The Libertarian Party Manifesto is the only party manifesto that has an extensive section dedicated to Home Education. You should read it, so see what the other parties should have included in their documents.

Home Education

The Party will dismantle barriers to Elective Home Education, including the repeal of new measures being planned by other parties in or out of government.

Although the Party will be implementing a Voucher System roughly along the lines implemented in Sweden[1], this will not mirror any clamp-down or coercive programme directed towards Home Educators that exists there. One of the cornerstones for us as a Party is to dismantle monopolies, not remove one only to replace it with another.

This raises important issues in regards to the funding of Home Education. We need to strike a balance between preserving the freedom of parents and children with that of Taxpayers, who, we must never forget, are being coerced and forced to fund government spending on pain of imprisonment.

On the one hand parents may wish to be free from any State control, while Taxpayers have a right to expect the State to spend their taxes prudently. The nub is “prudently”, as it immediately becomes a value judgment and a collectivised one at that.

Our position is that we would not prevent people Home Educating, nor would be demand any kind of “notification” across the board, which can rapidly become a Trojan Horse for State control[2].

However, should the Educator request that the taxpayer fund such education – take the State’s Shilling as it were – there would need to be evidence that the funding was in fact delivering an education [3]. It is

unreasonable for anyone to demand no strings funding from the Taxpayer and we feel that genuine Home Educators will understand this point completely.

In exchange for Taxpayer funding we would expect, in almost all cases[4], improvements in literacy and numeracy over time, where literacy is one of reading, writing, comprehension and critical reasoning. We are not interested in curriculum specifics and to be so would be irrational – one of the reasons some choose Home Education is due to their rejection of a centrally controlled and imposed curriculum, regardless of if that centre is National, County, City, Borough or even Parish[5].

Should even this be unacceptable to some Home Educators, they will always be at liberty to decline the funding and its attendant measurements for a period of time or throughout. Our Policy will not demand “all or nothing”, “now or forever not” or “once and forever more” conditionality upon the funding, which would be coercive, in our view, and may distort decision-making.

In summary, it is not unreasonable to expect that Taxpayer funded spending come with strings attached, but that one shall be free to decline the funding and, consequently, the strings. Educational funding is no exception.

[1] This differs from the Conservative Party approach, which still retains central control, commissioning, granting and approval powers. Fake, in other words.

[2] The idea of notification has been touted by others, including the Liberal Democrats:

The unasked question: is the “present job” of the Local Authority necessary, correct or beneficial? What is also ironic is that there are cases where the education of children by the Local Authority in schools is “of poor quality or non existent” and that is sometimes the motivation for Parents or Guardians to embark on Home Education in the first place. The problem with notification is that it rapidly becomes registration then an approval process – “granted until refused” then “refused until granted” – backed by monitoring, box ticking, targets, curricula and logistics such as teaching environment. The conceit of many that the State “owns” children, “knows best” or they need to be tagged/tracked like livestock is not lost on the Libertarian Party. We reject such self-serving notions.

[3] Blank cheques will create all manner of unintended consequences when one considers that a child might “yield” £’000’s pa in cash each year for a parent.

[4] In some cases this might not apply due to the particular child and this must be taken into account.

[5] It is important to remember that under the Libertarian Party approach to a Voucher System with its removal of barriers to the formation of educational establishments and micromanaging thereof, Educators will be free to form their own arrangements including whatever level of cooperation they are comfortable with, up to and including no longer being “Home” Educators once educational establishments form that meet their needs or forming such themselves.

[…]

http://lpuk.org/

I just watched the first installation of ‘Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking’, and it contained a schoolboy howler that made me laugh out loud.

At the end of the programme, Mr Hawking suggests that travelling at near the speed of light is ‘Time Travel’, which of course it is not, it is time dilation, not quite the same thing as exiting the present and arriving instantly in the future at a point in time of your own choosing. The phrase ‘time dilation’ is not mentioned in the segment. Discovery dumbing down much?

In any case, here is a transcript of this lol inducing howler:

If we want to travel into the future, we simply need to go fast. REALLY fast.

And I think the only way we are ever likely to do that is by going into space.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached twenty five thousand miles per hour.

But to travel in time, well have to go more than two thousand times faster. And to do that, we’d need a much bigger ship. a truly enormous machine.

The ship would have to be big to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate to nearly the speed of light.

Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require just six years at full power.

The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy, but gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances.

In just one week, it would have reached the outer planets, gas giants like Neptune.

After two years, it would reach half light speed and would be far outside our solar system.

Two years later, it would be travelling at 90% of the speed of light speed, and passing our closest neighbour Alpha Centauri.

Around thirty trillion miles away from earth, and four years since launch the ship begins to travel in time.

[…]

Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking: Time Travel

My emphasis.

Now compare this with the words of a Scientist who has some understanding about this subject:

There have been a number of studies published showing that staged fission and fusion deep space propulsion systems are capable of round trips to near-by stars in a shorter time then an average life span. Chemical rockets would be used to launch starships into orbit or to the moon for re-launching from there because of the greatly reduced energy requirements on the moon. Clever design would be employed such as was used by the Lunar landing program. Full advantage would be taken of very “free loading” possibility just as the Apollo vehicle takes advantage of the earth’s rotation to the east near the equator and of the gravitational field of the moon and of staged rockets which fire in programmed succession on the way and on counting on earth’s atmosphere to slow it down rather then carrying and firing retro-rockets to slow it down on the way back.

The final weight and cost depend almost entirely on the design assumptions rather than (as academic calculations so often assume) being independent of those design features. An early study of the required launch weight of a chemical rocket capable of sending a man to the moon and back concluded that the launch weight would have to be a million, million tons. The launching was accomplished less then thirty years later with a chemical rocket weighing three hundred million times less.

Stanton Friedman

Oh dear me. Even with this example on the record and many others to hand, Mr Hawking makes this ridiculous howler of a statement that we would need a ‘really big ship to carry all that fuel’.

Here is Stanton Friedman again, making it even more clear how absurd Hawking’s idea is:

We can go to the scientific record (where) there have been loads of papers published… what a track record it is for the astronomy community!

Back in 1903 a great american astronomer Simon Newcombe (October 1903) published a paper in which he showed that the only way man would ever fly would be with the help of a lighter and air vehicle (a balloon); that was two months before the Wright Brothers first flight.

When he heard about the flight his comment was, “well, maybe a pilot but never carrying passengers”. We know how right he was.

Another great astronomer in the twenties said that (proved mathematically) that it would be impossible ever to give anything sufficient energy to get it into orbit around the earth. You do not have to look far to know how wrong that was.

My favourite though is a Canadian astronomer, Dr. Cambell, 1941; he was sick and tired of all this science fiction stuff about going to the Moon, so he did a scientific paper in which he tried to calculate the required initial launch weight of a rocket, just a chemical rocket, able to get a man to the Moon and back. Thats a legitimate question; how big would it have to be?

Pages of equations, bottom line; the required initial launch weight of a chemical rocket able to get a man to the Moon and back would be a million million tonnes. Now even for me, thats too big. But isn’t it interesting that less than thirty years later we got three guys to the moon and back, still with a chemical rocket, whose initial weight (one of the members of the Saturn family) initial launch weight wasn’t a million million tonnes, it was three thousand tonnes; he was off by a factor of three hundred million!

How could he be so far off? He made all the wrong assumptions.

How could such a respected academic professor be so far off in his calculations?

He wasn’t the first and he certainly won’t be the last.

His problem was that he made all the wrong assumptions, because he didn’t know anything about space travel. Thats what aeronautical engineers are for. For example, he assumed a single stage rocket; none of our manned launches have been done with single stage rockets. Two three stages, more like, saves alot on weight. He assumed a limit of one g acceleration for the rocket. How certainly we can all withstand one g but the astronauts who get on these babies are sometimes subjected to 5,6,7 Gs the escape tower on the old apollo spacecraft and the mercury and so forth, if the astronauts have to come off the rocket real quick because there was a problem down below, they would have to take 13 Gs. Without damage either, it was expected. That makes an enormous difference. He assumed we launch straight up; well anybody knows that you bend over pretty quick to launch to the east, you do alot of ‘cosmic freeloading’.

Another example of freeloading, something we do on all our deep space shots incidentally, is he assumed quirt correctly that when you came back to earth from the moon you would of corse have to slow down; you are going 25,000 miles per hour that not a good landing speed. But he assumed the only way you could do that would be to turn the rocket around and fire the retro rocket to slow you down, but of course every pound of propellant we use at the end has to be launched form the earth at the beginning, slowed down when we get to the moon launched from the moon, most of it slowed down back here. It takes at least ten pounds of propellant per pound of payload to move it from each of these steps.

What do we do?

We get smart instead of powerful.

We say the atmosphere is already here; lets use it. We convert the problem from brute force into hitting the atmosphere at just the proper angle; it doesn’t take any propellant at the end of the trip. So, he was far off, no question about that, but can you get here from there or not?

From Stanton Friedman’s ‘Flying Saucers are Real‘

And so there you have it. Stephen Hawking could not be more wrong about this, just as Simon Newcombe and Dr Cambpell were so very wrong. Travelling to other star systems in a timely manner does not mean pushing a space craft like an oarsman rows a boat on the Cam. How do we know this? Because we pay attention.

