The Daily Mail published a blistering attack on HMG, written deliberately to raise questions. Shall we answer them?

Why not?!

This Parliament has now lost all moral and political authority and ought, by rights, to dissolve itself.

Thats like asking a bank robber to turn himself and his bag of money in, or more accurately, a counterfeiter to hand in his printing press and plates, ink and paper stock voluntarily. No corrupt political power ‘dissolves itself’. That would be an act of decent, moral people. These are not decent moral people.

It is now not only the Government that has ceased to deserve our trust. So many members of the House of Commons have disgraced themselves so completely that their right to make laws for the rest of us has evaporated.

These people have been abusing their positions for years. All during that time, they schemed up the ID Cards, ContactPoint and countless other evils. They never had the right to make laws for anyone. So, if this is the case, should not all legislation introduced by New Labour be struck off of the books? If we are going to start with a clean slate, then let’s actually clean it; the 3000 laws of New Labour should be removed, and all of their purely evil and fascist proposals permanently scrapped. That means ID Cards, ContactPoint, the NIR and everything to do with them – SCRAPPED.

Nothing comparable has happened to British politics in modern times. The revelations of surreptitious greed – sometimes pathetic, sometimes outrageous, often both at the same time – are uniquely damaging.

These people are not greedy. They are behaving like human beings. The mistake the Mail makes is to put these people on a pedestal and expect them to not be human. Instead of asking for this, they should ask instead why these people need to ‘cheat’. Once they find the answer to that question, they will come to the conclusion that everyone in the country should be relieved of the insane burdens that they live under.

We have always known that MPs are human and imperfect, like the rest of us. In fact, it is important, for the sake of our democracy, that they are.

Nonsense. Since no one can be trusted, no one should be put in a position of trust with exceptional powers over anyone else. No one should be able to steal money or property from other people. No one should be able to murder. No one should be able to initiate force against another person. This is true of individuals or collections of individuals, no matter how that collection is selected.

But we also assumed that on election to that hallowed chamber, they recognised the seriousness of their tasks, the long, honourable traditions of freedom and courage which they had been elected to defend and the need to be honest above all things.

This is a joke right?

Nobody can assume that now. Grubby, grasping, shameless, these essentially little men and women are now shown to have become worse, not better, to have shrunk rather than grown, once they took their solemn oaths and added the letters ‘MP’ to their names. What did they think those letters stood for? Manipulate and Profit?

Murder and Pillage
Money and Power
Milking and Pilfering
Menace and Poison
Manacle and Prison
Monsters and Parasites
Money-grabbers and Prostitutes
Movies and Popcorn
Morons and Pipsqueaks
Miscreants and Poopheads
Meddling and Profane
Mad and Pathetic
Mountebanks and Pillocks
Malignant and Perfidious
MMORPG and Pwned
Muffdivers and Poodlefakers

Feel free to add to this list.

They seem to have been gripped by a sort of collective madness, combined with an astonishing heedless arrogance.

Almost there… COLLECTIVIST MADNESS!

How did they dare to finance their unearned profiteering and nest-feathering using taxpayers’ money – and then actually exempt themselves from tax?

‘Who dares wins’ thats how. People like the Mail allowed it to happen by consistently failing to rise to the challenge (as if they even had the choice) of confronting evil from the root; that collectivism itself is the evil.

Like the members of some pampered rubber-stamp Soviet in the old days of communism, their relationship with the State has been the exact opposite of that suffered by ordinary citizens.

Firstly, they are not LIKE members of a rubber-stamp Soviet, they ARE the NEW rubber-stamp Soviet Britain. Everyone knows it.

The hand of Government reaches ceaselessly into the pockets of the hard-working and the productive: when they earn, when they spend, when they travel, when they try to provide for old age, when they die.

And the solution to this is?…. Wait for it…..

For MPs it is the other way round. The State kindly subsidises their forays into the housing market, pumps other people’s money into their pensions, furnishes their little bolt-holes, provides them with free car parking and fat car allowances. Tax free.

The Daily Mail doesn’t seem to understand, THEY ARE THE STATE. The State is not separate from them, they are the State INCARNATE.

