Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported that:

“A vast database containing a file on every man, woman and child is being planned by the Government in a ‘sinister’ expansion of the ‘Big Brother’ state.

Personal information containing details of every aspect of an individual’s life will be available to 400,000 Whitehall civil servants and council workers.

Lord Falconer has ordered privacy laws to be watered down to allow the plans to be forced through.

The plans would allow anyone working for a public body to monitor everything from an individual’s driving licence record to whether they had paid their council tax on time. ”

Who is this installed noxious toad Falconer to be ‘ordering privacy laws to be watered down ?’ You would tend to think, as useless as they have proved themselves in other ways, what feeble laws are there, are there for good reason.

“Critics warned that allowing sensitive financial information to be viewed by all public bodies would leave it wide open to identity fraud. And pensioners who take stands against soaring council tax bills by refusing to pay could have their rights to pension credit withdrawn”

One reason the UK is so vulnerable to this sort of crap, is that opponents of tyranny are not capable of arguing against it thanks to the crippling poisonous socialism that New Labour and its instruments of torture like the BBC have so corrupted political thought with.

People have been so bludgeoned into being terrified plebs by the regime, they can no longer argue in a principled way as human beings, but feebly; only against the trivial practicalities of tyranny as stupified slaves which is of course worse than pathetic and useless. […]

What’s more, appalled citizens who the state serve, have a responsibility to put their foot down when the state becomes this malignant.

The question civil servants, various council workers, the police, security services and military have to ask themselves is should we really be listening to a faction that Clare Short recently described as a coup ? That former Foreign Office officials are openly saying is putting the country in danger, and that the Telegraph describe as ‘Nazis’ ? (although it’s a tough one to choose, I think the better analogy is communists).

Are these people going to take orders like pitiful shamed automatons to hurt the population on behest of a truly wretched criminal government that instead of confronting it’s own abnormalities becomes sicker and more perverted by the day, and is permitted to do so by a largely worthless collection of coward backbenchers who are more concerned with masturbating over a pre-soiled gargoyle like Gordon Brown than doing their job ?[…]

Jultra

Another classic post from Jultra, and I agree with everything in it.

Now all we have to do is do nothing about it. Yes, thats right, do nothing, i.e.,

DO NOT apply for a new passport.
DO NOT renew your driving license.
DO NOT enter the NIR for any designated document or any other reason.
DO NOT answer any correspondence to do with this or registration in any database.

That is where we start.

On August 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches — and the passengers refused to fly with them on board.  The men were questioned for several hours and then released.

On August 15, an entire airport terminal was evacuated because someone’s cosmetics triggered a false positive for explosives. The same day, a Muslim man was removed from an airplane in Denver for reciting prayers. The Transportation Security Administration decided that the flight crew overreacted, but he still had to spend the night in Denver before flying home the next day.  The next day, a Port of Seattle terminal was evacuated because a couple of dogs gave a false alarm for explosives.

On August 19, a plane made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after the crew became suspicious because two of the lavatory doors were locked. The plane was searched, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, a man who tampered with a bathroom smoke detector on a flight to San Antonio was cleared of terrorism, but only after having his house searched.

On August 16, a woman suffered a panic attack and became violent on a flight from London to Washington, so the plane was escorted to the Boston airport by fighter jets. “The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat,” said the TSA spokesman after the incident.

And on August 18, a plane flying from London to Egypt made an emergency landing in Italy when someone found a bomb threat scrawled on an air sickness bag. Nothing was found on the plane, and no one knows how long the note was on board.

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets, or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.  The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

We’re all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.

In truth, it’s doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn’t even have passports.

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up ten planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now.

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

(I am not saying that the politicians and press are terrorists, or that they share any of the blame for terrorist attacks. I’m not that stupid. But the subject of terrorism is more complex than it appears, and understanding its various causes and effects are vital for understanding how to best deal with it.)

The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I’ll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.

It’s time we calm down and fight terror with anti-terror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation — and not focusing on specific plots.

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer. […]Incidents:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401419&in_page_id=1770 or http://tinyurl.com/k5njg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/5267884.stm
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/17/national/main1906433.shtml
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/08/18/doctor-winnipeg.html or http://tinyurl.com/emnox
http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/06/08/16/100wir_port1.cfm
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/broward_county/15321870.htm or http://tinyurl.com/s5oxe
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-20-fbi-passenger_x.htm
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/08/17/1155407916156.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6024132,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5283476.stm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11211166
There have been many more incidents since I wrote this — all false alarms.  I’ve stopped keeping a list.