Another howler was the idea that worm holes are impossible because of ‘feedback’. The first feedback example he gave involved an amplifier. Then this was transposed onto a wormhole in a scientist’s lab. What he failed to explain was where the amplifier was (is) that prevents worm holes from being possible. In fact, we know that entropy causes everything to lose energy; that should prevent worm holes from getting into a screeching feedback loop. Also, if the worm hole was far away from the point of origin, there would be no feed back at all if we use his speaker, amplifier, microphone analogy; it is only when the speaker and the microphone are in close proximity, with an amplifier, that you get feedback. Move either the speaker or the microphone away a sufficient distance and the feedback stops immediately. Presumably you could move the exit away in either space or time to stop this problem.

What these conventional thinkers hate when they address this particular subject are predestination paradoxes and other ‘problems’ that are not really problems at all, but states arising from bad assumptions.

It is the same with the UFO problem; they just cannot bear the idea of extraterrestrials coming here and usurping their positions in this backward society. To stop this from happening, they create all manner of false barriers to aliens getting here to make themselves feel good. It was the same motivation that caused the deniers of the heliocentric system to reject the truth that the Earth orbited the Sun.

That is not scientific thinking!

A lurking parent sent this in:

Europe presses UK to introduce total ban on smacking children
The Council of Europe says London needs to comply with 1998 ruling that said smacking violates children’s rights

The UK will come under increasing pressure to ban all smacking and corporal punishment of children as the European human rights body steps up pressure for a change in the law.

The Council of Europe – which monitors compliance with the European convention on human rights – will criticise the UK because it has not banned smacking more than 10 years after a ruling in 1998 that the practice could violate children’s rights against inhuman and degrading treatment.

Could violate ‘children’s rights’?

As you know, there is no such thing as ‘children’s rights’; this idea is nothing more than a pretext for the state to become the ultimate parent of all children.

All of you people who subscribe to the concept of ‘non violent parenting‘ might cheer the EU on this matter, but beware; first they tell you that you cannot discipline your child through a slap, then they will tell you that your child has the ‘right’ to go to school against your wishes, and you will have no where to turn to to stop it.

In fact, anything that your child wants that you do not want to give it will be a cause for the state to intervene; after all, they have a right to the internet, to TV, to school, to live without discipline, to sex, to eat whatever they like, and rights to things you cannot imagine that they have a right to.

You let them in on this issue and you can forget bringing up your children in your own way. Period.

“The campaign to abolish corporal punishment across the Council of Europe is gathering momentum; 20 countries have formally abolished laws allowing it in the past three years,” said Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, deputy secretary general of the Council of Europe.

Obviously it doesn’t matter how many countries introduce something, that does not confer legitimacy to their actions.

“The UK is one of the countries that has not yet implemented a full ban. In part, this is because the traditional parent-child relationship in the UK is one of authority [and] state intervention into family affairs is still not welcome,” she added.

and quite right too. There is no reason why that should change. The French, Germans, Dutch, Belgians and all the rest of them can do whatever they like in their own countries. There is no reason whatsoever that Britain should adopt this insanity.

We are talking about fundamental human rights,”

No, you are not. You are talking about a fallacious, fictional and dangerous fantasy ‘Children’s Rights’, which are a statists dream.

The state, through its role as the protector of these imaginary rights becomes the parent and owner of all children. The state controls all children, parents are sidelined and the fabric of human culture is re woven to include the toxic thread of the state as the strength of the cloth. It is pure, unadulterated evil.

she said. “Not only do children have the same human rights as adults, but they are more vulnerable than adults. They need more protection and not less.”

This is a very clever lie.

Children do have the same rights as adults, but they are a special form of property partly because they are vulnerable. The proper people to have the property rights in a child are the people who created it. It is not moral, natural or correct that the state should seize children and own them or exercise powers and property rights in children.

Children need protecting FROM the state not BY the state.

Current law prohibits the use of force against children,

Unless that force is being used by the state, which has a monopoly on the use of force and violence.

but gives adults in the home and in some part-time schools and religious institutions a defence to the charge of assault in cases of mild force where they can show the punishment was reasonable.

Corporal punishment is a very useful tool to maintain discipline in a school or the home. You can choose to use it or not as a parent. You can choose to send your child to a school where it is used to maintain order. That is your business; it is not the affair of the state.

The first ban on smacking was not introduced in the UK until 1987, then extended to independent schools in 1999. Further laws passed in the past decade have prohibited the use of corporal punishment in children’s homes and state care.

And now, children are running, literally wild in the streets, raping teachers, knifing them and everything imaginable and unimaginable beneath those crimes. Children who are properly disciplined from the off do not do any of this, and that is why schoolchildren in the 1950’s were so well behaved; they knew that if they got out of line there would be hell to pay.

Since 2004, the law has changed further to make it harder for parents, or adults “in loco parentis”, to use the defence of reasonable punishment when they could otherwise be charged with assault.

And Britain is suffering the consequences of this insanity.

Concerns remain about smacking at home and in part-time educational institutions such as weekend faith schools, where adults using “reasonable force” can avoid prosecutions. Last month, Sir Roger Singleton, the government’s independent adviser on child safety, published a report that recommended smacking should be banned in all places outside the home, citing particular concern about part-time schools and places of worship.

I wonder what Roger Singleton recommends to return discipline to schools? Why are these people so very keen to interfere with the private business of individuals? The sooner they are all consigned to the dustbin of history the better.

“Protection against physical punishment should be extended to all forms of care, education and instruction outside the family,” Singleton said.

‘Bollocks’ as a wise Home Educator once said to me.

However, the report stopped short of recommending a change in the law that allows parents to use corporal punishment within the home.

“I have concluded that any attempt to define those family categories or circumstances to which the availability of the defence ought or ought not to apply would be cumbersome, bureaucratic, largely impractical and very difficult to communicate,” Singleton said.

Interesting… WHY? They have no problem trying to pass legislation allowing them to enter the homes of people who Home Educate, why not do the same for this? Because there are too many properly operating families left in the country, and such a move would cause widespread anger that they just do not want to deal with. The incandescent rage of the Home Educators shone like a dawn before a hot summer day. Millions of parents in revolt to the same level would be like midday on Mercury in comparison.

None of the three main parties have any specific policy on corporal punishment in their election manifestos.

The BNP are for corporal punishment. You should read their manifesto (PDF), I guarantee you someone else is reading it, and agreeing with it.

Earlier this year, two Liberal Democrat MPs attempted to introduce a clause in the children, schools and families bill which would have limited the lawful use of corporal punishment to parents and those with parental responsibility.

You see? TOTAL LIB DEM FAIL once again! These people are your mortal enemies.

Spare the rod, spoil the child!

Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, has indicated that the government would support a ban on smacking outside the family, but not a full ban.

Why not?

This is the same bastard that wants your children to go to school because he believes that you are a child abuser if you do not send your children to be in his fat necked care.

“Sir Roger’s report makes it absolutely clear that a child should not be smacked by anyone outside their family.

Why not? If that task is delegated to another person, it is none of the business of the state. Children know that they are immune from discipline whey they are out of the home, that is why they are running wild!

I believe this is a sensible and proportionate approach,” Balls said. But the Council of Europe is increasingly critical of the UK’s approach, likening the campaign to the move towards the abolition of the death penalty.”Specific places cannot be exempt from rights,” said De Boer-Buquicchio. “Rights pertain to human beings wherever they are and in whatever circumstances and whatever the setting.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/25/law-reform-smacking-europe-uk

This is nothing like the death penalty. This is about controlling families in a completely unacceptable way, not banning a form of punishment that only the state can mete out.

Don’t be fooled by total scumbag Mr. Balls and his suddenly pro family stance; this is merely for the election. If he were to return to his office, he would go hog wild for implementing this evil ban and reintroducing his noxious bill to eradicate Home Education.

To my utter dismay, there are ACTUALLY PEOPLE WHO ARE INTENDING TO VOTE LABOUR!

It beggars belief!

UPDATE!

One of the great revelations of Libertarianism is the correction it makes to crucial words that are used in the English language. ‘Taxation’ is in actuality ‘theft’. ‘War’ is more properly called ‘mass murder’. ‘Conscription’ is, named correctly, ‘slavery’. All of these things and more, when they are called what they really are, can be put into the proper perspective so that you can think about them correctly. Without knowing what words really mean, you cannot start to come to a proper conclusion of any kind about the issues surrounding them. The same is true about the word ‘violence’.

To get to the bottom of this, we need to separate the world of adults from the world of children, and we need to define the terms.

Adults using force against each other is violence. Two men in a boxing ring thrashing it out is NOT violence, and neither is fencing, rugby or any other contact sport. Violence is a physical act of aggression committed by an adult against another, unwilling, non consenting adult.

A parent whipping a child is chastisement, not violence. Chastisement is completely different to violence between adults, where one adult profits in some way from the injury or coercion or damage done to another adult. In chastisement, the child benefits from the lesson imparted by the pain involved in the punishment.

