stupor the force of the state is then invoked to make sure that, “the right thing is done”. It is however, ALWAYS the wrong thing, and the case of forced circumcision or the banning of circumcision is yet another example.

Men can always get circumcised as adults if they wish; by contrast, once the foreskin is gone, it’s gone forever.

Irrelevant. No child is put onto this world without being created by its parents. If men were self made out of eggs or they grew like fruit from trees neither of which anyone owned, and they could look after themselves from birth like some animals or amoebae do, then you could make an argument like this. The same argument could be made of what a child is fed; if a child wanted to become a pure vegan as a moral response to ‘animal cruelty’, should we refrain from feeding it meat until it becomes an adult? Of course not; what we choose to feed our children is one of the many choices a parent makes, quite legitimately. That also goes for what we feed our children’s minds, and of course, there are ‘experts’ out there who think that children must be taught certain things in a certain way, and these same people are ready to use force to make parents comply with their personal prejudices.

It is all wrong and immoral.

Most people will concede that the procedure is painful even for babies, but they insist that the pain is justified because the baby will not remember it.

It is most certainly painful, and the number of people conceding this is irrelevant. Lots of procedures are painful, like getting a vaccination, one of the 24 that infants up to the age of two receive. Getting a disciplinary slap is also painful; and the pain is one that parents who practice that form of care certainly want a child to remember. There are many things in the world that hurt; hurt cannot be avoided, and the people who try and eliminate all danger and hurt from life either do not understand what life is, or do not have any experience of being a parent.

I wince at the thought of causing pain to a newborn boy. I say that even if he does not remember the physical pain as an adult, he may still suffer from the psychological sting of having had a body part removed without his permission.

This is squeamish emotionalism, and personal weakness. Both of these things have nothing to do with parents and circumcision, and certainly, infants have no concept of giving or withholding permission. Even if they did, children are made to eat things that they do not like every second of the day, ‘for their own good’; should this too be outlawed? Utter nonsense!

Another argument from the advocates of universal circumcision is that it makes good hygiene easier. This is a typical government one-size-fits-all solution: parents are too stupid, in the minds of government agents, to teach their sons good hygiene, so instead we should just circumcise everyone. People are also too stupid to practice safe sex, so we should circumcise them all because they will gain a marginal reduction in the overall risk of contracting HIV. I’ve also heard arguments for circumcision based in religious tradition and cultural norms. Sure, circumcision is common – and a very old tradition in some religions and cultures. But does that make it right?

It does not make it wrong. That is for sure, and it also does not make it any of our business what other people do.

I don’t think that’s for us to decide. I think that each individual, the owner of his own body, should make the call about whether or not circumcision is appropriate for him.

But the subtext here is that infants cannot defend themselves, and so the noble doctor, backed by the force of the state, should step in and protect it, using the ‘rights of the child’ as the pretext. It simply will not wash. And yes, that is why some people circumcise!

It’s difficult for me to assume the mindset of statists who advocate for this kind of thing,

And for the record it is very difficult for me to get into the mindset of people who want to use the state to make other people comply with their personal prejudices. I cannot contemplate going into someone else’s houses and demanding that they eat as I eat, think as I think, or do as I do. It is anathema to me. I also understand what asking for things does in the real world; in the real world, when you ask for something to change, there are consequences in this case, the consequence is, “The federal government butting into your most personal and private business” by telling you that you must, or as this author is advocating, must not, circumcise your boy.

so I raised the issue of universal circumcision in conversation with a few people whose opinions I thought would be unencumbered by that pesky philosophy of leaving others alone and letting them make their own decisions. In addition to the religious and culturally based arguments that several people trotted out, one colleague had an interesting comment. He thought that universal circumcision was a good idea, envisioning a world where no more would awkward teens have to worry about getting teased in the locker room, because “everyone would look the same.” Oh really? The last time I checked, people came in all shapes, colors, and sizes, and that was a good thing!

So is it a good thing that some people are circumcised or not?!

I guess that if everyone looked alike, wore the same clothes, and had the same hairstyles, nobody would ever have to worry about not fitting in. Would this egalitarian also propose to redistribute the wealth from the best-endowed men to those who are not quite as blessed by Mother Nature? Ridiculous.

Many people are brainwashed out there. Some are brainwashed to believe that children have ‘rights’. Since this is the case, it is most logical to not advocate that your personal opinions be made into law. Its hard to do when we are talking about something so wrapped up in emotion, but really, it is the only way to make sure that you do not become the enemy. Follow the non aggression principle; “is what I am asking for going to end up causing force to be used against someone?” If the answer to that is ‘yes’ then you should not do it or ask for it, and you should re-assess your thinking.

I certainly cannot agree with the CDC’s move toward making a blanket recommendation that all boys should undergo a medical procedure at birth, without their consent.

There is the subtext again. The next step is using the state and the medical industrial complex to STOP circumcision under the false pretext of ‘children’s rights’. We could also extend this logic to the very act of birth itself; no child asks to be born – should we seek the permission of a child before it is created wether or not it wants to be created? After all, being born is a sentence to live out up to eighty years in a world full of brainwashed, state loving, warmongering, fear soaked squeamish busy bodies who all have designs on your body and mind from day one. Certainly, some people would rather not be born; life itself is a far bigger pain to suffer than circumcision.

And there you have it; FALSE REASONING.

I want each man to have the opportunity to make his own decision about what to do with his foreskin when he reaches an age at which he is capable of doing so,

“I WANT” hmmm. If you want this, then when you have children, make sure that you have them with a man who is not circumcised, and who does not come from a culture where they do it. Then you can leave YOUR son’s foreskin for him to chop or not chop. What YOU WANT has NOTHING to do with ANYONE ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD, PERIOD.

based on his understanding of the risks and benefits, and how much he personally values each. The bloated, overreaching federal government apparently does not want the same.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy-s/murphy-s12.1.html

But in fact, what they want is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WHAT YOU WANT; they want to CONTROL OTHER PEOPLE based on their PERSONAL PREJUDICES. They just happen to be on the ‘other side’ of the argument.

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

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

Vetting: it should happen to an author

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

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

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

What on earth is their problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

This caricature of a human woman… oh dear me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Did you catch that?

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

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

Arse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, this radiotherapy is fail proof.

