Archive for September, 2007

Calling a spade a spade

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Astonishingly, CNN has published on its front page, a BLOGDIAL style Substitution, of the kind we know and love:

Iran’s parliament votes to label CIA, U.S. Army ‘terrorist’ groups

(CNN) — The Iranian parliament on Saturday voted to designate the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army as terrorist organizations, IRNA, the country’s state-run news agency, reported.

The CIA and the U.S. Army “trained terrorists and supported terrorism, and they themselves are terrorists,” the parliament said, according to IRNA.

The Iranian parliament said the condemnation was based on “known and accepted” standards of terrorism from international regulations, including the U.N. charter.

The parliament said it condemns the “aggressions by the U.S. Army, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan” and calls on the United Nations to “intervene in the global problem of U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret jails in other countries,” IRNA reported, quoting a statement from Iranian lawmakers.

The Iranian parliament also decried the CIA’s and U.S. Army’s involvement in the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, U.S. involvement in the Balkans, Vietnam and the U.S. support of Israel.

Of the condemnation, Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said, “There are some things that don’t even deserve comment. This is one.”

National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said he declined to comment “on non-binding resolutions passed by parliaments in countries with dubious records on human rights, democracy and that are state sponsors of terror.”

There was no immediate response from the U.S. State Department.

Washington and U.S. military leaders have long accused Iran of training and equipping insurgents in Iraq. The United States and Iran have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1980 after Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for 444 days.

The Iranian lawmakers’ condemnation was in apparent retaliation for the U.S. Senate’s resolution Wednesday requesting that the United States designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Quds Force, as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Senate resolution passed a day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the U.N. General Assembly that an agreement reached last month between his country and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over its disputed nuclear program has, in the Iranian view, settled the matter.

Iran says its nuclear program is necessary for civilian energy production. The United States and other Western nations have accused Tehran of trying to build a nuclear weapon.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/09/29/iran.parliament/index.html

You can’t make stuff like this up.

First of all, Paul Gimigliano is a lying bastard silly goose. The CIA itself says that it used terror tactics (including and not limited to bombs in public places) in its own declassified documents.

Secondly, this is not just a historical blip of immorality; CIA is using terror in this way right now, and they are threatening Iran with these tactics right now:

Presuming that you are not actually ignorant enough to desire war with the United States, you might be well advised to read the history of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 and the history of the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964.

Having done so, you will surely recognize that Americans are reluctant to go to war unless attacked. Until Pearl Harbor, we were even reluctant to get involved in World War II. For historians of American wars the question is whether we provoke provocations.

Given the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, you are obviously thinking the rules have changed. Provocation is no longer required to take America to war. But even in this instance, we were led to believe that the mass murderer of American civilians, Osama bin Laden, was lurking, literally or figuratively, in the vicinity of Baghdad.

Given all this, you would probably be well advised to keep your forces, including clandestine forces, as far away from the Iraqi border as you can. You might even consider bringing in some neighbors to verify that you are not shipping arms next door. Tone down the rhetoric on Zionism. You’ve established your credentials with those in your world who thrive on that.

[…]

Huffington Post

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a False Flag Operation staged to get america into war. Gary Hart is explicitly warning Iran that they have the will to kill americans to achieve their ends and will kill Iranians without hesitation or provocation.

The CIA did these operations and it does these operations. Lying about it is just SILLY.

Thirdly, and this is where the Substitution comes in, america designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a ‘terrorist organization’. Out of the two, on a sheer number count, CIA is far more of a terrorist organization, and far more deadly than the Iranian Revolutionary Guards…but I digress; this article is the same as a BLOGDIAL operation where we substitute words to find out what the truth is behind an article Burroughs style; its amazing how this works so often.

This line:

National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said he declined to comment “on non-binding resolutions passed by parliaments in countries with dubious records on human rights, democracy and that are state sponsors of terror.”

Is absolutely pure substitution; its almost as if we wrote it as a substitution, and yet this is from the actual article.

It just cannot get any weirder!

More BBQ Biometric Propaganda: Terminal 5

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

[…]
Fingerprints
T5 will have shops, cafes and bars like any other airport, and some of those are already fitted out – Harrods to name one.The terminal also has some new features, particularly in the area of security.

HEATHROW TERMINAL FIVE SECURITY

Every passenger will have their photograph taken and fingerprint scanned at passport control. Their fingerprint will be checked again at the gate before boarding.

“It’s so we can make sure that the person who turns up at the gate is the same one who checked in,” Mr Pearman says.

Another state-of-the-art addition involves X-ray scanners which screen hand luggage before they enter departures.

Never used before, the Advanced Threat Identification system is designed to detect explosives and liquids in baggage and automatically divert suspicious bags to one side for further examination.

In fact, the entire building is designed with security in mind: “We’ve been able to work security in, rather than try to add it on afterwards,” Mr Pearman says.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7015785.stm

This is of course, a total lie.

This building has been built with Security Theatre in mind…but you know this, because we have written about the abomination that is Terminal 5 before.

This nauseating piece of propaganda from BBQ by the completely ignorant ‘Victoria Bone’ is astonishing in its breathless promoting of Terminal five in nothing but glowing terms.

She completely leaves out any negative consequences to the fingerprinting of criminals passengers, and this is in the light of the huge fight against biometric ID cards that is going on in this country. Such an omission can only be by design, and that therefore means this article is pure propaganda and part of a ‘softening up’ exercise for the British population, who, if they were told about what this really means to them, might refuse to fly out of Terminal 5 altogether.

Richard Rogers has made one of the worst buildings in the history of mankind. His firm is going to be responsible (unless the building is retrofitted and fixed to work correctly) for a violation of humans on a scale bigger than the concentration camps of Germany; Up to 30m passengers will travel through Terminal 5 every year.

Millions of people are going to be processed through this infernal machine, by his design, humiliating, violating and dehumanizing them for no other reason than that it was possible to do.

History will judge this building and its designer after the biometric fad and ‘security’ (Security Theatre) hysteria are over over.

They will say that what Richard Rogers has done with this Terminal 5 was pure evil, architecture in the service of Fascism and it will cast a dark shadow over any other building or success he ever had.

I for one, I will never travel through this building. I will not submit to this Fascism and inhuman architectural experimentation.

SHAME SHAME SHAME once again on BBQ for this blatant piece of propaganda.

SHAME on Richard Rogers, who has designed this Fascist monstrosity.

I pray that the truth about this building gets out and that people refuse to mover through it.

And for you people who do not know anything about identity and security, a quick recap.

There is absolutely no reason to take people’s fingerprints and photographs as they check in.

First of all, this is being done not only for international flights, but for ALL FLIGHTS including domestic ones. That means that if you, a British Citizen, want to fly to Manchester you have to be fingerprinted.

Inside your own country!

That is INSANE.

The reason why they are doing this is that travelers on international flights and domestic flights are mixed in one large unsegregated departure lounge, unlike any other airport in the world, where passengers flying on domestic and international flights are normally separated by walls. If someone got on a flight that connects through terminal five, it could be possible for them to get onto a domestic flight and then evade immigration control since the passenger area is mixed. To fix this problem with the building, they are fingerprinting EVERYONE so that this loophole is closed.

This has to be the stupidest mistake ever in the history of architecture.

The article above does not mention this of course, since it is propaganda.

Secondly, when you check into an international flight in a properly designed airport, you go to the international departure lounge and show your passport, which has your photo in it. The staff check your face against the picture in your passport. The name in your passport is checked against your name in your ticket. You are let through.

When you get to the gate, you show your passport again and your ticket stub, and the staff check your face against the photo in your passport, and the name on the stub. You are let onto the flight.

Fingerprinting you is nothing more than Security Theatre; this extra step adds no extra security to the normal process of checking in, and similarly, taking another photo of you in addition to the one you have in your passport adds no extra security whatsoever.

This is total Security Theatre, insanity and vendor driven garbage.

And there you have it.

By all means, tell everyone you know about this outrageous and vile building.

Another final warning to all Americans

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

‘A Coup Has Occurred’

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming war with Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at an American University symposium on September 20. Below is an edited transcript of Ellsberg’s remarkable speech:

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now I’m referring to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a Führer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/ellsberg2.html

Call to the wild

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

I’ve been thrust into the Blarchive several times recently, for various reasons. You should visit. It’s a blast! I just saw my own wedding photo, which was a bit unexpected.
I remember joining Blogdial, receiving my paper hat along with the instructions: Post Hard. Post Often.

Here is my call, to any lurking Blogdialians, to read a random page from the Blarchive and please post something, anything that comes to mind after your visit. Mary13, Claus, CaptainD, a hymn in g to nann, barrie, alison and all the others out there…

Anyway, I have knots in some muscles the size of golf balls. On asking a wise owl for her best remedy, she suggested the following:

1. Find someone who likes having their hands all oiled up and likes touching you.

2. Find a selection of very smooth river stones, slightly flattened is best and not too large to cup in the oily person’s hand.

3. Boiling water

4. Thirty minutes

poor boiling water in a bowl and slide the stones in. Let sit for three minutes then poor the water off and cover stones with a hot towel. Take off your shirt, pick up the bowl of hot stones and approach your potential masseuse with a beseeching expression and little puppy noises.

The masseuse oils up their hands, oils of your back and shoulders, takes a stone in each hand skates those babies repeatedly over all the sore spots. When  the stones go cold, grab two more hot ones.