The chemical unreality of the plot:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/print.html or http://tinyurl.com/eeen2
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html or http://tinyurl.com/etrl8
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/14/tatp_about_that_pyro.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2306994,00.html

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/10/us.security/index.html
http://www.wondermark.com/d/220.html
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/08/wait-arent-you-scared.html

This essay also makes the same point that we’re overreacting, as well as describing a 1995 terrorist plot that was remarkably similar in both materials and modus operandi — and didn’t result in a complete ban on liquids.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/17/airport_futility/

My previous related writings:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-096.html
http://www.schneier.com/essay-038.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/terrorism_secur.html
http://www.schneier.com/essay-087.html
http://www.schneier.com/essay-045.html

This essay originally appeared in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71642-0.html

Uh oh.
Bruce is wrong to say that terrorists cause terror “sometimes out of sheer hatred”. This is never the case. Terrorists are highly intelligent men who have internally logical reasoning for their actions and tactics, that anyone would turn to if they were in their shoes. The americans did 200 years ago. The Israelis did, to get their own state. The ANC did to rid themselvs of Aparthied. Were all of these people acting out of ‘sheer hatred’?

I think not.
To say that governments do not share any of the blame for terrorist attacks is beyond naive. It is a matter of public record that many governments use terror attacks for political ends.

If you do not believe the facts, that is stupid. Stupid and dangerous.

Part of having real security means understanding the whole problem. What bruce is doing by saying that governments are not involved in terrorism is the same as saying that a computer connected to the internet without a firewall is safe from tampering because the keyboard and mouse have been removed. He should know better. Its not hard to find out the facts about the true nature of terror both in this and the last century, and if you are going to write about solving this problem, you must at least study it in its entirety and not from the spoon fed pabulum perspective of “they hate our freedom”.
Bruce is right however in saying that there are things our government(s) can and should do to fight terrorism; the primary one is not to terrorize other people in their own countries.

Americans are astonishingly insular and ignorant of their own history. Even the highly intelligent ones. This is why we are in the situation we are in today.  By all means, do not travel out of your own country; be ignorant of everywhere else in the world, but for heavens sake, pay close attention to what your own government is doing in your name.

It’s true. It’s weird. It’s nuts. The Department of Homeland Security, after a five-year hunt for Osama, has finally brought charges against … Greg Palast. I kid you not. Send your cakes with files to the Air America wing at Guantanamo.

Though not just yet. Fatherland Security has informed me that television producer Matt Pascarella and I have been charged with unauthorized filming of a “critical national security structure” in Louisiana.

On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It’s been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up” — except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.

To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nation’s second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.

So we filmed it. Without Big Brother’s authorization. Uh, oh. Apparently, the broadcast of these stinking smokestacks tipped off Osama that, if his assassins pose as poor Black folk, they can get a cramped Airstream right next to a “critical infrastructure” asset.

So now Matt and I have a “criminal complaint” lodged against us with the feds.

The positive side for me as a journalist is that I get to see our terror-busters in action. I should note that it took the Maxwell Smarts at Homeland Security a full two weeks to hunt us down.

Frankly, we were a bit scared that, given the charges, we wouldn’t be allowed on a plane into New York last night. But what scared us more is that we were allowed on the plane.

Once I was traced, I had a bit of an other-worldly conversation with my would-be captors. Detective Frank Pananepinto of Homeland Security told us, “This is a ‘Critical Infrastructure’ … and they get nervous about unauthorized filming of their property.

Well, me too, Detective. In fact, I’m very nervous that this potential chemical blast-site can be mapped in extreme detail at this Google Map location

What also makes me nervous is that the Bush Terror Terriers have kindly indicated on the Internet that this unprotected critical infrastructure can be targeted — I mean located — at 30º 29′ 11″ N Latitude and 91º 11′ 39″ W Longitude.

After I assured Detective Pananepinto, “I can swear to you that I’m not part of Al Qaeda,” he confirmed that, “Louisiana is still part of the United States,” subject to the first amendment and he was therefore required to divulge my accuser.

Not surprisingly, it was Exxon Corporation, one of a handful of companies not in love with my investigations. [See “A Well-Designed Disaster: the Untold Story of the Exxon Valdez.“]

So I rang America’s top petroleum pusher-men and asked their media relations honcho in Houston, Marc Boudreaux, a simple question. “Do you want us to go to jail or not? Is it Exxon’s position that reporters should go to jail?” Because, all my dumb-ass jokes aside, that is what’s at stake. And Exxon knew we were journalists because we showed our press credential to the Exxon guards at the refinery entrance.

The Exxon man was coy: “Well, we’ll see what we can find out…. Obviously it’s important to national security that we have supplies from that refinery in the event of an emergency.”

Really? According to the documents our team uncovered from the offices of Exxon’s lawyer, Mr. James Baker, the oil industry is more than happy to see a limit on worldwide crude production. Indeed, the current squeeze has jacked the price of oil from $24 a barrel to $64 and refined products have jumped yet higher — resulting in a record-busting profit for Exxon of nearly $1 billion per week.

So this silly “criminal complaint” has nothing to do with stopping Al Qaeda or keeping the oil flowing. It has everything to do with obstructing news reports in a way that no one would have dared attempt before the September 11 attack.

Dectective Pananepinto, in justifying our impending bust, said, “If you remember, a lot of people were killed on 9/11.”