Database to track vulnerable children scrapped by Government

A multimillion-pound Government computer system swamped in red tape is to be scrapped after experts said it was a danger to vulnerable children, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

By Heidi Blake

Heidi, how could you…. FAIL like this?!

Local authorities have spent the past four years implementing the Government's £72m Integrated Children's System (ICS) amid threats that critical funding would be cut if they did not comply.

This is fascinating. How much autonomy do these Local Authorities have? If they refuse to implement something dangerous, like ICS, and actually work FOR the residents in the boroughs they run, they are permitted to DO THAT? If this is the case, Local Authorities could bill themselves as proper servants by listing the things they DO NOT DO, like use 'anti terror' laws to spy on the people they are serving, or not interfering with Home Educators, whom they also serve.

Hmmmmm!!!

But the system, described by staff as "an unworkable monster", generated stacks of paperwork 6ins thick for every child, had no way of tracking the siblings of abused children, and absorbed up to 80 per cent of social workers' time.

???!!

'No way of tracking siblings'… this sounds like something another database CAN do that Heidi has, quite inexplicably failed to mention in this article..

ContactPoint.

In response to a damning assessment of ICS by a group of Government-appointed experts, Baroness Morgan, the children's minister, has written to councils telling them they can abandon the controversial record-keeping system. She has left the responsibility for its replacement in their hands.

This is the dictionary definition of Disingenuous:

dis·in·gen·u·ous   (d?s’?n-j?n’y??-?s)   
adj.  

1. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating: “an ambitious, disingenuous, philistine, and hypocritical operator, who … exemplified … the most disagreeable traits of his time” (David Cannadine).
2. Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naïf.
3. Usage Problem Unaware or uninformed; naive.

dis’in·gen’u·ous·ly adv., dis’in·gen’u·ous·ness n.
Usage Note: The meaning of disingenuous has been shifting about lately, as if people were unsure of its proper meaning. Generally, it means “insincere” and often seems to be a synonym of cynical or calculating. Not surprisingly, the word is used often in political contexts, as in It is both insensitive and disingenuous for the White House to describe its aid package and the proposal to eliminate the federal payment as “tough love.” This use of the word is accepted by 94 percent of the Usage Panel. Most Panelists also accept the extended meaning relating to less reproachable behavior. Fully 88 percent accept disingenuous with the meaning “playfully insincere, faux-naïf,” as in the example “I don’t have a clue about late Beethoven!” he said. The remark seemed disingenuous, coming from one of the world’s foremost concert pianists.

Baroness Delyth Morgan KNOWS that ContactPoint is planned to be unleashed, and that the capabilities of ICS are a sub set of what ContactPoint will be able to deliver. To say, "you can do what you want" is simply absurd… its a sort of sideways lie. Absolutely disgusting.

Officials last night raised fears that vulnerable children were still at risk because it could take years to build a working alternative.

Heidi, are you COMPLETELY MAD? How can you write an article about this without at least Googling children database vulnerable UK many results about ContactPoint come up… for heaven's sake, BUY A CLUE.

Tim Loughton, shadow children's minister, said: "Ed Balls has finally had to admit what front line social workers have known all along – the Government's Integrated Children's System was at best a waste of money and at worst a danger to children.

And the same can be said of ContactPoint, only magnified to include EVERY CHILD in the UK.

"This system wasted more than £72 million of taxpayers' money, but the human cost to child protection and to the social work profession has been much higher."

ICS, which stores case records about children at risk of abuse, was introduced in the wake of the Laming report which revealed that information-sharing failures at Haringey Council led to the death of Victoria Climbie in 2000.

It is not information sharing failures that lead to the deaths of children. Databases cannot save children, or stop crime or prevent anything bad from happening. All they can do is put money in the pockets of contractors and take away the privacy of the people who are put in them.

Social services, when they have information about children at risk, should act on that information; sharing it with other people who also fail to act means that nothing is done. Its hot potato protection.

But the Social Work Task Force appointed this March to review child protection practices after the death of a second child in Haringey, Baby P, issued a damning verdict on the Government system.

In a letter to the Department for Children, Schools and Families this May, the Task Force called ICS a "burdensome process" which kept social workers "tied up in bureaucracy" and away from their duties on the front line.

And now, magnify that bureaucracy by the total number of people in the country who are going to be on ContactPoint, ELEVEN MILLION and you begin to get an idea of what a nightmare they are in for. ContactPoint is going to make people less safe, from the statistically insignificant number of people who are actually at risk to the vast, completely safe majority, who are now going to have their personal and sensitive data exposed to all and sundry, should ContactPoint go online.

An Ofsted report published last Friday found that Haringey council was still failing to protect vulnerable children and identified faults with ICS as part of the problem.

Blame the database? What did these people do BEFORE they had computers? Were people more safe before or after the implementation of databases? Are these tools actually getting in the way of people doing the real work that they are meant to be doing?

It stated: "The risks arising from these system dysfunctions are that data are unreliable, managers cannot easily track progress on cases and in some cases professionals… do not have access to critical child protection or safeguarding information."

And ContactPoint is going to magnify this exponentially. Also, the database tables for ContactPoint are going to need to be expanded dramatically in order to store all the information that is mentioned in that last blockquote and more. This means that ContactPoint as it is designed now, is just the skeleton of an even more intrusive monster system that is going to develop incrementally.

KILL IT WITH FIRE.

In her letter to councils, Baroness Morgan told councils she was "making it clear that local authorities will not be required to comply with the published specifications for ICS in order to receive capital funding".

Because ContactPoint is around the corner. Pure EVIL.

She added: "ICT systems which support children's care should be locally owned and implemented within a simplified national framework".

Called ContactPoint. There cannot be any social workers who do not know about ContactPoint. They must be scratching their heads at why she is not referring specifically to it in this communication. Perhaps she did. Heidi has not let us know. She failed to mention ContactPoint at all ini this article. Absolute unmitigated FAIL.

Local authorities had previously been forced to use Government-authorised computer systems, known collectively as the "Integrated Children's System", in order to qualify for crucial funding.

Blackmail.

But despite telling officials they could abandon the Government model, the children's minister denied that ICS was effectively being scrapped.

Illogical.

She said in a statement: "Part of developing a highly skilled and professional workforce is ensuring that the IT system social workers use is accessible, workable and secure.

Databases can never be secure. Highly skilled workforces existed before databases. This is nonsense on stilts.