This is without a doubt the best and most wonderful massage technique I have ever used.

Even if you don’t have knots, I recommend this whole heartedly.

Uncle Sham keeps a list of the books you fly with

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known

By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 22, 2007; Page A01

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.

Officials yesterday defended the retention of highly personal data on travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information preserved by the department raises alarms about the government’s ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used to impede their right to travel.

“The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,” said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said, “may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent.”

Gilmore’s file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book “Drugs and Your Rights.” “My first reaction was I kind of expected it,” Gilmore said. “My second reaction was, that’s illegal.”

DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in passengers’ reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that it affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. “I flatly reject the premise that the department is interested in what travelers are reading,” DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. “We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading.”

[…]

Washington Post

This is of course, a bald faced lie; if they are not interested in what a person is reading, then they would not collect data on the titles of books that you are carrying with you when you travel.

These people are so thick that they cannot even come up with a plausible lie to tell, they just come up with insane non-sequiturs like, “we are not interested in it, thats why we do it”.

As loath as I am to help out the perpetrators of this utter evil and the de destroyers of the american way of life, I have to point out a single reason that a skilled liar might give for the retention of a list of books people are carrying into the USA.

Numbers Stations.

Hell-spawn Chertoff could assert in terror movie plot style that they need to keep a list of books people are carrying because section of the text from these books might be used as One Time Pads to decrypt messages sent by OBL from his secret mountain lair.

It would go like this:

“NSA needs to have a list of all books being carried with travelers so that they can load their 25 million CPU supercomputer under mount Rushmore with the texts of all these books and then run them brute force against all classified ads, Numbers Station transmissions and every other possible source of encrypted messages.”

There you have it. And there are some people in the USA who would willingly drink that Kool-Aid and then preach it like religion, and there are millions more who would subsequently believe it unquestioningly, and then conveniently forget that it ever happened a year or two down the road.

The fact that traitors like Chertoff do not bother to come up with lies like that, which whilst being improbable are at least open to sound bite debate, shows just how sure they are that they are going to take over the usa and grind it into dust.

Back to the gist; RFID tags in books and other property will make this sort of association of objects to people much easer. They will (or do they right now?) then keep a list of ‘bad books’ or ‘suspicious literature’ any of which will cause you to be flagged should you buy them or be detected carrying them.

And if you think that avoiding the land of the great satan will keep you out of their databases:

Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in Silicon Valley who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.

“It was surprising that they were gathering so much information without my knowledge on my travel activities, and it was distressing to me that this information was being gathered in violation of the law,” she said.

James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison’s brother, obtained government records that contained another sister’s phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact. “So my sister’s phone number ends up being in a government database,” he said. “This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth.”

Edward Hasbrouck, a civil liberties activist who was a travel agent for more than 15 years, said that his file contained coding that reflected his plan to fly with another individual. In fact, Hasbrouck wound up not flying with that person, but the record, which can be linked to the other passenger’s name, remained in the system. “The Automated Targeting System,” Hasbrouck alleged, “is the largest system of government dossiers of individual Americans’ personal activities that the government has ever created.”

Astonishing.

And finally, from the bug-eyed beelzebub pocket devil Chertoff:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in August 2006 said that “if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information. After Sept. 11, we used credit-card and telephone records to identify those linked with the hijackers. But wouldn’t it be better to identify such connections before a hijacker boards a plane?”

What ‘we learned’ you little devil, is that america is as vulnerable as any county is to being dismantled from the insiede and all it takes is a few evil and intelligent traitors to pull it off.

Furthermore, and stepping forward into the frame, what you should have learned (by now) is that there is a consequence to killing people in foreign countries (Vietnam). There is a consequence to imposing regimes on people (Iran, Operation AJAX) interfering with other peoples anything.

Now, with everyone running from the dollar like it is the plague, and the chinese threatening to destroy america without firing a shot, the american government is finally and literally going to pay for all the evil it has done, and the american people are very sadly going to pay for the evil that they have allowed to happen and which they have explicitly endorsed with their votes; remember this is all is entirely the fault of the voting public, who returned a war criminal to office, and who seem to be resisting the only man who can save America (with a capital ‘A’).

Once again. If there is one country on this earth that can turn such a disaster around it is the US of A.

They can be a great people…they wish to be.

Government may place everyone on organ donor register

Friday, September 21st, 2007

The Government is considering placing all people on the organ donor register automatically unless they “opt out”. Currently only a quarter of Britons are on the register and the waiting list for organs is at a record high.

But a system of presumed consent – which operates in several other countries including Sweden and Austria – has proved controversial in the UK.

At present, the family has the final say unless a person has actively put themselves on the organ donor register or expressed their wishes.

The family does not have the legal right to veto or overrule those wishes even if they disagree.

Chief Medical Officer for England, Sir Liam Donaldson, backs changing the law to drive up donation rates but some critics have argued against it. Sir Liam’s Scottish counterpart, Harry Burns, has said the public is not ready for a system of presumed consent.

Today, Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced that the Organ Donation Taskforce – set up in 2006 to look at barriers to organ donation – would examine the issue in detail.

The taskforce will focus on the moral and medical issues around presumed consent, including whether the family of somebody who has died should be given the final say on organs for donation.

Mr Johnson said: “We know that around 8,000 people in the UK need an organ transplant but only 3,000 transplants are carried out each year.

“With more than 400 people dying every year waiting for a new kidney, heart, lung or liver, we need to do everything possible to increase organ donation.

“The Chief Medical Officer’s annual report helped put the idea of presumed consent into the public arena to be debated.

“This is a sensitive issue, but it is vital that all possible options for increasing the number of organs available for transplant are explored.”

Elisabeth Buggins, chair of the Organ Donation Taskforce, said: “I am very pleased that the taskforce has been asked to explore this incredibly important issue.

“We will establish a special sub group to take this work forward which will examine the complex medical, ethical, legal and societal issues.”

Earlier this year, it was revealed that the number of people waiting for organ transplant had reached a record high. UK Transplant said 7,234 patients were waiting at the end of March, up 8 per cent on the previous year.

Currently, more than 14.5 million people (around 24 per cent of the population) are on the organ donor register.

The British Medical Association (BMA) supports a system of presumed consent for organ donation for those over the age of 16, where relatives’ views are taken into account.

The Human Tissue Act 2004 states that no organs and tissue can be removed without the consent of the dead person or their relatives.

Adrian McNeil, chief executive of the Human Tissue Authority, said: “As we said in our statement in July 2007 in response to the Chief Medical Officer’s recommendation, any move to a system of presumed consent would require a change in the law.

“There would need to be extensive consultation and debate before that happened.”

[…]

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

The first thing that comes to mind is what are the religious implications; for example, what rules govern the 1.6 million Muslims in the UK once they are dead?

Internets say:

[…] Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, issues the following Fatwa:

“Organ donation is permitted in Islam if it is done within the permissible limits prescribed by the Shari`ah.
The following are the conditions scholars have stipulated for donation:

Conditions associated with a living donor:

1. He/she must be a person who is in full possession of his/her faculties so that he/she is able to make a sound decision by himself/herself;

2. He/she must be an adult and, preferably, at least twenty-one years old;

3. It should be done on his/her own free will without any external pressure exerted on him/ her;

4. The organ he/she is donating must not be a vital organ on which his/her survival or sound health is dependent upon;

5. No transplantation of sexual organs is allowed.

Conditions associated with deceased donors:

1. It must be done after having ascertained the free consent of the donor prior to his /her death. It can be through a will to that effect, or signing the donor card, etc.

2. In a case where organ donation consent was not given prior to a donor’s death, the consent may be granted by the deceased’s closest relatives who are in a position to make such decisions on his/her behalf.

3. It must be an organ or tissue that is medically determined to be able to save the life or maintain the quality of life of another human being.

4. The organ must be removed only from the deceased person after the death has been ascertained through reliable medical procedures.

5. Organs can also be harvested from the victims of traffic accidents if their identities are unknown, but it must be done only following the valid decree of a judge.”

[…]

http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/

Hmmm and my emphasis.

The Muslim Religious Council initially rejected organ donation by followers of Islam in 1983; but it has reversed its position, provided that donors consent in writing in advance. The organs of Muslim donors must be transplanted immediately and not be stored in organ banks. According to Dr. Abdel_Rahma Osman, Director of the Muslim Community Center in Maryland, “We have no policy against organ and tissue donation as long as it is done with respect for the deceased and for the benefit of the recipient.”

[…]

http://www.redcross.org/donate/tissue/relgstmt.html

and finally:

A. 5. This question is very much debated by the jurists (Fuqaha’) in recent years. It is a matter of ijtihad and some jurists consider it permissible while other prohibit organ donation and transplantation. The Supreme Council of Ulama’ in Riyadh (as per their resolution no. 99 dated 6 Dhul Qi’dah 1402) has allowed both organ donation and organ transplantation in the case of necessity (idtirar). They use the principle of Maslaha and the principle that every thing is permissible unless it is forbidden. According to these jurists, the organ can be taken from the body of a living person with his/her consent and approval and also from the body of a dead person. In the case of a living person, the jurists have stipulated that this donation should not deprive him/her of vital organs. It should also not cause risk to his/her normal life. The Fiqh Academy of the Muslim World League, Makkah also allowed organ donation and transplantation in its 8th session held between 28 Rabi’ul Thani – 7 Jumadal Ula, 1405. The Fiqh Academy of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Jeddah during the year 1408 and the Mufti of Egypt Dr. Saeed al-Tantawi also allowed the use of the body organs of a person who has died in an accident, if the necessity requires the use of any organ to cure a patient, provided that a competent and trustworthy Muslims physician makes this decision.