Yes, Detective, I remember that very well: my office was in the World Trade Center. Lucky for me, I was out of town that day. It was not a lucky day for 3,000 others.

Yes, I remember “a lot” of people were killed. So I have this suggestion, Detective — and you can pass it on to Mr. Bush: Go and find the people who killed them.

It’s been five years and the Bush regime has not done that. Instead, the War on Terror is reduced to taking off our shoes in airports, hoping we can bomb Muslims into loving America and chasing journalists around the bayou. Meanwhile, King Abdullah, the Gambino of oil, whose princelings funded the murderers, gets a free ride in the President’s golf cart at the Crawford ranch.

I guess I shouldn’t complain. After all, Matt and I look pretty good in orange.  […]

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/palast.php

The Register reports:

The headmaster of Porth County Comprehensive School in South Wales has defended fingerprinting all 1,400 of his pupils days after their parents were told about the scheme last Wednesday.

[…]

Porth County Comprehensive headmaster Stephen Bowden told El Reg: “As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS.”

[…]

The system, called Vericool, was developed by Anteon, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a firm that specialises in developing systems for the military and intelligence services.

It will register children for lessons by scanning their fingers when they enter a classroom at the start of a lesson.

Bowden said it would give the school a means of “effective administration” and help in “reducing the bureaucratic burden” of staff taking registrations themselves. It had cost the school £25,000.

“By the time I’ve put this together, I can assure any parent that their child is safely in school and on the premises…or we can purely or simply track students to see if attendance affects their progress,” he said.

But Bowden said he would not know how much more efficient the system would be than a manual register until after its installation was complete in January.

[…]

What a despicable creature this Stephen Bowden is. How utterly repugnant that someone in charge of educating a rolling total of 1400 children believes they should learn to be treated like unthinking livestock. What sort of example does it show to overrule or blatently disregard viewpoints of these children’s parents.

What a dangerous man he is to institutionally abuse so many children?

Now, of course the parents who have complained about this should remove their children from this school until this system is withdrawn, with a bit of luck they will have the sense to link this nonsense with the daily impositions that the National Identity Register will cause and they will be motivated to resist that also.

Oberman sums up why we loved America

Crooks And Liars

Here is a sketch for a short season of tv programmes focused on surveillance. In it, there is an episode of ‘The Outer Limits’ called O.B.I.T.. You REALLY need to see this. It is of the type that Oberman talks about, from the era when america was America, and the people there were really different than they are today.

And this is the episode that Oberman is referring to in is piece, ‘The monsters are due on Maple Street’:

“Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves.”

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts… attitudes… prejudices. To be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.”

Rod Serling. A smoker.

The government of Sudan started seizing and quarantining laptop computers for inspection last week, ostensibly to stem the import of pornography and seditious material. Official assurances that the inspection of each laptop will take no more than 24 hours have done little to assuage fears of foreign visitors. Many are understandably reluctant to hand over collections of business and personal information for Sudanese officials to pore over in search of hostile or titillating tidbits.

Like many government policies across the globe, this directive was apparently drafted with a clear social goal in mind, but with little understanding of the use and pace of technology. Surely anyone serious about transporting intelligence information or treasonous material will use methods of encryption and obfuscation that would take more than a few hours of inspection to discover. Likewise, pornography has a way of finding its way to interested consumers no matter how it’s hampered. In any case, one would think the low-wattage beacons of leadership in Khartoum would have more pressing business in Darfur.

While the Sudanese government has been on spin cycle for half a century, the country’s leaders have been able to stabilize certain technology and energy-related aspects of the economy over the past few years. Recent ventures away from an otherwise solidly agrarian market have brought an increase in the number of affluent nationals and foreign businesspeople traveling in and out of the country — each carrying little devices with lots of data. Apparently it occurred to government officials that they didn’t understand what was in the devices and that the devices might be the conveyance for objectionable material. […] Computer World

Its clear that people are going to have to use tunneling and disposable laptops for travel. The scenario is this; you don’t want anyone to look at your private stuff. You need to be in another country on business, and you need to access your email / docs when you are there. You cannot bring your laptop with you, because some fascist will confiscate it, mirror the drive and then return it to you with a hardware keystroke logger installed. You need have a cheap terminal that you take with you, that runs a cut down version of hardened linux, the image for which you can download from a server at your HQ. When it unpacks and you install it, it sets up an SSH tunnel to your server, through which all your communication takes place. This laptop needs to be tamper evident, i.e., it uses anti tampering technology to let you know if the swines have opened up your box to put a keylogger in. If there are signs of tampering, then you simply discard it, and you have no email for this trip. If the box is intact, you go ahead and download your image and then start work once its up and running. You can even keep this image on a USB key. Anyone can have a copy of this image it is the credentials that you provide to your server at HQ that makes this image yours and allows you to access your stuff through the secure tunnel….

