BBQ staffers are not feeling the love:

The thing I find strange about all this is that often people who write blogs, or contribute to them, somehow think that they are involved in a private forum.

Don’t be stupid. No one thinks this. What they fear is someone from that festering nest of lies and nepotism looking at their blog. They fear it beceause they know that it is possible that BBQ will read the words and take the ideas from their blog, link to them ro print them out of context, and then blatantly misrepresent them in one of their unauthored, unnatributed pay for insertion PR pieces. There is no avenue of redress; BBQ is the face of power, and since everyone (almost everyone) blindly trusts it, it is more dangerous than FOX news since they have ‘back door access‘ to shape opinion in the UK. This is changing however.

If you and your blog are attacked by BBQ, you are the victim. Bloggers are ‘the little guy’. You are the guys putting advertisements that threaten the public on TV. You are the guys calling Bittorrent a tool for perverts and criminals. The fact that you cannot sense this or understand it perfectly, and pretend to be ‘just another voice’ speaks volumes about you and the problem. That is why people think its ‘spooky’ that BBQ is reading their blog, and lets not forget that you are in the pocket of spooks, which in and of itself is ‘spooky’.

It wasn’t the confidentiality issue that bugged me, but that anyone would think that we as programme makers don’t have as much right as everyone else to read what you’re all writing, especially if you are writing about us. So, what do you think? Stick it on your blog and I’ll respond.

Once again, we are not journalists. We understand from the beginning that freedom of speech and freedom of the press is everyone’s right, and not just the right of journalists in the pay of the state. We feel the same level of pain no matter who is killed in a conflict; we don’t reserver our best words feelings and airtime just for people in our profession.

You go on TV every night and with foreknowledge, lie, spin and distort, knowing full well that you are doing so. ({insert Pre-Emption} this is the part where they say, “you pointed to a set of BBQ comments telling us of our error, see? we are unbiased!”. This is the logic of a villain. You deliberately lie, and then say sorry we were wrong, and think thats absolves you.) This is what ‘buggs’ us. You are unnacountable, and even when you are pulled up on your shenanigans, you are utterly unrepentant.

It has to be said that we find it astonishing that you can use Technorati to find all the blog posts about you ‘in seconds’, but you cannot use it or Google to find out the truth about any subject. Actually, we suspect that you can do this, but that when you do, you deliberately distort what you find anyway.

So spare us your ‘we have feelings too’ whining about porr wittle jewemy ‘slumped over his computer’; if you are not doing somehting right, you deserve to be roasted, and that is what you are getting, because you are habitually and deliberately perveyors of lies, distortion and spin, and to add insult to injury, everyone in the UK is forced to pay for the ‘service’.

Thankfully we have Technorati, Digg and the blogosphere in general to act as a vaccination to your lie virii. You can never again lie without being instantly caught, countered and castigated, and the only thing you can do about it is slump in front of your computers. It is going to get worse for you. As more people become computer literate (there is a person in your comments that doesn’t know what a blog is. An increasingly rare creature surely), your ability to spread lies will be curtailed to the point where you will either give up the lie game entirely or start to report only the facts, as you are meant to, but often actually fail to do.

The best part of this is that we are now seeing the end of the role of Editors. We do not need editors. We also don’t need moderators censoring out comments that go against the BBQ line. We have our own massively powerful network of free writers in a self correcting environment where the truth always comes out quickly and efficiently; all you have to do is look. Compared to the very small numbers of people who read the comments on your site this is a force you cannot possibly compete with or overcome. Speaking of the comments, this one hit the nail right on the head:

I think the amount of time you spend thinking about yourselves is totally grotesque and seriously unhealthy for you and for us. […]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/

Amen to that. The amount of stories decrying the lack or attacks on freedom of the press is amazing. Whenever ‘ordinary people’ are killed in a conflict, one tone, (similar to the one used when recounting the rainfall for the day) is taken, but when a journalist is killed, all of a sudden, the level of tragedty is 1000 times greater. It’s sickening, but now tolerable because you are on the wane, you know it, we know it, and we will all benefit from your permanent elimination.

The comments on this story say it all:

I’ve voted Labour all my life but this is really the end. Their intrusion into our liberty is frightening and they have ground away the last of my support.

– Niki, Reading, UK

So Bliar won’t even tell us if Leo has had the MMR jab, but all our kids details will be on a register for Lord know’s who to access. Where are the Civil Liberties groups when you need them?

– Sarah, France

When Germany tatooed the Jews there was a human outcry, now our govenment want to bar code it’s citizens. We’ll be known as ‘Barcode Britain’. It’s a good job this didn’t happen when I was a child, I’d have been put into care years ago!

– Alison Johnson, Lanark.UK

Yet again the state is grabbing total control of peoples lives. The outrage however is the lack of opposition by the Conservative and Lib Dem parties to stop this happening. If they truly believed in liberty and freedom they would be shouting from the rooftops, holding the government to account.

– John Galloway, Stanton Upon Hine Heath, Shropshire

Let’s hope that the opposition parties can put a stop to this Dictatorship as soon as possible.

– Fred, Northants

What is this Country coming to? The whole of Britain should take a stand and do something about this!

– Mel, Oxford, UK

No surprises, coming from the same control-freak government that seeks to force every law-abiding citizen to be fingerprinted like common criminals and inform the police when moving house, like a registered sex offender!

– Oliver Coombes, London, England

Completely ridiculous. This is undesirable, unworkable and unethical!