It is important to note that most of the Fuqaha’ have allowed the donation of the organs only. They do not allow the sale of the human organs. Their position is that the sale of human organs violates the rules of the dignity and honor of human being and so it is haram. Some jurists suggest that because people have become too materialistic and it may not be possible to find a free organ, so under necessity one can purchase the organs, but a Muslim should never sell his/her organs.

Some Egyptian as well as Indian and Pakistani jurists do not permit organ donation or transplantation. They argue that our bodies are Allah’s trust (‘amanah) with us and we do not own our bodies. So as it is haram to commit suicide, it is also haram to give away part of one’s body. But this does not seem to be a strong argument. Allah owns every thing and every thing that we have is a trust from Allah, but Allah allowed us to use things for our benefit and to give them to others for their benefit. Suicide is a termination of life for no purpose and it is haram according to the specific rules of the Shari’ah, but organ donation or transplant is for the benefit of oneself or others and there is no rule of the Shari’ah that forbid it.

[…]

http://www.pakistanlink.com/religion/re10-04-96.html

Fascinating…internets led me to this tract about sperm donation in the Middle East, starting with Israel:

This focus on the “local moral” is found in another award-winning book on the topic of IVF. Titled Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel, this book by medical anthropologist Susan Martha Kahn (2000; see also her article in this special issue) takes us into the often arcane world of Jewish Halakhic law, where male rabbis legislate on the appropriate uses of IVF for their followers. Kahn carefully describes how these rabbinical debates and decisions affect the actual practice of Israeli IVF. For example, third-party donation of gametes, including sperm donation, is allowed, since Jewishness is seen to be conferred through the mother’s side, particularly through the act of gestating and birthing the baby. However, most conservative rabbis prefer that non-Jewish donor sperm be used, to prevent adultery between a Jewish man and a Jewish woman and to prevent future genetic incest among the offspring of anonymous donors in this small, intermarrying country. Furthermore, debates have revolved around whether surrogacy should be allowed for infertile couples, using single or married surrogates. Generally speaking, single Jewish women are preferred as surrogates, both to avoid the implications of adultery for married surrogate women and to confer Jewishness through a Jewish woman’s gestation of the fetus. Finally, because the Jewish state is pronatalist—with the state subsidizing up to six cycles of IVF or up to the birth of two IVF children for any given Jewish patient—rabbis have generally been permissive when it comes to single career women, as well as lesbian Jewish mothers, conceiving children through assisted conceptive means.

Kahn’s fascinating and frankly funny book details the sometimes dizzying rabbinical arguments regarding morally appropriate and inappropriate reproduction. In so doing, the book bespeaks the importance of local religious moralities in the contemporary world of Israeli assisted conception. There, doctors in many clinics serving orthodox Jewish patient populations attempt to practice IVF according to the moral dictates set forth by religiously conservative rabbis. The IVF laboratories in these clinics are full of orthodox women called maschigots, who literally peer over the shoulders of laboratory technicians to make sure that the correct sperm and correct eggs are being united—so as not to produce a mamzer, or an illegitimate child. In her book, Kahn is explicit in stating that the American consumer model of free-market reproductive medicine has yet to take hold in Israel, with its concern over religious guidelines. Nonetheless, Israel’s relative permissiveness over the use of donor gametes, surrogacy, and single and lesbian motherhood stands in stark contrast to the Muslim Middle East, including both neighboring Egypt and Lebanon, where I have conducted my own ethnographic research on IVF.

and now Sunni Islam:

Sunni Islam and IVF
IVF was first practiced in the Sunni Muslim world, with clinics opening in the mid-1980s in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, all Sunni-majority countries. The Grand Shaikh of Egypt’s famed religious university, Al Azhar, issued the first widely authoritative fatwa on medically assisted reproduction on March 23, 1980. This fatwa—issued only two years after the birth of the first IVF baby in England but a full six years before the opening of Egypt’s first IVF center—has proved to be truly enduring in all its main points (Inhorn 2006a). In fact, the basic tenets of the original Al-Azhar fatwa on IVF have been upheld by other fatwas issued since 1980 and have achieved wide acceptance throughout the Sunni Muslim world. Sunni Islam, it must be emphasized, is the dominant form of Islam found in the Middle Eastern region and throughout the Muslim world. Between 80 and 90 percent of the world’s Muslims are Sunni, and more than 90 percent of Egypt’s citizens are Sunni Muslims, the rest being predominantly Coptic Christian.

The degree to which these official Sunni Islamic fatwas on IVF have affected the actual practices of the Middle Eastern medical profession is also quite striking. For physicians, the dominant Sunni religious opinion on IVF has been made known to the Middle Eastern medical community through the writings of Gamal I. Serour, one of three founding members of the first Egyptian IVF center and the director of Al-Azhar’s International Islamic Center for Population Studies and Research. In article after article (Serour 1992, 1994, 1996; Serour and Omran 1992; Serour, El Ghar, and Mansour 1990, 1991; Serour, Aboulghar, and Mansour 1995), Serour has spelled out the main points of the Sunni Islamic position on medically assisted conception, as follows:

  • Artificial insemination with the husband’ssemen is allowed, and the resulting child is the legal offspring of the couple.
  • In vitro fertilization of an egg from the wife with the sperm of her husband followed by the transfer of the fertilized embryo(s) back to the uterus of the wife is allowed, provided that the procedure is indicated for a medical reason and is carried out by an expert physician.
  • No third party should intrude into the marital functions of sex and procreation, because marriage is a contract between the wife and husband during the span of their marriage. This means that a third party donor is not allowed, whether he or she is providing sperm, eggs, embryos, or a uterus. The use of a third party is tantamount to zina, or adultery.
  • Adoption of a donor child from an illegitimate form of medically assisted conception is not allowed. The child who results from a forbidden method belongs to the mother who delivered him/her. He or she is considered to be a laqit, or an illegitimate child.
  • If the marriage contract has come to an end because of divorce or death of the husband, medically assisted conception cannot be performed on the ex-wife even if the sperm comes from the former husband.
  • An excess number of fertilized embryos can be preserved by cryopreservation. The frozen embryos are the property of the couple alone and may be transferred to the same wife in a successive cycle, but only during the duration of the marriage contract.
  • Multifetal pregnancy reduction (or so-called selective abortion) is only allowed if the prospect of carrying a high-order pregnancy (i.e., twins, triplets, or more) to viability is very small. It is also allowed if the health or life of the mother is in jeopardy.
  • All forms of surrogacy are forbidden.
  • Establishment of sperm banks is strictly forbidden, for such a practice threatens the existence of the family and the “race” and should be prevented.
  • The physician is the only qualified person to practice medically assisted conception in all its permitted varieties. If he performs any of the forbidden techniques, he is guilty, his earnings are forbidden, and he must be stopped from his morally illicit practice.

interesting…

and finally:

Muslim IVF patients use the term “mixture of relations” to describe this untoward outcome. Such a mixture of relations, or the literal confusion of lines of descent introduced by third-party donation, is described as being very “dangerous,” “forbidden,” “against nature,” “against God”—in a word, haram, or morally unacceptable. It is argued that donation, by allowing a “stranger to enter the family,” confuses lines of descent in patrilineal Islamic societies. For men in particular, ensuring paternity and the “purity” of lineage through “known fathers” is of paramount concern (Inhorn 2006b). As one Sunni Muslim man, a high school biology teacher, summarized the problem:

The most important thing is that we are Muslims. If there is faith in carrying out this operation using sperm from the husband and ova from the wife, then this is okay. We cannot accept what happens in the West. We heard some women “hire the womb” of another woman, or take sperm. According to our religion, this is called ikhtilat in-nasab, “mixing relations.” We consider it some kind of zina, prostitution. Because there are many hadiths from the Prophet Muhammad that confirm this. If you put your sperm in another woman besides your wife, you go to hell. This is adultery. There is a hadith on adultery. “If you put your sperm in another woman other than your wife, you are going to commit a sin.” People asked the Prophet, “How?” He said, “If you put it in your wife, you are going to be rewarded from Allah.” They said, “Yes.” He told them, “But this is also the case if you put it in the wrong womb. You are going to have punishment.”

In addition to the consequences of mixed bloodlines and adultery, bringing such donor children into the world is considered unfair to the children themselves, who would never be treated with the love and concern parents feel for their “real” children. Such a child could only be viewed as a bastard—an ibn haram, literally “son of sin.” Thus, a child of third-party donation starts life off as an “illegal” child. The child is deemed illegitimate and stigmatized even in the eyes of his or her own parents, who will therefore lack the appropriate parental sentiments (Inhorn 2006b). As one Sunni Muslim IVF patient stated

:

And so on, from PubMed

That was a major digression, but worth it.

Essentially, this goes right back to wether or not a person is the property of the state or not. When you are dead, the state is trying to confiscate your body and then use it as it sees fit. They already do everything they can to steal your property after you die, so why not steal your body also?

Like the screengrab above from THX-1138, what will happen in the end is that they will compel you to have your health actively monitored and store the results in a database (a decedent of the NIR) so that they can then harvest your body parts on demand while you are still alive or under certain conditions, i.e., if you are a freshly executed criminal.