"The Social Work Task Force agreed that ICS is the right system but made a number of recommendations. Today we are driving this change forward."

How can it be the right system, but be optional, and now abandoned? Oh yes, hot is cold, day is night, and 2+2=9.

Council officers said they would have to "junk" the Government's specifications and start again from scratch.

Whith whose money? And what this will do is put massive pressure on government to expand the capabilities of ContactPoint; why have lots of little unconnected databases when you can save money with economies of scale by rolling out ContactPoint 2 that has tables for everything everyone could possibly need?

This is the chess game that this dying bunck of Aparatchicks is playing. If they scrap ICS now, they believe it will be harder for the Tories to scrap ContactPoint since the Local Authorities up and down the country were told to destroy their bespoke systems. The Tories will also be forced to expand ContactPoint to save money as I described above.

Sadly for Mutterschwein of Drefelin ContactPoint is being scrapped because it is dangerous and immoral. No matter how much efficiency it provides or what its capabilities are, it should be scrapped because its existence is an affront and danger to all decent people in the UK.

No matter how difficult you make it with these pre death of Neu Liebour moves, nothing can change this. Your police state apparatus is going to be dismantled and you are already disgraced for overseeing and agreeing with its implementation.

Andrew Christie, Director of Children's Services at Hammersmith and Fulham, said: "The Government has left social workers and vulnerable children at the bottom of a black hole that it will take years to climb out of.

Actually, this is an opportunity for you to build something clean and decent that does what it needs to do without being immoral or dangerous.

"We have already spent a huge amount of time and money implementing this labyrinthine system and now we will have to spend more time and money unpicking it and retraining staff."

But you MUST do this to be a moral person, so GET ON WITH IT and don't complain.

Staff at Kensington and Chelsea council, which had its funding cut for refusing to implement ICS in 2005, said they were being "inundated" with requests from other councils wanting to buy the alternative system they have built.

I wonder how it works?

RBK&C is also the council that publicly voiced skepticism about ContactPoint and offered shielding to whoever wanted it:

The Council has reservations about the scheme. These include concerns about the lack of publicity surrounding it and about security and confidentiality issues.

There are 33,000 children in Kensington and Chelsea. The Government expects their details to be included on ContactPoint and has made the Council responsible for the upkeep of that information.

The Government wanted the first 17 councils that are introducing ContactPoint to be using it from April 2009, with other councils – including Kensington and Chelsea – following in due course.

Although glitches in the system may delay the start date, the personal information of children living in the borough will be available to those first 17 councils as soon as they ‘go live’. Information on ContactPoint will include name, address, gender, a unique identification number and name and contact details of the child’s parent or carer. It will also show the child’s GP practice, health visitor, school and school nurse but not the detailed information that a GP or school would have.

Access
The Government currently estimates that around 390,000 people who work with children will be able to access the database nationally. They will be fully trained and follow strict confidentiality guidelines.

Safeguards and confidentiality
Although the Government maintains that the security of ContactPoint is of paramount importance and that it has been rigorously tested, Kensington and Chelsea Council is concerned about security issues and the ability of the database to keep information about children who are adopted confidential.

At the time of writing representatives from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) were still trying to remedy security issues that had been identified in the system.

Shielding
The Government has proposed something called ‘shielding’ as an extra measure to protect children and families from harm. Shielding means hiding details of the child’s, young person’s or family member’s whereabouts and reflects the fact that the Government accepts that a small number of children, young people and their parent(s) may be put at significant risk if their whereabouts become known. If a child is shielded, only their name, date of birth, gender and unique number will be visible.

The Royal Borough is encouraging parents and carers to consider shielding for their child or children. The Council will deal with each request for shielding individually and according to its shielding policy. Parents or carers who want the Council to exercise its discretion regarding their data should get in touch as soon as possible. Children and young people themselves can also apply for shielding.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is determined to support the best interests of its children and to address the understandable anxieties of parents/carers. Any request to ‘shield’ a record should include the reason why ‘shielding’ would safeguard the child. The Council will need to verify the applicant’s relationship to the child.

To enquire about shielding contact the CAF and Integrated Working Team on 020 7598 4694 or email: contactpoint@rbkc.gov.uk

What do you think?

[…]

http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/RBKCDirect/rdcouncilpriorities/cp0904_contactpoint.asp#shielding

I think you should not be implementing it at all. I think you are morally obligated to refuse it. I think ContactPoint is going to be scrapped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We call it ‘Idiocracy‘.

I am not ‘from India’. I have never been there. They have some of the best food on the planet, the best music and beautiful women. Hell, they even have Nuclear Weapons.

India is full of WIN.

But, they have some problems to solve. They have the brains to solve them. How do we know this? They have a huge number of software developers.

Now read this:

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Until May 2007

Meera Devi rose before dawn each day and walked a half mile to a vegetable patch outside the village of Kachpura to find a secluded place.

Dodging leering men and stick-wielding farmers and avoiding spots that her neighbors had soiled, the mother of three pulled up her sari and defecated with the Taj Mahal in plain view.

With that act, she added to the estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement that Indians leave each day in fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach, on banks that line rivers used for drinking and bathing and along roads jammed with scooters, trucks and pedestrians.Devi looks back on her routine with pain and embarrassment.

“As a woman, I would have to check where the males were going to the toilet and then go in a different direction,” says Devi, 37, standing outside her one-room mud-brick home.“We used to avoid the daytimes, but if we were really pressured, we would have to go any time of the day, even if it was raining.During the harvest season, people would have sticks in the fields.If somebody had to go, people would beat them up or chase them.”

In the shadow of its new suburbs, torrid growth and 300- ­million-plus-strong middle class, India is struggling with a sanitation emergency.From the stream in Devi’s village to the nation’s holiest river, the Ganges, 75 percent of the country’s surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent.Everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they’re not already, the Ministry of Urban Development concluded in September.

Economic Drain
Illness, lost productivity and other consequences of fouled water and inadequate sewage treatment trimmed 1.4-7.2 percent from the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2005, according to a study last year by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program.

Sanitation and hygiene-related issues may have a similar if not greater impact on India’s $1.2 trillion economy, says Guy Hutton, a senior water and sanitation economist with the program in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.Snarled transportation and unreliable power further damp the nation’s growth.Companies that locate in India pay hardship wages and ensconce employees in self- sufficient compounds.