For example, when a young child is walking with its mother down the street and she sees a ball in the middle of the road, she may (if she has not yet learned this lesson) run into the street to retrieve it, putting herself in mortal danger. When a child does this, the first response is for the mother to intone ‘NO!’ in a stern voice. Then, if the child bolts for the ball again, the mother intones ‘NO!’ accompanied by a sound slap. After a lesson like that, any normal child would forever more refrain from running into the road. That is the purpose of chastisement; to reinforce the gravity of a wrong act, its danger etc etc. Understanding by words is sometimes not enough to overcome the will to have fun, and this is where chastisement can communicate gravity where words are insufficient.

Chastisement and punishment are not violence in the context of the parent and its child.

We have all heard the phrase, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”. That neatly sums up what the true nature of chastisement is; violence, apart from being adults against adults (equal classes of human being), hurts the victim more than the aggressor, and this is by design. Of course, in the case of chastisement there is no victim, since chastisement is beneficial and is done out of love, and not out of the desire for gain.

Thinkers on this subject must be very careful about conflating the adult world, its relationships and interactions which are peer to peer, with the world of parents and their children which is one of owner of property to property.

This property based relationship makes obvious the fact that if an adult who is not the parent of a child, spanks a child without the permission of the parent, that is an act of violence. Only the parent has the right to use or authorise the use of chastisement upon its children. All other adults have no right to punish or chastise or command a child, unless of course, that child is is infringing the property rights of that adult.

It is incoherent and incomplete thinking, a fundamental lack of understanding of English and a mixing up of the adult world and the world of children and parents that started the entirely evil ‘children’s rights’ movement. The relationship between parents and children cannot and should not be conflated with adult relationships. As soon as you do that, you immediately end up with ‘children’s rights’, ‘hearing the voice of the child’, children ‘choosing their own religion’ and all other nonsense like that, all enforced by the state.

Children are not free in the way that adults are free. Children and adults are not equatable in this respect, since one is a special case of the property of the other.

Man’s domestic relationships and rules are of course, his own affair. Many parents today accept behaviour from their children which is appalling, shocking and incomprehensible to some. So be it. When those children misbehave in the streets, everyone knows who to blame. When they cannot sit still in a restaurant, everyone knows who to blame. When they climb upon statues and run hog wild in museums while on group outings we know who to blame. When they scream at the top of their lungs in a supermarket or other public place, we know who to blame. When they constantly interrupt, force the parent to take them out of a public space because they are completely hysterical and out of control… we know who to blame.

Often the parents of such feral children are apologetic and embarrassed when their children go wild; it causes the observer of such bad behaviour to silently ask the question, “Why are you embarrassed? This is the type of child you are rearing with your style of parenting, you have nothing to explain to anyone, so why are you blushing with shame and embarrassment when your child ‘flips out’ in public?”.

The fact of the matter is those parents who have children that do not know how to behave and who have no boundaries know perfectly well that their children are in fact poorly reared, and they are embarrassed because they know that their children’s disorderly behaviour reflects poorly on them. This is especially true when there are children who are properly parented side by side with wild children. You can see it everywhere; when well behaved children are called, “time to go home!” in a park they obey without question and get ready to go. The bad children whine, the really bad children start to cry, le méchant throw a tantrum and les Enfant terrible fling themselves on the floor in complete hysterics. Allowing your child to expose this sort of revolting behaviour to other people is simply disgusting. To some. Parents get to know what parks to go to and which to avoid, and which families to avoid also.

But I digress.

If we really want to change the world for the better, we all need to know our boundaries and stay within them. We might also consider the sort of children we are going to unleash on the world, and make sure the parenting that is provided to them imparts discipline as well as an understanding of what the world really is and what free people are. I have deliberately not touched on the subject of obedience; it is clearly tightly linked to chastisement and its application. This whole area contains many elements that make it difficult to strike a balance for some, especially since it involves your offspring and an uncertain future that is almost certainly going to be filled with bad people. There is no greater teacher than experience, and for those that have more than one child, it gets easier as time goes on, and those in extended families have it even better.

One thing we can say for sure is this; all aspects of parenting are a strictly private affair and its completely up to you to parent in whatever way you feel is appropriate. It is also up to you to pick and choose who you associate with; those parents with children who are intolerable to one group are either included or excluded from your social circle and that is the end of it. This is perfectly natural; “birds of a feather, flock together”. As long as no one tries to force you to live like them, or accept behaviour that is repulsive to you, everyone can live in peace, share information, share public spaces, opinions and enjoy their lives. It is only when someone thinks they are right and then tries to make you obey them that trouble starts.

Another paid / placed-through-bribery article by the ubiquitous anonymous writer at the BBC is selling a TV programme for The Discovery Channel. The same article appears in the Telegraph.

The programme is about aliens, and as usual, if this regurgitated PR is anything to go by, it is going to be full of the same unscientific nonsense as all mainstream media ‘documentaries’ about this very interesting subject. In fact, a more interesting documentary would be about the reactions of people who believe they are scientists to the subject of UFOs.

Here we go!

Aliens almost certainly exist but humans should avoid making contact, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.

TOO LATE!

1. Aliens already know we are here
2. They have made extensive contact on many levels
3. There is nothing that any human can do about it

In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was “perfectly rational” to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere.

And so, by proclamation, it is all of a sudden ‘rational’ to assume that intelligent life exists elsewhere. ALL HAIL THE HIGH PRIEST, WHO RELEASES US FROM OUR DARKNESS!

The next barrier for the ‘rational’ to break through is to accept that alien life has been here, is here, and that there is nothing the Gods of Science® can do about it. Most of them cannot even find the balls to discuss it, such is their total fear of this subject and its implications for their status.

But he warned that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources, then move on.

There is absolutely no basis for this statement whatsoever.

They just as likely might treat the Earth like an amusement park or a zoo. They could use it as a laboratory. They could quarantine it. They could use it for any conceivable or inconceivable purpose. The point is that when non scientists (Sagan, Schostack, Blackmore, etc etc) talk about aliens, we must remember that they have refused on principle to look at any of the good UFO evidence. They take the posture of ostriches, don the robes of high priests, and make proclamations. These people are not in any way read in this subject, they know, literally, nothing about it, are not scientific in their thinking and should be scrutinised when they talk about it.

One thing is for sure; if aliens can get here, they can reach practically any star they like, either in person or with robotic craft. There is no need for them to come and ‘raid’ the Earth. For WHAT exactly? All the minerals you could possibly want can be found on other planets or synthesized…. the idea that they would come here only to steal is COMPLETELY ABSURD, leaving out completely the fallacious idea that human beings are the first owners of this planet and its resources. For all we know, some alien race might have a prior claim, having terraformed this place for their own use. Who knows? One thing is for sure, to superimpose human frailty, culture, nonsense, ignorance, technology, economics and rationale onto alien races is fraught with dangers. Attributing your petty primitive motives to other people (and they are people) is the precursor to misunderstanding and calamity.

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.

I actually agree with this, but not for the reasons that Mr. Hawking is suggesting. Columbus landing in America was one group from the same species encountering another less advanced group. The more advanced group was a criminal gang of primitive murderers and looters, not scientists. Primitive murderer looters kill and steal. That is completely different to scientists from another species and planet coming to collect plants and animals for study.

The danger from alien contact will be (and I have written about this before) the complete abandonment of human culture in favour of alien culture.

You think we have it bad now with a multiplicity of religions and nut-cases, imagine what would happen if and advanced race of beings landed here and gave us their book of philosophy. Billions of people would switch to it… after all, “it is SUPERIOR is it not” will be the rationale.

In the space of a few years, the world of humans would be changed forever, the culture of man discarded for the culture of other beings, and if not discarded, distorted beyond all recognition.

May God forbid it.

Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact.

What professor Hawking thinks does not amount to a hill of beans. He doesn’t know the facts of this matter, has not done his homework, is literally ignorant about this subject and is years behind the curve.

He explained: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Actually this is not the case at all. We only have to look at good science fiction to see how intelligent life might develop into something that we would want to meet that is very different to us; so different that it would be difficult to communicate with them on the most basic of levels, even though we might share technologies with them. Try reading Joe Haldeman’s ‘The Forever War‘ to find out about that. I’m sure you can think of your own examples, science fiction fans.

In the past probes have been sent into space with engravings of human on board and diagrams showing the location of our planet.

Radio beams have been fired into space in the hope of reaching alien civilisations.

Prof Hawking said: “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.

When you do the math with your mathematical brain, you have to do all of the math to the end and not stop at the equals sign, or two levels up from the final balanced equation. You do not get the full marks for saying x² = y²; you only get 100% for the final answer of x = y. Hawking and his science cult devotees and junior priests all do the math that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that intelligent aliens must exist, but then they refuse to finish the calculations that would prove that they are, without a doubt, here, right now, which would then make obvious the conclusion that what we should be doing is looking for them here.

Finishing the equation means coming to a set of conclusions that will give us a set of predicted phenomena to look for. If we start to detect these phenomena, and then rule out all other explanations, then we may have found them. One thing is for sure, if it is taboo even to look, they will never be discovered, even though they might be right over your heads every day.

“The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

No, it is not. The real challenge is to break through the despicable, unscientific and shameful wall of ridicule and irrationality that prevents the scientific method from being applied to this subject.

The programme envisages numerous alien species including two-legged herbivores and yellow, lizard-like predators.