The Fascists are at it again

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

The people at Bizarre magazine have pointed out to their readers, the details of a most illogical, immoral, unjust, unworkable, idiotic, ill conceived and undemocratic piece of legislation, to be debated in October.

This bill is an illiberal bill, which no free society would even dream of tabling for debate.

It is part of the the new Criminal Justice Bill, which will make it illegal to possess certain images.

Lets take a look at what the bill says, and tear it to pieces.

64 Possession of extreme pornographic images

(1) It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image.

(2) An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both ~

(a) pornographic, and

(b) an extreme image.

First of all, its a good thing that the servant of satan David ‘scumbag adulterer’ Blunkett is no longer in high office; we would have no one to finally determine what is or is not pornographic or extreme.

People have been over this for the entire twentieth century. Careers and lives ruined, businesses trashed and yet, ‘here we go again’. If two people want to create an image, whatever it is, it is their business, it is also their business if they want to publish those images and it is their absolute right.

The laws of copyright are enough to protect people who publish images (model releases etc etc) and the criminal laws covering violence of all kinds are adequate to protect people whose images are taken during acts of violence.

This law is simply not needed. It is yet another knee-jerk jack-boot reaction. More on that downwards.

(3) An image is &quotpornographic” if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.

Nonsense. People can be aroused by anything, including pictures of feet. This definition does not work.

(4) Where an image forms part of a series of images, the question whether the image appears to have been so produced is to be determined by reference to ~

(a) the image itself, and

(b) (if the series of images is such as to be capable of providing a context for the image) the context in which it occurs in the series of images.

(5) So, for example, where ~

(a) an image forms an integral part of a narrative constituted by a series of images, and

(b) it appears that the series of images as a whole was not produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal, the image may, by virtue of being part of that narrative, be found not to be pornographic, even though it might have been found to be pornographic if taken by itself.

So, if you have a movie where there is a plot where something bad happens that’s OK, but if you take a still from that film and distribute it, then that is a crime.

That is INSANE.

(6) An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following ~

(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,

so all the stills of people being killed in Iraq who have their shoes off are now illegal. Very smart!

(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

This line says more about the people who drafted this bad bill than any decent person would care to know. What about serious injury to a persons feet? As we all know, there are people who are obsessed in a sexual manner with feet; why are these parts of the body singled out? It is just irrational nonsense.

(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,

First of all, corpses do not have rights. Secondly, you cannot do violence to an inanimate, non-living object which is what a corpse is. This bill is written by someone with no experience of life, the arts or the history of pornography, and dare I suggest, the law.

(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.

This is entirely problematic.

By extending these rights to animals, you go down a slippery slope ending in the banning of meat. But I digress. This part of the bill not only outlaws the depiction of images of real bestiality, but it outlaws, simulations of bestiality you can never, ever ban the depiction of something from someone’s imagination, that is the ultimate restriction of your right to free thought and expression.

An image of an act, conjured from the imagination is protected speech. There are no victims, no animals are harmed; there is no crime, unless you consider thinking to now be a crime.

Then there is the aspect of images conjured from the imagination that are not staged photographs, i.e. simple drawings made with paint, or crayons or computer graphics. Those images too would be subject to this absurd legislation.

Your first thought when you read about this is that it is designed to prevent the ‘Mr. Sebatians‘ of this world from making and distributing images of their consensual S&M fun and games, but actually, it encompasses everything, and not just those works.

(7) In this section “image” means ~

(a) a moving or still image (produced by any means); or

(b) data (stored by any means) which is capable of conversion into an image within paragraph (a).

This is interesting from a technical point of view; all files can be turned into images and sounds; what you need is the right tool to do it. Going into the details here would be a major digression, but suffice to say, you can (circular) file this in the same place where the arguments covering DVD decoding codes (strings of nummbers) and DCMA violating t-shirts are stored. Use the Google.

(8) In this section references to a part of the body include references to a part surgically constructed (in particular through gender reassignment surgery).

???!!!

It is a defence if

(c) that the person ~

(i) was sent the image concerned without any prior request having been made by or on behalf of the person, and

(ii) did not keep it for an unreasonable time.

What is a reasonable amount of time?

It’s all garbage clearly.

Now on to the reason why this part of the bill exists.

A woman’s daughter was brutally murdered by an insane man who liked to look at ‘violent images’. This grieving mother modeled herself on Mary Whitehouse and collected 50,000 signatures in a petition that caused this bad law to be written.

I have some questions.

Why is it that a petition of 50,000 people results in a new law being written, an absurd and bad law, but if MILLIONS of people sign a petition against road pricing, that is TOTALLY IGNORED?

How is it that two million people can march in the streets of London in the biggest ever demonstration in this country’s history against an immoral illegal and predictably murderous war, and they are TOTALLY IGNORED?

Those are rhetorical questions of course, as we know the answers.

This is another piece of knee jerk legislation, as is the way in this country, where the law is created by newspaper editors and grieving parents with a disproportionately loud voice.

We see it with the ban on dangerous dogs (brought in after a child was savaged), and the ban on handguns (after some nutter killed some children, in that case, with a gun). The same process unfolds every time; the parents ‘go public’ the newspaper editors get behind them and pressure parliament to ‘DO SOMETHING’ or look like they are soft on crime.

The only law that comes out of this is bad law, and it is bad law every time.

What is also shocking (actually, not really shocking because this is normal behavior for them) is that the government gives the excuse (as Bliar did for his police state measures) that only a small number of people will be affected by this legislation.

This is astonishing and evil in equal measures.

If one person has their rights taken away by this law, we all suffer. Thats like saying, “we will only exterminate a small number of people to solve this problem”. Everyone’s rights are as precious and important as everyone eles’s and you cannot take away someone’s rights and then justify it because the numbers of the victims will be small.

I’m not making this up.

And you can read all the other lies and deceptions that they regularly take out of the Fascist Neu Labor toolbox at that link.

Needless to say, no one will obey this law should it come into force. Thanks to the internets, you can look at whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, and no one will know what you are looking at as long as you are computer literate and take the necessary precautions.

The days of risking mail order to get your copies of ‘Piercing Fan International Quarterly‘ are over, and so are the days of legislation like this being enforceable.

You BASTARDS.

Kurt Nimmo goes wild!

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Accept HillaryCare or Face Homelessness

Kurt Nimmo
Wednesday September 19, 2007

“Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system,” reports News for clueless Yahoos.

Sure, Clinton rejects “punitive measures,” that is if you consider homelessness and the prospect of starvation, enforced by the government, something less than punitive. Clinton said “she could envision a day when ‘you have to show proof to your employer that you’re insured as a part of the job interview—like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination,’” Yahoo News continues. In other words, you’ll need HillaryCare in order to get a job, no word on how you’ll be able to afford it after months of unemployment. Call it a Catch-22, one the scribes over at the Associated Press did bother to mention.

Incidentally, for a presidential selectee, Clinton is awful stupid, even though former fed mob boss Alan Greenspan thinks she is a genius. Every single state in the United States allows for vaccination medical exemptions and a few even permit philosophical and/or religious exemptions, although the American Medical Association is attempting to put an end to this and force your children to be injected with thimerosal (i.e., mercury), formaldehyde, aluminum, and other toxins.

In other words, your children are not required to “show proof of vaccination” to enter school, although not going to a federal “education” indoctrination center may be considered a blessing.

Clinton is not stupid, of course. Rather she is an accomplished liar—on par with her war criminal husband—and a conniving Bilderberg doorstop, determined to impose the globalist agenda, even if it results in your kids ending up autistic, thanks to a mercury cocktail lovingly injected.

“On Tuesday, Clinton began airing a 30-second ad statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire promoting her new health care plan. The ad reminds viewers of her failed effort to pass universal health care in the early 1990s, trying to portray a thwarted enterprise as one of vision,” News for Yahoos continues. “The ad also highlights her support as senator for an expanded Children’s Health Insurance Program and for more affordable vaccines…. Her health care plan would require every American to buy health insurance, offering tax credits and subsidies to help those who can’t afford it. The mandatory aspect of her proposal, however, gets glossed over in the ad.”

It stands to reason Clinton’s plan will be “mandatory”—under penalty of taser-wielding, ninja-black drabbed SWAT cops—and, soon after she is selected by way of Diebold, Clinton will make sure millions of kids are stricken with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, seizures, mental retardation, hyperactivity, dyslexia, and other developmental disorders, such as autism.

[…]

http://adereview.com/blog/?p=48

Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt!

NHS staff view celebrity records

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

An NHS primary care trust has warned of a new risk to the confidentiality of medical records stored under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT] after a celebrity was admitted into hospital and more than 50 staff viewed the patient’s records.The warning by North Tees Primary Care Trust raises questions about whether hundreds of thousands of NHS staff who would be able to view electronic records under the NPfIT would have their accesses to information policed robustly.

Systems that support electronic patient records – a central part of the NPfIT – produce audit trails of who has accessed what information. But it’s unclear whether busy NHS employees would have adequate time to police audit trails

And Computer Weekly has published evidence of a culture in the NHS that is incompatible with tight lax security. Smartcards have been shared so that busy doctors can share PCs without having to log on and off each time. This means it can prove difficult to establish who has accessed confidential patient information.

North Tees Primary Care Trust says that the unauthorised access by staff of patient records presents a “new security risk” under the Department of Health’s Care Record Guarantee – which gives an undertaking to patients that their confidential data will be protected from unauthorised access.