The toll on human health is grim.Every day, 1,000 children younger than 5 years old die in India from diarrhea, hepatitis- causing pathogens and other sanitation-related diseases, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

‘Sanitation Crisis’
For girls, the crisis is especially acute: Many drop out of school once they reach puberty because of inadequate lavatories, depriving the country of a generation of possible leaders.

“India cannot reach its full economic potential unless they do something about this sanitation crisis,” says Clarissa Brocklehurst, Unicef’s New York-based chief of water, sanitation and hygiene, who worked in New Delhi from 1999 to 2001.
When P.V.Narasimha Rao opened India to outside investment in 1991, the country went on a tear.For most of this decade, India has placed just behind China as the world’s fastest- growing major economy.Revenue from information technology and outsourcing jumped more than 300-fold to $52 billion a year as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys Technologies Ltd. and other homegrown giants took on computer-related work for Western corporations.

Annual per-capita income more than doubled to 24,295 rupees ($468) in the seven years ended on March 31, 2008, before the full force of the financial meltdown kicked in.Even during the current global recession, India’s economy will expand 5.1 percent in 2009, the International Monetary Fund projects.

Hygiene Breakdown
Yet India’s gated office parks with swimming pools and food courts and enclaves such as the Aralias in Gurgaon, outside New Delhi, which features 6,000-square-foot (557-square-meter) condominiums, mask a breakdown of the most basic and symbolic human need — hygiene.

Devi, who installed her neighborhood’s first toilet, a squat-style latrine in a whitewashed outhouse, created a point of pride in a village where some people empty chamber pots into open drains in front of their homes.Like most of Kachpura’s residents, more than half of India’s 203 million households lack what Western societies consider a necessity: a toilet.

India has the greatest proportion of people in Asia behind Nepal without access to improved sanitation, according to Unicef.Some 665 million Indians practice open defecation, more than half the global total.In China, the world’s most populous country, 37 million people defecate in the open, according to Unicef.

‘It’s an Embarrassment’
“It’s an embarrassment,” says Venkatraman Anantha- Nageswaran, 45, an Indian working in Singapore as chief investment officer for Asia Pacific at Bank Julius Baer & Co., which managed $234 billion at the end of 2008.“It’s a country that aspires to being an international power and which, according to various projections, will be the third-largest economy in 20-30 years.”

India has the highest childhood malnutrition rates in the world: 44 percent of children younger than 5 are underweight, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

“Malnourished children are more susceptible to diarrheal disease, and with more diarrheal disease they become more malnourished,” says Jamie Bartram, head of the World Health Organization’s water, sanitation, hygiene and health group.“If we collectively could fix the world’s basic water and sanitation problems, we could reduce childhood mortality by nearly a third.”

Half of India’s schools don’t have separate toilets for males and females, forcing young women to use unisex facilities or nothing at all.Twenty-two percent of girls complete 10 or more years of schooling compared with 35 percent of boys, a national family health survey finished in 2006 found.

Indignity, Infections
Devi says she was concerned that her 14-year-old daughter would suffer the indignity and infections she herself endured due to poor menstrual hygiene.That was a major reason she bought a toilet, taking out a 7,000 rupee, interest-free loan from the U.S.Agency for International Development, which enabled her to pay for her new latrine over 18 months.

The agency also gave her a 3,000 rupee grant and a 2,500 rupee-a-month job with its Cross-Cutting Agra Project, which promotes hygiene and sanitation in her village.Until then, she, like her husband, was unemployed.Her daughter’s situation has also improved, Devi says.

“When she has her period, it’s especially difficult for her to go out into the fields,” she says.“It’s better to have a toilet at home — as it is for every female.”

Girls’ Education
Barriers that keep girls from equal education compromise the nation’s future, says Renu Khosla, director of CURE India, a New Delhi group that works to improve water and sanitation for the poor, including in Kachpura.

“We will have a less skilled population of youth,” she says.“Every year of schooling reduces household poverty by bringing down the family size and increasing skill levels.”

So far, companies looking to locate in India haven’t been turned off by the sanitation shortcomings, says Anshuman Magazine, chairman of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc.’s South Asian unit, which manages about 62 million square feet of property in the country.“India is a completely different planet,” he says.

As such, employees know not to drink tap water, and employers provide clean washrooms.

“As far as offices are concerned, I have never come across anyone raising these concerns.Businesses run on making money and opportunities.Since 2004, we have seen huge interest from foreign investors and businesses.”

[…]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aErNiP_V4RLc&pid=20601109

After reading that, do you REALLY believe that India needs….

ID CARDS FOR OVER ONE BILLION PEOPLE?

Astonishingly, in a country with some of the best software developers in the world, Israeli companies are bidding for the contract!

The whole world has gone NUTS.

This article has an idea:

Why The SIM Card Should Be India’s National ID Card
By Guest Author Sanjay Swamy, CEO, mChek

Imagine India as a country where 100% of the population is uniquely identified, has connectivity for telecom services and also has access to structured financial services. Imagine secure, personalized, anytime-anywhere healthcare services, government disbursements, loan disbursements and repayments! Imagine – the SIM card can become the government issued voter ID card – and one could even “vote” from the convenience of one’s mobile phone.

Which is echoed in this company’s idea. I strongly recommend that you read that last link. Mobile phones are like the biblical thief in the night.

In any case, India DOES NOT NEED ID CARDS, in my humble opinion. Of course, if ‘they’ want them its their business, and not any of mine or anyone else’s. One would have thought that after being a colony for 250 years, you would not want to be the slave of another master. Go figure. Your mileage may vary. Subject to change without notice. Your statutory rights will be affected. Not valid as a part of any other offer.

I was told when discussing this subject two days ago, that in India, births registration of births is not compulsory. My Google-Fu failed to confirm wether this is true or not. India is now one of the most powerful nations on earth, set to become even more powerful. Quite why they want to derail their success is anyone’s guess. And giving out ID Cards to everyone is a backwards step… at least, that is what it looks like from here, which is nowhere as far as they are concerned.

FURTHERMORE

Meau graciously fills in the blanks with his Google-Fu in the comments… registration WAS voluntary and was made compulsory in 1969… there have been problems in getting everyone to respond to compulsion it seems….read below!

The Renegade Parent has a great post about Ed Balls.