Back to the PR for the programme. CGI Porn!

Another picture from that set is on the Telegraph article. Taryn Fritz PR (or whoever it is) is doing a sterling job.

I am now going to make a scientific hypothesis combining my observations of fractal geometric forms and the results of the small amount of space exploration that man has managed to do between his murderous rampages.

In three dimensional space living and non living forms are to a large extent self similar, with a large amount of variety. Meteor craters always take on the same shape, as do crystals, fish and anything else you can mention. There is variety in these objects, but they are all self similar.

We have seen that on other planets, craters look like craters on earth. The same goes for all geologic artefacts like weathering and any geologic form you can mention.

Now. There is no reason to suppose that a creature that lives under water on Europa is not going to look like a crab or a fish or a giant deep-water volcanic vent tube worm. The chemistry of life doesn’t matter as much as the fact that the life has formed in three dimensions under gravity; all life that we are going to find will conform to shapes that we would recognise as life on Earth. If we find any life that does not fit any model that we are familiar with, then it is a pattern of a common form that we do not recognise, but which nonetheless is probably not unique. There have been forms of life on earth that no longer exist on Earth that bear littler or no relation to anything living, like the Hallucigenia.

The form of life will always alter to fit the gravity of its environment; this is the most important variable, over chemistry and pressure. Pressure doesn’t matter as much as gravity; crustaceans, worms, jellyfish, cephalopods and fish exist in variations under two tons per square inch. Chemistry doesn’t matter as much as gravity; we have found the badly named ‘extremophiles‘ that live under conditions that seemed ‘harsh’ to biologists trained to believe the false idea that life only exists in a very small gamut of ideal conditions.

You are not going to get bipeds in a zero gravity soup of life supporting chemistry. You will however, get snake forms and flagellating creatures on different scales.

On Europa, you are going to find crustaceans, worms, jellyfish, cephalopods and fish and all other sea forms that we are familiar with. That is a wager I will make with anyone.

The idea that extra terrestrial life is going to be drastically different to life on Earth is irrational; it is a part of the xenophobia that scientists have about alien life, where in every thought and utterance they seek to ‘push away’ alien life. They do this by saying that intelligent aliens cannot possibly get here in space craft. They do it by saying that alien life will not be anything like us, but instead will be totally unfamiliar to us. Both of these views are simply not true. Aliens that come here are humanoid shaped because that is one of the ideal shapes that intelligent forms end up in under gravity. As I explain above, all the other non intelligent shapes we are going to find will exhibit self similarity to the forms that we are familiar with.

Scientists still want to believe that humans are unique in the universe. This is a leftover from thousands of years of non understanding and religion. If they truly believed what they say about their quasi religious ‘Theory of Evolution’, they would not be dealing with this subject in this way.

But Prof Hawking conceded most life elsewhere in the universe is likely to consist of simple microbes.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8642558.stm

This is not scientific thinking.

The most abundant life on earth is microscopic and in the oceans. Does that mean that there are not billions of intelligent space faring creatures on the ‘dry’ parts of Earth? If the same proportion of ‘microbes’ to bipedal space faring creatures was replicated across only the Earth type planets, then there would be BILLIONS (Sagan voice) of bipedal, space faring intelligent beings in this galaxy, coming from worlds that are BILLIONS of years older than the Earth.

Once again, if you are a believer in the religion known as Evolution, it is irrational to believe that microbes can exist on a stable planet for billions of years without evolving into more complex intelligent life forms, and there are many planets in the galaxy that are much older than the Earth. On these planets, the Darwinists must concede that intelligent life would have an opportunity to develop there if it developed here, or, they must explain why the Earth is unique, which, by their own math, it cannot be.

These people have painted themselves into a corner. They have to admit that alien life exists or they cannot explain why life is here on Earth. They have to admit that complex alien life must exist, otherwise they cannot explain why it arose here on Earth. Finally, they have to concede that intelligent alien life must exist, otherwise, they have no explanation for intelligent life on Earth.

In the corner they have painted themselves into, stands a clutch of bipedal alien beings and their very odd transluminal space craft, waiting to confront them with their own ignorance.

All scientists who mocked the idea of bipedal aliens visiting the Earth will be utterly discredited forever and consigned to the ranks of the people who burned Giordano Bruno, or who those foolish cultists who laughed at the people in the list at the bottom of this post.

The programme makes a concession to the reality of ‘Spacefaring Aliens’ where “…a fleet of “nomadic” aliens enters a wormhole opened with technologies that are beyond human comprehension.” but once again it fails to do the final part of the math; given the huge numbers of alien races that MUST exist, and the fact that they WILL be space exploring, and that they are BILLIONS of years ahead of man in age, with technology that we can not comprehend, the inescapable conclusion is that they ARE capable of getting here, they DO get here REGULARLY and the ETH explanation of the UFO phenomenon is CORRECT.

Google ‘not interested’ in privacy, say information tsars

Google has repeatedly shown a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information about its users, the privacy officials from 10 major countries have said.

Britain’s Information Commissioner Chris Graham and equivalent officials from Canada, France, Germany and Italy were among the signatories to a letter to the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, which condemned the way the company has delivered both its Streetview mapping service and its Buzz product, which was conceived as a rival to social network Facebook.

The letter, organised by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, calls on Google to lay out how it will meet concerns about its use of public data in the future, and says that it has “violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information”. The search giant has already acted to address a number of the points now raised in the letter, but said that it had no further statements to make on its privacy policies.

The launch of the Buzz network in February sparked an international wave of protests because it took information about email users’ most common correspondents and automatically built each individual a network of followers. This meant that links which people wished to keep private could immediately become public.

Google Streetview, which provides an eye-level picture of almost every street in dozens of cities around the world, continues to cause “concern about the adequacy of the information [Google] provides before the images are captured”, the commissioners said. The product has also been launched some countries “without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms”, they added.

In a statement Google said that it had quickly rectified the problems that caused Buzz users concern. “We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today’s letter,” the search company said. “Of course we do not get everything 100% right. We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect, and how we use it, as well as to build meaningful controls into our products.“

The commissioners, however, said that they “remain extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues [as Buzz] was launched in the first place”.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7612988/Google-not-interested-in-privacy.html

The hypocrisy of the state is a bottomless well full of the excrement of a thousand years of violence, theft, lies and bastardy. They “remain extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues [as Buzz] was launched in the first place”. What an extraordinary statement, especially coming from the people who issue mandatory Passports, ID Cards, forced enrolment in ContactPoint and all the other harmful things that these states have deployed, knowing full well in advance that they were harmful to the privacy of the people who would be forced into being violated by them.

Lets think about what Google DOES NOT DO, compared to what these states DO DO.

Google does not:

• FORCE people into a National Identity Register, where your fingerprints are taken BY FORCE.
• Operate a system of MANDATORY passports where if you want to exercise your right to travel, you need their permission in advance.
• FORCE people to apply for and carry a driver’s license to drive their own cars
• FORCE people to carry an ID Card when they leave their own houses
• FORCE people to ‘register’ their children at birth
• FORCE people’s children onto databases like ContactPoint
• FORCE people to reveal their private banking transactions to facilitate theft
• FORCE private companies to violate the privacy of their users
• SPY on people’s telephone conversations
• SPY on people’s emails
• READ people’s snail mail to spy on them
• FORCE people to be locked into their violations and predations with no opt out
• FORCE people to _________ their own ________ so that they can __________

Google is a provider of VOLUNTARY SERVICES that exist on a PRIVATE NETWORK OF COMPUTERS that is the internets. In this respect, they are absolutely moral, clean and without blemish of any kind. You do not like their services? Go to Yahoo, Hotmail or the devil for all they care. Google will not hunt you down with guns and murder you for refusing their voluntary services, unlike the state.

All of these purely evil people, namely Jennifer Stoddart Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Alex Türk? Chairman, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (France), Peter Schaar? Commissioner, Bundesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit (Germany), Billy Hawkes ?Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, Yoram Hacohen ?Head of the Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority, Francesco Pizzetti? Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (Italy), Jacob Kohnstamm? Chairman, College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens (Netherlands)?Chairman Article 29 Working Party, Marie Shroff ?Privacy Commissioner, New Zealand, Artemi Rallo Lombarte? Director, Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (Spain), Christopher Graham? Information Commissioner and Chief Executive (United Kingdom)

Are ALL guilty of working for criminal and immoral organisations that routinely steal, murder and violate the property and privacy of hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis. There is no escaping this, and they have a huge amount of PURE GALL attacking Google in this way.

When these idiotic, violent, violating, computer illiterate agents of the state offer:

giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honouring their requests in a timely way.

so that the state has none of the information they hold on citizens, THEN and ONLY THEN will they be in a position to say ANYTHING to Google. The state should not have a monopoly on privacy violation; this is what it has now, and that is unacceptable to any decent person with a properly formulated code of ethics.

While we are at it, we must make special mention of Germany and Canada, who outlaw speech that they find objectionable. Obviously (you read BLOGDIAL after all) you know that what anyone feels about a particular speaker is irrelevant. Freedom of speech is a non negotiable absolute. It is entirely illegitimate for the state to proscribe strings of words.

But I digress.

These people, these unproductive, unethical parasites, have a hell of a nerve writing a letter to a company that provides a useful and completely voluntary service to anyone who wants it.