Read the rest of this entry »

• Stop JonBenet Overload; Remember the REAL News
• Irdial/ What your Senator said about Rumsfeld
• What did we accomplish, anyway?
• Irdial/ Here’s what your Rep. had to say on Iraq
• Follow the money
• VICTORY … If we can keep it. Act Now.
• Stop Fake News
• IRAQ FOR SALE/ The War Profiteers Screening
• TODAY/ Stand Up to Rumsfeld
• Federal Budget PRIORITIES Campaign is Rocking
• Enough JonBenet!
• Success on Fake News – Now on to the Budget
• On Hiroshima day, send an e-card that will stop the madness
• Keep the Internet Free
• Israel, Lebanon and America/ Tell Rep. Nadler to get involved
• LAST DAY/ Keep this Show on the Road
• Last Chance — IRAQ FOR SALE/ The War Profiteers Screening
• It’s not too early for a good idea

That is a list of the recent subjects sent out to all ‘TrueMajority’ subscribers. Lets go through some of them.

Stop Fake News
Information is the life blood of democracy. If we lose trust in the news, how can citizens possibly make informed decisions at the polls?

Some TV stations air “news segments” that look like everyday journalism but that are actually produced by the federal government or large corporations and are designed to promote a political position or product.

The Federal Communications Commission must enforce rules stating that TV stations “must clearly disclose” when they air news segments produced by the government or other entities.

To send a message (text below) to FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin urging him to ban fake news, click here.

Instead of whining, why don’t you START YOUR OWN NEWS CHANNEL like Alex Jones has? He has reached millions of people with his films and websites with a small team, and had a global influence.

What did we accomplish, anyway?
[…]Tax Breaks for Millionaires. The polls are clear, and the citizens let Congress have it: diverting billions to those who don’t need it by raising the deficit and further reducing spending on human needs is bad policy. The House did pass a giveaway to millionaires, but the Senate won’t touch it because now they don’t have the votes to pass it. So far so good.[…]

[…]America’s Occupation of Iraq. American troops are still dying in Iraq. But thanks to ongoing pressure from citizens like you, Congress is finally starting to discuss our course in that country, and many who originally supported the invasion have come out in opposition to the war. TrueMajority launched an online innovation to let you know what your congressmember said during a heated daylong debate about Iraq. Thousands of you contacted your lawmakers to thank them for standing up or to tell them to get it right. We even heard back from some congressmembers themselves who weren’t happy that we exposed their usually hidden pronouncements to public scrutiny. We got a lot of feedback from you on this. Here’s one example:[…]

[…]Save Public Broadcasting. PBS and NPR are again under attack by those who would silence public broadcasting’s alternative to commercial media. The House Appropriations Committee voted to slash funding for NPR and PBS by $115 million, but TrueMajority members joined tens of thousands of others who objected. The Senate subcommittee in charge of that money just voted to restore funding…we citizens may have turned this one around.[…]

Firstly, Sour grapes bullshit doesnt stop wars or reform society. YOU, you fucking morons, ARE THE BILLIONAIRES, with your MASSED DOLLARS. As a group, you are more powerful and wealthy than any single man. This jealously driven garbage is so twentieth century, so childish, irrelevant and pathetic I can scarcely believe people still talk like this.

Secondly, Nothing you say will change what is going on in Iraq. The embassy they YOU are building in Iraq, the biggest one on earth, indicates that you are going to be there for a very very long time. Wake up you idiots.

Thirdly, and once again, Start your own TV station if you want free TV. Don’t rely on Uncle Sham to finance it and support it, and if you want your money to be spent on that, well, spend it on that and not war you imbeciles which neatly leads us to…

the final inslut (yes, ‘inslut’):

Follow the money
Already presidential hopefuls for the 2008 elections are trooping thru Iowa and New Hampshire. And TrueMajority organizers are on the ground working to make sure that this time they are forced to take a stand on how the federal budget pie gets sliced up. We want more money for education, healthcare and energy independence, without raising taxes or increasing the deficit. And we can get it with your help. We’re off to a great start – the plan, with the backing of congressmembers, big-time business executives and even retired generals and admirals, is beginning to make headlines.

The idea is simple: America fritters away billions of taxpayer dollars every year on maintaining 10,000 nuclear bombs and other obsolete Cold-War weapons. According to President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense1, we could save $60 billion (out of the $460 billion Pentagon budget) by getting rid of those dinosaurs. Polls show a big majority of our fellow citizens already agree with the idea – all we have to do is start the discussion.

And we’re doing it in a way which is fun, entertaining, and engages regular people.

What these people need to do is something we have been saying for ages, others have been saying for longer and some have just said. They need to ‘follow the money’ right back into their own pockets, where these insane wars, Orwellian police state, barbarism, international adventurism, Hegemonic contamination and bullshit starts.