I have been looking into this creature over the last few days, and found two articles that sum him up perfectly:

Our children have had the MMR jab, says Brown’s Cabinet friend

By GLEN OWEN

A key Cabinet ally of Gordon Brown has let it be known his children have had the controversial MMR vaccine, in a clear break with former Premier Tony Blair’s policy of refusing to discuss the issue.

Going public: Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls with baby Elle in 1999

Schools Secretary Ed Balls, who has three children with his wife, Communities Minister Yvette Cooper, sanctioned the release of the information in the week that officials revealed Britain is in the middle of the worst measles outbreak for 20 years.

In allowing the disclosure, Mr Balls – who was Mr Brown’s right-hand man at the Treasury for nearly a decade – has broken ranks with Mr Blair’s long-standing ban on Ministers saying whether their children have had the controversial vaccine.

Campaigners are now calling on the Prime Minister to declare publicly that his children, too, have had the MMR inoculation.

Take-up of the vaccine, which also protects against mumps and rubella, plummeted after Dr Andrew Wakefield published research in 1998 that claimed it was linked to autism and bowel problems.

Mr Blair – who has repeatedly refused to say whether his son, Leo, had the jab – was furious at the embarrassment caused to him in January 2001 when Ms Cooper told a newspaper that her daughter, Ellie, had received the inoculation.

He later slapped the ban on Ministers speaking about their personal decisions.

Since then, Mr Balls and Ms Cooper – who is also in the Cabinet – have had two more children reach vaccination age (there are two injections, one at 13 months and a booster between the ages of three and five).

Mr Balls’ decision to lead by example follows a warning from the Health Protection Agency that the number of children suffering from measles has trebled in the past 11 weeks.

The HPA, concerned that even more children will be infected as the autumn term begins, has urged parents to add MMR to their back-to-school list.

After Dr Wakefield published his research in The Lancet, take-up of the vaccine fell to 80 per cent.

It has since recovered to 88 per cent, which is still short of the 95 per cent rate the HPA recommends.

The study is being scrutinised by medical watchdog the General Medical Council in a professional misconduct hearing involving Dr Wakefield and two of his co-authors.

Meanwhile, in a series of briefings timed to coincide with the start of the new term, Mr Balls announced he will write to every headteacher in the country to urge them to help deliver ‘a world-class education for every child’.

The new term also sees the start of a ban on schools selling fizzy drinks, chocolates or sweets in vending machines.

From now on, pupils will have to choose from foods such as bagels, muffins and breadsticks.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/

This is a man (and his ‘wife’) who would use (and if he gave the MMR specifically for this purpose, SACRIFICE) his daughter’s health to show support and undying loyalty for the evil gargoyle Gordon Brown, and to curry political favor.

If he will do this with his own child, imagine what he would do with yours? Well, you do not have to; you have the Balls and Badman report in your hands.

And here, we have an example of the Balls anti family agenda, where the school and the state are the new parent in the totalitarian dystopia being born in the UK:

Teachers ‘must worry about pupils when they go home’, warns education secretary Balls

Teachers have a responsibility for what happens to children after they return home from school, Education Secretary Ed Balls warned today.

On the day that he and Gordon Brown are launching a national debate in Bristol on the future of children’s services, Mr Balls has urged schools to do more beyond their gates.

“Not every school sees their responsibility as worrying about what happens when the child goes home… and they should,” he told The Guardian.

Praising breakfast clubs for giving children a good start, Mr Balls added: “A little boy may not eat between leaving school and coming back the next day. There’s no way the school can solve that problem.

“It requires parents with the support of social services to do that, but the school can provide an early warning.”

Mr Balls dismissed Tory claims that society in Britain is “broken” following the spate of killings of teenagers in London and other cities.

“There are always going to be some kids that get into more serious trouble with the law, but we shouldn’t demonise young people.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown today opened the first new school built under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

He arrived at the Bristol Brunel Academy in the inner city Speedwell area flanked by Mr Balls.

The school is the first in England to be completed under the Government’s £45 billion BSF programme.

The initiative is intended to re-build or refurbish every one of England’s state secondary schools over the next 15 years.

About 1,000 pupils moved into the school this morning which replaces Speedwell Technology College whose crumbling buildings sit immediately in front of the gleaming new academy.

The Prime Minister will tour and then officially open the new school.

Later this morning he will take part in the first citizen jury held in the school’s sports hall.

The Prime Minister looked at a “wishing wall” at the school entrance which is covered in messages from pupils.

One message read “I wish I could eat toenails” while another read “I wish to become a successful accountant”.

He then chatted with pupils, each with their own personal laptop computer, in a Year 7 IT class being taught in one of the school’s many open-plan classrooms.

The Prime Minister then visited pupils undertaking a soldering lesson in a craft design and technology class.

The pupils were guided by overhead monitors in a state-of-the-art classroom as they worked on circuit boards.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Do I really have to spell this out for you?

Have a look at all these articles on Balls for yourself.

I wouldn’t leave this man in charge of an ice cube in the Antarctic.

The Times has published this piece on the complete insanity that has taken over the state schools:

Edu-babble is turning schoolchildren into ‘customers’

Performativity is forcing curriculum deliverers to focus on desired outputs among customers in managed learning environments.

If you struggled to understand that sentence, pity the poor teachers (curriculum deliverers) who are struggling to interpret jargon and management language rather than simply teaching their pupils (customers).

Edu-babble has become so common that it earns censure today in a review of education led by professors at the University of Oxford. Their report criticises the “Orwellian language seeping through government documents of performance management and control that has come to dominate educational deliberation and planning”.

Heads and teachers receive edicts on inputs and outputs, audits, targets, curriculum delivery, customers, deliverers, efficiency gains, performance indicators and bottom lines, it says.

This language of policymakers and their advisers hinders the enthusiasm of teachers and engagement of pupils, it adds. The Nuffield Review report is the biggest independent analysis of education for those aged 14 to 19 in fifty years, taking six years to complete. It was led by Professor Richard Pring and Dr Geoff Hayward, from Oxford, and professors from the Institute of Education and Cardiff University.

It claims that ministers’ micro-management of schools and colleges has resulted in a narrow curriculum, teaching to the test, and a high number of disaffected teenagers not in education, employment or training.

