Tory peers will use time pressure to thwart Gordon Brown’s ‘electioneering’ package
Queen’s speech focuses on pensioners, parents and economic recovery

Tory peers are ready to block most of the government bills to be announced in the Queen’s speech tomorrow, threatening to mire the final days of Gordon Brown’s government in frustration and delay.

Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative leader in the Lords, predicted that few if any of the bills announced amid tomorrow’s fanfare and pageantry would reach the statute book without the consent of Tory peers.

“We all know that this Queen’s speech is all about better electioneering and politics rather than the better governance of the country,” he told the Guardian.

“If these measures were so important they would have been in the legislative programme last year rather than being left to the last moment of the fifth term. That does not suggest they have the greatest priority or urgency.”

The government is expected to launch a total of 15 bills, encompassing measures to provide residential care for old people, new controls on the parents of antisocial children and a fiscal responsibility plan compelling the government to halve the public deficit within four years.

But as the government takes parliament into a fifth session for the first time since John Major in 1996 – when the Tories had to jettison legislation before the election the following May – Conservative peers can use the government’s lack of an overall majority in the Lords to block bills owing to lack of time before an expected May 2010 election.

Strathclyde said the Lords would not abandon its responsibility to scrutinise. His remarks underline the degree to which the Queen’s speech will be seen as the first draft of a Labour manifesto rather than a realistic legislative prospectus.

He said: “There are now only 33 legislative days left in the Lords between January and Easter [the most likely date for parliament’s dissolution]. That does not give much time at all to carry out the Lords’ proper duty to scrutinise legislation. Historically the Lords has taken its job of scrutinising legislation very seriously. We should not throw away that reputation or duty at the last moment.”

Strathclyde said it was “too early to say which bills we will allow through, but we will have to look at each bill in turn”.

Tory strategists know they will have to tread carefully not to be seen to be blocking popular measures, something governments perennially accuse oppositions of in the runup to an election.

Sources in the Lords said that in practice the government would have to jettison vast tracts of bills in order to get non-controversial clauses through. Even if the Conservatives do not have an overall majority, they can use the government’s lack of time to extract concessions.

The Lords tend to spend as long as seven weeks scrutinising a bill. Unlike the Commons, all amendments can be selected for debate and no time limit is set on how long an amendment can be debated.

Labour has 212 peers, the Conservatives 190 and the Liberal Democrats 71. Bills most likely to reach the statute book are those carried over from the previous parliament, including the equalities bill, the child poverty bill and the constitutional reform bill.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/17/queens-speech-tories-lord-strathclyde

Now whether or not you have the right to educate your children at home without interference rests on wether or not there is enough time to debate a bill.

All those who pick or bite their nails will no doubt be getting their plasters ready.

And what if there had been enough time? Would that make the result correct? It would be a great relief that this evil is killed, but really, the very fact that it has gone so far as to be actually drafted is a big wake up call to all those who think that they have any guaranteed rights.

Graham Stuart said in a speech:

The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, said that she has been persuaded that a light-touch registration scheme for home-educated children would be appropriate. At first glance it looks as if that would offer benefits, just as with ID cards it seemed obvious at first glance that they would provide us with defence against terrorism and make us more secure. The more we gained an understanding of how ID cards would actually work and of the nature of the terrorist threat, the more the efficacy of ID cards to help us in that regard melted away. I would suggest that the idea of light-touch registration to make children safer or to make it more likely that they will get a suitable education will, on closer inspection, also melt away. I put it to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that people who move around the country will not be caught by the net, but the typical people who will be caught by it are those who live in one place, who are committed to elective home education yet have to face someone from a local authority coming and knocking on their door.

[…]

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtoday/cmdebate/16.htm

The problem with this of course, is that the ID Card fiasco, despite everyone shouting at the top of their lungs for almost a decade that it was a huge and immoral mistake, not only passed in a vote, but has had a vast fortune spent on it, and it is in fact being trialled right now in Manchester, despite the Tories saying they are going to scrap it.

Why should anyone have to put up with the violations in this bill for even one second, only to have the bill undone when these people realise what any idiot can, that it simply is WRONG. The answer to that question is that they should not have to wait, or be damaged, or disrupted or forced to pull up stakes and move on the word of a few venal and evil people. No one should have to suffer because these sinister busybodies do not have a complete understanding of technology and no morality.

Sadly, even if this bill is killed, the threat of other reviews and new bills will still be there and then there is the even bigger threat of the Lisbon treaty that can be added to without any review process whatsoever. If an anti Home Education article is added to that treaty, then all the states that are signatories will have to implement it, and of course, since most of the EU is already rabidly anti Home Education, you can expect no sympathy or help from them in that potential fight.

Its been said elsewhere, and here…

1. No more reviews into Home Education, no matter who is involved in them.
2. No new legislation regarding Home Education. Period.

Home Education is well understood and understandable for anyone who cares to spend a day on the Google. And now, for that speech:

Why cannot the Government adopt a humbler approach?

Because totalitarians are not humble.

Why can they not invest more money in research, enabling us to gain a better understanding of who is not at school and who is being educated at home?

Spending money on research is not an ‘investment’. Home Education is already very well understood. People who are educated at home are not the responsibility of the state. That money would be better spent in the failing schools that the state is already in charge of.

Why can we not be given a better understanding of where problems might lie among electively home-educated people?

All you have to do is ask, if you are interested, which apparently most MPs are not. In any case, there are no problems in the first place; the idea that there is a problem with Home Education is a fantasy concocted by people who want to make money off of children.

Why can we not have a voluntary registration system, perhaps involving additional financial support for families educating children at home?

There already is a voluntary registration system in place; you can register with your Local Authority if you like. This is hilarious coming from someone who used the ID Card fiasco as an example of what should not be done; the government first said that the cards would be voluntary, and of course, getting the card might be, but if you want to leave the country (renew your passport) you will have to be entered onto the National Identity Register by force… or you can never leave the country. Yes indeed, that’s really voluntary.

The present position is absurd.

It is absurd. They say the current system is unworkable, and that is true; the Local Authorities have been given duties that are beyond their remit in a free society. They have no business getting involved in family life in the way that they have been doing. The onerous and immoral duties that have been placed on these people should be removed; THAT is the way to solve the conundrum of them being given the responsibility for the supervision of Home Educated children but not the power to interfere with them.

A home educator told our Select Committee that one father had to pay £1,000 to cover the cost of GCSE exams taken by his daughter, although he was a taxpayer like the rest of us.

I do not know about anyone else, but if I had a daughter that wanted to take some exams, I would find the money so that she could take them, and not complain about it. That amount is far less than a decade of fees in a private school. In any case, this is a simple matter to solve. Schools that are examination centres should be required to allow anyone to come and sit exams just like the students who attend the school. Problem solved.

Why do we have to go down the compulsory route?

Because the people behind this are monsters, as are the people behind the fake charities that feed off of the existence of children. Without compulsion, the contracts for the licensing databases, and all the companies that are now lining up to offer training in ‘Elective Home Education’ would be worthless. This is what it really is about, and as long as those pressures are there, there will be vampires lobbying for these sorts of immoral measures.

Why do this Government always think they know best?

They are completely delusional, psychopathic monsters who are not acting in the best interests of anyone but whose sole driving impulse is to cause harm on a massive scale on every front that they can touch.

Why can they not work with people on a voluntary basis,

Because they believe they are the masters of the population, not the servants.

build up the picture and then and only then—with a complete picture and a real understanding of the risks in respect of safeguarding and education—come forward with proposals, which might involve compulsory registration if there is due and proper cause.

Even if, out of the alleged eighty thousand home educators, ninety percent of them were really terrible parents, that would not mean that the remaining ten percent should have their lives disrupted, and their rights wiped out. There are many types of bad person out there; we do not register everyone just because there are a few, or many ‘bad apples’. You are innocent until proven guilty. You should not have your liberty in any way curtailed just because there are other people who are bad. This is a fundamental principle of living in a free country and of liberty itself. That is why no legislation of this kind can ever be justified or moral. The ISA is another example of this sick and twisted thinking, straight out of the evil totalitarian philosophy of New Labour.

Due and proper cause does not currently exist, and I sincerely hope those aspects of the Children, Schools and Families Bill that deal with home education will not become law.

Once again, even if there are some bad parents, that does not mean that all parents should be interfered with. And wether the bill is passed or not, everyone will be working against its measures except those who will stand to profit from them, and the corrupt and immoral system that produced this travesty will be even further discredited, if that is even possible.

FURTHERMORE

Hansard does not record how many people were there to hear a speech, but according to the Daily Mail:

No one was there to hear this speech. And that photo from the ever lying BBC is cropped; the complete wide angle view shows nothing but row upon row of empty green leather

You can guarantee that none of the MPs not there to hear the speech will be reading Hansard to comb through the drivel to inform themselves before any vote, so this speech might as well have been given in the house of commons loos for all the influence it will have.

And on the same page as this, is an amazing tirade from Barry Sheerman:

Childhood ought to be protected, warns MP, as he reveals young pupils are staying up late to watch pornography

Children as young as five are imitating sex acts at school because they are being allowed to stay up late and watch pornography, a senior MP has warned.

Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, said that teachers are witnessing ‘disgusting’ behaviour in the classroom by pupils who are too young to know what they are doing.

Mr Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield, blamed the increasing amount of pornography that could easily be watched by children on satellite channels and over the internet.

He said Britain was ‘awash’ with promoting sexual activity to youngsters far too early in life.

In a Commons’ debate on the Queen’s Speech he said: ‘I think it is very serious the access to pornography to children.

‘You go to infant schools now and teachers say to me: “Children come here at five and six simulating sexual behaviour that they should know nothing about.”
‘We are a country awash with focus on early sexual activity.’

He said the amount of pornography on the internet and satellite television that was available to children ‘ disturbed’ him. He added: ‘I believe that childhood ought to be protected.’

His comments echo those of other MPs who are calling for tougher measures on ‘lads mags’ to ensure they are kept out of children’s reach.
Earlier this year a survey warned that teenagers said they had learned about sex from pornography.

Nearly nine out of ten 14 to 17-year-olds had looked at graphic images and nearly one in five viewed them more than once a week, according to research for Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show Vs Pornography.

Daily Mail

This government, wants to force decent people with unblemished children who are very sensibly running away from these insane asylums known as ‘schools’ to send their sons and daughters to be corrupted by the children described by Barry Sheerman.

If it wasn’t all happening you would not be take seriously if you said the words out loud.

This is also the government that wants to force all parents to expose their five year olds to sex education in state schools.

None of this makes any sense.

On the one hand, you have Barry Sheerman saying that children are not acting appropriately in state schools, then on the other, he is saying that any parent that does not want their children to be exposed to this is not being a good parent. Then the same people want to force all five year olds to have sex education, but with the same breath, say that ‘childhood ought to be protected’ and that these children are demonstrating knowledge about ‘behaviour that they should know nothing about’.

If they should know NOTHING about it, then how on earth can you advocate TEACHING THEM ABOUT IT?

And just what kind of lunatic would observe that some children are clearly being exposed to things they should not be seeing, but then insist that all children must be locked in rooms with these children from bad homes?

Any sensible person would say, “I am not having any part of it”. And damn them all to hell from whence they came.

Finally this is on top of the fact that these schools are fundamentally and systemically broken places, where if you send your child there, you risk them not being able to read, write or do arithmetic. Or know the difference between the ion form of an element and an element.

Dumped into our inbox; it’s worse than your worse nightmare:

This is bad. Here is the link to the bill on home education.

http://www.publicat ions.parliament. uk/pa/cm200910/ cmbills/008/ 10008.38- 44.html#m01s

You would have to apply to register your child for home education. It lasts one year. This seems to me to mean that you have to get permission to home educate your child, because in some circumstances, like when they decide your information is inadequate, the LA can decline to register your child, and if they think it would be “harmful to your child’s welfare” to home educate, the LA must refuse registration.

You have to give prescribed information about your child’s education when you apply to register. (To be defined in later regulations or guidelines.)

The local authority should arrange to see your child, and the parent or educator, at least once during the year, and visit at least one of the places where education is taking place at least once a year. These arrangements “may, unless the child or a parent of the child objects, provide for a meeting with the child at which no parent of the child or other person providing education to the child is present.” (So maybe you can meet at a museum? And maybe you can stop them meeting with your child alone, but then again, you may get a lot of pressure and they just might decide that you are not cooperating? see below.)

The local authority is to decide whether the education is suitable, whether it accords with the information you provided them, what the child’s wishes and feelings are, and whether it would “harmful for the child’s welfare for the child to continue to be a home-educated child.” I

The LA can revoke your registration if :

• you “fail to fulfil an undertaking” given in your statement of prescribed information — ie you didn’t do what you told them you planned at the beginning of the year;
• information provided in connection with your application is incorrect or inadequate in a material respect whether or not it was correct when you gave the information — I can’t figure out just what this means but it seems like if circumstances change, the LA can revoke your registration;
• it would be “harmful to the child’s welfare” to continue to be home-educated; or
• you don’t co-operate with the LA, by not cooperating with the annual meetings with you and your child or if you give an “objection to a meeting” and the LA decides this does not leave them “adequate opportunity” to decide if your education is ok.

I have to say the lawyer in me is very worried about how fuzzy these standards are, and the many opportunities to deny the right to home educate, fearing that in some ways this is worse than I feared from the dire Badman report . . .

Unbelievable.

So you have to not only be licensed, but you have to APPLY to be licensed.

Autonomous learners need not apply obviously.

This bill is completely outrageous in every way that something can be outrageous.

Notice at the end, there is language that hints they understand that ContactPoint is going to be scrapped:

A local authority in England must make arrangements to enable

them to establish (so far as it is possible to do so) the identities of

children

If they have ContactPoint in place, they would have written that the ‘national register of children should be consulted to create a list of all those who are unaccounted for’ etc.

But all of this is moot.

The legislation is drafted. They will successfully argue that it needs to be passed intact.

If they do pass it, there will be no route out for anyone that wants to educate their child at home without interference.

Take a look at this:

(4)

In determining whether the condition in subsection (1)(d) or (f) is

satisfied, an authority shall, so far as is reasonably practicable and

consistent with the child’s welfare, give due consideration (having

regard to the child’s age and understanding) to any wishes and

feelings of the child ascertained by them.

This essentially means that the the Local Authority becomes the parent of the child if you apply for registration as a home educator, and ‘your’ child can short circuit your parental authority, duty and care either by accident, misinterpretation or deliberately, causing your licence to be revoked, and your child withdrawn from your care.

For all those who bristle at the idea of children being property, your registration of ‘your’ child will turn over parental responsibility and ownership to the Local Authority, who will have control over your child in the same way that a parent should. Registration of your child is a transfer of property and of responsibility.

No doubt, this bill is going to be picked to pieces by the people who are good at that. There is nothing good to be found in it whatsoever; it is thoroughly bad.

This bill gives carte blanche to Local Authorities to absolutely control Home Education and Home Educators, and of course, the next round of legislation and or guidelines defining what a suitable education is is just around the corner, and will be the final nail in the coffin.

It effectively destroys it completely, leaving no room for anything other than what the Local Authority thinks is good for ‘your’ child.

They said that they respected Home Educators. This is their version of respect. They said that Home Educators would be operating within the law, unlike the Germans. Clearly there is not going to be any real Home Education at all in the UK should this bill pass.

I said that everything they say is the reverse of what they really mean; they said they want to strengthen Home Education, when they actually mean they want to destroy it. Well, now we see that this is precisely the case.

In a move that could spell the end of the plasma TV industry as we know it, the state of California agreed today to enact strict regulations on the amount of power televisions can consume, effectively outlawing most large plasma TVs as of January 1, 2011, with many more televisions set to be banned beginning January 1, 2013.

The state had been concerned that 10 percent of a home’s energy use is typically devoted to the TV and its related equipment, and that percentage has been increasing as consumers gain access to larger and larger (and cheaper and cheaper) televisions, which command an ever-increasing hunger for power.

The new rules go into effect a little more than a year from now: On January 1, 2011, televisions will be required to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent. In 2013, a second tier of restrictions will go into effect, with average energy consumption required to be reduced by 49 percent vs. today’s levels.

Rest assured, this doesn’t mean the end of the television as we know it. As the California Energy Commission notes, as of now, over 1,000 televisions already meet the 2011 standards, so many manufacturers won’t have to panic in order to comply with the regulations, at least for now.

Those who will be heavily affected are manufacturers who make televisions that draw more than their fair share of juice. A formula related to the size of the TV’s screen in square inches will be used to determine the maximum power draw allowed by a TV. For example, Panasonic’s 54-inch VIERA plasma TV would be allowed to draw 281 watts of power in “on mode.” Today that set is rated to draw 293 watts of power. Smaller plasmas are generally OK under the 2011 specs, but virtually all of them fall short when put up against the 2013 rules. That same 54-inch plasma will be required to draw only 175 watts once 2013 arrives, a power reduction that just might not be possible.

Bottom line: Most LCD televisions will be safe under the 2011 law, and many plasmas will as well, but come 2013, everyone’s going to have to do some serious belt-tightening.

All told, the new rules are expected to save 6,515 Gigawatt-hours annually in the state, save the state $8.7 billion in costs for additional power plants, and save consumers $8.1 billion a year in lower energy bills.

One additional point of note: The new rules currently don’t apply to very large TVs, those of 1,400 square inches or larger (roughly a 58″ set), although rules are likely to be enacted against these ultra-large sets in the second phase of this legislation.

[…]

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/154936/california-outlaws-large-power-hungry-tvs/

Lets get this straight.

You buy an electricity supply from a company, or make it yourself with your own solar panels or windmill.

The state says, “you cannot use that TV because it consumes too much electricity”.

Too much of WHOSE electricity?

Once that electricity enters your house, or you make it yourself, it is completely up to you what you do with it. Why should someone who lives ‘off grid’ (or on grid for that matter) be stopped from spending his own money on electricity?