People do not like being on streetview. This is understandable. If all the roads were private, then streetview would be impossible. The people who own the streets would have the right to exclude the streetview cars from travelling down their roads. Libertarians WIN again!

Of course, this would not stop people making drawings of what is on a street and publishing them; those would be just as useful as photographs and would not violate anyone’s privacy.

Thankfully, Google has some balls:

As we have written before, there are definitely questions to be asked over the privacy implications of StreetView and the so-called ‘joined-up’ online world Google is creating with phone, email. social networking, GPS mapping and, potentially, medical records all being held on the database of one large multinational company.

Well, it seems that Google took the accusations to heart and – in a wonderfully catty reaction – has today published a a tool that shows how often governments around the world have either asked it for data on users or asked that data be removed from Google search results.

This ‘Government requests tool’ (click here to view the fascinating table) reveals some very interesting results. As explained by tech site V3.co.uk:

Top of the list of user information requests is Brazil with 3,663 inquiries, reflecting the strength of Google’s Orkut social networking system in that country. The US comes second with 3,580 requests and the UK third with 1,166, the highest in Europe by a considerable margin.

Brazil also tops the lists of information removal, with 291 requests. Germany comes second with 188 and India third with 142, edging out the US, which made 123 requests.

Congratulations should go out to Google for publishing this table and revealing the extent to which Governments around the world are prepared to lean on internet-based companies – and potentially control what we see on the web. Congratulations are also due to our Information Commissioner for recognising the privacy issues with StreetView etc.

It further proves that it is not just state databases we should be concerned about.

[…]

http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2010/04/google-reacts-to-government-privacy-complaints.html

Actually, Big Brother Watch is wrong about the non state databases being something of concern; it is only the state’s mandatory access to private data that causes the problem, not the fact that company owned databases are used as a tool. If there were no state, there would be no threat from databases because it is the violence of the state that makes a database dangerous.

Google and more recently Talk Talk are demonstrating that they have some guts and are not willing to passively be the apparatus of the state.

At last, a ram amongst the sheep!

Environmental Hysteria

Because they know that the vast majority of Americans would reject their real agenda, the environmentalists use lies, exaggerations, and pseudo-science to create public hysteria.

EXXON: The environmental movement is cheering the criminal indictment of the Exxon Corporation for the Alaska oil spill, with the possibility of more than $700 million in fines. The one shortcoming, say the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is that Exxon executives won’t be sent to prison.

Exxon cannot be allowed to get away with an “environmental crime” which despoiled the “pristine wilderness of Alaska,” says Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. But the legal doctrine underlying this indictment is inconsistent with a free society, notes Murray N. Rothbard.

Under feudalism, the master was held responsible for all acts of his servants, intended or not. During the Renaissance with growing capitalism and freedom, the doctrine changed so there was no “vicarious liability.” Employers were correctly seen as legally responsible only for those actions they directed their employees to take, not when their employees disobeyed them. But today, we are back in feudal times, plus deeper-pocket jurisprudence, as employers are held responsible for all acts of their employees, even when the employees break company rules and disobey specific orders-by getting drunk on duty, for example. From all the hysteria, and the criminal indictment, one might think Exxon had deliberately spilled the oil, rather than being the victim of an accident that has already cost its stockholders $2 billion. Who is supposedly the casualty in the Justice Department’s “criminal” act? Oiled sand?

In fact, Exxon is the biggest victim. Through employee negligence, the company has lost $5 million worth of oil, a supertanker, and compensation to fishermen, or the cost of the clean up. The total bill could be $3 billion.

Yet every night on television, we were treated to maudlin coverage of oily water and blackened seagulls, and denunciations of Exxon and oil production in “environmentally sensitive” Alaska. Though why it is more sensitive than, say, New Jersey, we are never told. In fact, environmentalists love Alaska because there are so few people there. It represents their ideal.

Despite all the hysteria, oil is – if I may use the environmentalists’ own lingo – natural, organic, and biodegradable. As in previous oil spills, it all went away, and the birds, plants, and fish replenished themselves.

The Exxon oil spill was hardly the “equivalent of Hiroshima,” as one crazed Alaska judge said. And who knows? Oil might be good for some wildlife. This year, the salmon catch is almost 50% bigger than any time in history.

WETLANDS: One of the great engineering achievements of the ancient world was draining the Pontine Marshes, which enabled the city of Rome to expand. But no such project could be undertaken today; that vast swamp would be protected as wetlands.

When John Pozsgai – an emigrant from communist Hungary – tried to improve some property he found this out. After buying a former junkyard and clearing away the thousands of tires that littered it, Pozsgai put clean topsoil on his lot in Morrisville, PA. For this, the 57-year-old mechanic was sentenced to three years in prison and $200,000 in fines, because his property was classified as wetlands by the federal government.

After ordering a bureaucrat to “get the Hell off my property,” Pozsgai was arrested, handcuffed, and jailed on $10,000 bail. Quickly tried and convicted, Pozsgai’s brutal sentence will – said the prosecutor – “send a message to the private landowners, corporations, and developers of this country about President Bush’s wetlands policy.”

John Pozsgai has a different view: “I thought this was a free country,” he told The Washington Post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

From his priceless ‘Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto’

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

And if it happens, you KNOW WHAT TO DO…. NOTHING!

Here it is:

Chris Mounsey is right in what he thinks of course (except his views on copyright!), and all reasonable, rational people understand that he is free to use whatever language he wants on his blog, which is his personal property.

The entire English language is at his disposal to use in whatever way he sees fit. In my humble opinion, using expletives in a blog post is less offensive than mass murder and all the other revolting crimes of the state, or journalists who write pieces to excuse those crimes, or newspaper editors whose only purpose is to reinforce the system that makes mass murder possible.

Chris Mounsey is a free thinker. It is a badge of honour to be ridiculed by the likes of Andrew Neil:

Resistance to Liberty
We can now see that the rapid growth of the libertarian movement and the Libertarian party in the 1970s is firmly rooted in what Bernard Bailyn called this powerful “permanent legacy” of the American Revolution. But if this legacy is so vital to the American tradition, what went wrong? Why the need now for a new libertarian movement to arise to reclaim the American dream?

To begin to answer this question, we must first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests — the ruling classes — who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies.

[…]

In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.” Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of religion. It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between Church and State; the Church informed its deluded charges that the king ruled by divine command and therefore must be obeyed; in return, the king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church and State. The new liberal world was a world in which intellectuals could be secular — could make a living on their own, in the market, apart from State subvention.

To establish their new statist order, their neomercantilist corporate State, the new conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between intellectual and State. In an increasingly secular age, this meant with secular intellectuals rather than with divines: specifically, with the new breed of professors, Ph.D.’s, historians, teachers, and technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians, and engineers. This reforged alliance came in two parts. In the early nineteenth century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy. By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship the nation-state and its war-making machine. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism adopted the trappings of reason and of “science.” Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of society by technocratic “experts.” In exchange for spreading this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals was rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the New Order and as planners and regulators of the newly cartelized economy and society.

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

Rock on Chris Mounsey, and next time, bring your army with you!

Tom Chivers the Telegraph.co.uk’s “Strategic Events Editor”, ‘science nerd and pedant’ startles us by the stupidity of his unintelligent and pedestrian twaddle on UFOs:

Marvellous. An “American professor” has called for UFOs and other “unexplained phenomena” to be a university subject.

Science IS marvellous… what is your problem?

It’s in the US, not in Britain, mercifully,

Properly executed Scientific method not being practiced in the UK is a good thing?

although with our excellent range of pseudoscientific BSc options you feel it’ll only be a matter of time (the University of Westminster’s course in “Vibrational Medicine” is a case in point).

I smell a Saganite, Shostlackite skeptic. And it smells BAD.

I’ve put the words “American professor” in inverted commas, not because he isn’t really American or really a professor, but because it’s a direct quote from the news story. It’s a funny thing that being a professor – of any subject, at any university – seems to make you an authority on anything at all.

In the same way that a “Strategic Events Editor” makes you an expert on Science. I guess.

So Prof Philip Haseley, a professor of anthropology at the Niagara County Community College in New York State, is now held up as an expert on alien life.

He at least, appears to be a real scientist, which is quite different to a skeptic; skeptics are not scientific, they are religious fanatics in the cult of Science. This cult of science has its own dogma, its high priests and rabid followers, just like Tom Chivers, who is, apparently, a fully paid up member.

Let’s be clear: I’m not saying a belief in alien life per se is ridiculous. The debate over whether or not we are alone in the universe is huge and ongoing.

That debate is over; haven’t you heard?

The most famous tool we have is the Drake Equation,

Here comes the dogma!

which – using estimated figures like how many stars there are in the universe, how quickly they’re formed, how many planets they have on average, how many of those planets could support life (and how many of those then do), and so on – attempts to work out how many extraterrestrial civilisations we might, in principle, be able to communicate with.

One set of current figures puts that number at two, but that is highly controversial; a few minor tweaks to the estimated inputs can easily raise it as high as 20,000 or as low as 0.000065, which would imply that we are almost certainly alone in our stellar neighbourhood. This continuing argument is the basis of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which for 50 years has scanned the skies for signals which could only come from intelligent life (and there is, of course, a further argument over what that means).