The report says: “The increased central control of education brings with it the need for a management perspective, and language of performance management — for example, levers and drivers of change, and public service agreements as a basis of funding. The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Stakeholders shape the aims. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits measure success defined in terms of hitting targets. Cuts in resources are euphemistically called ‘efficiency gains’. Education becomes that package of activities (or inputs) largely determined by government.”

It adds: “As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.”

Professor Pring told The Times that policy language was “leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and impoverishment of learning”. He added: “We are losing the tradition of teachers being curriculum directors and developers — instead they’re curriculum deliverers. It’s almost as though they have little robots in front of them and they have to fill their minds, rather than engage with them.”

Bill Rammell, a former education minister, recently told the House of Commons about the establishment of the Centre for Procurement Performance. This had worked “proactively with the schools sector” to “embed principles and secure commitment from the front line” by “working with and through key stakeholders” and “engaging with procurement experts” to “deliver efficiency gains”.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “We call it edu-babble. It completely denudes education from being a human and social act.”

WHAT THE DICTIONARY SAYS

Articulated progression

A clearly defined route through the qualification system that enables pupils to choose the next step in education towards their goal

Big Brother syndrome

A growing tendency among younger learners to voice an ambition for celebrity without notable achievement

Dialogic teaching

Teaching through dialogue between teachers and pupils, and between pupils themselves, which places an emphasis on speaking and listening

Level descriptor

A definition of the outcomes that a learner should have reached

Performativity

A relatively recent term coined to convey the emphasis that monitoring by government agencies and Ofsted places on the achievement of targets

Source: Truncated definitions from the Oxford Dictionary of Education

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6458791.ece?Submitted=true

And this, in a nutshell, is why Home Education as we have known it must be banned.

Home Education exists in the polar opposite, anti-matter universe of what is described above. Home Education is an unknown. There are no statistics available about it, no performance metrics, no hierarchy, no governing body. Home Education is autonomous. Its practitioners are outside of the mainstream, outside of society. Out of control. No one has a handle on them, what they are doing, what they are teaching, how they are teaching it, where they are going, how they get there and who decided what the goals were. No one even knows how many Home Educators there are. There is no uniform curriculum that they follow, no single test that they take, the ‘teachers’ do not need qualifications or state vetting of any kind.

In other words, Home Educators are free.

And that is anathema to the state.

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

This is why the upcoming report from Graham Badman will recommend the end of Home Education as it has been practiced in the UK. Its secret thrust will be the same as the German desire of not tolerating ‘parallel societies’, and of course, we all know that it was Hitler who outlawed Home Education in Germany for this very reason, and that it is the exact same law that the Third Reich enacted which is being followed to the letter and so brutally enforced in Germany today, with the explicit approval of the European Court of Justice.

The overt pretext for eliminating Home Education will be the absurd notion of, ‘children’s rights’, and the emotionally manipulative call to, ‘protect the children’. Whatever the review says, Home Education is here to stay, and I predict that it will remain unchanged since there will be an unprecedented backlash against any move to change the status quo.

People are leaving state education in droves precisely because of the pernicious influences described above, as well as the insane, suicidal nonsense of introducing (for example) sex education to five year olds and giving condom credit cards to twelve year old boys.

Now take a look at the sickening origins of this:

Part 1

Part 2

The state cannot run the schools that it is in charge of. They are failing the pupils that they are already responsible for; only a total idiot would want the state to interfere in Home Education, and only a deluded imbecile would call for incompetent people to try and regulate something that already works far better than the thing the incompetent are failing to run correctly.

I do not know a single Home Educator that is going to change what they do and how they do it in any way; no matter what they recommend in this report, and no matter what changes are made in the legislation, the rights of man are set in stone; this far, and no further – no one has the right to enter any home and demand that a family behave in one way or another. This is the logical conclusion of the totalitarian fascist state; they try and control everything you do outside the home, and now that they have nowhere left to legislate, they come into the home to control you there also. Many Home Educators are saying, “over my dead body”, and I agree with them one thousand percent.

No matter what this review of Home Education says, Home Educators will not be managed, manipulated, registered, corralled, categorized, controlled and subjected to the abuse that they dish out at state schools.

You can take your Edu-Babble, your reviews, your ignorant opinions and your bogus concerns and take a running jump. No one is buying what you have to sell, no one will tolerate your attempts to control and destroy the family, and you can go straight to hell.

And for your information, this is how you tell them to go to hell. This is a TRUE THING:

[…]

Yesterday morning, I received a phone call from a gentlemen in the EOTAs section of a Local Authority who asked me to tell him the names and addresses of all the people who attend a home education group we help to run and any other home educating families I happen to know about. Naturally, I told him this was impossible as I didn’t know him from Adam and anyway I couldn’t possibly breach people’s confidentiality or betray their friendship and trust, even had he come at me with a badge, his Criminal Record’s Bureau Check, his CV, his passport, you name it. All the while I was thinking, I do actually love loads of the people he is asking about. Who does he think I am?

The conversation, if anything, then took a turn for the even worse with a perfect demonstration of one LA employee’s serpentine understanding of current legislation. Actually, chopped logic is the phrase that springs to mind.

I tried to explain that I thought he might like to think again about his understandable belief that he must search us all out for the purpose of assessing every family for the suitability of their educational provision, whether or not there is any reason to think that there might be a problem. I suggested that this behaviour might create both a constitutional and a practical problem for his authority, whatever current guidance might actually say.

I told him that since he (understandably) believes that it is this duty to assess all out of school educational provision, then he must accept that the state is responsible for determining the nature of education in this country. In which case, I went on, I think both home educating and state schooled parents alike whose children are being failed by this state-elected educational provision should be rubbing their hands rather gleefully, since it looks like bonanza time.

He then said “Well, it’s up to the parents what and how they teach”. In which case, says I, “Why are you bothering to visit? If the parent says that they are not going to help their child to learn to read because that is part of their educational philosophy, what exactly are you going to do about it, if it is up to the parents to make that decision?”

At which point, he turns round and says angrily and heatedly (sorry, this is mutating into a bad episode of Eastenders I do realise), “This is not what this conversation is about. I just rang you up for the names and addresses.”

“Yes, you did,” I says, “and I can’t help you there, and no-one I know will help you”.

“Well, how am I supposed to do my job then?” he asks.

“The thing is,” says I, “I don’t think that is my problem,” which I don’t think it is really, as I didn’t vote for this government and didn’t write the Education and Inspections Act 2006.