The trust says in a paper to the Board:

“A new security risk … has been identified as part of the Care Records Guarantee. This risk is around staff inappropriately accessing [a] patient’s records who are not part of their care load. It was noted in an audit that a recent admission of a celebrity to a hospital had revealed over 50 staff viewing the patient record… Staff should only access records of patients with whom they have a legitimate relationship.”

The document paper adds that trusts have to demonstrate that regular audits are undertaken and that they have “disciplinary procedures in place to deal with breaches”.

If staff wanted to access the medical records of a well-known individual or anyone else they were interested in, the risk with paper-based medical records would be smaller because the files would ordinarily be held in one location, and may not be accessible remotely. It’s unlikely that dozens of staff could view a paper record without drawing attention to themselves.

Evidence on the security risks of electronic records was submitted to the House of Commons’ Health Committee by the UK Computing Research Committee, which is an expert panel of the British Computer Society, the Institution of of Engineering and Technology and IT-related scientists.

It said: “As a general principle, a single system accessible by all NHS employees from all trusts maximises rather than minimises the risk of a security breach. It increases … the opportunity for access to any one patient’s data from some point on the extended system… it is important that a formal analysis is carried out to identify risks and show that they have been reduced as low as reasonably practicable.”

A spokesman for North Tees Primary Care Trust said the accessing of a celebrity’s records took place elsewhere, not within the trust. The spokesman was unable to give any details of the incident or where it took place.

Links:

Smartcard sharing by an NHS trust – a breach of IT security or a practical way around slow access to the NHS Care Records Service?

Care Record Guarantee [for example on the confidentiality of patient data]

Loss of 1.3 million sensitive medical files in the US – possible implications for the NHS’s National Programme for IT

Department of Health and Connecting for Health security flaws

Major reports on NHS and NPfIT

Evidence submitted by UK Computing Research Committee to the Health Committee on the Electronic Patient Record

Report raises further NPfIT concerns – British Computer Society [Security]

Computer Weekly

My emphasis.

And of course, if the spine is implemented as they desire, you can multiply the 50 Hippocratic violators, nosey parkers, scumbags by 1000 as every terminal connected to the spine will be able to see everyone’s records without restriction.

The same goes for ContactPoint, the child violating database, and of course, the nearly aborted NIR/Identity Card.

All of these systems will be abused from the day they go online.

One can only hope that some brave person leaks the personal details of every member of parliament and the house of Lords and their many offspring, so that we can see whose daughter had an abortion, which of their children is on anti-psychotics, who has been beating their wife, which MP is infertile, which MP(s) have Gonorrhea / Syphilis / HIV etc etc.

THEN we will start to hear loud howls of disdain for the system, with rapid moves to dismantle it and then blame the previous administration(s) for the failure.

In the meantime, you really must have your records physically deleted from your GPs computer, so that the data does not get snarfled into the NHS Spine. If you do not even bother to ask, then you only have yourself to blame, when all of a sudden you are surprised when your new employer says, “I hope that we wont have any more skiing accidents while you are working with us; we need your commitment to us to be 100%”.

Yes.

Your employer got a hold of your medical records and saw that you broke your leg whilst on holiday in the Alps two years ago.

How did he do it?

YOU LET HIM you JACKASS!!!

UPDATE

Of course, this is not a ‘new security risk’ as the report fallaciously states; this security risk is inherent to these poorly designed systems

Lucid thought breakout on Security Theatre

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Anti-terrorist programs depend on technology — remotely controlled cameras, automatic license plate readers, interception of cell-phone signals and high-tech explosives detectors.

It might pay to ask: Is this high-tech surveillance security or security theater? Does it provide enough additional safety to justify the added intrusiveness? Or do the bad guys just find a way around it?

For example, if terrorists don’t know that the National Security Agency can intercept their phone calls in remote parts of the world, the intercepts will be useful. Once they know, they stop using cell phones.

This is doubtless a nuisance to them, but hardly a show-stopper. If they know about automated monitoring of e-mail, again, they stop using it or, depending on what they are doing, use an anonymous, disposable Hotmail account.

The inability thus far to capture Osama bin Laden demonstrates the ease of circumventing surveillance techniques.

For a while people talked about combating steganography — the hiding of messages in, say, Web pages by various coding schemes. At least some security folk wanted specialized software to examine pages for messages exchanged among terrorists. Useful sometimes, perhaps — unless the bad guys know about it.

Then they communicate by prearranged codes. For example, a post on a classic-car site looking for a blue 1957 Chevy six-cylinder means one thing, whereas looking for a red 1958 Ford means another.

If a suicide bomber (which seems to be the threat we face) thinks he can’t get his bomb past nitrate sniffers and specialized X-ray machines at the airport, he simply blows himself up in a crowded part of the terminal. If the point is to protect airplanes, security may work.

If the point is to stop terrorism, it is useless.

There is no way to stop a guy with a backpack from getting on Metro at rush hour.

New York is set to spend $90 million on more cameras and license plate readers. What will this accomplish? A CNN story on the system quoted Steve Swain, a security specialist who spent years working with London’s net of cameras, who said, “I don’t know of a single incident where CCTV [closed-circuit television] has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act.”

Cameras aid in the investigation of a crime already committed, he said, and “you need to do this piece of theater so that if the terrorists are looking at you, they can see that you’ve got some measures in place.”

But catching the offender is of trivial importance compared with preventing the terrorism. Is the theater aimed at the terrorists, or at the public? Surveillance increases apace. From the Times Online of London, “An ‘intelligent’ CCTV camera designed to predict when a person may be about to commit a crime is being tested in high streets and shopping centres.” I have encountered brain-scan research endeavoring to determine moods thought to be associated with terrorists.

According to a recent ABC News poll, the public favors surveillance by almost 3 to 1. Governments from federal to local want to integrate cameras and similar devices.

Concern with terrorism makes it difficult to oppose new measures. And there is big money in making the equipment. All of this contributes to the acceptance of more and more surveillance, without anyone asking, “Wait, what are we really going to get out of this? Will it work?” In the words of Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York ACLU, “Technology is an unstoppable train. The question is whether we can maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.”

[…]

http://washingtontimes.com/

And there you have it; another Post Tipping Point Post®

We have been saying this for years, as have many other people.

It must be pointed out that the ‘terrrorists using Steganography’ hysteria was just that hysteria. Not a single Steg image has ever been found in the wild by researchers and, certainly not a single image has ever been traced to a ‘terrorist’.

You can guarantee that if they ever found a ‘terrorist’s’ laptop with encrypted data on it, using any of the popular crypto wares like GPG/PGP that uncle sham would trumpet this from every one of their ‘news’ outlets and use it as an excuse to bring in some sort of ’90s style insane controls.

And then of course, if these people need to use telephones, all they need to do to have secure, untracable calls where NSA will not even know that a call is being made, is to use Asterisk in a private telephone network.

Finally ACLU Donna Lieberman is wrong to say that, “Technology is an unstoppable train.”. STUPIDITY is an unstoppable train, and as everyone knows, trains run on rails, and those rails eventually reach the ‘end of the line‘.

Stupidity (them/they) WILL come to an end, and reason (us/we) WILL prevail.

Homeschooling Comes of Age

Friday, September 14th, 2007

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the modern home education movement was in its infancy. At that time, most Americans viewed home-styled education as a quaint tourist attraction or the lifestyle choice of those willing to endure more hardship than necessary.

What a difference a few decades makes.

Homeschooling has undergone an extreme makeover. From maverick to mainstream, the movement has acquired a glamorous, populist sheen.

Flip through a few issues of Sports Illustrated, circa 2007, and there’s no shortage of news about photogenic homeschoolers who make the athletic cut. Like Jessica Long who was born in Russia, resides in Baltimore, and is an accomplished swimmer. At 15, Jessica became the first paralympian to win the prestigious Sullivan Award, which honors the country’s top amateur athlete. Then there’s the dashing Joey Logano who, at 17, has already won a NASCAR race.

Even presidential hopefuls and their spouses have jumped on the school-thine-own bandwagon. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) has offered enthusiastic support for homeschooling families, and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) told the Wall Street Journal that this fall she plans to home educate the couple’s two youngest children “with the help of a tutor.”

As for scholastic achievements, this national competition season was remarkable, seeing home scholars crowned as champs in three major events. A twelve-year-old New Mexican named Matthew Evans won the National Word Power competition, sponsored by Reader’s Digest. Thirteen-year-old Evan O’Dorney of California won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and fourteen-year-old Caitlin Snaring of Washington was christened the National Geographic Bee champ.

Then there’s Micah Stanley of Minnesota who has yet to receive any lessons in a brick-and-mortar classroom building. For the past few years, he’s been enrolled in the Oak Brook College of Law, a distance learning law school headquartered in Sacramento. This past February, he took the grueling, three-day California general bar examination (California allows correspondence law students to sit for the bar), and he can now add “attorney” to his resume. In his spare time, he’s finishing up a book titled, How to Escape the Holding Tank: A Guide to Help You Get What You Want.

Micah is 19.

A teenage lawyer/budding author, however, wouldn’t surprise John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of compulsory education laws and a former New York State Teacher of the Year. Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Gatto forthrightly argued that “genius is as common as dirt.”