Now lets hear from an actual, real scientist:

“Drake’s Brave Guess”. He waxed poetic about the Drake Equation, originated 45 years ago by radio astronomer Frank Drake (now co-director of the SETI Institute) which supposedly is a scientific approach to determining the number of civilizations in the galaxy capable of sending radio signals. The idea is that, if we just keep listening, we will make the great discovery that man is not alone in the galaxy. The reasoning is a great example of pseudo-science. The primary reason for the article was the fact that the new Allen Telescope Array with 42 dishes, each 20 feet in diameter, is just going on line at Hat Creek in Northern California.

Eventually there will be many more dishes. He really seems to believe the quaint notion that our best systems are on a par with alien civilizations’ best capabilities apparently assuming they would not have improved in what could easily be the billion years during which such systems have been around. I was using a slide rule 50 years ago. I don’t anymore. A laser printer is not just a better IBM Selectric Typewriter. Atomic bombs are not just bigger 10 ton block busters that were used earlier in WW 2.

Of course Shostak doesn’t mention that Hat Creek can’t tune into Southern sky alien radio transmitters,even assuming they are still transmitting using very old, for them, technology. In the “Zeta Reticuli Incident” by Terence Dickinson, which discusses Marjorie Fish’s very exciting research on the Betty Hill star map, it is noted that many sun like stars in the neighborhood can only be seen from below the equator.

Shostak presents the Sacred Drake equation and then plays dartboard physics to try to come up with values for such things as on what fraction of planets life develops; on what fraction of those intelligence develops; and on what fraction of those the ability to send radio signals develops and perhaps most important, the lifetime of a civilization.. Considering that we have data for some of these factors from one planet around one star in a galaxy of a few hundred Billion stars, one can see that this is just a mite of a stretch, a rather huge extrapolation. The galaxy may be 13 Billion years old and the sun is only about 4.5 billion years old. But Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, just 39 light years away, are a billion years older than the sun and just down the street.

[…]

http://www.theufochronicles.com/2006/06/drake-equation-by-stanton-t-friedman.html

My emphasis. Quoting Stanton Friedman is not an appeal to authority by the way, it is simply quoting facts. Here are some more facts about the Drake Equation:

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x fL = ?

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses — just so we’re clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing…

In the case of the Drake equation, we wind up with a formula that would be science if the values were known, but they aren’t so it doesn’t tell us anything. They may claim to use conservative estimates in their calculations, but if the value has no known basis then there’s no good reason to suggest the “guesstimate” is conservative or wildly optimistic. Of course, looking for ET to call home, or Earth, is not that serious a question so we cut the SETI folks some slack even though they are spending taxpayer money.

[…]

http://www.terrycolon.com/4features/quasi.html

And by the way SETI SHOULD be closed down, not only because it is junk science, but because it is being funded with stolen money. They should be cut no slack whatsoever, they should just be CUT.

But I digress.

But even if we assume the 20,000 figure, the nearest alien civilisation would probably be about 1,500 light years from Earth. So what Professor Haseley is proposing we take seriously is the following:

All true scientists take everything seriously. It is precisely the same sort of mocking and illogical posture that ‘scientists’ in the 1800’s took when they shouted down the real scientists who proposed that meteorites came from space.

1) That one or more alien civilisations have either developed vastly faster-than-light propulsion systems or flown for a minimum of 1,500 years across space to find us

This argument is faulty. First of all, it is like arguing that the only way to cross the atlantic in three hours is by building a boat that travels at twice the speed of sound. You do it in a plane, not a boat. There are probably many ways of travelling long distances that have nothing to do with the holy laws of physics (thou canst not travel faster than the speed of light. To say so is HERESY!). victims of such experimentation. It would look inexplicable, unfathomable, terrifying. It would leave marks, and of course, your fellow polar bears would say you were insane when you recounted the story. If polar bears could talk.

They’re big claims. And, as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

ALL HAIL SAINT SAGAN, SAGE OF SCIENCE, SOOTHSAYER, SKEPTIC, SAVIOUR – PARAGON OF REASON AND OUR GUIDING LIGHT!

And there is no such evidence.

That is a lie. One out of three.

The trouble with the whole field of “UFOlogy” is that it relies on a logical fallacy. “You can’t explain this photograph/video/experience”, say the UFOlogists, “therefore aliens did it.”

That is another lie. Two out of three.

It’s reminiscent of creationist logic – “you can’t explain this chemical pathway/complex organ/unfound fossil, therefore God did it”, and like creationist logic it cheapens what it wants to promote.

And yet another lie. Three for three.

It is a weak and attenuated religion that hides God in a dwindling supply of feeble, unexplained details, instead of seeing God in the whole glory of the universe; and it is a sad misrepresentation of the serious and important search for alien life to reduce it to conspiracy theory and nonsense.

I don’t know Prof Haseley, or the Niagara County Community College. Maybe the course will be sceptical and scientific. But I think the really interesting university course – and one more appropriate for a professor of anthropology – would be one examining why humanity has such a powerful urge to believe that they have seen ET. What is it in our psyche that needs to know we are not alone?

[…]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tomchivers/100007612/a-degree-course-in-ufology-cheapens-the-real-search-for-alien-life/

Here is an interesting question; how would a “Strategic Events Editor” recommend the release of information relating to the reality of UFOS as alien spacecraft, so that the minimum number of people goes insane when the trigger is pulled?

We may never get the answer to that one, but one thing is for sure, this particular “Strategic Events Editor” does not have the intellectual capacity to design that programme.

Another classic example of weak mindedness, poor logic, religious dogma masquerading as science and ostrich posturing.

Finally, science is not something that can be ‘cheapened’, at least, not in the minds of people who actually have an understanding of how science works.

The scientific method can be applied to anything. Your personal prejudices, deeply held superstitions, religious beliefs and childish thinking have no effect on what is and is not true. If someone is applying the scientific method to a subject that offends you, science is not in any way cheapened. This is the language of the religious fanatic; what this man is really saying is that studying UFOs is blasphemy and that the people who are doing it are fit only for ridicule and then excommunication.

The history of science is littered with this sort of bad behaviour:

• Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
• Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
• Baird, John L. (television camera)
• Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
• Bardeen & Brattain (transistor)
• Bretz J Harlen (ice age geology)
• Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
• Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
• Crick & Watson (DNA)
• Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
• Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
• Galvani (bioelectricity)
• Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
• Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
• Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
• Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
• Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
• Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
• Goethe (Land color theory)
• Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
• Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
• Lister, J (sterilizing)
• T Maiman (Laser)
• Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
• Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
• Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
• McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, “jumping genes”, transposons)
• Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
• Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
• Ohm, George S. (Ohm’s Law)
• Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
• Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
• Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
• Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
• Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
• Steen-McIntyre, Virginia (southwest US indians villiage , 300,000BC)
• Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, “Schumann” resonance)
• Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
• J H van’t Hoff (molecules are 3D)
• Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
• Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
• Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
• Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
• Zweig, George (quark theory)

and the very least we can expect from people with even one brain cell is caution when ridiculing a scientist. Not only does it serve no purpose, but you might just find yourself having to eat your hat.

Richard Dawkins has hatched a plot to arrest the head of a sovereign state. We are talking about the Pope, who is the head of state of the Vatican:

Vatican City /?væt?k?n ?s?ti/ (help·info), officially the State of the Vatican City (Italian: Stato della Città del Vaticano, pronounced [?sta(?)to del?a t?i?t?a del vati?ka(?)no]), is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, the capital city of Italy. It has an area of approximately 44 hectares (110 acres) (0.44 km2), and a population of just over 800.

Vatican City is a city-state that came into existence in 1929. It is distinct from the Holy See, which dates back to early Christianity and is the main episcopal see of 1.147 billion Latin and Eastern Catholic adherents around the globe. Ordinances of Vatican City are published in Italian; official documents of the Holy See are issued mainly in Latin. The two entities even have distinct passports: the Holy See, not being a country, only issues diplomatic and service passports; the state of Vatican City issues normal passports. In both cases the passports issued are very few.

The Lateran Treaty in 1929, which brought the city-state into existence, spoke of it as a new creation (Preamble and Article III), not as a vestige of the much larger Papal States (756-1870) that had previously encompassed central Italy. Most of this territory was absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, and the final portion, namely the city of Rome with a small area close to it, ten years later, in 1870.

[…]

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

The supremely deluded Dawkins and his followers object to living in a society where the people who rule over them use religion as the basis of the law making. Specifically, they are talking about monsters like Ruth Kelly, Roman Catholic with four children, member of Opus Dei, being in a position to create laws that they have to obey, set school curricula etc etc. They want to replace the de facto theocracy with a completely secular state, where religion has absolutely no influence or place.

The error that Dawkins and the other shrill and irrational types like him make is that they are concerning themselves with the wrong problem.

The problem with people being religious is not that they use their religious convictions to control others, but that there is a state in the first place that provides them with the power to control.

Dawkins’ partner in crime Christopher Hitchens, neocon, lover of the good life, is a to the bone statist. He is way beyond help, and it is a waste of electrons discussing him.