I have said it before; begging will get you nowhere. Petition writing, mass telephoning, letter writing…all of these are meaningless gestures at best, and at worse, tools to deflate and disempower the masses; redirecting and even sapping their energy as the war machine trundles on, gaining momentum every day that it is fed. These people are as bad as the enemy; they, through their actions, do nothing to stop the war machine, do nothing to educate their members and as they do this, in no way hider the monsters plotting our total enslavement to war.

StopWar are of the exact same type of course.

There can be no Iraq ‘war profiteering’ if there are no dollars to buy weapons. There is actually nothing wrong with selling arms; what is criminal is that all these nincompoops blithely pay for these arms instead of paying for infrastructure, like their beloved PBS.

If they had a single brain cell between them, and followed the course of total permanent success, then there would be no begging, no pleading…there would be a quiet, and startling sunrise on a new democracy, a fine grained democracy where warmongering is impossible, there is an abundance of funding for everything imaginable that is purely beneficial, and multi generational peace and prosperity that will be the envy of the world. It would mean the end of the fear that is soaking into the bones of all americans. It would mean a return to the real America. Those missing buildings in NYC would symbolize the birth of this new era of peace, and not the point at which everything turned bad.

Nothing less than this will do. Nothing less than the cutting off of the blood supply to the vampires will solve this problem. It needs to be done now. No more pointless elections. No more faith in politicians. No more begging and whining. A return to true democracy, where choices are local and the effects are global, where the constitution is not ‘just a piece of paper’ but the foundation of a true and beneficial way of life.

Or…

You can continue whining, writing to congress, emailing your many members, making flash animations explaining that ‘we are paying WAY too much to the military’.

And nothing will change, and your sons will be drafted for war, and your rights will melt away and evaporate like ice dropped on an Arizona street in the middle of summer. You will be treated like cattle to be milked and sheep to be fleeced, and you will deserve it, because you are behaving like domesticated animals instead of human beings.

The chairman of British betting company Sportingbet, Peter Dicks, was detained by American authorities in the early hours of today in what is being seen as a further crackdown on online gambling.

Mr Dicks is being held at JFK Airport by the Police Department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey after a warrant was issued by the Louisiana State Police. Police sources said that the charges related to Louisiana’s strict laws on gambling by computer but that no Federal charges were involved.

The Port Authority confirmed his detention with a spokesperson saying: “We were acting as the middle man. We were informed that Mr Dicks was wanted on an out-of-state warrant.” Mr Dicks was expected to be extradited to Louisiana to face charges.The detention of Mr Dicks, 64, comes just two months after David Carruthers, the chief executive of BetOnSports was arrested in Texas on alleged fraud and racketeering charges. Mr Carruthers, who has maintained his innocence, was on his way to the company’s offices in Costa Rica.

Mr Dicks was detained while travelling to the country on non-company business. A spokesman for Sportingbet could not confirm whether he had been arrested or charges levelled.

He faces a US hearing at 2pm London and 9am Eastern time.

But the City immediately took fright and marked online gaming companies’ shares down heavily.

PartyGaming, which today posted a 47 per cent increase in first-half profits to $380 million, fell as much as 11 per cent. It was trading later down 8.74 per cent at 107p.

And World Gaming, which revealed today that it was in talks to be taken over by Sportingbet in a deal worth £57.6 million, crashed more than 28 per cent to just 66p. Sportingbet has been considering an offer of 104p a share for the company.

888 Holdings tumbled more than 12 per cent to 149.25p.

Sportingbet asked for its shares to be suspended “pending clarification of the situation”. The shares were suspended at 239p, down 2.05 per cent since the open.

At this price Sportingbet is worth more than £1 billion.

BetOnSports dismissed Mr Carruthers in the wake of his arrest and the charges. It has shut the office in Costa Rica and culled its staff.

Confidence in internet gambling operators has taken a serious knocking since the arrest of Mr Carruthers with some regulators in America determined to outlaw online activities.

Sports betting is currently deemed illegal by US residents, while A Bill has been passed by the House of Representatives that, if approved later by the Senate, would tighten the laws across the board on betting in the US. […]

The Times

You can’t make this stuff up. Anyone with even a rabbits sense of self preservation would avoid the USA after their colleague was arrested in the way that he was, now a Chairman also?

Really.

The Supreme Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accused the Bush Administration and the Israeli security service Mossad of ordering the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, DC.

“The events of September 11 were ordered by U.S. [officials] and Mossad so that they could carry out their strategy of pre-emption and warmongering and unipolarisation in order to dominate the Middle East”, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi told military commanders on Tuesday. His comments were reported by the state-run news agency ISNA.

General Safavi said that Iran was the leading force of the “Islamic world”. “The geographic heart of the Islamic world is in Mecca and Medina. But, the political heart of the Islamic world is in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is the flag-bearer of the front of Islamic awakening and the fronts of the awakening of third world nations”, he said.

He said that Washington had been defeated in its strategy of “attacking Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon” and creating a new order in the Middle East.