This is all part of the same core idea; that the state can get into your home and tell you what you can or cannot do there. Wether it is running a certain type of electricity consuming equipment, washing your clothes, heating your house, cook your food, flushing your loo or bathing, or eating, they are trying to regulate absolutely everything that you do, no matter where you do it.

And note the language in this piece, “more than their fair share of juice”. What does this mean exactly? Electricity does not come from a collective pool that is distributed free to everyone; it is a product that is purchased by a household for personal use. There is no ‘fair share’ in any aspect of electricity generation, distribution or consumption. And no, global warming is not a result of electricity generation.

No doubt, if america is even still there, there will be a ‘cash for plasmas’ where people are encouraged to trade in their perfectly good televisions for new ones, none of which are manufactured in the USA.

Dropped into the BLOGDIAL inbox (twice!):

[…]

This is urgent, and requires active participation by all HEs. Please read and forward to all HEs and HE lists that you belong to.

This act is not in competition with or an attack against any HE person or HE organisation. Now is not the time for an HE civil war. We need to deal with the real threat first, then try to resolve conflict within the HE community later. OUR STRENGTH IS NOT ONLY IN OUR CONVICTIONS IT IS ALSO IN OUR NUMBERS.

The Badman recommendations have generated a great deal of fear within the HE community; but the threat is an illusion. If we ALL refuse to cooperate nothing will happen – they will NOT come for you and your children. Their power over us is based on our own fear.

This is a declaration to parliament, putting them on notice that they should not add the recommendations of the Graham Badman Report into new law, and that we will not co-operate with any such law should they dare to enact it.

If you agree with what it says, select all the text between the dividers, copy the text to a new document, print it, sign it or otherwise make your mark on it, and then send it to your MP. Then forward this entire message to any Home Educators and parents that you know and urge them to do the same. You may disseminate this public notice to anyone and any place you think will help it gain momentum.

Whether you are involved in the petition or any other initiative makes no odds. Use this to deluge your MPs and show them once and for all that we are united!

To find your MP’s address use this site: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notice of Refusal to Co-operate

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

WHEREAS the recommendations of the GRAHAM BADMAN REVIEW OF ELECTIVE HOME EDUCATION have been accepted in full by the Secretary of State.

AND that these grossly disproportionate recommendations hold serious implications for the civil liberties of parents, children and families in this country.

AND that these recommendations place primary responsibility for assessing the suitability of education and the welfare of the child on the state, rather than the parent – with no prior evidence that either is unsatisfactory prior to this grossly intrusive intervention.

AND that the recommendations of the review assumes that the home is an inherently unsafe or unhealthy place for the child to be.

AND that these recommendations undermine the role of the parent and trample over family freedoms in its haste to set parent and child up against each other, bestowing additional and selective “rights” on home educated children that only the government can adequately minister to.

AND that these recommendations destroy the very possibility of true autonomy in learning.

AND that these recommendations operate from a position of requiring proof of parental innocence rather than reasonable suspicion of guilt.

AND that these recommendations discriminatorily use the coercive and interventionist tools of parental licensing, warrantless entry to the home, inspection according to arbitrary external standards, and an unconscionable new power to interrogate the child without the parents present.

AND that the outcome of these recommendations will be horribly discriminatory to a minority community, the measures eventually having to apply to anyone who has their child at home with them: parents with under 5s, those whose children attend private school, and also those with school-aged children who are at home in the evenings, over the weekends, and throughout the summer holidays.

AND that the outcome of these inspections will be based on the very human whim and prejudices of a local authority officer, who will have the power to destroy the life and education that that parent has conceived for his or her child.

AND that if the government is to avoid further discrimination it also stands to reason that each child who attends school must be given the same “rights” as home educated children – to “have their voices heard” regarding whether or not they are happy to be educated in school, whether they are satisfied with their teachers and whether they feel safe in such an environment.

WE ACCEPT that it is right that appropriate and proportionate action, as currently outlined in the law, may be taken to rectify a situation if there are serious concerns about a child’s welfare, observing that a child being at home with its parents is not, and never has been, in and of itself a child welfare issue.

AND HEREBY RESOLVE that any such utterly disproportionate legislation if passed will fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, and would constitute a fundamental violation of our rights,

AND that any such legislation is illegitimate on its face.

NOW UNDERSTAND that by this declaration, Parliament is PUT ON NOTICE that I and others will not co-operate with any such legislation, and strongly caution you not to consider, debate, or enact any such legislation.

Signed _______________________________

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Well well well. At last, the sleeper has awakened!

No more begging. No more pleading. No more nonsense.

No means ‘NO’, and that does not mean ‘maybe’, or conditionally, or partially or “come back after you have thought about it some more”.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and no matter what, this is the LAST STRAW. You may go NO FURTHER.

I have said it many times before; there is nothing they can do to force you to obey them, and they rely on your good and honest nature as if it were a character flaw so that they can do bad things to you. They cannot stop the hunters from hunting, they cannot keep drugs off of the street and they cannot even keep them out of the prisons. They are massively overstretched on every front, almost to breaking point. There is no money to come after Home Educators, who are the lowest priority of all priorities. Ed Balls and the other evil clowns have announced a list of 23 new guarantees for all pupils; how are they going to pay for all of it when they are CUTTING The budget by TWO BILLION POUNDS? The answer is THEY CANNOT.

Anyone who says that they are going to cooperate in any way is quite simply a total fool. Filling out their vile forms and engaging with them does 99% of the work of control. If no one communicates with them, if no one cooperates with them they will find their plans to be completely stymied. There are not enough of them to chase up and control everyone. There are not enough of them to collate all the information they need, and of course, whatever they can write down will not have your consent and will be worthless. Even if they could do it, there are not enough people to enforce their disgusting plans.

The facts are these; if you want your liberty you can take it; it is yours, right in your hands right now. You need to put all of your fear aside and simply… ‘do not’.

But that is only if they manage to pass the legislation, and that might not even happen. Certainly it is not going to be made easy for them.

In the final analysis, no matter what happens, either way they have LOST!

FURTHERMORE

In case any of you simple minded people out there have any doubts about the ill intentions of these monsters, take a look at where the Home Education licensing proposal is listed at the website of monster central:

[…]

under ‘Safeguarding the Vulnerable’!

Full screen grab here, in case they try and re-write history.

Absolutely unbelievable. These people are declaring that the children of home educators are in need of safeguarding, simply because they are educated at home!

Are you angry yet?

This is just like the scandal of Neu Liebour officially listing Landsbanki as terrorist organisation:

Absolutely appalling.

Once again, there is no depth to which these people will not sink, no lie they will shirk from telling in order to get their grubby fat hands on your children, and as we have seen, the women are as bad as if not worse than the men.

If this has not pushed you over the edge, then you do not have a pulse.

If you are wasting your time bickering over nonsense instead of doing everything you possibly can to put a stop to this, you deserve everything that you get.

They really are the worst bunch of people imaginable, and they really are after you and your children!

Three fat clown monsters want your children to march to their beat. You know their names. See how it runs:

They may just get away with it. Why? Because there are many intelligent, well meaning, thoughtful, dutiful and innocent people who believe in fairy tales and outright lies, like ‘democracy’.

[…] This travesty of a review and constant consultations are discrimination and prejudice against a law-abiding population who are shouldering the very important task of providing an education to their most precious children.

It is true; this is a form of vile discrimination, but it is more than that; it is a deliberate and premeditated project to snuff out the emergence of a properly educated army of thinking people, who would constitute a grave threat to the status quo.

Home educators should be honoured and encouraged, not vilified and harassed by a pretend and disgraceful shambles of a concoction thrown together by a bunch of people (Badman, Balls and the various LAs) who have reason to manacle home educators. Schools are dying. Everyone knows that a school education in many cases is tantamount to no education, therefore we must have alternatives in this country.

No, ‘therefore’ you and your home educating must be snuffed out. You are a forest fire that needs to be put out. You are a threat. Your children are a threat. Your success is threatening, because as people learn about what you were able to do, they rightly believe that they can do it too. A trickle becomes a torrent, a torrent of fire that is scorching out the belief that, for example, only a qualified teacher can teach a child, or even more shocking, that a child needs a teacher at all.

To cut the throat of other interesting and lively possibilities like home education is to cut the throat of a vibrant and economically sound Britain.

If anything is clear, its that these people do not know anything about economics. Economic illiteracy reaches from the the lowest person to the highest in this and almost every other country. It is a very big problem. As for interesting and lively possibilities, these monsters with no souls do not want anything lively to be anywhere within one hundred thousand miles of them. Why do you think they outlaw playing music in clubs and dancing in open fields?

The only reason Britain has lasted as a sovereign nation thus far is that Britain has been tolerant of minorities and encouraging of difference. This quality in our once-glorious country is disappearing fast and will leave Britain trailing along behind those devastated economies that treat people worse than pigs and snuffle up the left-overs of more primary nations.

Britain has lasted for such a long time on the momentum of the empire, and nothing else. Tolerance of minorities has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Government ministers must realise that they are actually accountable to the people. They must be aware that people have rights and work on that premise.