– Frances, Redhill, Surrey

My question to the people of Britain is are you going to let the government and its officials get away with this? Is it not time adults took back control of their families from the state?

– Mabon Dane, Haverhill, UK

What has happened to the spirit of Great Britain? From my side of the Atlantic it seems the British people are oblivious about losing their freedoms. It must be that the majority of the citizens are comfortable giving up their responsibilities to Big Brother. Little by little you are losing your individuality, effectively making the State your dad, mum, boss, etc. I am not anti government, I am for good government, and good government is limited government. I guess there is a childlike comfort to have someone or something looking out for you. But it comes with a big price to pay…your freedom. Maybe I’m totally wrong here, and if that is the case will someone please enlighten me as to what I’m missing.

– George Ruggiero, Whitney Point, New York USA

I can’t believe the over bearing restrictions of personal freedom I see coming out of England. Is there something in the water? What other excuse for the behavior of supposedly intelligent politicians? Either the birth rate will drop even further or couples will start leaving the country.
Next move? Inspectors at the borders to prevent pregnant women from emigrating.

– Joyce B. Goetz, Westlake Village, CA USA

This is outragious! British citizens should take a cue from France for once and riot in the streets.
Don’t depend on civil liberty groups to take the government to task as they are even more left than Labour. No wonder the West is slowly sinking and losing all it’s greatness it once had.
China Inc. will be smiling in the wings.

– John Main, Auckland, New Zealand

Children need one register to keep them safe – the Child Protection Register. It works very well. Tragically, the government is to abolish this by 2008. This register focuses professional attention on the few children identified as at high risk of child abuse – there is very good reason to be monitoring them and their families to keep the children safe from harm. Most children are well cared for and to electronically monitor their progress is an affront to good parents and carers and a terrible invasion of human rights. Please campaign to save the Child Protection Register. Vulnerable children depend on you to contact your MP.

– Liz, london UK

Papers please. What are we coming to? This is only the beginning of complete monitoring of all citizens. Trouble is, as long as we only complain about this in bars and take no action, we are eventually going to have to accept complete state control. Whatever happened to “never again”?

– John, Darwen, England

Britain seems about time for a revolution. They’re just doing this so that in 30 years, they can start tracking these babies as adults as they build their careers… the entire country is becoming a sick social experiment where the government is a scientist, tracking, analyzing and trying to play god with the human race.

– Matt, Carroll NH, USA

How can this even be done? To monitor whether a child is eating 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day? How is that even possible?
I don’t see how this could be implemented in any practical way, just more bureaucracy and more paperwork and more confusion. Also more jobs created by the government. It’s scary to think the govt. will give so many people power over the lives of families. This isn’t going to help children at risk, it’s going to prepare an entire generation to obey orders and to be, essentially, helpless in the long run.

– Desha Devor, Washington, DC, USA

What happens if you refuse to give details?

– John De St Croix, London England

[…]

The Daily Mail

The hate is swelling in them now.

Look at all of these comments!

It looks like a rough ride for Bliar and the Neu Labour fascist enterprise. The best comment, the most satisfying, exiting and hope inducing one is:

“What happens if you refuse to give details?”

FINALLY someone somewhere (and this person CANNOT be the only one) is waking up, and saying, “fuck that for a scream, I’m just not going to do it”. Awesome.

I would suggest however, that the way forward is not to ‘refuse to give details’ but to simply ignore any and all requests for information. When you refuse, you actually provide feedback to the system, which is then recorded by and which engrosses the very system you are trying to strarve of information.

Imagine this; they send out 16 million letters to parents up and down the country, and not one of them replies. What are they going to do?

There is NOTHING that they can do. If no one reples, and no one responds, they are dead in the water. They might of course, try and cobble this information from schools or other sources, but that may be illegal, and fundamentally they need everyone’s cooperation. If you don’t give it, they die.

The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.

That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.

There is no excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon just as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can to those in Israel.

But they don’t – and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.

My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of e-mails – some defensive, others angry – from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not “campaigning” journalists after all, they are “professionals” doing a job.

But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do – and the nature of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.

Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That nonevent was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border? These images from Lebanon exist, because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.

Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its citizens, how it must “punish” Hezbollah This is not journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.

Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hezbollah has no choice faced with Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?

Would the BBC bother to show prerecorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear – or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside – is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.

These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC – and the institutional biases that are the result.

They know that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak; that the charge of anti-Semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.

This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives – in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army – is likely to become inevitable.

So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you.

[…]

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9320

The fact of the matter is we don’t need BBC, FOX or anyone else to tell us that the artic is cold. As soon as you understand this, then you won’t care about wether or not the BBC is spinning ID cards on the behalf of contractors, uncritically spreading lies about ‘the middle east’ or any other despicable shenanigans that they are getting up to.

I wish Aljazeera had english subtitles….then we could actually get some perspective.

“Power is very rarely limited to the pure exercise of brute force…. The Roman state bolstered its authority and legitimacy with the trappings of ceremonial – cloaking the actualities of power beneath a display of wealth, the sanction of tradition, and the spectacle of insuperable resources….Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images.”

Jás Elsner in his recent book Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph

Britons face 11 ID checks a year

Passports are commonly used to prove identity

UK adults are asked to prove their identity (ID) 11 times on average each year, research from Manchester Business School has found. Laws meant to combat money-laundering and terrorism mean Britons are increasingly being asked to produce ID.

Buying an airline ticket, leasing a property, opening a savings account and registering with a doctor require ID.