Dawkins on the other hand, claims to be a scientist. Any properly thinking scientist would by now have come to the correct conclusion that the state itself is the problem when it comes to religion ‘being the bane of humanity’. He should have reasoned by now that democracy can be used by any religious person, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, all of whom will bring their terrifying brand of thinking to the levers of the machine. In order to be free of these deluded people, you need to have no machine at all, or at the very least, a machine with a lever the size of a fly’s leg, so that no matter who has their hands on it, they cannot pump their religious poison into the minds of children and force their religious laws upon unwilling citizens.

Then there is the matter of the logic in arresting the Pope. This is like singing a song to put out a fire, or holding a candle lit vigil to stop a war. Arresting the Pope will do nothing to solve Dawkins’ problem of the power of religion over people. Even if the Pope is put in prison, the Bishops will simply elect a new one, and lo and behold, in a puff of smoke, there will be another Pope!

More than that, Dawkins now has billions of people wishing that he was dead, and many others openly calling him a coward for not attacking Islamic figureheads; of course, he doesn’t attack Muslims because he knows that they will hunt him down and cut his head off for the slightest provocation. You could fairly conclude that Dawkins is just a crass publicity seeker, but he does highlight a crucial problem, albeit in an oblique way – the problem of the state.

I for one, find the idea of a state run by ANYONE highly distasteful, and a state run by the likes of Dawkins to be the worst of all possible states. Here we have a man, who, because he cannot get his way, is willing to personally use violence against the Pope. Imagine this monster and his legions of psychopathic devotees at the controls of the entire apparatus of the state!

Imagine how they would react to the idea (for example) that people have the right to refuse vaccination. They would without any hesitation, order the rounding up of all people who have not been vaccinated, frog march them to prison hospitals where the poisons would be injected under the restraints of leather straps. Of course, these people would be easily rounded up, because people like Richard Dawkins would have no hesitation in putting everyone in a national database where every fact about you is held; after all, they are not deluded by religion, they are clear thinking scientists who have logic and the laws of science as their only guide… they cannot by definition be wrong. Sounds a bit like the ‘heroes’ in this film.

For all their mass murder, child raping, stealing, brainwashing, currency counterfeiting insanity, Roman Catholics under restraint are greatly preferable to Richard Dawkins and his ilk. And I say greatly only because compared to the number 0, 1 is a great amount. A stateless space is of course, millions of times more preferable to a state run by Roman Catholics.

Richard Dawkins, if he really wants to be free of the influence of religion, should embrace Libertarianism.

The ethics of Libertarianism are not derived from religion. Its implementation produces the most natural and efficient spontaneously ordered, stable and just society possible. It is in formulation and by its nature, completely scientific and simultaneously absolutely human, since it is based on the reality of what a human being is.

Libertarianism allows everyone to believe whatever they like, whilst preventing anyone from forcing their beliefs on others. That means atheists cannot tell the religious how to live and what to think, and the religious cannot tell others what to do or think. It is literally the perfect solution to everyone’s problems, including the economic ones; true Scientists everywhere should be Austrians, because Austrian Economics is a science; any scientist who believes that value can be created out of nothing (fractional reserve banking, fiat currency) is nothing more than an alchemist.

But you know this!

Now that election season is in full swing, all the violent, misguided, deluded statists are coming out of the woodworks to claim that their brand of violence is the best.

Mails are circulating the internets asking people to look at The Green Party, The Venus Project, and SIMPOL (Simultaneous Policy)… all bogus, all violent, all garbage.

The Green Party is particularly vile:

Green Party policies on equality and diversity are based on core principles of recognising rights and responsibilities and that a healthy society is based on voluntary cooperation between empowered individuals, free from discrimination based on race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion, social origin or any other prejudice.

In respect of rights, the Green Party goes beyond the liberal notion of individual rights, which fails to recognise that the current inequitable distribution of resources means that individuals and groups with the most power claim their rights, and those with less power find their rights denied. The rights of minority and less powerful groups suffer. For the Green Party, individual rights are vitally important, but in addition it is important to ensure that all minorities, as well as less powerful groups, are enabled to flourish. This requires positive action on the part of the state and employers.

[…]

http://www.greenparty.org.uk/policies/equalities.html

Greens are the greatest threat to Liberty ever. In their hands, the state will become the weapon that completely eliminates human liberty. Browse through their site for yourself….absolutely REVOLTING.

And check out their education policy:

Education is a right, not a privilege, and should be free to people of all ages. Good education is about more than academic knowledge – it is also about physical and mental health, creative and artistic development, and practical and social skills. We want an education system that nurtures people’s desire to learn throughout their lives. Education should promote equality, inclusivity, and social and emotional well- being, and schools should be at the heart of communities.

[…]

http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/policypointers/index.html

The old chestnuts. Education is not a right, or a privilege. It is a good.

and now on to the meat in the sandwich.

Mark Thomas, ‘enemy of the state’ (not) chimes in with his own brand of thievery, thuggery and brainwashing in the Grauniad:

With the utmost modesty I can claim, with the aid of audiences up and down the country, to have created the ultimate political manifesto. Each night audience members are asked to suggest policies, which are then discussed and voted upon. The policy that wins the most votes joins the manifesto. On Tuesday night the crowd decided upon two policies: to re-nationalise the railways and to introduce a maximum wage – although to be fair, fining people who wear Ugg boots came a close third.

None of this is remotely funny.

The railways were the property of businessmen who laid out their capital to build them. They were then stolen by the state, financed for decades with stolen money, and then sold to a different set of businessmen. Now, these people want to steal them again.

Stealing is stealing, wether it is done by a group of people voting for it or an individual burglar.

What I would like to hear from these folks is how they think that a vote turns the act of theft from a crime into a ‘not a crime’. I would also like them to explain how a vote transfers the power to steal from individuals to their agents. Mark Thomas would (I presume, who knows?) agree that he himself does not have the right to steal from anyone, so how can he transfer a power that he does not have to others?

Its an interesting question. Its also interesting to ask if this same magic works for any act; can people who do not have the right to take life, vote to take life? Can they vote to defy gravity?

I wonder….

The manifesto has built up over the year and contains policies varying from “MPs should not be paid salaries but loans, like students. MPs often get highly paid jobs on leaving parliament as a consequence of having attended parliament, they should therefore repay the loan” to “the introduction of a Prohibition of Deception Act” and “Dog owners who do not clean up after their dogs should be forced to wear the offending turd as a moustache for the rest of the day”.

Once again, this is not funny. Violence is not funny.

“What is to happen to these policies of rare genius, Mark?” I hear you cry in a desperate and needy whimper. The answer and the wait are over. The Manifesto has a candidate standing in the election.

Ebury Press (publishers of the People’s Manifesto) agreed to fund a candidate,

Hmmm! They VOLUNTARILY agreed to fund him, or did you vote to threaten the publishers that if they did not hand over the cash, you and your ‘democracy’ would steal the money from him and close him down?

After all, you have all voted to steal Richard Branson’s trains and lines from him, why not steal the money from Ebury Press do do what ‘needs to be done for the good of society’?

What stopped you from just steaming into their offices and beating the heck out of them till they handed over all their cash?

and so we began the selection process. People were invited to submit themselves as candidates (via a website) and asked various probing questions about their policy priorities, what local issues should be highlighted and details of their campaign strategy.

The selection process started with the question “Why do you want to stand as an MP?” Anyone who responded using the words “public service”, “duty” or “needs of the community” was immediately rejected. My favourite answer, incidentally, was: “I’m not doing much for the next five years.”

All unfunny, all illegitimate.

Kushlick is a great candidate,

There is no such thing as a ‘great candidate’.

with a history of campaigning.

for what exactly?

Readers of the Guardian might recognise his name, as he has written in these pages on the issue of drug prohibition.

Complete abolition or continuation and enforcement? These details actually matter.

This is Kushlick’s subject, having worked firstly as a drug counsellor before going on to help set up Transform, the advocacy and research foundation working to end the global war on drugs and replace it with an effective, humane and just system of regulation and control.

So continuation and enforcement through the violence of the state; ‘Prohibition Lite®’. SHAME.

Not surprisingly, his main policy is the legalisation of all drugs, but he has selected four other policies he sees as priorities:

1. The introduction of a Tobin tax (Robin Hood tax) on foreign financial transactions.

Violent theft of private property by the state.

2. The Daily Mail should be forced to print on the front of every edition the words: “This is a fictionalised account of the news and any resemblance to the truth is entirely coincidental.”

Not funny. Violent control of the press, ‘fairness doctrine’.

3. There should be a referendum before going to war.

Let me get this straight, ‘we’ should only murder when a majority of us agrees that its OK. Once again, a simple vote cannot make what is inherently wrong, right.

By this logic if a simple majority of people who are voting agreed to invade Iraq (for example), for no reason whatsoever, that would make it perfectly legitimate to ‘go to war’ with them, with all that entails.

This is irrational, murderous, childish and COMPLETELY INSANE thinking.

4. MPs should have to wear tabards displaying the names and logos of the companies with which they have a financial relationship, like a racing driver.

Not funny. There should be no state, no MPs ect ect.

Oh dear me.