“The U.S.’s neo-conservative strategy was to dominate the vast energy resources of the Persian Gulf in order to be able to control Europe, China, and India and drive the world to a unipolar state. Therefore, it planned to change undesirable regimes such as those of Iraq, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan”.

The IRGC general said that the Lebanese militia Hezbollah had defeated Israel during their recent war. “After many years, the political and military image and hollow might of the Zionist regime was broken and the real power of Hezbollah fighters was proven. Thus, Hezbollah defeated Israel”.

He described Washington and Tel Aviv as two “inter-continental threats” against Tehran. “The U.S. must be livid at Iran because of its disgraceful defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. Regarding [Iran’s] nuclear dossier, it might try to create circumstances so that slowly but surely economic and political pressure is applied against Iran by the [United Nations] Security Council”.

He accused Washington of plotting a “cultural” attack on Tehran by setting up new radio and television stations broadcasting into Iran, supporting dissident groups, and stepping up intelligence operations. “Therefore, the armed forces must be completely prepared in order to combat any forms of foreign and domestic threats”, he said.

He charged that Britain and the U.S. were stirring ethnic and religious divisions in Iran, in particular in the provinces close to the country’s frontiers.

The IRGC’s primary task is to export the Islamic revolution to Jerusalem via Baghdad.

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of many officials who stem from the IRGC. […]

Iran Focus

Whats that? A new word? (with your Lydon voice if you please)

Have you seen the ‘new’ Iranian Jet?

And you MUST SEE Admiral Sajjad Kouchaki:

speaking about their new capabilities.

I get a strong sense of ‘Deja Vu’ when watching these guys. We saw the same sort of footage and heard the same sort of talk when Iraq was about to be smashed to pieces. Oh dear.
And lastly, look at and listen to Azzam the American who says, amongst other things:

The civilization, in which anti-Semitism is an unforgivable sin, and grounds for dismissal from public and private office… The civilization which considers flag-burning to be, at the very least, an issue for congress and the courts, and perhaps even a crime against the state… The civilization which permits the filing of lawsuits against those who slander and libel celebrities, politicians, and other public figures of ill repute… A civilization such as this cannot then hide behind the excuse of freedom of expression after it desecrates copies of the Koran, or defames, with unquestionably malicious intent, the chief and master of Adam’s children, and the embodiment of high morals and good character, our Prophet and Messenger Muhammad, may Allah’s peace and prayers be upon him. […]

Those who think democracy is synonymous with freedom are either people who haven’t experienced life in America, or Americans who haven’t lived abroad. To America and the rest of Christendom, we say: Either repent of your misguided ways and enter into the light of truth, or keep your poison to yourself, and suffer the consequences in this world and the next. But whatever you do, don’t attempt to spread your misery and misguidance to our lands. Muslims don’t need democracy to rid themselves of their home-grown despots and tyrants. What they do need is their Islamic faith, the spirit of Jihad, and the lifting of foreign troops and interference from their necks. […]

If the Zionist Crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants, like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the Crusader-in-chief George W. Bush, were to abandon their unbelief and repent, and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam – for them what is for us, and upon them what is upon us. And if even the repentance of high-ranking enemies of Islam is valid and acceptable, then it needn’t be said that the same goes for the foot soldiers of the Crusade and those who have no active part to play in the war against Islam, other than paying the taxes that fund the Crusader war machine, and like pre-programmed machines or laboratory animals, living the lifestyle laid out for them, and believing the myths imparted to them by their school teachers, pastors, and politicians. They are the real victims, tranquilized inhabitants of the human farms, which these con men and women control, as our brother Mathew Stuart, may God protect him, aptly described them. […]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Did you know…

… that the notorious No Child Left Behind Act includes a sneaky section that requires high schools to turn over private information on students to military recruiters?

And that the Pentagon has created an illegal database of 30 million 16-25 year-olds, including names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers, ethnicities, social security numbers, extracurricular activities, and areas of study?

Yikes. What do we do? Any way you look at it, this is a family privacy nightmare, another strong-arming of our local schools, and a creepy warm-up to a possible draft. However, it’s also a great reason to get together and take action.

So, whether you’re a parent, teacher, school administrator, veteran or just another adamant American concerned about privacy rights, look for an action that you like and JOIN US!

http://themmob.org/lmca/

How about if you refuse to pay for these ‘services’ that you don’t need or want?

Three Bills Threaten the Constitution and Your Privacy

In the Senate, the Cheney-Specter Bill (S. 2453), would enshrine in federal law the president’s claim of inherent, exclusive power to set government spies loose on your phone calls and emails at will, without any individualized warrant or independent check.  It would also give officials complicit in the government’s illegal spying program a “get out of jail free card” by re-writing the criminal code after the fact, exempting the government from FISA.

The Cheney-Specter bill would make individualized warrants optional while allowing a secret court to rubber-stamp the wholesale surveillance of Americans, without even knowing the names of the Americans to be wiretapped or whether they’ve done anything wrong.