And according to the research, by 2010 Britons will be asked to produce ID an average of 17 times a year.

Consumer burden

Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business Rob Laurence, GB Group

Technology firm GB Group, which commissioned Manchester Business School to undertake the research, said UK firms and government agencies were making up to half a billion identity checks on customers each year.

This could place a great burden on individual consumers who had to produce passports or driving licences to prove who they were, the group said.

For example, those moving house may have their identity checked more than five times throughout the process by different organisations such as estate agents, solicitors, financial advisers, lenders and the Land Registry.

“Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business,” Rob Laurence, GB Group spokesman, said. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5193986.stm 

A vigilant BLOGDIAL lurker points us to this flagrant piece of PR being hosted free of charge at the BBQ (free of charge apart from the fistful of fivers it took to get it published.)

This story has no author. That is the most telling thing about it. It is a pure regurgitation of a press release from GB Group, who used the cover of Manchester Business School to produce this thinly veiled call for an ID Card to ‘make peoples lives easier’. You will note that there is no link to N02ID in the ‘related links’ sidebar.

The BBC should always be forced to divulge how these ‘stories’ or ‘pieces’ have come to be published in a ‘story audit trail’ so that we can see who the biased writers are, and identify the PR companies that have priveledged access to the BBC.

In fact, if they won’t do it, we can do it ourselvs in a Web 2.0 mashup style, where people can report PR injected BBC URLS in a database, so that we can correlate the authors, businesses and PR firms who are squirting stories into BBQ. Hmmm, “Will someone do it” is the question we ask aloud.

In a sharp escalation of their crackdown on Internet gambling, United States prosecutors said yesterday that they were pressing charges against the chief executive of BetOnSports, a prominent Internet gambling company that is publicly traded in Britain, and against several other current and former company officers.

Federal authorities arrested the chief executive, David Carruthers, late Sunday as he was on layover at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on his way from Britain to Costa Rica. In a hearing yesterday in Federal District Court in Fort Worth, he was charged with racketeering conspiracy for participating in an illegal gambling enterprise.

Also at the hearing, the court granted the government’s request for a temporary restraining order preventing BetOnSports from accepting wagers from customers in the United States and requiring it to return money held in the accounts of American customers.

In addition to Mr. Carruthers, the government filed charges against 10 other people involved with BetOnSports and with three Florida marketing companies that prosecutors say were involved in promoting illegal gambling.

The charges, particularly those against Mr. Carruthers, who runs a company that has been a symbol of the investment potential of offshore casinos, raise complex legal and political questions. And they are the most direct attack in several years on offshore Internet casinos, setting up a showdown with an industry that has grown increasingly brazen in promoting online wagering in the United States.

The gambling sites allow people to place bets on sporting events and play casino games like blackjack from their computers. The companies keep their computer servers in places like the Isle of Man, Antigua and Costa Rica, where BetOnSports has its operating headquarters. […]

Prosecutors assert that under the Federal Wire Act of 1961, the providers and promoters of Internet sports books and casinos are participants in a criminal enterprise.

The fact that these operations are legal in their home jurisdictions “does not entitle them to do business in the United States,” said Catherine L. Hanaway, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, which brought the indictment. The charges announced yesterday indicate that “their efforts to avoid U.S. law enforcement will be challenged and brought to justice whenever possible.”

In addition to Mr. Carruthers, prosecutors brought charges against Peter Wilson, BetOnSports’s media director; Gary Kaplan, the company’s founder; and several of Mr. Kaplan’s relatives, whom the indictment alleges were involved in the business. The indictment was returned June 1 but was sealed until yesterday. […]

The indictment seeks to have the accused forfeit $4.5 billion in holdings. […]

Ms. Hanaway, the United States attorney in Missouri, said the arrest happened during this visit because “it’s when we knew he was coming.” Asked whether it presented a challenge to prosecutors that Mr. Carruthers is not an American citizen, Ms. Hanaway said, “Thus far, no.” […]

Sue Schneider, publisher of Interactive Gaming News, an online magazine focusing on the Internet casino industry, said the charges would have at least one major chilling effect on the industry’s officers. “I imagine the number of executives coming through the U.S. on connecting flights will come to a screeching halt,” she said. […]

New York Times

My emphasis.

Firstly and OT, they probably knew he was passing through the US because the airlines are giving people’s itinearys to the feds on a regular basis.

Secondly, this is all wrong. BetOnSports is a 100% legal operation. It is not incorporated in the US, does not have any servers in the US and is in no way a US legal entity. Its owner is not a US person. It is however, on the internet, and las time I checked, the US does not own the internet, so why they think they can arrest the owner of this business is arrogance beyond comprehension.

If someone in Spokane wants to connect to BetOnSports with their browser, that is THEIR business, and it is not correct that the US government should arrest people from other countries who are going about their lawful business. If they want to stop internet gambling, then they should do what China does and block sites. Then of course, they would face a Supreme Court challenge, and they dont want that, so they take the easy route of arresting an innocent person. Shameful behaviour.

If the tables were turned, all americans would be OUTRAGED if one of their citizens was arressted while ‘on layover’ through Germany because he published texts in the USA that are illegal in Germany.

This situation is no different. Jurisdiction is a real and necessary thing, so that people in different places with different moral standards can live in peace. america is violating this rule by arresting people who are not breaking the laws in their own countries. All business men, if they have any brains at all are avoiding the US like a plague.