Perhaps. But it’s also understandable that when everyday folks hear about the homeschooled Joeys and Caitlins and Micahs, they become a tad intimidated — as if this educational choice were the exclusive domain of obsessive-compulsive moms and dads with money to burn, time to spare, and a brood of driven, Type-A offspring.

Although it’s commendable when the young achieve Herculean goals, homeschooling has always been more about freedom and personal responsibility than winning an Ivy League scholarship or playing at Wimbledon. In general, it has attracted working-class families of all ethnicities and faiths, who have been eager to provide a nurturing, stimulating learning experience.

Of course, the unabashedly adventuresome are always an endearing staple of the movement. The Burns family, of Alaska, set out on a 36-foot sailboat this summer to travel the world for three years. Chris Burns (the dad) told the Juneau Empire he hopes “to connect with Juneau classrooms and host question-and-answer sessions while at sea,” as well as homeschool the two Burns children.

In a legal sense, homeschools serve as a glaring reminder of a complex issue that has become the stuff of landmark Supreme Court cases: does the state have the authority to coerce a youngster to attend school and sit at a desk for 12 years? Whether said child has the aptitude and maturity for such a long-term contract (or is it involuntary servitude?) remains an uncomfortable topic because, in the acceptable mantra of the day, “education is a right.”

Such a national conversation is long overdue, as there are plenty of signs — costly remedial education and rising dropout rates, to name two — to indicate that the status quo public school model isn’t kid-friendly.

Homeschooling, after all, began to catch on with the masses because a former US Department of Education employee argued that children, like delicate hothouse plants, required a certain type of environment to grow shoots and blossoms, and that loving parents, not institutions, could best create the greenhouses.

It was 1969 when the late Dr. Raymond Moore initiated an inquiry into previously neglected areas of educational research. Two of the questions that Moore and a team of like-minded colleagues set out to answer were (1) Is institutionalizing young children a sound, educational trend? and (2) What is the best timing for school entrance?

In the process of analyzing thousands of studies, twenty of which compared early school entrants with late starters, Moore concluded that developmental problems, such as hyperactivity, nearsightedness, and dyslexia, are often the result of prematurely taxing a child’s nervous system and mind with continuous academic tasks, like reading and writing.

The bulk of the research convinced Moore that formal schooling should be delayed until at least age 8 or 10, or even as late as 12. As he explained, “These findings sparked our concern and convinced us to focus our investigation on two primary areas: formal learning and socializing. Eventually, this work led to an unexpected interest in homeschools.”

“Above all, the merit of homeschooling is that it allows for experimentation, flexibility, and trial & error.”

Moore went on to write Home Grown Kids and Home-Spun Schools. The rest, as they say, is history. The books, published in the 1980s, have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and offer practical advice to potential parent educators.

Nowadays, there’s a sea of such self-help material, scores of commercial products, and online opportunities solely dedicated to encouraging families to learn together in the convenience of their homes. Homeschooling has graduated into a time-tested choice that allows children to thrive, learn at their own pace, and which frequently inspires other success stories. As our nation is famous for encouraging immigrants to reinvent themselves and achieve the American Dream, so home education does for youngsters whether they are late bloomers or are candidates for Mensa.

Above all, the merit of homeschooling is that it allows for experimentation, flexibility, and trial and error. Here is the great contrast with state-provided education. As with all systems hammered out by bureaucracies, public schools get stuck in a rut, perpetuate failures, respond slowly to changing times, and resist all reforms. Errors are not localized and contained, but all consuming and system wide. It’s bad enough when such a system is used to govern labor contracts or postal service; it is a tragic loss when it is used to manage kids’ minds.

[…]

http://www.mises.org/story/2682

Stupid Blanco

Friday, September 14th, 2007

Many years ago, fourteen to be exact, I saw an episode of a science fiction programme that shocked me. I couldn’t remember anything about it other than the words in a single scene that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was a scene in a police station where one officer called one of his colleagues a “Stupid Blanco”.

What triggered my memory about this phrase and the series was the all the recent heated talk about the invasion of illegal immigration in the usa, the proposals for amnesty etc etc.

Thanks to The Internets I managed to find information about the series where this scene came from by searching for the phrase “Stupid Blanco”; the series was called ‘Time Trax’ and it is (was):

a Prime Time Entertainment Network[2] American/Australian co-produced science fiction television series that first aired in 1993. It is about a police officer who has been sent into the past to track down and return convicted criminals who have escaped into the past. This was the last new production from Lorimar Television.

Premise

In the year 2193, over a hundred criminals became fugitives of law enforcement by travelling back in time two hundred years, using a time machine called Trax. Darien Lambert (Dale Midkiff) was a police detective of that period who was sent back to 1993 in order to apprehend as many of the fugitives as possible. He was assisted by SELMA (Elizabeth Alexander), an extremely small but very powerful computer (described as equivalent to a mainframe)—disguised for the mission as an AT&T MasterCard—who communicated through a holographic interface which took the visual form of a prim British nanny (SELMA was an acronym for Specified Encapsulated Limitless Memory Archive). Lambert was also equipped with a MPPT (Micro-Pellet Projection Tube) disguised as a keyless car alarm remote, which could stun the target or engulf the target in an energy field which would render him transportable to the future, at which point Selma would execute the transmission sequence to send the criminal on his way. Lambert’s biggest enemy was Dr. Mordecai Sahmbi (Peter Donat), who was responsible for sending the fugitives to 1993, and who tried several times to kill him.

Captain Lambert, fearing the possible consequences of altering the timeline, did not actively attempt to interfere with the natural flow of history, although he frequently left messages for his colleagues in 2193 (via the ‘personals’ sections of assorted newspapers). The series made occasional allusions to a theory of parallel timelines as a way of skirting the issue of temporal paradox; essentially, it implied that the time travellers went into an alternate past so that their actions there had no effect on the 2193 “present.” However, the series rarely pursued this point – probably because if Lambert was really in a parallel timeline, he would be unable to leave messages to his colleagues. Also, fugitives are sometimes seen using knowledge of the future to their own ends, which would also be impossible under the ‘parallel’ theory. The series did not have a proper ending – as of the final episode, Lambert was still in 1993 and had not yet completed his mission.

[…]

Wikipedia

Under the section named Terminology & Technology, you can find the phrase that sent my head spinning:

Blanco
It is the 22nd Century’s most abrasive racial slur. It is a reference to Caucasians, who are now a minority.

Bingo.

All the ‘European Americans’ who are shouting at the top of their lungs against the tidal wave of mass unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico and the abominable ‘North American Union’ will be frightened to death of a future where the most abrasive ‘racial slur’ applies to them.

It is destined to be called ‘the ‘B’ word’ no doubt.

This was the first time (on television) that I ever saw the issue of America becoming a Spanish speaking country treated in any serious way. I imagine that it is something, an idea, so repugnant to the current majority American English speaking public that no television company would normally finance its production.

The fact is that unless something is done to stop it and American English is legally adopted as the language of the nation and the Spanish language is actively rejected and suppressed, then america WILL become a spanish speaking nation from coast to coast. Already it is the case that over one third of the people in California speak spanish.

Then again, thanks to the internets, we learn that Spanish in america is in fact, nothing new, and as far back as 1870, California enshrined Spanish as one of the languages that the law is delivered in:

California’s first constitution approved an important recognition of Spanish language rights: “All laws, decrees, regulations, and provisions emanating from any of the three supreme powers of this State, which from their nature require publication, shall be published in English and Spanish.” By 1870, English-speaking Americans had become a majority in California. In 1879, California promulgated a new constitution under which all official proceedings were to be conducted only in English; this clause remained in effect until 1966. In 1986, California voters added a new constitutional clause by referendum stating that “English is the official language of the State of California.” However, Spanish is still spoken widely throughout the state, and many government forms, documents, and services are available in both English and Spanish.

This is an issue that has a long history. It can be a source of humor if the population is intelligent however.

On a trip to Quebec in the 80’s I saw a red octagonal ‘STOP’ sign that had been altered with red spray paint (identical in colour to the red of the sign so as to render the spray indistinguishable from the original paint) so that the ‘S’, the top sides of the ‘T’ and the curve of the ‘P’ had been sprayed out to make the sign read ‘101’.

This, which I didn’t know at the time, was an absolutely brilliant piece of political defacement.

I started to see the number ‘101’ grafittied all over the place, and of course, being the curious sort, asked my kind hosts, “what the heck are all the 101s all over Montreal?!”.

It transpired that the state of Quebec was going through a language war between the French speakers (“luh”) and the English speakers (“ay?”).

The ‘101’ refers specifically to:

The Charter of the French Language (also known as Bill 101 and Loi 101) is a law in the province of Quebec, Canada defining French as the only official language of Quebec.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_French_Language

And so, that red octagonal ‘STOP’ sign was brilliantly, and with utter inspiration, transformed from being just a ‘STOP’ sign into a ‘STOP Bill 101’ political statement.

Pure unadulterated Genius!

The French of course, with a beautiful language as their deadly weapon, were not outclassed.

I saw something that made me laugh out loud one day; someone, someone stupid, simply grafittied ‘101’ on a wall somewhere, as so many dumb people did back then, to which the following text was subsequently added by another, more inspired artist:

‘Dalmatiens’

Oh how we laughed!