And if they do not, then what? What are you going to do about it? Neu Liebour does not in any way think that it is accountable to ‘the people’, in fact, quite the opposite. They do not accept that you have any rights other than the ones that they describe and grant you, and all of those, including the right to life, are conditional. That is the sole premise upon which they operate. That is why they believe that they have the power to enter your home and speak to your children without you being there, and they propose it without any fear that they will be stopped or in any way seriously challenged. What is even more nauseating than the fact that there are subhuman monsters that think they can do this, is the fact that there are parents who say out loud that they will comply with any such law should it be passed. I wonder just what it would take to make those parents say, “that is a step too far, and I will not do it”. I wonder, if they passed legislation saying that all parents must give their child up to a state run kibbutz upon birth, to be returned when they are 16, that these parents would say, “I am not sure if I am going to disobey this new law”. Just what sort of people are these, that they would obey such violations? What will it take for them to say, “enough is enough”? Teaching their children that they are required to submit to strangers is clearly not ‘enough’.

They must assume that people who seem to be doing their best ARE doing their best.

No they must not. This is pure projection; this is what you, as a reasonable person, WANT them to assume.

We are angry, and we have a right to be angry.

Anger is a good, not a right.

We have been slapped in the face with time-sapping and time-wasting consultations. We have been told that we are not fit to educate our children. We have been called child abusers. We have been investigated in case our children have been forced into domestic servitude or trafficking as sex slaves. We, mothers, have been suspected of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy (another charming defamatory statement). How much more do we have to put up with? How much defamation is TOO MUCH?

You tell us. It seems like there is nothing that the state can do to some people that will be too much. Like a pack of hungry wolves, the state knows when the prey has no fight left. Until you are willing to really put your foot down, these predations will continue until you literally have nothing left, and are torn to shreds.

Local authorities regularly treat home educators like enemies.

You ARE their enemies. You represent an element outside of the system. You are ‘the anomaly’. You can spread this systemic threat, by simply existing in the way that you do. Also, you live the sort of life that they are too frightened to live. They are intensely jealous of you. That is why they hate you.

They lie to home educators.

Home Educators LET THEM LIE. The law is available to everyone; they refuse to group together and set up legal defence funds, they refuse to hire lawyers on their own, and so they are WEAK and will be picked off like foxes picking off chickens. It’s as if they have no knowledge of the history of collective resistance and mutual assistance… it beggars belief that it goes on, and honestly, if they refuse to use the power that it at their fingertips, they deserve what they get.

They encroach on their time and energy, and they make up the rules to suit themselves. So MPs are intent on giving them MORE power?

Why not? What are you going to do about it either way? There is nothing that some parents will not obey, so their thinking is, “why not go all the way with every sick proposal that is imaginable and unimaginable?” Remember these are the same monsters who want mandatory sex education for five year olds; there is no depth to which they will not sink. This should be absolutely clear to everyone by now.

Where is democracy? Where is fairness?

THIS IS DEMOCRACY!!! ‘Democracy’ is not a synonym for ‘fairness’, ‘justice’, ‘decency’ or anything else that people routinely misuse that word for. Democracy is exactly what has produced everything that you hate and these attacks on you and your family. The sooner you wake up and understand this, the quicker you will get to the solution to your problems… or at least a real understanding of them.

Where do we look for justice? Not to Parliament, we fear.

Parliament is the seat of democracy.

What do we tell our children? That MPs don’t care about you or your rights? That they’ll listen to you but not take heed? That you can refuse medical treatment but you cannot refuse to be led away by a stranger to be questioned by yourself (no matter who that stranger is)? That your mother and father have to be on a list because they might hurt you and some faceless bureaucrat with ice in his heart might have to ‘check’ that you’re not being brutalised?

You tell your children THE TRUTH. And the truth is that democracy is the thing that is about to criminalise you and which abuses you and your family. It is the thing that steals from you, corrals you like cattle, and uses the fruit of your own labour to do it. If you do not tell your children this truth, then they will be slaves just like everyone else. Slaves to false ideas of what is right and wrong, of who and what they really are and what their true place in this world is. And you will have utterly failed them. AND YOU DO NOT LET THOSE PEOPLE INTO YOUR HOME.

I am sickened and disgusted by this whole farce, and wish I had never returned to what I considered ‘home’ from Canada. At least, in that country, home educators can do their duty in peace and be free from scurrilous attacks on them from people with dirt in their souls. http://www.threedegreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/

Go back there. At least you have a place to go to; many people do not have the means or the place to go. If you are going to stay here and obey, then you really should not waste your time complaining, since no matter what you do, they are going to try and crush you, and only a definitive ‘no’ will be of any real value. And make no mistake; this is just the beginning. There are unthinkable predations on the horizon that come right out of the best/worst science fiction dystopia scenarios, and Britain is where they are going to try them all first.

Britain is issue an official apology for the “shameful” forced attendance of tens of thousands of children to failing state schools with the promise of a better education, only for many of them to end up illiterate, abused and neglected.

By Richard Alleyne

In what Ed Balls, the children secretary, described as “stain on our society” the anti Home Education programmes saw healthy, perfectly safe, hard working and intelligent Home Educated children sent to state schools, against the expressed wishes of their families.

Many ended up illiterate, many suffered abuse and neglect and many others were used as “slave labour” in factories.

Now after years of campaigning from pressure groups, Gordon Brown has agreed to meet with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology next year.

Mr Balls said the apology would be “symbolically very important”.

“I think it is important that we say to the children who are now adults and older people and to their offspring that this is something that we look back on in shame,” he said.

“It is still happening today. But I think it is right that as a society when we look back and see things which we now know were morally wrong, that we are willing to say we’re sorry.”

The government has estimated that a total of 80,000 British children may have been forced to attend state schools under a variety of immoral programs that continue to operate.

A report said that between 6,000 and 30,000 children from Britain and Malta, in perfectly normal families, had their children seen alone by social workers, whereupon they were abused.

Some of the children were told, wrongly, that they were having their “rights” protected.

The anti Home Education laws were intended to stop the children being a burden on the British state by suppressing their natural intelligence, providing the country with pliant workers.

A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry noted that “a further motive was racist: the initial pretext for the changes in the law was forced marriage seen only in certain countries that used to be British Colonies”.

Mr Balls said that while an apology would not “take away the suffering” it was important to the victims to admit it was wrong and to make sure lessons are forgotten.

He said the government was talking to the victims’ organisation to work out how to frame the apology.

“These were children who were stripped of their childhood and education, without their parents permission, and because of our abuse, went on to be illiterate labourers thousands and thousands of miles away from their true destinies, suffered physical and sometimes sexual abuse as well and it was something that was sanctioned, facilitated and encouraged by me and my government and that how we like to treat children,” he said,

“I think there have been discussions going on for some months about how to do this but to be honest it’s a matter of shame for our country and countries around europe that this terrible policy of banning Home Education happened for so many years and decades and it’s actually my government policy.”

The issue of the UK Home Educators was investigated by the Commons select committee, a process which led to the no changes in this immoral policy.

Barry Sheerman, the chairman, said Mr Brown wrote to him over the weekend to confirm he would issue an apology in the new year.

The Prime Minister told him “the time is now right” for the UK government to apologise for the “misguided policies” of this government.

However some survivors felt the apology was too little too late.

Harold Haig, the secretary of the International Home Education Association, said he was appalled that the British apology has come so late and without any change in the law.

“Gordon Brown should hang his head in shame,” he said.

“It is an absolute disgrace. He should hang his head in shame.”

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6575200/Gordon-Brown-to-apologise-for-Britains-shameful-child-migration-policies.html

The memoranda submitted to the Schools and Families Select Committee Inquiry into the DCSF-commissioned review of elective home education have been released.

In the submissions, are many entries confirming everything that has been asserted by Home Educators, and permanently sealing the fate of this scandalous, scabrous, ill considered and highly suspicious report.

There are also some submissions by the same gang of monsters whose common aim is that they wish to get a hold of your children for their nefarious ends.

The line between these two groups is very distinct; on the one hand, we have people who are applying logic, science, high standards, principles and morality to this apalling report, and on the other, sycophants and child exploiters who do not refer to any single fact, but who endorse the report, “because it is right“.

I am going to cherry pick some of the best parts of the submissions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Original (without artistic intervention from flickr).

We hear from Ralph Lucas, the following:

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

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

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

[…]

http://daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/

Secret inspections?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a start.

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

promote service improvement

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

ensure services focus on the interests of their users

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

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

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

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

Nothing to do with Home Education.

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

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

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

No thank you.

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

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

What a servant is and is not is central to understanding the proper role of government.

When the creatures who run this government and the apparatchiks who operate under them say they are public servants, they lie; it is the same perversion of language that permeates all of their speech. When they say they want to ‘strengthen Home Education’ they really mean they want to cripple and destroy it. When they say that they are ‘public servants’ what they really mean is that they are your masters. This is the way they behave, the posture they adopt when they respond to you and it is evidenced in everything they do.

Servants have characteristics:

• They are deferential
• They do not lie
• They follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters
• They do not command anyone other than other servants
• They obey their masters absolutely
• They cannot instantiate new servant classes
• They are under tight control and audit

The proper posture of a servant can be seen in the behaviour of the people who sweep the streets with brooms in London. When you pass by them, they accept your rubbish into their wheeled bins. They get out of your way when you are walking down the street.