We can add this example to the one of the NatWest Three who have just been extradited without any basis at all, for crimes committed in the UK that have nothing to do with the US.

UPDATE

Read the PDF of the actual indictment, which says that they took over ONE BILLION dollars in bets, and that they BetOnSports must forfeit 4.5 BILLION dollars!

Now, what on EARTH was Carruthers doing on a commercial airline flight if they have as much money as this indictment alleges? Anyone with that much turnover flies private aviation by default.

I smell some inflated figures!

‘Anti-terror style “control orders” could be used to disrupt the activities of the gangsters at the top of organised crime, the government says.’

‘The government brought in control orders to target terror suspects who could not be prosecuted in courts. Control orders allow terror suspects to be tagged, confined to their homes and banned from communicating with others.’

(In other words, without a trial, they can tag you and put you under house arrest, and no communicating means no visitors, no mail, no phones, landline or mobile, and no internet access). First it was terrorists, now gangsters, what next?

Note further: ‘The plans also include introducing new laws to target people on the periphery of criminal activity and moves to increase the amount of data sharing between public sector agencies.’

Right, so they’ll be able to extend these to people they allege might be involved, and severely reducing the protections under the Data Protection Act.

Big Brother or what? Doesn’t this sound a little like a fascist or communist dictatorship? Hitler? Mussolini? Idi Amin? Saddam Hussein? Stalin? Nicolae Ceau?escu?

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator
“In modern usage, dictator refers to an absolutist or autocratic ruler who governs outside the constitutionally normal rule of law with checks and balances, usually through a continued state of exception. However, unlike the original Roman dictators (who were a constitutional institution), modern dictators rarely give themselves the title “dictator”; it is generally used by their opponents as a pejorative term for totalitarian rule, just like despot and tyrant (also unlike their counterparts in Antiquity). “

At least some have wit. For example, Idi Amin Dada, who had been a British army lieutenant prior to Uganda’s independence from Britain in October 1962, subsequently styled himself as “His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

Oh, and the Crown Prosecution Service have decided not to prosecute any police officers over the killing of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on London’s Underground (metro), but will prosecute the police in general under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act for “failing to provide for the health, safety and welfare” of Mr Menezes on 22 July.

So they can shoot you now to and get away with it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5187752.stm

[…]

Snarfed from a thread on Digg.

As they Stand They Point Everywhere:

The four large upright blocks pointing outward are oriented to the limits of the migration of the moon during the course of the year.

An eye-level, oblique hole is drilled from the South to the North side of the center, Gnomen stone, so that the North Star is always visible, symbolizing constancy and orientation with the forces of nature.

A slot is cut in the middle of the gnomon stone to form a window which aligns with the positions of the rising sun at the Summer and Winter Solstices and at the Equinox, so that the noon sun shines to indicate noon on a curved line.

The cap stone includes a calendar of sorts, where sunlight beams through a 7/8 inch hole at noon, and shines on the South face of the center stone. As the sun makes its travel cycle, the spot beamed through the hole can tell the day of the year at noon each day. Allowances are made because of variations between standard time and sun time to set the beam of sunlight at an equation of time.

The site was chosen because it commands a view to the East and to the West and is within the range of the Summer and Winter sunrises and sunsets. The stones are oriented in those directions.

The Guides Explained

A massive granite monument espousing the conservation of mankind and future generations. Sources for the sizable financing of the project choose to remain anonymous. The wording of the message proclaimed on the monument is in 12 languages, including the archaic languages of Sanskrit, Babylonian Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Classical Greek, as well as English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, and Swahili.

The guides, followed by explanatory precepts, are as follows, the words are exactly as the Sponsors provided them: […]

http://www.thegeorgiaguidestones.com/stones.htm

The Culling is Coming…

The stones say:

• Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature
• Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity
• Unite humanity with a living new language.
• Rule Passion – Faith – Tradition
• Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
• Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
• Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
• Balance personal rights with social duties.
• Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
• Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Police call for tracker chips in paedophiles
David Leppard

BRITAIN’S most senior policeman is proposing that electronic chips should be surgically implanted into convicted paedophiles and dangerous sex offenders so they can be more easily tracked.

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said the implants would be tracked by satellite, enabling authorities to set up “zones” from which sex offenders would be barred. These could include schools, playgrounds and former victims’ homes. Any attempt by the offender to enter the zones would trigger alarms in a monitoring centre, enabling police to act.

Jones, whose association represents all 43 chief constables in England and Wales, said the scheme would help to reassure the public at a time of mounting concern about the government’s handling of sex offenders.

“If we are prepared to track cars, why don’t we track people? You could put surgical chips into those of the most dangerous sex offenders who are are willing to be controlled,” he said.

His comments follow the announcement last month by John Reid, the home secretary, of a review of the way paedophiles and other sex offenders are treated on their release. […]

He said he was aware that civil liberties groups would object to the idea of a “Big Brother” monitoring system but emphasised that the chips would be implanted only with the agreement of sex offenders and would be targeted at those guilty of the most serious crimes.

“You could have a pilot scheme for the people who represent the highest risk and who would voluntarily want to go into this. You’d be surprised how many would be willing to submit to that kind of control,” he said. […]

The chips — inserted beneath the skin under local anaesthetic — could also monitor the heart rate and blood pressure of the offender, alerting authorities to the possible imminence of an attack.

Dr William Harwin, of the cybernetics department at Reading University, said such tags were now widely available: “Similar tracking chips are already extensively used on pets and livestock.”