“But”, says I, trying to be generous, “If it’s any consolation, I’ll tell you that there isn’t a single family I currently know of who isn’t providing a highly suitable education. ”

“Well, that’s not up to you to decide”, says he.

I didn’t actually manage to provide an instant summary of his argument at the time, but in l’esprit d’escalier:

“So what you’re saying is that it’s not up to the state to decide on the nature of a suitable education because it’s up to the parents, but it’s actually not really up to the parents, because in fact the state does have this duty. Err?

[…]

http://daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/stasiland.html

WTF?

WELL DONE to this person for having the guts and brains and awareness to be on your toes when a call like this invades your home. She is a heroine.

Second, HOW DID THEY GET HER PHONE NUMBER?

Third, By what statute are they able to demand that she provide information on other people?

Fourth, this is ONLY THE BEGINNING. If ContactPoint is not stopped, they will be calling everyone who is the parent of a child not listed as registered in a school. All HE people need to be ready to receive this call or one like it, and answer it in terms like this or less, i.e., telling them they do not have your permission to call your telephone, telling them to write to you, and hanging up. You should then ban their number by dialing 14258 after you hang up and blocking the last number called. Then, when the letters arrive, simply ignore them.

This is the only way to deal with these subhuman animals; be on your toes and ready to react instantly and firmly.

These people and their power are like spider’s webs; easily brushed away. They have no real power, and no ability to do anything. They cannot even collect the names of Home Educators without the collaboration of the people they are trying to target. They have lost before they have even begun.

It is people like the HE mother above who make a difference to everyone by setting such a sterling example, and then posting it for everyone to read.

Police forces are to stop monitoring hunts in a change of policy that sounds the death knell for the hunting ban, The Times has learnt.

New guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) states that gathering evidence of illegal hunting is difficult, that the ban is hard to enforce and that chief constables have more pressing priorities.

So, Acpo is the new Parliament. The lawmakers pass laws, and then Acpo decides which ones will, or will not be enforced according to their own… what exactly?

In future, forces should rely on anti-hunt activists to produce information, it says. But they should also be “very cautious” of such groups and recognise that hunting is an “emotionally charged” subject.

so they are outsourcing the policing of hunting to the most irrational, illogical, hysterical bunch of people in Britain, but, they should be cautious in doing it.

Pinch! Pinch! Pinch! Pinch!

yep, I am actually awake and not dreaming this!!

Hunts will also no longer be required to inform police in advance of the time and place of meets and their planned route.

This is absolutely amazing. By what permission are they able to essentially nullify a law? Why do they not nullify ALL the laws that are insane, like the absurd prohibition laws that no policeman agrees with. Wether you agree with the idea of a group of mass murdering nincompoops saying who can and cannot do what, it makes no sense if you BELIEVE in that system to say that after the process of making laws another, unelected body actually decides which laws are going to be enforced.

By the way, it is completely sensible that they are not policing this insanity. The police should not be telling people to put on their seat belts, should not be telling people what they can or cannot do on their own land (hunting) and should not be doing anything other than protecting physical people and property. They should not be sitting at the side of the road with speed radars, should not be running drink drive checkpoints, should not be in schools running magnetic arches.

You get the picture.

Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales and the Acpo spokesman on rural affairs, said: “Hunting is definitely not a policing priority. It is not illegal to wear a red coat and ride a horse in a public place.”

That isn’t funny!

The new guidance undermines one of the most controversial pieces of legislation introduced by the Labour Government, which took up 700 hours of parliamentary time.

Since the Hunting Act came into force in 2004, there have been eight prosecutions, of which only three have been successful, with one pending. Hunting has thrived.

Yay hunters and YAY property rights.

Mr Brunstrom said that police had to chose which areas of law enforcement to devote scarce resources to. He said: “If you look at hunting, the penalties do not include a prison sentence for offenders. This puts the Hunting Act to the lower rather than the higher end of offences. Parliament had the chance to include imprisonment as a sentence but did not do so.”

Thats odd… why should the level of sentence have anything to do with it? There are already too many people in prison; the idea that the potential sentence determines wether or not a crime is investigation worthy doesn’t make any sense. What is the ‘value’ of putting people in prison? In fact, it costs people money to keep them there, so surely this something to be avoided. It is not logical; if the police are only going after crimes that could result in a prison sentence, that means that all crimes that do not call for such a sentence are basically unenforced.

The new guidance is not binding but was unanimously approved by the country’s most senior officers this week. Officers are urged to avoid “acrimonious, time consuming, frustrating and ultimately fruitless activity”.

Wow, so that REALLY means that they should not be doing any prohibition style enforcement at all! ‘Drug’ busts are most certainly acrimonious, time consuming, frustrating and ultimately fruitless, because nothing they do can stem the tide of ‘drugs’ in the UK. The decades of the failed ‘war on drugs’ has proved that. You can get anything you want cheaper than ever, and growing mariguana (yes ‘mariguana’) is a cottage industry in the UK.

Just who are these ‘senior officers’, how often do they meet, how do they decide what they decide etc etc. The article says ‘unanimously’ so they voted on it… that makes it OK then right?!?!

Senior officers expressed concern that their neutrality had been compromised by being forced to release details of meets through freedom of information requests to activists who had gone on to disrupt hunts.

If they were not wasting their time and violating the rights of landowners, they would not be compromised in the first place. I guess that is not a problem anymore; just ignore the law.

More and more the message is clear; if something, some law, is wrong, simply ignore it. The MPs do it, the police do it. EVERYONE does it.

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has made it clear that he favours a repeal of the Hunting Act and in the event of a general election victory will offer MPs a free vote in government time, although a backbencher would have to produce a Bill.

Hmmmmmm. That really is not good enough. If a law is wrong it should be REMOVED from the statute books. Imagine if there was a law saying that the penis of all newborns should be cut off. Cameron says, “I am aginst this, but I am going to allow a free vote on the matter”. No, that is NOT good enough at all, and in fact, all the things that need to be removed from the statute books, NIR, ID Cards, Biometric Passports, DNA Database for non criminals, cannot be left to a simple vote. Or at least they should not be.

Mr Brunstrom said: “I am pleased with the new guidance but hunting is definitely not a policing priority and don’t let me give you the impression it is. But that does not mean we are not going to deal with it. We recognise it is the law of the land and the duty of the police to enforce it — but to do so proportionately and according to priorities.”