Despite the inspiration of the graffiti artists, this was a deadly serious problem and people felt very strongly about the whole issue. Emotions were running high, and there was a noticeable split in Montreal between the French speakers and the English speakers.

and it got serious:

The Charter of the French Language, though popular among a majority of Francophones, has been poorly received by many anglophones and allophones. The enforcers of the Charter, widely derided in English media as the “language police” or “tongue troopers”, are able to levy fines of up to seven thousand dollars per offence to punish those who are not in compliance with the law (“Titre V”, 2004). The charter is claimed by opponents to have caused up to 244,000 people to emigrate from Quebec to other provinces since the 1970s. [21]. Many companies most notably Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal (which even considered removing “Montreal” from its name), moved their major operations to Toronto. Many angrily blame the Charter for hindering Montreal’s economic development, arguing about the status of English as a language of international business.

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) (which is commonly referred to as l’Office) provides several warnings before resorting to any legal sanctions. Alleged abuse of its power has led to inflated charges of racism and harassment being levelled against them by members of minority groups (Martin 2004). The OQLF urged stores to remove imported kosher goods that did not meet labelling requirements, an action perceived in the Jewish community as an unfair targeting that coincided with a high-profile case against the well-known delicatessen, Schwartz’s (B’nai B’rith, 1996). In 2002, unreliable media accounts reported cases of alleged harassment of allophone merchants who refuse to speak French. (Gravenor, 2002).

and very silly:

One of the specifics of the Charter is insistence of French instructions for all products. During the 1990s Pokémon craze, the then PQ-led government pushed for the publication of French-translated Pokémon cards, lest Wizards of the Coast and the various stores selling the cards be fined. A line of French cards was produced, but did not gain as much value among collectors as the original English and Japanese versions. However, the cards used the Pokemon names from France, because they were merely imported from France or reprinted from France’s cards and not produced for Quebec (most Quebecers knew the Pokemon from their English names, because the video games in Quebec were in English, and the Quebec French dub of the Pokemon anime used the English names).[22]A line of French Yu-Gi-Oh! cards was also produced for Quebec, but it sold rather poorly despite high demand, and only the first two starter decks, first expansion set, and promotional movie cards were released. Other French versions of games (such as Axis & Allies) were merely imported from France, like Pokemon. Some, such as Dreamblade, Heroclix and Star Wars Miniatures, do not have French versions at all, but only short French product descriptions on the package.

As of 2003, all video games sold in Quebec must include French instructions. Stores holding unused games with English-only instructions will be fined for each individual offending copy and see their merchandise seized.

Now, I use the word ‘silly’ but the fact is that these people are taking the threat of the destruction of their culture seriously, and are taking steps to stamp out or at least control English.

There are still Americans who say, “this is america, speak it or beat it”…cough… and essentially, that is what the Royal Bank of Montreal did; they beat it.

And there you have it. If you want to preserve English as the language of the USA, you have to introduce legislation to mandate it, and then get ready for a war over it.

Of course, in a truly federated country like america should be and was designed to be, if New Mexico goes 100% Spanish that is their business, and not the business of the Federal Government.

What a life!

BBQ Anti Controlled Demolition propaganda is bogus

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

An email thread on BBQs latest 1 + 1 = 3 propaganda piece:

Have you see Twatchell’s piece in todays Grauniad?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/

Meanwhile the BBQ is continuing to toe the party line…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6987965.stm

The details of what happened on 9/11 may still be unclear and are important to some individuals. However, the truth of what happened is standing as tall and obvious as the twin towers themselves, and is all that should really matter to most people. It cannot be covered up, but if you are not awake you won’t be able to see it.

9/11 the big cover-up? Actually, 9/11 is still doing the job it was intended to do, 6 years down the line. It is making Twatchell and the 435 people who have posted comments on that piece look at the swinging necklace while their freedoms are stolen from under their noses. It’s good to know we have such focused and sharp-minded intelligentsia bringing our attention to these matters.

Everyone knows about the art of distraction. Including origamists…
http://www.origami-resource-center.com/paper-magic.html

Look at that Troublewit hat!

Now the troublewit (sic!) Twatchell is, he obviously did not put on his paper hat before writing!

Boom!

Did you know that the American Institute of Architects (a member thereof) has fallen on the side of controlled demolition?

http://tinyurl.com/2zv2fq

Twatchell is a classic ostrich posturer.

… and was this ‘study’ by a Cambridge University engineer peer reviewed?
hmmm how can we find out?

It’s in a peer-reviewed journal
http://scitation.aip.org/emo

But the journal has an impact factor of 0.7

This is very low.

Impact factors rate the importance of a journal based on it’s publications, how many times they are cited by others and for how long they continue to be cited. Most ‘average’ journals would be between 1-3. This would probably cover 90% of journals. Anything above three and you start to get good stuff. My latest publications are in journals of around 6-7, of international and broad worth. Above this are really only the truly world-class journals. Immunity, THE one for certain fields of immunology, rates about 18. Nature and science are 20-something. Maybe 30.

So 0.7 is just somewhere to stick a student’s data to get their first publication, basically. And not a very interesting student at that. How the hell this got picked up by BBQ… there we go with the PR people again! Or maybe with a more ‘sinister’ plant-er. Or perhaps I just don’t know the field, but that’s what it would be like in medical sciences.

Here is Keith Seffen
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/~kas14/
And his publications
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~kas14/publicationsChron.html

Expert Immunologist Trashes New Chickenpox Vaccine Proposal

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Before the measles vaccination, measles used to be considered like chicken pox is today, a nuisance, and nothing more. Why, just because we have a vaccination for it has it suddenly become worthy of HUGE FRONT PAGE HEADLINES? Will chicken pox get the same treatment when the drug peddlers come up with a vaccination against it? Smacks of hysteria and sheep shearing to me.

Irdial; Blogdialian Blarchive, July2nd 2002. http://www.irdial.com/blogger/archive/2004_09_05_blarchive.html#109455661950837288

You can find more preminiscences on Chickenpox vaccines, and our early discussions on their proposed by using the Blarchive search.

Their relevance is cranked up a notch today by this story, the thrust of which we will now deconstruct:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6990643.stm

Children may get chickenpox jab
The Department of Health is to consider a mass vaccination of children in England against chickenpox.
There are now 2 chickenpox vaccines, licenesed for use in the UK since 2002. But the market is tiny, as it costs 60-90 pounds sterling from a private clinic. Which means GSK and Sanofi are missing out on a few quid.
Experts have been drafted in to weigh up the benefits following a recommendation from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
http://www.advisorybodies.doh.gov.uk/jcvi/members.htm

This bit of the article makes it sound like the JCVI is acutely concerned about varicella infection rates and mortality. However, there is nothing on their site about a varicella vaccine report. The minutes of 18th October 2006 say “The JCVI had proposed that subgroups be set up to look at rotavirus vaccines and varicella zoster vaccines. This had not yet been possible they but would be set up shortly.”

From 2001: “Varicella Vaccine

The Committee discussed varicella (chickenpox) vaccine and its potential use in the UK. The Committee agreed that, as far as the vaccine’s use in the wider population was concerned, there was insufficient information on which to make any recommendations. However, the vaccine’s use in health care workers could be considered more immediately as data on its use in this group was available. The vaccine was not yet licensed for use in the UK. A sub-group would look at this further.”

And from 2002, when the vaccine was licensed:

“Effectiveness and cost effectiveness of varicella vaccination This paper suggested that the key factor in the effectiveness of any varicella immunisation programme is the impact on zoster. Based on the assumptions in the paper and the available evidence, the case for routine infant or pre-adolescent immunisation had not been made.

The Committee welcomed the paper. It was suggested that the data offered very much a minimum estimate of the burden of disease. However, based on the current data available the paper’s conclusions were reasonable.”

So what has changed their collective mind? According to the most recent study in the British Medical Journal, deaths from chickenpox are decreasing.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7337/609/a

In context, so as not to scare you with the word ‘deaths’ or an image like this:


Chickenpox can be fatal

it should be noted that deaths predominate among the very immunocompromised, and are often ‘varicella-associated’, which means you die from a secondary infection such as pneumonia while trying to fight off chickenpox or shingles.

Peanuts can be fatal.
Ballpoint pens can be fatal.
It’s all about context.

So then, in 2006;

“13. VARICELLA
The Committee recognised that varicella was an area of increasing importance with recent evidence that vaccine prevented shingles in the elderly. However this is a complex area because of the potential impact of chidhood infection on transmission dynamics at older ages. It was agreed that a sub-group should be setup in the near future to consider the issues.”

This advisory committee are not convinced, are they? But just a few months later and here we are, front page of BBQ News, and about to jab every kid in the land.

From The Telegraph we discover that the news is actually that,

“The Govenment’s advisors, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation have set up a sub-committee into chicken pox and will meet later this year or early next year for the first time.

It will investigate the impact of a vaccination programme for all or selected groups and the cost effectiveness of such a plan.
Advisers have previously rejected calls for chicken pox vaccination in the UK.”

Which is what was in the JCVI minutes from almost a year ago. So what does this lead us to conclude? That someone has fed this story to the press, to increase it’s profile. The Daily Mail will, no doubt, have horror stories about chickenpox spreading like a rash across it’s pages as you read this.

We have, of course, told you before of the major reason behind MMR and now varicella vaccination, and it is money. It is cheaper for the NHS to give you a jab than it is to send a doctor to see your sick child. This is the monetary justification of HMG.