Supporters believe implanted chips would be more effective than electronic tags on ankles or wrists because they cannot easily be removed.

Figures released by the Home Office last month showed that since 2001 more than 3,300 sex offenders had been punished for absconding or failing to tell police where they were living. […]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2272338.html

1/ We are not ‘prepared to track cars’.
2/ People are not cars.

Police DNA database ‘is spiralling out of control’

Secret emails show private firms store genetic data from innocent victims

Antony Barnett, investigations editor Sunday July 16, 2006 The Observer

The security of the police National DNA Database is in question following the disclosure of confidential emails which reveal that a private firm has secretly been keeping the genetic samples and personal details of hundreds of thousands of arrested people. Police forces use the company LGC to analyse DNA samples taken from people they arrest. LGC then supplies the information to the National DNA Database. Yet rather than destroy this afterwards, the firm has kept copies, together with highly personal demographic details of the individuals including their names, ages, skin colour and addresses.

In a separate twist, evidence has emerged that the Home Office has given permission for a controversial genetic study to be undertaken using the DNA samples on the police database to see if it is possible to predict a suspect’s ethnic background or skin colour from them. Permission has been given for the DNA being collected on the police database to be used in 20 research studies […]

The Home Office emailed LGC with its concerns: ‘From a [DNA Database] custodian and Data Protection Act perspective, it is important that there are no demographics linked to these retained profiles. Otherwise, suppliers would be building up subsets of the National DNA Database.’ The company admits that is has been doing this. It states: ‘All the information is on [our system]. We do in effect have a mini-database.’ One of LGC’s directors is Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and it has several contracts with companies in the pharmaceutical, biotech and chemicals industry. Although there is no evidence that the firm has used the DNA records for other commercial purposes, opposition MPs are calling for the Home Office to launch an investigation. Lynne Featherstone, the home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: ‘This might be more cock-up than conspiracy, but the Home Office must investigate whether DNA taken from thousands of innocent people has not been abused.’ […]
The genetic research is being carried out by Jon Wetton of the Forensic Science Service. An FSS spokesperson said the aim of the research was to reduce the time taken to identify a suspect .’ […]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1821749,00.html

My emphasis.

At last, we see the results of the DNA database, and government databases in general as they reveal their true natures; Racist tools of absolute control.

Not only has this data been illegally and imorally retained by the contractor that was doing the work, but a secret, Nazi style race experiment was ORDERED by the Fascist Bliar government.

At any other time between the end of world war two and the end of the twentieth century, any politician involved in such a disgusting, immoral and wrong project would instantly resign and then be aressted, but today, they simply get away with it.

All you sheeple, you morons, you Facist Facilitators, you Upstream Warmongers™ THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.

You can see from the link to Jon Wetton’s name above that he is publishing his research:

Inferring the population of origin of DNA evidence within the UK by allele-specific hybridization of Y-SNPs.

Wetton JH, Tsang KW, Khan H.

The Forensic Science Service, R&D, Trident Court 2960, Solihull Parkway, Birmingham Business Park, Solihull B37 7YN, UK. jon.wetton@fss.pnn.police.uk

Marked differences in Y-SNP allele frequencies between continental populations can be used to predict the biogeographic origin of a man’s ancestral paternal lineage. Using 627 samples collected from individuals within the UK with pale-skinned Caucasian, dark-skinned Caucasian, African/Caribbean, South Asian, East Asian or Middle Eastern appearance we demonstrate that an individual’s Y-SNP haplogroup is also strongly correlated with their physical appearance. Furthermore, experimental evaluation of the Marligen Signet Y-SNP kit in conjunction with the Luminex 100 detection instrument indicates that reliable and reproducible haplogrouping results can be obtained from 1 ng or more of target template derived from a variety of forensic evidence types including, blood, saliva and post-coital vaginal swabs. The test proved highly male-specific with reliable results being generated in the presence of a 1000-fold excess of female DNA, and no anomalous results were observed during degradation studies despite a gradual loss of typable loci. Hence, Y-SNP haplogrouping has considerable potential forensic utility in predicting likely ethnic appearance.

Now, if this research has come from the immorally stolen DNA of the British public, then anyone who works with this data has comitted a crime. Scientists are morally obligated not to use the results of work done on people without their consent. If PubMed have published this immoral work, then they are culpable. Anyone who derives anything from this work is also culpable.

This article is being sold for Thirty Dollars. Anyone who is selling this document, if it is tainted, is culpable.

As for Lord Stevens, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the ex Metropolitan Police Commissioner “…the most successful Commissioner in modern times” is the head of the private company that won the contract to fleece the British people of their DNA for their racist, immoral, unpardonable, unspeakable, hideous, Mengeloid madness. That is the least surprising aspect of the whole sordid affiar.

According to this article it costs between $100-150 to get a DNA profile done. That means that with three MILLION profiles on file, they have charged at least THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS for this ‘service’, and now that ANY OFFENCE is arrestable, it means that MILLIONS MORE people will be DNA swabbed at this same price. That my friends, is what we call a licence to print money.

It’s all bad business. Note finally that the enemies of the people the members of parliament call only for another toothless investigation and not the wholesale destruction of the databases.
DIE DIE DIE you animals!

Meth crackdowns employ IDs, signatures

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. (AP) — Showing ID isn’t just for smokes and beer anymore.

Starting Sunday, cold and allergy sufferers in Illinois will need identification and they must be willing to sign a log before they can buy a popular decongestant that’s also used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine.