Those people are acting as true servants – they defer to you; they respond to you by making sure they are not interfering with you, and they take your garbage from you without you having to drop it for them to then sweep up.

A street sweeper who is not adopting the posture of a servant would, when you offer him your garbage, ask you to drop it first, so that he may sweep it up, as he is a street sweeper, and not a garbage collector.

Any public servant adopting a posture other than that of an obedient street sweeper or other true servant is not a public servant.

Servants who are serving correctly do not lie to their masters. If a china cup is broken in the household, the proper servant says, “I broke it by accident ma’am”. If accidents like this happen rarely, it is forgiven, forgotten and life goes on. If however, the servant lies and says that she found it broken, then this servant is a liar, and must be sacked. This is the servant who will steal a spoon, who will steal money and do all other sorts of things; this is a servant who cannot be trusted. You would not be able to leave your house with that servant in place, and in the case of Parliament, you cannot leave the power to legislate and declare war in the hands of people who cannot be trusted; you will end up with bad laws and many wars and your money stolen.

Public servants follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters. When a properly behaving servant is asked, “why are my shirts not ironed and folded Isabel?” she does not say, “Please take this matter up with the ironing lady”. She will instead, apologise, then run down to the ironing lady and ask why the DEVIL the master’s shirts are not ironed and in place.

If a servant speaks out of place on a matter, she is apologetic and grateful for correction. She does not raise her hackles, huff and puff, suck her teeth and say, “well if you don’t like it, then lump it”. A true servant who behaved in this way would indeed, be told to ‘lump it’ and be dismissed on the spot.

True servants do not command anyone but other servants. The public servant in charge of street sweepers has the power to command the army of street sweepers that he is in charge of and that is all. He has no power to mandate anything or control anyone or any other aspect of garbage. He cannot, for example, tell you, the master, how to pack your rubbish bin; if he can do that, then he is your master and you are his servant.

Servants who are behaving in their proper role always obey their masters in all matters. If the venal liars who claim to be public servants were actual servants, they could never have illegally invaded Iraq, since the masters did not want this to happen. Each consultation that came up with a result that meant new legislation was not capable of being brought to debate, so total was its rejection by the public, would be obeyed absolutely and without question.

Servants do not act in the best interests of their masters against their masters wishes. No matter what the servant believes is best, the master is to be obeyed in all things at all times, without exception.

The final characteristic of servants that differentiates them from masters is that a servant cannot instantiate another class of servant. Only a master can create a new class of servant. A street sweeper or housemaid cannot hire on their own initiative, and neither can they create a new position in the household.

This demonstrates that, for example, the multitude of Czars that are being created are all illegitimate, since no servant can create a new role for filling by another servant.

In fact, servants cannot create or demand anything that will cause the master to expend money without his permission. When the stable master needs saddle soap, he takes it out of the budget allocated to the stables, which is regularly audited by the master. He cannot order replacement horses, or saddles or anything above a certain price without the express permission of the master. In this respect, servants exhibit another characteristic; they are under control.

Finally, in this equation there is another consistent factor; the behaviour of the master. In all cases, the master must behave like a master, and not a servant.

• When he asks a question, he expects an immediate, truthful and direct answer.
• He does not tolerate breaches of etiquette (insolence).
• He does not tolerate breaches of the instantiation rule.
• He sacks for deliberate misallocation of his monies.
• He sacks for disobedience.

If you do not treat a public servant like a servant, the servant is sent the wrong signals and she begins to behave in ways that are above her station.

Scullery maids are low in the hierarchy of the household, but they obey the mistress of the house in all things instantaneously. They do not owe a greater duty of obedience to the head housekeeper; this is precisely what the appointees of ministers are doing today; their loyalty is not to you, the master, but to the person who appointed them, who they consider to be their true master. You are nothing to them; you are a serf who is taxed to pay their wages. You are to be spied upon, numbered, vilified and squeezed for the pleasure of the true master; a servant running wild.

If there is to be any long term solution to the problem of bad behaviour of public servants, it is absolutely essential that everyone when dealing with these people treat them in the manner that they should be treated.

No master ever begs his servant, or behaves in a deferential way towards them. Masters give orders and make demands of their servants on penalty of the sack should they fail to obey or function properly.

Being a master does not give you license to abuse a good servant. Good servants are like good dogs; you pet them, treat them and treasure them. ‘Please’, ‘thank you’ and all other forms of courtesy are due to servants; being a servant is not the same as being a slave. This distinction is the crucial block that prevents servants from committing immoral acts against others on the orders of their masters. Slaves are compelled to murder on the word of their master, free men who are servants are not. That being said, a servant who is not acting as a servant can never be tolerated, and must be sacked, not only to protect yourself and your household, but as a warning to other servants that should they not behave correctly, the sack is a word away.

No one forces people to become public servants. If they are not willing to behave as proper servants, obeying absolutely the points that are listed above, then they should not enter into public service at all, and should work for companies (where by the way, they will be under a modern version of the sort of discipline that you find in a good household with servants).

Without competent masters who understand their position in all of this, public servants, like untrained dogs, will ride roughshod over you as if they were your masters, and we have all started to see what that looks like.

What are the five most important words in the computer industry?

1. What
2. Are
3. Your
4. Latest
5. Warez?

The luddites are at it again. Sith Lord Mandelson says:

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, warned internet users today that the days of “consequence-free” illegal filesharing are over as he unveiled the government’s plan for cracking down on online piracy.

The real question is WHAT consequences. Everyone who has read the very enlightening academic work ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ knows:

• File sharing is not theft
• Patents retard progress
• Copyright hurts society

These are not assertions, but are provable facts.

The consequences of this ill considered legislation will be that people’s connections will be temporarily disrupted whilst doing absolutely nothing to stop the flow of files across the internets.

Anyone who knows anything about computers or file-sharing or the decades old, bigger than ever, Warez scene knows this.

Mandelson, speaking at the government’s digital creative industries conference, C&binet, confirmed that the internet connections of persistent offenders could be blocked – but only as a last resort – from the summer of 2011.

He added that a “legislate and enforce” strategy was the only way to protect the intellectual property rights of content producers.

This is of course, a lie.

The intellectual property rights of content producers are not violated by people who makes copies of files with their computers, any more than sharing a light from a candle diminishes the light of the person who owns the first lit wick:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Thomas Jefferson

What people copy when they share files are not physical objects, but ideas. Every file is a unique number, and nothing more. It is a representation of an idea, and when you copy it, you merely recite that number using a machine, allowing another machine to listen to it and ‘write it down’ for you. Nothing is lost when this happens. Nothing is ‘stolen’ and in fact, filesharing improves the condition of man and it also benefits the people who made the first copy. The question is how are the people who made the first copy going to be able to make a living out of doing it. Many people have ideas.

Lets be clear; you sharing a file that you got from someone is in every way legitimate if two people are sharing files consensually. If however, someone hacks into a computer in a studio and then shares files that are not released, that REALLY IS stealing, since the owners of those copies had not released them to anyone. Once you get a copy of a record, tape, CD or file, and the transfer to you was legitimate, i.e. did not involve violating someones consent to give it to you, those copies are YOUR copies, and you can do whatever you want with them and no part of that is immoral, including selling those copies.

Against Intellectual Monopoly goes into how this is so in detail; see in while you are at it, the section on the report of the 911 commission, and how that work made a fortune for the publisher who printed copies of it, despite there being no copyright on it.

And speaking of ‘Terrorism’ we all remember how the pathetic, discredited, whorish, corrupt and bias soaked BBC shamelessly and stupidly tried to equate Bittorrent with terrorism and the omni-present Paedophile threat, climbing down later with the statement:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

I wonder how they are going to spin this Mandelson mandate that says filesharing IS theft.

But I digress.

The strategy, which will be officially set out in the government’s digital economy bill in late November, will involve a staged process of warning notifications with internet suspension as a last resort.

The vast majority of people in the country share files. This is the reality (and its not new; people copied cassettes before the internets), and it is an entirely good thing. The only way that you will be able to stop it is by shutting off or crippling the internet. The damage that a crippled internet will do to human progress will be incalculable.

The story of James Watt and his steam engine patent as recalled in Against Intellectual Monopoly is informative:

In the specific case of Watt, the granting of the 1769 and especially of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine: innovation was stifled until his patents expired; and few steam engines were built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occurred immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations. This should not surprise us: new steam engines, no matter how much better than Watt’s, had to use the idea of a separate condenser. Because the 1775 patent provided Boulton and Watt with a monopoly over that idea, plentiful other improvements of great social and economic value could not be implemented. By the same token, until 1794 Boulton and Watt’s engines were less efficient they could have been because the Pickard’s patent prevented anyone else from using, and improving, the idea of combining a crank with a flywheel.

Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills were badly allocated: we find him spending more time engaged in legal action to establish and preserve his monopoly than he did in the actual improvement and production of his engine. From a strictly economic point of view Watt did not need such a long-lasting patent — it is estimated that by 1783 — seventeen years before his patent expired — his enterprise had already broken even. Indeed, even after their patent expired, Boulton and Watt were able to maintain a substantial premium over the market by virtue of having been first, despite the fact that their competitors had had thirty years to learn how to make steam engines.

The wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges is referred to by economists as rent-seeking behavior. History and common sense show it to be a poisoned fruit of legal monopoly. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension was clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Hornblower’s engine is a perfect case in point: it was a substantial improvement over Watt’s as it introduced the new concept of the “compound engine” with more than one cylinder. This, and not the Boulton and Watt design, was the basis for further steam-engine development after their patents expired. However, because Hornblower built on the earlier work of Watt, making use of his “separate condenser” Boulton and Watt were able to block him in court and effectively put an end to steam-engine development.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3280

This chapter of Against Intellectual Monopoly goes on to describe how the rate of increase in efficiency of steam engines in the years of Watts patent was low compared to what happened after his patents expired; the rate of increase in efficiency shot up spectacularly when people were free to incorporate his ideas into their designs. Society benefited from these new machines, and Watt’s business was not harmed in any way.

It is abundantly clear that if the reason why copyrights and patents exist is to benefit society, then they should be abolished, since everyone is better off without them. This is not an opinion, but is a fact based on research.

“It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over,” Mandelson said. “Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting.”

There is no technical measure that can be implemented without fatally crippling the internet itself. If the goal is to reduce the internet to a Minitel level service, then this imbecile will succeed.

Even if it is not reduced to that level, the artificially and unnecessarily increased cost of access to the internet will have a distorting effect, as will the shifting of scarce resources inside every ISP, as they are turned from being service providers to police men for the monopolists.

Think about it. No one will be able to update their computers; the files for some updates can be 100meg. YouTube will be off limits, as watching to much of it will flag you. Unless they are going to sniff all of your traffic to see wether or not it is infringing, they cannot possibly cut people off for downloading ‘too much’. In any case, if you want to copy the contents of a CD, that is only 65megs, which is nothing in the days of broadband. A movie is 750meg, once again, nothing. This whole plan is absurd on every level, but most importantly, it is an immoral, culturally damaging plan that will retard the progress of everyone who uses the internet.

The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year.

Like so many other pieces of legislation, this one too will be totally ignored.

The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people’s internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year.

Amazing. There is no evidence that downloading movies and music impacts on the sales of tickets or CDs.

Remember FOX’s film ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ that had a work print released onto the internets?

Lets look at the numbers for this movie:

Domestic Total Gross: $179,883,157
Distributor: Fox Release Date: May 1, 2009
Genre: Action / AdventureRunning Time: 1 hrs. 47 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $150,000,000

[…]

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=wolverine.htm

They made all their money back and more. Clearly these creative people were compensated despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people downloaded that work print.

What about ‘The Hulk’, which also had a work print leaked:

Theatrical Performance
Total US Gross $134,806,913
International Gross $128,542,344
Worldwide Gross $263,349,257
Home Market Performance
US DVD Sales: $58,230,676 Weekly Breakdown
Production Budget $137,500,000

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2008/HULK2.php

That movie also was widely available on the internets, and yet, it made a huge amount of money.

There are now, suspiciously, many work prints available on teh inernets. The fact of the matter is that these studios know that leaked copies of movies have no effect on DVD and ticket sales, and might actually increase the two if the film is any good. And who, whilst in production, thinks they are working on a lemon?

Finally, for the biggest example of all, ‘Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’, which was leaked days before its release:

Domestic Total Gross: $380,270,577
Distributor: Fox Release Date: May 19, 2005
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy Running Time: 2 hrs. 26 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $113,000,000

[…]

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars3.htm

That is a healthy profit, and of course, every Star Wars film is being actively shared every day, with no effect on the bottom line of LucasFilm. Once again, these leaks if they came from theft were immoral acts. This has nothing to do with the correctness of people who share legitimately obtained copies of works.

Are you starting to get the picture? Filesharing does not harm the bottom line of companies that are offering something that people want.

“If we reach the point of suspension for an individual, they will be informed in advance, having previously received two notifications – and will have the opportunity to appeal,” Mandelson added. “The British government’s view is that taking people’s work without due payment is wrong and that, as an economy based on creativity, we cannot sit back and do nothing as this happens.”

An economy based on creativity? The internet is the one of the most efficient ways that that creativity can be spread all over the world. By crippling it, Mandelson will be breaking the legs of this ‘economy based on creativity’.

Mandelson said that the strategy was a “proportionate measure that will give people ample awareness and opportunity to stop breaking the rules”. “The threat for persistent individuals is, and has to be, real, or no effective deterrent to breaking the law will be in place,” he added.

It is clear that ‘the rules’ serve only a handful of people and not the majority of people. Those made up, illogical rules that he claims are being broken are in fact, the thing that will push back the emergence of a culture never before seen by mankind, where fortunes beyond avarice will be made, everyone will be free to share and knowledge and good will spread everywhere.

Of course, this is precisely what Mandelson is against. These people are the snuffers out of light. They are for darkness, ignorance and are opposed to every natural instinct that man has.

They will be defeated. Just as Watts patents expired and steam engine efficiency shot up, Mandelson, Geffen and the monopolists will eventually be destroyed. Linux is destroying Microsoft Windows. Android is destroying Symbian. Human beings are not designed to live in chains as slaves, and they will do anything to get out of them. The question here is wether or not Mandelson and co will succeed in retarding progress like Watt did.

There would be a “proper route of appeal” for those that do have their internet accounts suspended, Mandelson said. He added that he did not want to see internet service providers “unfairly burdened” by the new system.

“ISPs and rights-holders will share the costs, on the basis of a flat fee that will allow both sides to budget and plan,” he said.

ISPs want nothing to do with any of this. They provide your connection, what you do with it is your business. BT is not responsible for the content of your phone calls, so why should ISPs be responsible in any way for what websites you look at or the files you transfer?

The staged roll-out of the strategy will see Ofcom assess the effectiveness of the warning notification system on cutting illegal filesharing, backed by the threat of legal action by rights holders and content companies, in about April 2011.

If the 70% reduction is not achieved the use of technical measures to cut off persistent offenders’ web access will be introduced by about July 2011.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/28/mandelson-date-blocking-filesharers-connections

How are they going to measure this number? Where did this number come from? These are the missing pieces of this article. But this should come as no surprise, since The Grauniad is a 100% Kool-Aid drinking anti-progress copyrights and patents promoter.

Anyone who knows anything about this knows that ‘piracy’ is good for business and the consumer. Tentatively, the people who make software have embraced superdistribution in the form of shareware and crippleware; the more copies you have in circulation, the more likely it is you are going to make money, either from donations or by someone making commercial use of your work.

Remember CoolEdit? That was a free sound editing application that you could download, that was very useful. Some people bought licenses for it, the majority did not. In the end, the people who wrote it sold it to Adobe for a very large sum of money. 16.5 million dollars in fact.

The shareware world demonstrates that people when left to their own devices will find out ways to make money off of their work. What Mandelson is doing is protecting the interests of people who do not have the imagination or means to adapt to the new conditions of business. In effect, they are like Watt going to parliament to ask that his patents be extended. In fact, Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is an example of this happening successfully.

The question you have to ask is this; are you going to allow these small minded, computer illiterate, venal, nasty monopolists to cripple arguably the greatest invention that man has created to date? Are you going to allow them to retard the flowering of human knowledge and interaction that has literally changed the world?

Once again, it is up to business to grow a pair of balls and say that they are not going to take responsibility for the actions of the people they provide a connection to. If they do not, first they will be forced to police ‘piracy’ then they will be forced to police everything else the government does not like meaning speech.

Either way, even if the rise of the internet era of man is retarded by thirty years, it will come to pass, and scum like Mandelson will be swept away. They will be remembered as wreckers of civilisation, the new luddites, idiots, men without vision and the servants of monopolists.

And everyone will be able to look it up on the free internet.

This just came to us over the inernets:

I would like you to take note of, and publicise, the following important situation regarding this governments apparent intention to allow the public’s access to herbal medicines, medical herbalists and herbal manufacturers to go down the pan when new EU laws come into play in this country in eighteen months time. I also want to publicise actions planned to highlight the issue. Here are the details, in brief:

The background: For ten years, following the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s desire to see herbal medicine better regulated (following concerns around the rapid expansion of the Chinese and Indian herbal traditions into this country) much work has been done within the industry, with the MCA/MHRA, with academics and other interested parties to work out a way to better protect the public, the profession and the businesses that supply the professions. The answer was found to be Statutory Regulation.

The newly formed body The Health Professions Council was deemed to be the appropriate umbrella organisation under which professional Medical Herbalists could practice, ensuring the raising of educational standards, continuing professional development, quality control of herbal products etc. The government produced a Public Consultation Document on the matter, and it was due to end on Nov 2nd 9009 (although it has just had a two week extension due to the postal workers strike).

The bigger background: On 30th April 2011 the EU regulations on herbal medicinal products (Directive 2004/24/EC, amending Directive 2001/833/EC) become law in the UK. Only herbal preparations that have been licensed will be marketed. That means that the current manufacturers of herbal medicines, who have Good Manufacturing Practice and thorough quality control and analysis in place, will not be permitted to sell their products to qualified, trained and insured Medical Herbalists (the practitioners), so they will not be able to prescribe tailor made medicines to their patients, who will suffer.