Also in the Senate, Senator DeWine’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program Act of 2006” (S. 2455) makes judicial review of wiretaps optional and permits government spies to engage in surveillance for several weeks without any court order or oversight at all.  Even after spying on potentially innocent Americans for 45 days, the Bush administration could bypass judicial approval, deciding for themselves if they want to follow the Constitution or not.

In the House, the Cheney-Wilson Bill (H.R. 5825) would allow the president to secretly search Americans’ homes, businesses, conversations and e-mails without warrants for months at a time if there were an attack.  The bill would also make judicial review “optional” for wiretapping Americans after 90 days of warrantless surveillance, and obviously optional rules providing a judicial check do not square with the mandatory check required by the Constitution.  Both the Cheney-Specter bill and the Wilson bill also redefine the meaning of electronic surveillance to allow more warrantless surveillance of Americans through the back door.

It would literally put our rights in the hands of terrorists, allowing an attack on any US territory to suspend our constitutional right to have a warrant issued before the government searches our homes and offices, or secretly listens in on our conversations.

Your calls today and in the weeks to come will help make sure your elected officials know you are counting on them to stand up to the Bush-Cheney White House and protect your rights by voting against these bills.

One of the underlying problems with any legislation on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program is that Congress has yet to hold any real, substantive investigation into the issue and get any commitment from the president that he will actually follow any laws on the books, let alone new laws.  Lawmakers must not legislate in the dark on an issue with such broad implications for our fundamental privacy rights.  Just recently, a federal judge in Detroit found the program to be illegal and unconstitutional.  The court, in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, noted that, “there are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”  No president has the power or the right to break the law and disregard the Constitution. […]

ACLU

There are no hereditary Kings in America.

Bush brands Iran leader a ‘tyrant’

WASHINGTON, Sept 5 (AFP) Sep 05, 2006
US President George W. Bush on Tuesday branded Iran’s president a tyrant and compared leaders in Tehran to Al-Qaeda terrorists who cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.

“America will not bow down to tyrants,” he said in the second of a series of election-year speeches defending his handling of the war on terrorism and Iraq. “The world’s free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Bush accused Iran of funding the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and other groups “to attack Israel and America by proxy” and said Hezbollah was second only to Al-Qaeda in the number of US citizens it has killed.

“Like Al-Qaeda and the Sunni extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims. They want to drive America out of the region, to destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle East,” said the US presidents.

But, he said, Shiite extremists have done something Al-Qaeda only dreams of by taking over Iran in 1979, “subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny and using that nation’s resources to fund the spread of terror and to pursue their radical agenda.”

“The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans, and now the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons,” said Bush.

The US president quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying, in an August 15 speech, “If you would like to have good relations with the Iranian nation in the future, bow down before the greatness of the Iranian nation and surrender.”

“If you don’t accept to do this, the Iranian nation will force you to surrender and bow down,” he quoted the Iranian leader as saying.

“America will not bow down to tyrants,” he replied.

Spacewar

Yes indeed. More of the same inverted speech that we have come to know and love from ‘The Great Satan’. Lest we forget, lets look yet again at why there is an Islamic ‘regime’ in Iran, and just who precisely is responsible for putting one there:

Operation Ajax (1953) (officially TP-AJAX) was a covert operation by the United Kingdom and the United States to remove the nationalist^[1] cabinet of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, to support the Pahlavi dynasty and consolidate the power of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The idea of overthrowing Mossadegh was conceived by the British. They originally asked President Truman for assistance, but he refused. When Eisenhower became president in 1953, the British proposed the idea once again, and this time, the Americans agreed to help.

Rationale for the intervention included Mossadegh’s socialist political views and his nationalization, without compensation, of the oil industry which was previously operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which later changed its name to The British Petroleum Company) under contracts disputed by the nationalists as unfair. A particular point of contention was the refusal of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company to allow an audit of the accounts to determine whether the Iranian government received the royalties it was due. Intransigence on the part of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company led the nationalist government to escalate its demands, requiring an equal share in the oil revenues. The final crisis was precipitated when the oil company ceased operations in Iran rather than accepting the Iranian government’s demands.

The newly state-owned oil companies saw a dramatic drop in productivity and, consequently, exports; this resulted in the Abadan Crisis, a situation that was further aggravated by its export markets being closed. Even so royalties to the Iranian government were significantly higher than before nationalization. Without its own distribution network it was denied access to markets by an international blockade intended to coerce Mossadegh into reprivatization. In addition, the appropriation of the companies resulted in Western allegations that Mossadegh was a Communist and suspicions that Iran was in danger of falling under the influences of the neighboring Soviet Union. But Mossadegh refused to back down under international pressure.

For the U.S., an important factor to consider was Iran’s border with the Soviet Union. A pro-American Iran under the Shah would give the U.S. a double strategic advantage in the ensuing Cold War, as a NATO alliance was already in effect with the government of Turkey, also bordering the USSR.