State police have seen a huge jump in the number of meth lab busts in recent years — from just 24 in 1997 to nearly 1,000 each of the past three years — and the number of Illinois cases has risen to third in the nation.

The state tried pulling pseudoephedrine-based medications off open shelves and putting them behind the counter last year, but Illinois remained a magnet for meth makers because other state’s had even stiffer requirements, Attorney General Lisa Madigan said.

Oregon, meanwhile, started a registry for cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine and saw its methamphetamine lab discoveries dropped by more than half last year.

“Our hopes are that we will see similar numbers,” Madigan said.

She and others hope that by further limiting access to the drug found in non-prescription medications such as Sudafed, Tylenol Cold and Claritin D, will curb the growing problem.

Just the requirement that buyers show ID may deter many meth users, who are often already paranoid because of the effects of the drug, said Master Sgt. Bruce Liebe, who heads the state police meth response team.

The newly required logs could also become a powerful investigative tool for law enforcement, said McLean County Sheriff Dave Owens. The logs will be confidential in most respects, but available to police for drug investigations.

Some pharmacists aren’t as optimistic. They say the new law will give them headaches by forcing them to check IDs, log every purchaser by name and keep track of medication so buyers don’t exceed 7.5 grams of pseudoephedrine a month, which authorities say is enough for daily recommended dosages of the decongestant. If they don’t follow it, they could face $500 fines and possible criminal charges.

Bill Martin, who owns an independent pharmacy in Bloomington, decided to simply stop selling the cold and allergy remedies rather than deal with it.

“We just didn’t want to hassle with the paperwork. We sell so little of it that we just pulled it off the shelves,” Martin said.

Shoppers, however, say they’re willing to wait if the new law reverses the rise of the highly addictive, homemade drug.

“You can’t be in that big of a hurry if it helps the kids — not just the kids, everyone,” said Nancy Harvey, 54, of Normal.

As of October, 37 states had some sort of restriction on the sales of pseudoephedrine, from requiring a prescription to simply limiting the number of packages purchased at one time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Since then, Michigan has also restricted sales.

Nationally, lawmakers wrote federal restrictions into legislation to extend the Patriot Act, but those restrictions weren’t included in the temporary renewal that was enacted, and its fate in Congress this year is uncertain.

Illinois officials acknowledge their new law isn’t perfect.

For now, purchases will only be logged at individual stores, meaning meth producers can still stockpile medications by hitting several pharmacies. Madigan hopes to develop a statewide database. Walgreens, based in Illinois, is considering its own database for its nearly 500 stores statewide, as well, spokesman Michael Polzin said.

Lynn Webber, who owns an independent pharmacy in Bloomington, said the state might be overreacting at the expense of customers and pharmacists.

“We’re jousting at windmills,” Webber said. “It’s a terrible addiction, but it’s such a small percentage of the drug users.” […]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-14-meth-crackdown_x.htm

The problems with this are many but the main one is that, it will not stop the purchase of ‘cough syrup’ by the microsopically small, statictically insignifigant, puny group of people who want to use it to make another product, and it will allow access into the lives of ordinary, law abiding people. It will allow companies to create a database of everyone who has bought this product. It will allow all the bad things we constantly talk about when we discuss this.

It is the wrong headed idea of having to show ID to do something that has reared its ugly head again, and of course, when everyone in that sleepy country is used to showing ID for anything and everything, they will switch to ‘only REALID is real ID’ and then the entire population will be caught in the snare.

From the guardian pipes:

NHS database ‘will damage privacy’

Doctors have criticised the massive new health service IT system, claiming the project will harm patient confidentiality.

They said there were serious issues of security once 50 million patient records are stored on one database.

The barbed comments from doctors are the latest set back for the £12.4 billion IT scheme, which has been shrouded in controversy.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, several frontline medics questioned the wisdom of putting the medical records of the UK population on to one central computer.

Consultant Michael Foley said suggested that the huge sums of money invested in the database would be better spent improving patient care.

Passwords to existing patient records were sometimes shared and computer screens left on in open view, he said.

“Insufficient attention is paid to confidentiality and security, even though staff can be disciplined for breaching rules on electronic data protection,” he said.

“When the medical history of the whole population becomes available on a central computer the potential for loss of confidentiality is obvious.”

Mr Foley, a consultant anaesthetist at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, said: “Workers in hospitals or general practice surgeries might seek inappropriate access to medical records because of curiosity or malice, commercial gain, or simple error.

“If screens are left on in open areas or passwords compromised, tracing of access for disciplinary purposes would be difficult. If challenged after a breach of security one could argue that data were requested accidentally. I occasionally enter a wrong number into the radiology viewing system and see unwanted images. Such errors are inevitable.”

The concerns will give succour to critics of the Government’s National Identity Register, which was recently lambasted in internal emails by senior Home Office officials. An Home Office insider who wished not to be named said “these are exactly the same concerns which we will be unable to address with the new Identity Card system, and unfortunately will make implementation of the system more difficult in the face of increased public concerns about the ability of Government databases to securely store private information about individuals”. A spokesman from No2ID added that “this is only the tip of the iceberg the NIR will not only store health records but provide a complete audit of an individual’s life, it is inconceivable that the Government still wishes to pursue this path in light of all the recent developments”.

Naturally the guardian just reprinted a Press Association article and I had to put the last paragraph in to show the sort of simple additions that need to be done to articles in order to inform people, rather than relate isolated facts

I imagine the printed version will include such detail!!!