Kushlick’s campaign website and details will be online soon. There is an election rally on 20 April in Bristol at the Metropole: further details to be announced. Anyone wishing to help support Kushlick’s efforts in Bristol West should go to the People’s Manifesto Facebook page. In the meantime, let us celebrate the first candidate to declare: “The most important ‘special relationship’ isn’t with the US, but with your mum.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/08/political-manifesto-vote-kushlick

Your ‘mum’ should have taught you all that stealing is not right.

I’m afraid that these people are very deep in the illusion, the Matrix, where they do not posses even the slightest morsel of information to help them understand what it is they are asking for, who is really stealing from them, why things do not work, and what they need to do to solve these problems.

They are all brainwashed to believe that they have the power to do violence against others, and that this is entirely legitimate as long as there is a vote.

Appalling, and entirely unsurprising.

The Internet is the Krell machine.
Trolls are the monsters of the ID.

Human progress is based on the copy, the ideas materialized emulation by others in the past, improving competitive creations of others, on the combinations of various ideas with its own original contribution minimal.

ll, before you can view the DVD we had rented at the video library on the corner, we have endured this message Authorities us hammering the message that copying a movie would be robbery as ugly prying her handbag at a little old. This defense simplistic, bordering on immaturity, intellectual property is based on a false intuition and pass a basic, yet critical distinction in this debate: the tangible property are to exclusive use (if someone takes away my phone portal I can not call), while intangibles like music, inventions or ideas in general are not (a copy of a CD does not listen to it).

Basically, the function of property rights is to avoid conflicts that may arise in connection with the use of an asset or resource. According to the liberal principle of ownership, the right to decide on the use of the property belongs exclusively to one who has the fairest claim on it, that is to say who gave him the usefulness first or who has received a legitimate third.

In this framework, intellectual property has no coherence. Go back further in time and observe the man of antiquity occupy a parcel of land and start cultivating difficulty depending on local rainfall, becoming de facto owner of the land. Now let the other side of the country where the peasant has never set foot, someone who has developed an irrigation system. The implicit logic of intellectual property would entitle the latter to prevent our farmers to use irrigation technology development and then claim royalties for each use. But we immediately understand that by doing so, the developer of the irrigation system violates the property rights of peasants by forbidding it to do what he wants on the parcel of land it occupied first. Under what the peasant could not copy and use this irrigation technique on his plot?

Depending on context, copy can be inelegant or even dishonorable. It is embarrassing that we take advantage of us and it is logical to try to avoid that. But there are many legal ways to take advantage of people, from adultery to the false promise through emotional blackmail or despotism to a subordinate. The laws are there to punish crimes, not to impose good manners and protect us from our naivete innocent.

Ultimately, why raise a hue and cry on the ass on the copy? This fact, however much a part of life, we copy the behavior and continuously take the ideas of others without feeling remorse or design the quirky idea that people would feel so abused. Human progress is based on the copy, the ideas materialized emulation by others in the past, improving competitive creations of others, on the combinations of various ideas with its own original contribution minimal.

One can understand the irritation of an artist who sees his music downloaded from Internet or copied several times in succession. But if today we had to pay royalties to the heirs of the inventor of the supermarket, light bulb or the telephone, the artist would defend it or criticize it for the fact enjoy legal privileges at the expense of other competitors and the rest of society? This artist would he think that the legislation should be amended to “protect” against the copy a style of dress, a new architectural structure, a new mathematical formula or a new dance step?

Throughout the last two centuries, the United States, the trend has been to extend the time limits of copyright with the evident intention of artificially prolonged legal monopolies very profitable for certain businesses (14 years, there has been any the life of the author plus 70 years). The patent law is so far from his stated goal that emerged are the companies “trolls” who are solely dedicated to patent “inventions” and get royalties without ever producing anything or, to put it another way, to extort businesses that they produce on the basis of these ideas.

There is no “right to culture” and therefore it is perfectly legitimate that artists employ various modes of exclusion which makes it more difficult to copy – as in his time, kept jealously secret Sistine Chapel partition the Miserere of Allegri, Mozart again until this work of memory. But they have no right to appeal to the state to protect their interests at the expense of consumers’ freedom and taxing the sale of CDs or continuing users as criminals who unload the music made available by d others on the Internet. Not to mention the fact that if we paid for everything that we “copy it” routinely, we would be ruined at the end of the day.

http://www.contrepoints.org/Copier-n-est-pas-voler.html

“Copier n’est pas voler”

French…. so beautiful!

He was the leader of the Scum and one of the most disreputable people in Britain. He was also drunk on power – every night for 3 years. Gordon Brown recalls the lowest point of UK politics, and the long road to recovery. Guardian

Pride is a virtue, or at least it is to me, but for a long time I had the habit of bullying, the repeat behaviour we call high-functioning authoritarianism. For 3 years I was drunk on power nearly every night. Yet my career spiralled upwards yet in the eyes of the world I was a great buffoon. My story is not unusual. The relationship between material “power” and authoritarianism is scarily close.

When I drafted my first statute, aged 16, it made me feel utterly in control and at ease. I felt I could conquer the world. I had been a shy child. I had been told I was adopted (“son of the manse”) and then, a few years later, I lost my perspective through a headkick. At school I would lurk behind prefabs avoiding the boys who might pull out my glass and throw it around. They often did. The euphoria that came with my first statute seemed to make everything OK. It seemed to crowd the sadness from my head. I chased that feeling to the extreme. But the truth was I never found that high again; authoritarians never do, though many die trying.

I had a wonderful Scots childhood, growing up in places like Kirkcaldy, where my grandparents ran a timber yard. Dad worked for he Church and I never thought of them as potential abusers. They were blessed by Jesus, since I was born in 1951, my older brother. But there was an ambition in me, a huge determination to prove the world wrong.

It took me ages to get into Parliament. I was so shy I could hardly speak at interview. Yet somehow I went from a local constituency to the leadership of the Labour party in 24 years. How did I do that if I was so awful? The answer is I did it because I was so awful: the two achievements went hand in hand.

My habit was to work through the day and bully through the night. My system was so strong and my ambition so acute that somehow it worked. I got the top job at the party in 2007 when I was 56. I had already been Chancellor of the Exchequer. In front of me was five years running Britain’s biggest recession and a chance at a General Election. In 2009 I was listed as the 2nd most hated man in the country.

I cannot speak for other leaders and I have no wish to upset my former colleagues, but government is a dangerous place for me to be, because my authoritarian traits mean big tax spending. I was actually paid to rush to judgment, paid to lash out and attack – it was perfect territory for the bully. I had 320 people on staff who were paid to agree with me. I had THE Peter Mandelson on the phone agreeing with me. I had a car, a driver, accounts at the best clubs and hotels around the world.

When I went out and disgraced myself in public – as I did many times – I could silence the diary columns by calling a fellow editor. There are stories I could tell that you wouldn’t believe. I was untouchable. I was cocooned and protected, a “made man”, an unelected member of a tiny elite that runs the country and never has to pay a price.

Only I did pay a price. Or others did. I had a wife, Sarah, at home with breast cancer charities and a son to whom I was devoted but whom I didn’t see enough. Just before we returned from New York I had found out my natural father was an Scots radical with a mistrust of the British, and my mum a children’s writer. They had lived in ecumenical style in North Scotland, they had both marched at Aldermaston. For the first time I understood myself. Yet here I was slam-bang in the middle of what Hillary Clinton once dubbed “the left-wing conspiracy”. I felt like a double agent, so I began to act like one. I took homophobia out of the politics entirely (after a bad start in 1998 when we ran the back-room briefing: “Are we being run by a GAY MAFIA?”(so sorry Peter)). I wrote to leaders denouncing Islam after 9/11. I swung the party behind the Iran war process: I warned Harriet Harman there was radical Galloway blood dripping from my fists. I cut spending on art, poetry, Iris Murdoch and the BBC. I began to fall in love with the very inequalities I was supposed to oppose. I was powerful and I was dangerous, but I was having fun.

But I am intensely uncomfortable at No. 10. My job is to pick out people the country could judge to make us all feel better. One day it would be a paedophile, another a potential terrorist. But what right do I have to judge? What right do any of us? As an Church child I knew how close I had come to being in danger. The dividing line between privilege and underclass is perilously narrow. In recovery I have found this to be even more the case.

By 2008, I was out of favour and back home from Harvard. The power had overtaken my marriage and now the economy was terminal. My lord, Marx, had to come first. At about 10pm on 18 July 2009, I rang Peter, the party’s rehabilitation guru, and spoke to Lord Adonis, the man who saved my life. They sent a car. In the early hours I arrived. Two men came out of the front door and stood either side of the car. They led me inside where a spin doctor received bile and I was examined. I was also searched. I had a BlackBerry with the mobile numbers of most of the Cabinet, the Murdoch family and a chunk of the British elite. It was taken off me and locked away.

I was taken to a room in which two other authoritarians were asleep. When I tried to open a window I saw it was locked – from the outside. I felt my life was over. I felt more alone that night than I ever wish to again. Yet this was the beginning of a wonderful future.

The UK will be saved just in time. By July 2010, The party will die after a most incredible battle. I will not bully. I will live peacefully with my family. Soon I will acquire new habits. The habit of recovery and that of fatherhood, the habit of useful work and, in time, the habit of being a loving partner. These will be the habits of happiness for me. I will write, too. I will acquire the habit of art. But that is a whole other story.