In planning the operation, the CIA organized a guerrilla force in case the communist Tudeh Party seized power as a result of the chaos created by Operation Ajax. According to formerly “Top Secret” documents released by the National Security Archive, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith reported that the CIA had reached an agreement with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and intelligence agents could operate.

Operation Ajax was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in a plot to overthrow a democratically-elected government. The success of this operation, and its relatively low cost, encouraged the CIA to successfully carry out a similar operation in Guatemala a year later.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the oppressive regime of the reinstalled Shah led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the occupation of the U.S. embassy. The role that the U.S. embassy had played in the 1953 coup led the revolutionary guards to suspect that it might be used to play a similar role in suppressing the revolution.

The leader of Operation Ajax was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior CIA agent, and grandson of the former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. While formal leadership was vested in Kermit Roosevelt, the project was designed and executed by Donald Wilber, a career contract CIA agent and acclaimed author of books on Iran, Afghanistan and Ceylon.

As a condition of restoring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the U.S. was able to dictate that the AIOC’s oil monopoly should lapse. Five major U.S. oil companies, plus Royal Dutch Shell and French Compagnie Française des Pétroles were given licences to operate in the country alongside AIOC.

[…]

Operation AJAX

Now, look at the text properly inverted to show what it REALLY should say:

TEHRAN, Sept 5 (AFP) Sep 05, 2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday branded America’s president a tyrant and compared leaders in Washington to Al-Qaeda terrorists who should not be allowed to posess nuclear weapons.

“Iran will not bow down to tyrants,” he said in the second of a series of election-year speeches defending his position on the ‘war on terrorism’ and Iraq. “The world’s free nations should not allow America to posess a nuclear weapon.”

Ahmadinejad accused America of funding the Israel government and other groups “to attack the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah by proxy” and said America was second only to Al-Qaeda in the number of US citizens it has killed.

“Like Ohlmert and the Israeli extremists, the American regime has clear aims. They want to remove democracy from the region, to destroy Iran, and to dominate the broader Middle East,” said the Iranian president.

But, he said, Americans have done something Al-Qaeda only dreams of by taking over Iraq, “subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny and using that nation’s resources to fund the spread of terror and to pursue their radical agenda.”

“The American regime and its terrorist proxies have demonstrated their willingness to kill Iraqis, and now the American regime is pursuing our nuclear weapons,” said Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian president quoted American president Bush as saying, in an August 15 speech, “If you would like to have good relations with the Amercan (sic) nation in the future, bow down before the greatness of the American nation and surrender.”

“If you don’t accept to do this, the American nation will force you to surrender and bow down,” he quoted the American leader as saying.

“Iran will not bow down to tyrants,” he replied.

And there you have it. Not difficult to do, and certainly not as difficult as a W.S. Burroughs cut up where you can, “find out what it REALLY says”.

And now, from the IHT:

Some Americans didn’t support my decision to remove Saddam Hussein. Many are frustrated with the level of violence. But we should all agree that the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We will not allow the terrorists to dictate the future of this century, so we will defeat them in Iraq. […]

And when we multiply by 1/x:

…

The question is, can YOU multiply that by 1/x?

[…]

If the ‘triumph of Blairism’ means the triumph of unlimited depravity and diseased thinking over right and reason, convincing the most stupid in society that up is down and black is white, then I guess you could call it a ‘triumph’. But to everyone else, trying to repaint a repugnant, soiled, fanatical dictator with poll ratings worse than Nixon during Watergate, up to his eyeballs in a half-baked international coup against the world in some warm and friendly light where the public will be left ‘hungry for more’ is simply a lost cause.

And what is Blairism as history shows ? A means to give a veneer of deceptive ‘free-market’ legitimacy to a hodge-podge of dangerously deranged social fanatics to play God ?

Blair’s legacy across the board is nothing to celebrate, instead it is a deep shame on Britain itself. Perhaps worse than Western-installed despots who Blair seeks to otherthrow with manufactured dossiers and old student essays plucked off the internet and then sexed-up some more by his advisors, as he was actually voted in and repeatedly, so all the more disgrace must be accepted by a vacant chunk of the British people for nominating everyone into a humiliating, crushing ‘social democratic’ nightmare. Of course, Blair’s ‘social democracy’, is more akin to an extreme form of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’, without the ‘democratic’ bit, i.e, Blair decides and a gaggle of useful (or rather useless) idiots under the spell of his personality cult in the vestigal cabinet dotingly agree to press on with wars, ID slave grids and debased police state fanaticism however ridiculous they look. […]

Jultra.

Stop Motion Studies

David Crawford |

“To translate the stilled image into movement is to see the uncanny nature of the photograph transformed out of one emotional and aesthetic paradigm into another. The uncanny of the indexical inscription of life, as in the photograph, merges with the uncanny of mechanized human movement that belongs to the long line of replicas and automata.”
—Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second

Stop Motion Studies – Tokyo, 2004