–

Part two (Salami fascism):

From the guardian’s film section;

Among those interviewed for Sabina Guzzanti’s “satirical documentary” Viva Zapatero! is Furio Colombo, a former editor of the Italian leftwing daily L’Unita. He recalls how his family kept bound editions of the newspaper from previous years. As a boy, he says, he used to leaf through the volumes from the years that saw the rise of fascism. “I remember I used to wonder why people didn’t see,” he tells Guzzanti, “because at first there were so many who later became anti-fascists, and even joined the Resistance, who took part or said weak-kneed things like ‘Despite everything, Italy’s still a democracy.'”

But, looking through the yellowing pages, he gradually realised how Mussolini had established his dictatorship almost by stealth. “The second volume was more fascist than the first, the third was more fascist than the second, and the 10th was infinitely more fascist than at the beginning, so that by the end of a year of bound volumes, there was fascism.”

Police confiscated a Klingon Bat’leth in a raid on a house in Gloucestershire. It was subsequently used by them to promote the nationwide knife amnesty that was taking place in the UK last month.

Is it REALLY possible that not a single police officer in Gloucestershire has never seen Star Trek TNG?

Is it REALLY possible that not a single journalist that was spreading this story has never seen Star Trek TNG, and did not point out to the police that …. using a Bat’leth to promote a knife amnesty is … very funny.

This piece comes from HELLO magazine.

Please do not ask me what I was doing reading it.

Perhaps this is why, according to British Telecom, 48% of all landline users, including non-BT customers, are ex-directory. And the figure has been climbing steadily. Add to that Britain’s legion of mobile phone users, virtually all of whom are not listed on any directory, and you have a nation that wants to be left alone. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5168570.stm

Now. The obvious next question is this; do all these people who jump at the chance of being ex-directory also understand what it means to be forced to carry the new ID card and register for the evil NIR?

SURELY if they were iinformed of what it means, they would be against it en-masse.

The article also has this:

HOW TO VANISH
Be ex-directory
Opt out of edited electoral roll
Tick boxes to stop third parties getting info
Join Telephone Preference Service

How will you be able to ‘vanish’ if you are on the NIR? Did the idiot Finlo Rohrer even THINK about this as he was writing this piece? It beggars belief that with the recent leaked emails that the light bulb didnt go off in his head…. Heh…now its ME being dumb!

Clearly all the people who are ex-directory if given the choice would ‘opt out’of the NIR/ID shenanigans. This statistic is heartening. It means that people still value their privacy and are willing to protect it as long as it is easy for them to do so.

That means that we have to create a solution that makes it easy for people to opt out of the NIR should HMG try and roll it out. It also means that in the new system where we take control of our identity documents, we need not only to contact all of these people, but to make it easy for them to use it and thereby destroy the previous system of state controlled identity by default.

Beware of card tricks

The government claims that national identity cards will help to counter terrorism, illegal immigration and ID fraud. That’s rubbish, says Henry Porter, and in fact there is something much more sinister about them – they will fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, and make slaves of us all

Tuesday July 11, 2006
The Guardian

The other day I went to see my publishers in central London and prepared for the usual performance at the entrance, which involves me writing my name, the name of my editor and the time in a book. On this occasion the man asked me to type the details into a keyboard then angled a camera on a stalk into my face. I typed away but held one hand in front of the lens before moving swiftly out of the camera’s field to make for the lift. “Hold on, sir,” shouted the security guard after me. “You can’t go in unless you’ve had your picture taken.”

“I can,” I said, “because you have no right to take my photograph without my consent. And you most certainly don’t have it.”

A week later I was confronted with the same piece of equipment at my gym in west London. Again I placed my hand over the camera lens and to the baffled receptionists quoted the Image Retention Act 2002. There was, of course, no Image Retention Act in 2002, or any other year. That time, they let me in. By my next visit they were waiting for me. The receptionist stood back out of range of my hand and snapped my picture before I had time to react.

To many, my behaviour would seem unreasonable. After all, my picture is taken hundreds – maybe thousands – of times every day in London. But that is not my objection. What bothers me is when someone puts my image, my name, the place and time together. That is information of a personal nature, and is an invasion of my privacy.

I have exactly the same response to the ID card and the much more sinister National Identity Register (NIR), which one day will track each one of us through almost every important transaction of our lives. Emails leaked to the Sunday Times at the weekend suggest that senior civil servants in charge of key aspects of the scheme, Peter Smith and David Foord, have grave doubts about the practicalities of introducing the card. This may be reassuring to some but the argument against this folly must take place on every level. I am instinctively against them, politically against the card and the NIR – and, if it doesn’t sound pretentious, philosophically against them too.

At a stretch, I would carry a voluntary little plastic ID card, because I have no objection to identifying myself when it is my choice. I don’t mind taking my passport along to the bank or showing my driving licence to collect a parcel from the post office – but I am preternaturally against the state forcing me to supply biometric measurements and 49 separate pieces of information about myself to a database which will be accessed by God knows who without my permission or knowledge. I am genetically incapable of submitting to such a process. I cannot do it. I will not do it, and I pray that when the public understands how this scheme will profoundly alter the relationship between the individual and the state thousands more will recoil and say the same. […]

First things first; well done Henry, you have your brain switched to ‘on’.