Tax free – two little words. Most of us would faint with shock if we were allowed even for a single year to see how much wealthier we would be without this burden.

There it is!

When the Daily Mail types wake up and understand that there can be no State without their cooperation, then the image will have cracked, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” will be everyone’s new reality, and all our troubles will soon after be over. Not only would everyone be wealthier, but this country would start to resemble the sort of place that it used to be; not a police state.

Yet MPs, who impose most of our taxes, do not even have to pay them on what is for many the bigger part of their income, an arrangement that places them in the luxury class. No wonder they are so carefree about loading taxes on everyone else.

‘The luxury class’ what does that even mean? Whatever it is you own or make, no one has the right to steal it from you. Whatever happens, nothing must distract from this and the fundamental principles.

Even now, they do not understand how their behaviour appears to others. Monstrously, it is proposed that the police should act against the source of the leaked information. How doubly ridiculous.

“Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done”. Hmph! What their behaviour appears like is IRRELEVANT. It is what they are ACTUALLY DOING that is important. All the time they were ‘cheating’, they were passing draconian measures to enslave the British people, all the while, appearing to be decent and behaving correctly. Correct behaviour, or at least the appearance of it is enough to keep everyone quiet in the UK. This is TOTAL INSANITY; as long as they are not spitting in your face, they can steal your money, your property, your liberty and …. you do not care? How can people BE like this?!

Modern Whitehall, so keen on gathering our secret details on its databases, so blithe in its promises that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, has proved yet again that it is not fit to be trusted with a bus ticket, let alone information of any value.

Actually, they have control of Bus Tickets also and you are right, they cannot be trusted with that either. As for all the other databases, you are paying for them; you are financing your own oppression. When are you going to join the dots and complete the hideous picture? Not only are they taking your money to live lives of ‘luxury’ but they are using your money to put you all in virtual cages from which you will never be able to escape, short of a total revolution. Wake up you dunderheads!

The 2005 Parliament is, in all important respects, not just a lame duck but a dead one. The Cabinet is an assembly of haggard political ghosts awaiting the end, bereft of ideas and even of the gimmicks and stunts that have served it so well till now.

It has been like this since before Bliar took office. This is not a new phenomenon. This is not news. What people like you need to talk about is how nothing like this is ever going to be allowed to happen again. What are you going to do to ensure that this is the case? That is the question.

Prime Minister’s Questions is a futile, modern version of bear-baiting in which nothing is revealed or gained. Nothing will come out of this nothingness.

“Welcome to the real world.”

The ‘modernisers’ and radicals who have sneered for so long at the Monarchy might now reflect on the fact that the one part of Government completely untouched by scandal and wholly above suspicion is the Sovereign herself.

I defy anyone in Britain to name a modern prime minster that would be preferable to absolute monarchy. Its an interesting question!

As she surveys the behaviour of her MPs, the pitiful failure of the Speaker and of the House of Commons authorities to check their behaviour, the involvement of Privy Counsellors and of the Opposition in the scandal, she must be more than tempted to summon her Prime Minister to the Palace and suggest to him that it would be a kindness to dissolve one of the most disgraceful Parliaments of modern times. This could begin a process of cleansing which is sorely needed.

And the Royal Prerogative to declare war should be returned to the monarch also. The power to wage war is too dangerous to be left in the hands of peasants. Yes, PEASANTS.

The Speaker should, of course, go. The officials supposedly supervising MPs’ allowances should likewise go. The MPs themselves should be compelled to face their constituents, who should all be provided with full details of their member’s expenses claims. The ex-MPs can then explain how they plan to reform their own institution and work out a system by which they would be adequately paid and properly recompensed for genuine expenses. Some of them might then be allowed back.

‘Allowed back’. This is why you FAIL. Its like voluntarily letting a thief back into your pockets for a second rifle around. Are you all TOTALLY INSANE?!?!

Voters face an awkward problem here. This is not – as will become increasingly clear in days to come – a party political issue. The Conservatives were trembling last night, wondering when their own misdeeds would begin to be exposed alongside those of Labour.