The problem: The government is planning to abandon it’s committment to Statutory Regulation of this sector and leave it to be all but destroyed from May 2011 (18 months away).

The solution: Complete the Statutory Regulation of the sector, as planned and worked through, and then the public can be assured of high quality herbal preparations, and of the training of the professionals.

The action being taken: A demonstration outside Parliament and a Mass Lobby of MPs on November 2nd (next Monday) 12 noon until 4pm, with Medical Herbalists, universities that teach degrees on the subject and produce proficient practitioners, companies that produce high quality herbal medicines, and the UK public, who have always had access to herbs, their birthright, and wish to continue to have the choice of this form of medicine, especially once reassured that they are in safe trained hands.

PLEASE JOIN US IN MAKING YOUR VOICE HEARD. YOU AND YOUR READERS NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU WILL NEED HERBAL MEDICINE (WE ALL EVOLVED WITH IT AFTER ALL!)

Yours very sincerely

Afifah Hamilton MNIMH Cert Phyt
Member of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists since 1993

[…]

If you read BLOGDIAL, then you know that it is immoral to use force to prevent people from ingesting whatever they like into their bodies. This is true of any substance, no matter where it is from, who made it, or for what purpose you are ingesting it.

It is completely immoral to try and regulate or restrict the use of or the practitioners and dispensers of any medicine, including Herbal Medicine. This includes licensing of any kind of either the people or the products.

Once again, any regulations brought in will affect only the poor. The rich will be able to fly to China and receive top class herbal medicine, whilst the poor are left with poisonous pharmaceuticals that are designed not to cure people, but to keep them in a steady state of illness. Just ask anyone who is on anti cholesterol or anti hypertension drugs. They are explicitly told that they will be taking pharmaceuticals for the rest of their lives, and of course, this means ‘customers’ for life for the drug companies, who in countries with socialised medicine, will be taking stolen money from everyone to pay for the endless stream of prescription drugs.

It’s a wonderful scam, and of course, herbal medicine is a direct threat to this stream of stolen money. In China, acupuncture is used instead of pharmaceutical anaesthetics. Do you REALLY think that anaesthesiologists and the people who manufacture their knock out drops want Chinese ‘pseudo science’ in their operating theatres?

Of course they do not.

Not only are the rich going to continue to get superior, natural, individualised and genuinely beneficial health care, but anyone who wants it will be able to get herbal medicine by illegal means.

Does anyone really think that the same government that cannot stop the importation of Cocaine, Heroin and Marijuana or the clandestine manufacture of Acid, Ecstasy and Meth-amphetamines and will be able to stop herbal medicine?

If everyone who wanted it simply ordered it by post, it would be physically impossible for the state to intercept all of the packages without disrupting commerce. And that is something they will not allow.

Of course, a black market in herbal medicine will drive the prices up, and cause all sorts of unscrupulous people to get involved in supplying it, putting people’s health at risk… but the state doesn’t care about your health, or you or what is right and wrong; they simply want to destroy EVERYTHING that does not benefit the people who control them, i.e. corrupt business in vampiric symbiosis with the state.

Demonstrating is, of course, a total waste of time. Lobbying your MP is also a complete waste of time; this edict has come down from Europe, so the vestigial, purely ceremonial MPs will be powerless to stop it. Most of them are spineless or brainwashed or totalitarians in any case, and do not want you to be able to trot down to China Town and get a bag of stinky herbs to eliminate your bad skin:

Think about it; what are they going to do to stop people from reading recipes on the internets and brewing up their own teas from herbs they grow themselves or trade? Perhaps they are going to police the gardens of every house in the UK to make sure you are only growing those plants that are either of no medicinal value or that are deadly to consume.

The people behind this legislation are COMPLETELY EVIL AND INSANE, and anyone who obeys them is nuts.

Only the most simple minded fails to see that the EU is a terrible organisation and the only solution is for Britain to get out completely as soon as possible. If not, even more laws will be dictated to the UK Parliament, who will bend over every time and then enforce the diktats of foreigners that are not only a nuisance, but are now doing actual bodily harm to you.

Once again, lobbying MPs and demonstrating is not going to change anything. It would be far better if everyone who practiced this form of medicine simply put the state on written notice that they are no longer bound by the illegitimate edicts that have been handed down, and that they will continue to serve their patients no matter what. A single full page ad in the Times would be enough. It would cost the same as mounting a demonstration and mass lobbying the MPs and would send a very strong signal that business as usual WILL CONTINUE.

There are not enough aparatchicks to stop everyone from doing exactly what they want and following common sense. We have reached a tipping point where the state has detached itself from reality and the consent of the governed. All you need to do is simply carry on doing what you do whilst completely ignoring them. All they will be able to do is throw up their hands.

This is the response to the Graham Badman proposals by a ‘Neil T’:

1. Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

Disagree

This disgusting war of attrition on a legitimate section of society, which has used every trick in the book, not to mention outright insults, betrays the total lack of decency, integrity, or even safety of this reivew and therefore also of this government. The totalitarian intentions that lie behind this attack on fundamental constitutional freedoms, for no credibly demonstrated reasons forces me to conclude that I can have zero confidence in it to do anything but harm. It has demonstrated to me that it is a completely illegitimate despotism, and I hereby withdraw my consent to its rule. IMO it is unfit to make any changes to current education law or practice.

The government’s role in education has become irredeemably toxic, and the state should get out of education, and repeal the insult of compulsory education altogether, restoring that unmolested natural impulse of the young of our species to learn what it needs to learn without coercion.

The education of my children is none of the government’s business unless it appears that I am neglecting my s7 duty. If LEAs understood and respected this law of the land since my parents generation fought and died fighting for ‘freedom’ while it was being drafted, then children would be protected as well as they can be, and far better than the current dangerously deficient fiasco of universal child molestation and destruction of their privacy embarked on by this government.

2. Do you agree that a register should be kept?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

3. Do you agree with the information to be provided for registration?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

4. Do you agree that home educating parents should be required to keep the register up to date?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

5. Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

6a Do you agree that home educated children should stay on the roll of their former school for 20 days after parents notify that they intend to home educate?

Disagree

Absolutely not. Either parents are responsible for the education of their children or the state is. There is no legitimate reason for this incursion, other than to intimidate and dissuade parents from this course of action altogether, as HEers already experience from those schools and LAs which already assume they have such powers, and for which the Pupil Registration regulations 1995 were always a dead letter, no prosecution ever having been brought for the many breaches of a law never intended to be policed, but given as a sop to Education Otherwise to trick us into imagining that talking to government might actually get us anything we wanted.

6b Do you agree that the school should provide the local authority with achievement and future attainment data?

Disagree

The question makes no sense. Why would a school have anything to do with home education? The state system has no role in monitoring education that is not provided by it, nor should it have.

7. Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

Disagree

I do not need permission from the government to home educate my children.
Why would any sane parent vote to give up such a fundamental freedom?, and that is what registration is. The state also has no statutory monitoring role, despite dishonestly claiming such a function, thereby misrepresenting its powers, and since it militantly and relentlessly determines to misunderstand what HEers do, it perpetually demonstrates its own profound unfitness to judge what it cannot and does not want to understand.

8. Do you agree that children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns should not be home educated?

Disagree

Is this a trick question? Children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns will by definition already be being seen by social services. If in the course of any such contact ‘if it appears’ that a child is also not receiving suitable education, then the LA is already well placed to invoke s437 and involve the LEA. Current protections and procedures therefore seem highly adequate. It is conceivable that a good education might be being provided despite specific welfare concerns for a child, so a blanket ban would seem unnecessary and crude.

9. Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

Disagree

Our home is not a ‘premises’, its our home, and we are entitled under human rights instruments not to have it invaded. The so called home visit, which is really a non legally sanctioned state inspection of families by deception and misrepresentation of powers the state does not possess, should hardly predispose anyone to vote for making such unwanted and unhelpful intrusions legal.

10 Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

Disagree

If this suggestion does not actually have its specific origins in a paedophile agenda, it might as well have. This suggestion invokes necessary child protection actions by any responsible parent against a negligent state (at best), that cannot manage to make its own institutions safe from harbouring dangerous child predators, and at worst, manages to look like a perverts agenda in the first place. This suggestion is beyond vile, and will simply never be tolerated by a large section of society. No decent government could propose such an outrage against families. Powers already exist to enter homes where serious welfare concerns exist, but to suggest this as routine for all families is to debase citizenship utterly, and put all children at a new and totally unnecessary risk.

11 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

Disagree

The LA is entitled to make enquiries, and draw conclusions from non responders, or responses which only state that the parents are home educating and no more. It can then require information to be provided or serve an SAO. That is power enough, or would be if LAs understood the law they are supposed to administer.