It is essential that the shareholders of GlaxoSmithkline, Merck et al., who make these vaccines, recoup their R&D costs and make substantial profit. Their ideal target market is EVERY PERSON ALIVE. Trebles all round for them, and for the PR companies working on their behalf, if (no, WHEN) HMG adopts a policy of vaccination against chickenpox. The greed of these companies and their financial clout, allied with the corrupt thinking of HMG mean it is all but inevitable that you will be “offered” chickenpox vaccination very soon.

But is there a health-based reason for choosing to vaccinate? In short, no.

The chance of complications from chickenpox are insignificantly higher than the chances of complications from the vaccine.
The protection from natural infection is lifelong. Vaccine-mediated protection is estimated at 9 years. Or if you believe the optimists, 10-20 years.

Since a major reason behind the vaccine is to cut adult deaths (at 40-years plus, in the main) the vaccine is, useless.

So there we go.

Once again the public are being lined up to take a shot in the arm simply to fill the boots of a drug company, at the behest of the government. And they will do it in their droves!

But they can’t say they haven’t been warned.

[…]

From the lab of the scientist and Immunologist Dr. Alun Kirby, “the man who keeps BLOGDIAL honest”.

Bill Maher “You can’t handle the truth”

Monday, September 10th, 2007

“My love/hate relationship with Bill Maher fluctuates wildly from episode to episode. Though I love his politically incorrect sense of humor and the fact that he provides a forum for people with differing views to debate, I do hate his scapegoat arguments and constant contradictions. Still, last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher was a classic episode, mostly due to the always charismatic Mos Def, whose off the cuff bluntness drew applause and laughter in juxtaposition to Maher’s counterproductive defense of the establishment.

While skeptical of the Bush administration, Maher’s unwavering centrist beliefs often fall short of providing genuine insight. My beef is that he’s simply not radical enough. For example, he dismisses even the possibility that our government had something to do with 9/11, he clings to the fallacy that religion is to blame for the instability in Iraq, and thinks that corporate candidates like the Clintons are good for America because of their extensive experience in screwing us over. Luckily, Cornel West was also present to elaborate upon Mos Def’s arguments. Regardless of what religion any particular empire happens to subscribe to, Professor West correctly states that the problem is actually with the economic desire to create those empires. Throughout history, religion has actually had little to do with conquest, and is simply an easy scapegoat for capitalists who want to displace proper blame.

Later on in the show, the greatest consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, was on to talk about the regulation of imported goods and plug his new book, “The Seventeen Traditions”. Nader also spoke the truth about Hillary Clinton, the need for universal healthcare, and the need for an end to imperial wars. Maher did redeem himself though by highlighting the conventional wisdom of Americans who like what Nader has to say, yet hate the idea of voting him into office where he could actually make a difference. Dennis Kucinich faces the same hurdles during this election.

I’m afraid of having my account deleted for posting the full episode, but Tullycast seems to have it all if you’re interested:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO1w1H3iZUU

This is a truly wonderful and vivid example of the slavery inured, corporate brainwashed, ostrich posturing american who despite everything, every piece of evidence, every vibration of common sense, still believe that 2 + 2 = 5.

This Bill Maher, who makes the right noises, appears to do so only because it is in vogue to be ‘alternative’, because there are ratings in it. This is why he believes Islam is a religion of violence above all others, and refers to some author to back up his nonsense. Bill Maher is part of the problem, not only because he has a popular TV programme and is himself asleep and therefore no threat, but because he is an ordinary citizen that cannot wake up, and it is people like him that keep the nightmare going, individuals believing the nightmare is reality, that day is night, that hot is cold, that water is dry…people like him who have their finger in the Dyke, believing that if they remove it thy will die and every thing will end when in fact, they are on the wet side drowning and taking their finger out will release and violently launch them them into dry land and the world of the waking.

Note Bill’s posture (leaning away from his guests like they are going to explode) as he speaks to these two men, and note also how his english deteriorates when he talks to them…I’m sure its all completely involuntary.

Fat kid kidnapped for being fat

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Council takes overweight child into care

Sarah Knapton
Monday September 10, 2007
The Guardian

A child has been taken away from his parents because, it is understood, they were not coping with his disability and social workers became anxious about his weight.

Social services in Tower Hamlets, east London, removed the boy earlier this year and placed him in council care. He has not been returned to his home.

Social workers were concerned about his increasing bulk which was far above normal for a boy of his age. The council said it could not comment on individual cases.

It follows the case of an eight-year-oldboy who was nearly taken into care this year after reaching 14 stone, more than three times the average for a boy of his age. His family claimed the youngster had an intolerance to fruit and vegetables.

North Tyneside council allowed him to stay with his family after his mother promised to change his diet.

Britain has one of the worst records for childhood obesity in the world.

Around 1 million under-16s are considered dangerously overweight, leading to fears that the country is facing a health timebomb.

In an attempt to tackle the problem the government has launched campaigns to increase fruit and vegetable consumption and has poured cash into school sports schemes. The overall cost of obesity to the NHS is currently around £1bn, with a further £2.3bn to £2.6bn for the economy as a whole.

http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,,2165891,00.html

This is an interesting story for several reasons, and thank you to that special lurker for bringing it to the attention of BLOGDIAL Man dem.

Now.

As far as I know, there is no legal definition of overweight. Without such a definition, those council workers rely on their personal prejudices to determine what a fat child is.

In Wales, this might mean a fatter child than a one living in Tower Hamlets, where a thinner child is the average.

It is completely absurd that workers in a council can exercise their personal prejudice in this way, and this has a direct bearing on those parents who Home Educate.

If a Home Educator teaches her children that there is such a thing as Sin, and a worker in Camden Council does not believe that this is the case, the council worker, by the example of this ‘overweight’ child, could remove that child from its parents so that it is taught ‘correctly’.

There is no difference between feeding a child’s stomach and feeding its mind, and if you accept that prejudiced workers at any council can take a child from its parents for the ‘protection’ of the child’s well-being in the case of obesity, then there are no limits to what these people can do.

They can take your child because you refuse to:

  • vaccinate your child.
  • put your child on a diet.
  • visit the doctor.
  • teach pluralism / multiculturalism / ‘tolerance’.
  • {insert your particular belief and exercise thereof}

What they are saying is that your children do not belong to you, and you are not the ultimate parent; your children belong to the state, the state is the ultimate parent, and the state allows you to keep your children as long as you do not disobey their guidelines.

Of course, they refuse to pay for your children to attend good schools, demand taxes from you so that they can finance these evils on you and your family, and they expect you to just sit there and TAKE IT.

You will note that this child lived in Tower Hamlets, where the family is most likely to be poor and uneducated and unable to defend themselves. No council worker in a wealthy borough would DARE do such a thing to a wealthy family, because they know that they will instantly be on the receiving end of a well financed lawsuit, or even worse, be faced with parent that are themselves lawyers.

These laws and council actions are for the poor and uneducated only, who are the eternal victims on this planet.

Should we rely on Europe for moral guidance?

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Europe to rule on whether police can keep DNA of innocent people
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 08 September 2007

Police could lose the power to keep DNA samples taken from suspects who have been cleared of any wrongdoing, in a landmark case which is to be decided by the highest court in Europe.

A ruling against the British Government could lead to the destruction of tens of thousands of DNA and fingerprint materials as well as deal a severe blow to any plans to create a universal genetic database.

The challenge at the European Court of Human Rights is being brought by a teenager, known as S, who was arrested and charged with attempted robbery aged 11 in 2001, and Michael Marper, from Sheffield, who was arrested on harassment charges, aged 38, in the same year. Both were cleared and have no criminal records.

But the Court of Appeal ruled in 2002 that they cannot ask for their DNA and fingerprint evidence to be destroyed. One of the judges hearing the appeal was Sir Stephen Sedley, who this week called for a national database to include DNA samples taken from every British citizen and any foreign visitors to this country. His comments provoked outrage from the human rights group Liberty, which called his proposal “chilling”.

European judges in Strasbourg believe the issue is so important that they have decided to fast-track the case to go before the grand chamber, where all the Strasbourg justices will sit to determine the matter.

The decision has been taken because the court decided that the case raises a serious question affecting the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights or because its resolution might have a result inconsistent with a previous judgment of the court.

In both cases, the clients asked that their fingerprints and DNA samples be destroyed – but the requests were refused by South Yorkshire Police.

Mr Marper and the juvenile argued that keeping fingerprints and especially DNA samples was an unjustified breach of their right to respect for private life protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. They are especially concerned about the future uses to which the DNA samples might be put, and the lack of independent oversight in the national DNA database.

They are represented by Peter Mahy, a civil liberties specialist at Sheffield-based Howells, and one the country’s most respected human rights barristers, Richard Gordon QC. Mr Mahy said:”This decision by the European Court of Human Rights gives us significant hope that these cases will finally result in a massive change in the law – providing protection for those acquitted of crimes against their fingerprints and DNA samples being kept, putting them on a level footing with those not previously accused of any crimes.”

He added: “We think this will be one of the most important human rights challenges the court has grappled with in recent years.”

This is all well and good, but there are problems with this.

Why should Britain be obeying this court, and why should people in the UK not be able to get justice from their own courts? Why is it that people in the UK are being criminally mistreated and abused in this way in the first place?

And should the court side with the keeping with DNA samples from the innocent, what then? Does this suddenly make it ‘all right’?

I don’t think so.

Britain should be the most just place, the most fair place, and the second you have to go to another court, in another country, something very important is lost; confidence in British Justice.