That doesn’t make any sense; “We are going to enforce the law, but we are not.”

Mr Brunstrom said that forces needed a consistent approach in dealing with reports of unlawful hunting. He also raised concerns about militants becoming involved with anti-hunt organisations and said that police had to be cautious when people made complaints to them. He outlined the difficulties facing police. “If there are offences they are likely to be taking place in a remote rural environment. We are not very well equipped to follow hunts and get evidence and nor do we think we can justify it. Pursuing hunts is an expensive and sophisticated operation.”

The police are in an impossible position. They do not get paid enough money. They are asked to do things that any rational person would refuse to do. Every year there are more and more things they are asked to police, and they become more and more complicated. Take for instance computer ‘crime’. They have to open labs, get training in how to look at hard discs and then when they do it, they have to expose themselves to horrible things that would derange any sane man. For this, they get hated by everyone.

If the police had simpler roles of protecting property and people, then they would not have any of these problems… or at least they would be greatly reduced. They could allocate their resources correctly and efficiently, and the public would look upon them completely differently. But I digress. If the police are able to do this for Hunting, they should immediately do the same for prohibition, and most certainly, they should NEVER involve themselves in the complete nonsense that they have been getting mixed up with.

He accepted the need to train more police in hunt investigations and said he hoped that the pro-hunt Countryside Alliance and the RSPCA, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the League Against Cruel Sports would attend training seminars to give their views. A hunt investigation manual is to be distributed to forces before the autumn season.

A manual that no policeman has time to read, about a law no policeman has any inclination to enforce, and which is now moot.

The Countryside Alliance said: “We have always understood what a difficult job the police have in dealing with such a confusing piece of legislation. But the guidance suggests that the sort of engagement some police forces have had with animal rights groups should, quite rightly, be avoided.”

POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP! POOP!

That is the sound of Champagne bottles popping all over the west country!

A spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sport said: “We fought for 80 years for the hunting ban and, while we accept it is not a high priority for police, a ban was the will of Parliament and is the will of the people and we are going to press for more prosecution cases to be brought.”

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6289896.ece

The ban is the will of SOME members of Parliament, is NOT the will of the people, and you wasted 80 years which would have been better spent keeping Britain sane.

I cannot begin to list all the nonsense that has happened in the UK over the last EIGHTY YEARS. Hunting over that time has been the VERY LEAST of Britain’s problems, and in fact, it is perfectly shameful that so much effort should be wasted on banning hunting while there are still people in Britain who CANNOT READ AND WRITE.

Of course the members of the League Against Cruel Sport can campaign for whatever they like, but thinking about it rationally, in the same way that the police are now forced to prioritize, any rational person would work to eliminate illiteracy in the UK before hunting. Perhaps if they worked for that instead of attacking hunting directly, they would have produced an electorate more disposed to banning hunting…or rejecting the idea as absurd on its face…who knows? One thing is for sure, humans come FIRST, ALWAYS, and FIRST where you live. That means eliminate poverty in your own country FIRST, then encourage other people to solve their problems by the example you set, and THEN you can think about ‘banning hunting’. Or not!

Thanks to a collaborator….

Essex funds home tutoring

Essex CC is to award a group of parents cash towards home tutoring.

The parents were given £10,450 after they refused to send their children to their local school, which has been placed in special measures. They had applied to several schools in the area but failed to get their fourth choice.

One of the mothers, Holly O’Toole, said the councils will find it ‘very difficult’ to refuse other people in her position.

She said: ‘Living locally, you just hear so much bad press about [the local school]. I don’t see why we should have to send our children there.’

Essex CC granted the money for the youngsters’ education because the private tutoring was draining the family’s finances.

A spokesman from Essex CC said: ‘We have always considered and will continue to consider any requests from parents for financial support on their own merits.’

But he added that the council did not expect the pay outs to ‘become the norm.’

[…]

http://tinyurl.com/prjuyq

This is ASTONISHING news.

Hopefully it does not come with any strings attached.

The only problem with it is, of course, that the money the council is giving to these parents is stolen, but apart from that, it is very encouraging.

You would have expected the council to bus these students to schools that are further away instead of paying them to Home Educate. That they understand that Home Education is not only an option, but one worth paying parents to do is… breathtaking; especially in the current situation where Home Education is being viciously and maliciously attacked.

I can tell you something right now; £10,450 ($15,777.52 or 17¼oz/au) to help home Educate is a lot of money; many HE families get along with a fraction of that, and succeed. Some Home Educating parents putting their children through exams cannot afford the cost of several private sittings in one go, and so have to opt for spreading the exams out. Finding exam centers outside of London is difficult; many parents have to visit the capital so their children can sit exams; that means extra costs. Money like this would help tremendously; even better would be to open the schools so that HE children can sit exams at their local school. Minor digression.

This means that other councils might decline to allocate stolen money to Home Educators, but will simply leave them alone.

BBQ says:

Parents given home teaching money

A group of parents who refused to send their children to a failing Essex school has been awarded more than £10,450 towards home tutoring.

Essex County Council said it would help towards the education of six children aged between 11 and 12.

The pupils have been receiving private lessons since September after their parents stopped them attending Bishops Park College in Clacton-on-Sea.

The families said Essex County Council had set a precedent for other parents.

Holly O’Toole, whose 12-year-old son Harry is among the pupils being taught at home, said the education authority’s decision could prompt other parents to take similar action.

Ms O’Toole said: “I definitely think the council has set a precedent.

“It’s going to be very difficult for them to say ‘no’ to anybody who is in the same position as us.”

Ms O’Toole said the six children didn’t even get into their fourth choice of school.

“People complain when they don’t get their first choice school but we didn’t even get our fourth.

“Bishops Park is in special measures. You just hear so much bad press about it. I don’t see why we should have to send our children there.”

A spokeswoman for Essex County Council said: “The payment followed an initial discussion around parents establishing their own school, and we are pleased to be in a position to assist.

“We have always considered, and will continue to consider, any requests from parents for financial support on their merits.”
The families said the money would pay for the four boys and two girls’ lessons until the end of term after which they hope to get into one of the four local schools they had initially applied for.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/7989254.stm

“The £10,000 grant will help parents pay the £100 a week per pupil to educate the children at home”

Hmph!