If you are a voter, then you have more problems than political parties. If you believe that voting can solve your problems, you are insane.

It is worth recalling that when The Mail on Sunday first uncovered the misuse of housing allowances in December 2002, it was the Tory MP Michael Trend who was found out.

So, between 2002 and 2009, nothing has changed and yet you want to go back to the polls, AGAIN, for MORE OF THE SAME. That is insane. There is no other word for it. Total unhinged insanity.

This newspaper has continued with its bipartisan pursuit of this abuse ever since, following a long trail. This has led more recently to the exposure of the increasingly preposterous Jacqui Smith’s slippery arrangements and to the unveiling of Tony McNulty’s similarly suspect claims.

These stories, doggedly and consistently investigated, undoubtedly helped bring about the mass exposure now under way.

It is true that Labour has made matters worse than they were, repeatedly trampling on rules and institutions which once preserved integrity at Westminster.

Without a paradigm shift, nothing will change. You can write all the articles you like; as long as you prop up the system by pretending that it is legitimate in its form and only needs ‘the right people’ to make it work properly, you will consistently FAIL and continue to be stolen from.

It has debauched Civil Service impartiality, imposing political commissars on Whitehall. It told deliberate lies to Parliament and people to gain support for an illegal war, the one single action that has done most to undermine good government, corrupting everyone involved. The lasting shame of the MPs gulled in this episode has no doubt demoralised them.

That war really and truly broke something. What you are doing by talking like this and holding back is trying to glue back together the dust of the porcelain vase that was the illusion you were living. Instead of trying to glue dust together, you should seize this opportunity to build a truly just britain, with a very small government that does not tell anyone what to do, and that does not steal money from its citizens.

Labour has also connived at torture and presided over the worst economic catastrophe for 80 years, bleating that it is not to blame.

A country with a small government cannot act as the poodle to any other country. Britain should get out of the EU, and tear up all the other treaties that cede sovereignty to foreign bodies. As for the financial crisis, if Britain had sound money no one in this country would be suffering the secret taxation of inflation and all the other problems to do with currencies controlled by a central bank.

At the same time it has extended the system of MPs’ allowances, and accelerated the process (already under way for many years) by which MPs have become the compliant, feather-bedded employees of Downing Street rather than the vigilant representatives of the British people.

When were they EVER the ‘vigilant representatives of the British people’? Those people are nothing more than warmongering ignorant control addicts hell bent on gaining absolute control of every British person down to their urine. After years of publishing articles about this, SURELY you all realize that that is the truth.

The Mother of Parliaments has been transformed into a personal wealth-creation scheme on the moral level of Las Vegas.

When has it been otherwise? It has always been an organ of organized theft and murder. It is only now that they not only steal and kill, but seek to totally oppress the population in a system of absolute control facilitated by technology. The vegas analogy is interesting. Let’s flesh it out.

At a Las Vegas casino, the house (parliament) always wins. The casino owners make a fortune. They ‘own the joint’. The difference is, people CHOOSE to gamble there, the rules NEVER CHANGE, and players can win MILLIONS of dollars with a single pull of a lever on a small stake. While you are there, you are treated with great respect and friendliness by the casino employees, there are free shuttle busses to everywhere laid on for you by the casino, you and your family have lots of fun, the food is cheap, plentiful and high quality, the weather is nice, and when you leave, you cannot wait to come back and spend more money.

Does that sound like Britain’s Parliament to you?

But both major parties have played their part in the transformation of politics into a well-paid and comfortable career for people who probably could not succeed in any other field.

True.

Both have done this as the European Union has hoovered power from Westminster to Brussels, leaving British governments with little to decide and not all that much to divide the parties.

Britain out of the EU.

Wise, experienced and forceful men and women have increasingly turned away from parliamentary politics. Inexperienced and unqualified backstairs-crawlers have taken their places.

So, you prefer to be stolen from by ‘wise, experienced and forceful’ men? That does not make sense. Also, even if those men WERE decent, there is always another Bliar or Brown around the corner. Only a system that permanently defangs government can prevent future theft, murder and abuses.

This change, until today too little noticed by the public, is now exposed in all its squalor.