HEers have been trying to humanise and get LAs to understand and respect the law, and the validity of what we do, probably ever since there have been LAs, and certainly ever since 1944, but with mostly little success, with one or two notable exceptions. It is pointless to contemplate greatly increased powers of intervention when so many LEAs are already local despotisms that act as if most of these powers already existed anyway. It is to shudder to contemplate what would befall us as a result of giving them these proposed new powers, even if they never exceeded them, but it is already no mystery to HEers, and we don’t believe it is any mystery to government either, which is the principle inciter to ultra vires despotism by LAs.

Government should be aware that the people will not be pushed in the direction of totalitarianism for ever, and that there is a line which government can cross that will not be tolerated, such rule, disobeyed.
For myself and many others I know, that line has already been crossed in this shameless and disgusting process, and as I have said before, and now reiterate, government does not have my consent to this process or any outcome from it. I will not submit to such tyranny. I will not obey this rule.

[…]

http://maire-staffordshire.blogspot.com/

My emphasis, underlined.

This is music to my ears, and of course, I agree with all of it.

We can but hope that this is the strength of sentiment in the vast majority of Home Educators.

Whoever Neil T is, he is a hero, no doubt about it. Blistering, flawless logic, delivered in the correct voice, with a clear declaration that all bets are off.

When these consultation responses are ignored, then the rage will increase exponentially as will the resolve to completely resist.

These people are making enemies of every last person in the country. There are not many people left who are not at the end of their tether. Everyone is fed up, everyone is harassed, pressured, squeezed and pestered.

And for what?

No one wants to be troubled with this sort of nonsense; I am sure that Neil T would much rather be doing something else than boiling his blood over Neu Liebour and its latest perversion.

The fact must be that these monsters crave disorder, ill feeling and violence. It is the only conclusion that a logical person can come to, since everything they do breeds murder, violence, chaos and disruption.

As I have said for years, no one should give them satisfaction.

Protesting in demonstrations merely puts you on cards like this (N.B. not that cards like this mean anything at all in the grand scheme of things; just ask the East Germans, many of whom appeared in their local equivalent. Decades later no one is affected by those records and they are just a bad memory, just as this card and the victims on it, in the long run, will not be harmed by this, when everything changes. In fact, cards like this are a symptom of the impending death of a nation, where ordinary decent people are criminalised because the state is totally illegitimate and completely corrupt: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government” Tacitus. These cards are designed not only as police tools but to spread fear and to shut down people’s willingness to act. It never succeeds in the end, EVER.):

Whilst doing nothing to achieve your goals.

Whatever you might think the solution to any particular problem is, one thing is for sure, doing again and again what has not worked is insane, and everyone who calls for more of what does not work is… not helping.

These are the key parameters that anyone who wants to solve a problem needs to understand:

1. There is not enough money for them to do everything that they want to do.
2. There are not enough aparatchicks to enforce everything they want to enforce.
3. There are too many of any single constituency to control, whether we are talking about motorists, smokers, drinkers, Home Educators, motorcyclists, hunters or any other group of people made up of large numbers.

If you can get all the people in your group to agree to obey only common sense, and do disobey any order or directive that violates your rights, then essentially, there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Common sense and order will prevail and insanity and disorder will cease to exist.

Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality — we judge reality by the responses of our senses. Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules. We judged the bullets to be solid, the guns to be real, therefore they can kill. I know the bullets are unreal, therefore they cannot harm me.

Spectre of the Gun

This is what the hunting crowd have discovered; they keep hunting and nothing has stopped them. It is directly analogous to Neo’s not running anymore, turning around and saying very calmly ‘No’.

It is directly analogous to THX and SEN being shown by SRT that in fact, there are no barriers to escape, and if you try to escape, nothing will stop you.

Finally, there is no need for violence from you. Power is an illusion. If enough people say no, there is nothing that can stop them, in fact, bullets cannot kill what energises them because bullets cannot kill ideas.

Read it and deal with it:

1. Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?
2. Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.
3. Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.
4. Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.
5. If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, the above goes double.
6. Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.
7. We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
8. Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
9. Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.
10. We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
11. Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.
12. If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.
13. Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.
14. Stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.
15. Stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.
16. Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.
17. Stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.
18. If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.
19. Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.
20. Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.
21. Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.
22. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.
23. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.
24. Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.
25. Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html

Sept. 28, 2009 | It’s a Sunday night at the tail end of summer, and I’ve dragged two squawky kids out of the minivan and into a half-closed rest stop on the Garden State Parkway in search of non-dreadful dinner options. Leslie, their mother, is catching some precious zone-out time in the car. After we sit down with our unadorned burger and fries, I notice the woman at the next table, the one who’s making eye contact and smiling.

“Are they twins?” she asks. “How wonderful!” Then she talks to Nini and Desmond: “Wow, you guys are 5. So big! Are you starting kindergarten soon?”

Here’s where the fun starts.

My son and daughter regard me in grave silence, faces stuffed with processed meat and fried potato product. They field this question themselves fairly often, but they’re going to let me take it this time. For an insane split second, I consider a full-on lie, just some total invention about where and when they’re going to school this fall. Instead, I take a swig of fizzy fountain Pepsi and bite the bullet: “Actually, we’re home schooling.”

After various tense conversations with friends, family members and strangers, Leslie and I have concluded that earnest, heartfelt discussion of exactly how we’re approaching our kids’ education and why we’re doing it is a bad idea. For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it’s like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert. I can certainly remember having a weirdly defensive response (“You know, I hardly ever eat red meat”), one where I reacted to someone else’s comment about themselves as if it were really all about me.

At the risk of gross generalization, there’s a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don’t much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don’t experience the subject as a personal affront. Let’s be honest: It’s almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.

[…]

Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it — more formal, more “academic,” reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year — is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it’s also one that’s debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we’re not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family — two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan — but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. As Alicia Bayer, a Minnesota home-schooler and blogger who’s one of Leslie’s online mentors, puts it, “People think we’re all conservative Christians who hate the government and wear denim jumpers.”

In order to avoid one or more of these discomfort zones, we try to answer all well-meaning interlocutors with bland, diplomatic and totally unspecific generalities. Not quite lies, but well short of what you’d call the truth. This is a phenomenon known to almost all home-schoolers, from Mormon separatists to off-the-grid hippie anarchists, and a frequent discussion starter in online home-school groups. So it was in my conversation with the nice Garden State Parkway lady in that fluorescent cavern between Burger King and Sbarro.

Mrs. Garden State Parkway: Well, you guys live in the city, right? I guess the public schools are out of the question.

Me: No, that’s really not true. There are some perfectly good schools in Brooklyn.

Real answer: There are, indeed, and in any other municipality you care to name. Now, it is true that the zoned public school in our multiracial, middle-class neighborhood has, let’s say, a checkered reputation and is mainly attended by children bused in from other parts of Brooklyn. It’s a uniform school run on a paramilitary model, ruthlessly devoted to driving up the test scores. Oh, and last semester the principal was arrested for assaulting a teacher. But, honestly, that stuff played only a marginal role in our decision making. There are numerous pretty good to very good schools in nearby neighborhoods that we could have applied to but never did.

[…]

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/09/28/confessions_homeschooler/

And this, my friends, is what it looks like when you are far down the road to Home Education being totally accepted as normal and in fact, desirable.

The man who wrote this stresses the fact that he does not hate the government, does not hate the idea of school, and is not running away from his local schools. He is a perfectly average person who simply has chosen to ‘Home School’.

This is exactly the point that has to be reached in the UK, a point in time where there is no one left who does not understand, see as desirable and most importantly, trust the idea of Home Education.

Right now, we have totally ignorant people making the claims that this author refutes nicely and even more troubling those same ignorant people pushing for unnecessary legislation to control something that is not a problem in any way. In fact, the only thing that the ignorant Diana Johnson wants to eliminate is her own ignorance about Home Education and she is using legislation to try and do this rather than Google.

Now get a load of this:

Ofsted visit faith schools and give them glowing reports

Independent faith schools give pupils a strong sense of personal worth and help them understand the importance of being a good citizen according to a report published today by Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills.

Then we go to the BBC and Schools Minister, Diana Johnson and all of a sudden things a Faith based education is BAD

Some evangelical parents need monitoring by the state because they may ‘intimidate’ their children with ideas about God, sin and hell, a BBC radio host has said.

If that isn’t a perfect example of the anti home ed focus of government…

[…]

http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/9088-faith-schools-faith-home-ed.html

You CANNOT make things like this up!

These people REALLY ARE INSANE!

Perhaps Roger Bolton and Diana Jonson could take some money from the BBC, fly on a research mission to the USA to meet Home Educators and then come back enlightened. Certainly Johnson has heard from Home Educators in the UK, and for some reason their words have gone in one ear and out the other, there being nothing in between to stop them.

But I digress.

Clearly, when people of the social class Andrew O’Hehir belongs to start to Home Educate, the tipping point is passed. They have access to influential media, know how to use it, and by that use, educate all the people who have not yet thought about Home Education as to what it really is and who does it; every type of person does it, and what it is is entirely natural, beneficial and wonderful. It has nothing to do with child safety issues or being against the government; it is only occasionally politicised because misguided governments are staffed by people who are ignorant of what it is, or who are philosophically opposed to it. Home Educators do not have any desire to engage with politics. They are busy enough doing what they do, but when push comes to shove, they are, as we have seen, more than capable of entering that nasty arena and defending themselves.

Priceless…