Now. What on earth would a gym need to take your photograph on entry for? If they issue you with a photo ID, you show it when you enter and thats it. They are doing this because they can. The correct response is not to do a ‘crazy dance’ and make up false laws etc etc. What you do is, you call the manager over there and then, and then say to her, “I will not allow you to photograph me as I enter the club. If you do not stop this, I will cancel my membership right now, and write an article in The Guardian explaining why I have cancelled my membership. You are a private organization, and you have the right to do whatever you want inside your own club. I on the other hand, will not pay you to violate my privacy.”

That is how you lay your cards out. This is about money at the end of the day, and if you were to do as I said, not only would the practice be stopped at your gym, but everywhere that is doing this would be stopped.

Like I have said on BLOGDIAL again and again; do not do anything that does not directly contribute to giving you the result you desire. Crazy man act achieves nothing. Covering the camera at your publisher does nothing. You need to make sure that everyone knows what you think and why, and that you WILL NOT tolerate it, and will withdraw your money, and spread the message to everyone else using the same service should the business in question refuse to comply.

As I said, I am instinctively – genetically, as I put it – opposed to ID cards and the Identity Register. I am also politically opposed because as the government database grows, I believe there will be a commensurate lessening in the state’s respect for each one of us. We will be reduced to the great mass of classified specimens, pinned down and itemised like dead butterflies in a showcase. Because of the power it possesses over us, I believe the government will gradually become less accountable and less responsive to the needs and wishes of the people. Whereas once politicians were our servants, they will become our masters and we their slaves.

I have philosophical objections, too. In a free country I believe that every human being has the right to define him or herself independently and without reference to the government of the time. This, I believe, is particularly important in a multicultural society such as ours. The ID card and NIR require and will bring about a kind of psychological conformity, which is utterly at odds with a culture that has thrived on individualism, defiance and the freedom to go your own way.

And it will remove the right of those who for whatever reason wish to withdraw from the cares of the world and the influence of society, to resort to the consolations of solitude and privacy without inspection from a centralised authority. Privacy, anonymity and solitude are rights, and we are about to lose them for ever.

People say that everything about you is known already. Someone has calculated that each of us appears on up to 700 databases. But the real point is that everything that is known about you will become linked up on the NIR. The register will take on a life of its own, for once you set up a system like this it becomes ineluctably compelled to find out more and more about you. That will be its hardwired purpose.

Imagine handing over the keys to your home when you are out at work to allow some faceless bureaucrat to rifle through your desk and drawers, your photograph albums and children’s school reports, your bills and love letters. That is the kind of access they are going to have, and it is going to grow as time goes by and we become accustomed to this unseen presence in our lives.

Well, it’s not for me. I cannot do it. I will not do it, and I hope you won’t either. […]

The Guardian

I am sad to say that alot of what is happening today, the bad stuff, has everything to do with genetics…genetic deficiency. But I digress.

What we (you, I and everyone else) needs to do is to now execute a plan to remove control over our identity documents from administration by the state. The noble No2ID, in the wake of the leaked memos are now calling for everyone to write letters to their MPs and the newspapers. This is totally pointless. The MPs are the ones that have created this insanity. The newspapers are staffed almost without exception by idiots from top to bottom. We need to take an action that will give us what we want, and remove from the government what they should not have; the ability to administer identity.

If we do not do this, and take the postmen, the Eloi, the morons the uneducated along with us, nothing is going to change, and, as you remark in your article, the next generation will suffer the consequences. Indeed, if the ID card scheme is shelved for now and done in 2026 as some have predicted, that is precisely what will happen. We now have a golden opportunity to re-engineer our releationship with government. Identity is a key element of how man relates to government; if we take permanent control of our identities and remove that control from the state, we immediately take a step towards making government into a service that serves the constituent.

Every totalitarian state uses ID cards to control populations in a fine grained way. We need to prevent this from happening in the UK, and we can do it, with a scheme that is British in nature, highly efficient, very private and ‘secure’ iin that the documents are unforgable.

What’s that you say? “How can it be done?”

The document is coming.

The US Census shows that there are about 300 million people living in the USA.

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.0132, which is near zero, very far from one. Ergo, NSA’s surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.

Suppose that NSA’s system is more accurate than .40, let’s say, .70, which means that 70% of terrorists in the USA will be found by mass monitoring of phone calls and email messages. Then, by Bayes’ Theorem, the probability that a person is a terrorist if targeted by NSA is still only p=0.0228, which is near zero, far from one, and useless.

Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

NSA knows this. Bayes’ Theorem is elementary common knowledge. So, why does NSA spy on Americans knowing it’s not possible to find terrorists that way? Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if there is a higher base-rate. Higher base-rates arise from two lines of thought, neither of them very nice:

1. McCarthy-type national paranoia;
2. political espionage.

The whole NSA domestic spying program will seem to work well, will seem logical and possible, if you are paranoid. Instead of presuming there are 1,000 terrorists in the USA, presume there are 1 million terrorists. Americans have gone paranoid before, for example, during the McCarthyism era of the 1950s. Imagining a million terrorists in America puts the base-rate at .00333, and now the probability that a person is a terrorist given that NSA’s system identifies them is p=.99, which is near certainty. But only if you are paranoid. If NSA’s surveillance requires a presumption of a million terrorists, and if in fact there are only 100 or only 10, then a lot of innocent people are going to be misidentified and confidently mislabeled as terrorists. […]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/rudmin1.html 

“Slowly developing cognitive deficits as demonstrated so clearly by the president can represent only one diagnosis, and that is… presinle dementia” Dr. Joseph M. Price, The Atlantic, October 2000

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