Serious citizens of all parties and none should recognise that they have not been paying enough attention, that they have trusted too much and questioned too little.

Bloggers would disagree with this. Clearly.

We cannot expect Parliament to hold the executive to account, if we do not ourselves hold MPs to account, in every sense of the word.

Now is the time to do so. The people can and must recapture Westminster from the careerists and the cheats.

AND THEN WHAT?!

[…]

Daily Mail

Judging from the comments on this related post many people seem to instinctively understand that something fundamental is wrong, but they are incapable of making the leap to the final conclusion that the whole system is fundamentally evil. There is talk of throwing them all out and starting again… starting again with the same rules? That is going to inevitably end up with more of the same.

Speaking of rules, Labour’s Lynne Jones, MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, had this hilarious line:

She said: ‘It’s a very difficult situation. People retire on certain financial assumptions and we can’t just change the rules.

[…]

Daily Mail

Astonishing? Hardly.

These are the same people who do nothing but change the rules in the middle of the game (people’s lives); the most recent example is the change of the rules for ‘Non Dom’ workers:

Many people came to the UK because the rules were favorable. Now, after settling down, doing good work, bringing prosperity and creativity to the UK, the government wants to change the rules halfway through the game. That is not cricket.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=986

This is a perfect example of the hypocrisy of government aparatchicks; the rules cannot be changed when it comes to THEIR PLANS FOR THEIR OWN FUTURES, but the plans for ANYONE ELSE are infinitely mutable. I do not need to go into how these parasites are not even productive, producing nothing ever, whereas the people in business are actually productive.

Like we have been saying for many posts, there are too many laws and regulations. If you are going to bring back parliament at all, it should sit in an unprecedented form whose sole Raison d’être should be to remove legislation.

Parliament in its current form sits to create legislation. If it continues to exist as it was, it can only make things worse for everyone, since it justifies its existence through the creation of legislation. As time goes on, they will, logically, have to legislate on every aspect of human life. This is unacceptable. Its like a runaway population of consumers producing garbage until there is no more space to live on earth. And no, the laws cannot be recycled.

Such a parliament could sit for many decades carefully undoing the byzantine and irrational laws and regulations that their venal predecessors conjured up. They would be assured of jobs for life, and great, even unprecedented popularity, as their role would change from ‘oppressors’ to ‘liberators’.

As it stands now, they are revealed as almost completely illegitimate and actually dangerous. They have very little room to maneuver; they can either go forward with the police state and risk being obliterated by force, or they can re-define their role and survive till the end of this century as heroes.

Either way, business as usual is off of the table!

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has an article about something familiar to all americans who have looked behind their TV sets or their toasters:

Look at the back of your computer monitor, the bottom of your table lamp, or the label on your hair dryer. Chances are you will see the symbol “UL” with a circle around it. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a firm headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, and an unsung hero of the market economy.

Most people don’t realize that dozens of products in their homes — toasters, fire extinguishers, space heaters, televisions, etc. — have been tested by the Underwriters Lab for safety. The Lab also tests items like bulletproof vests, electric blankets, commercial ice-cream machines, and chicken de-beakers, among thousands of other products.

But the Lab isn’t an arm of the government. It is privately owned, financed, and operated. No one is compelled by force of law to use its services. It thrives — and makes our lives safer — by the power of its excellent reputation. For that reason, its ideologically driven enemies on the Left despise it.

The firm was formed in 1894 to deal with the dangers posed by the dramatic increase in the use of electricity. Today, it employs 4,000 scientists, engineers, and safety specialists to render an independent verdict on hundreds of thousands of products.

The very existence of the Lab debunks the common civics-text view that, without government intervention, private businesses would seek profit without regard for safety; thus, bureaucrats have to police markets to impose a balance between private interests and the common good. The government, according to this view, is the only thing standing between us and unceasing fatal accidents.

The truth is the opposite. The market is well equipped to regulate itself, and does a fine job of it. It’s the government that operates without oversight. To discover the quality and value of products, no one would trust the advice of the scandal-ridden Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission.

Unlike quality and price, safety isn’t always at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. But that hasn’t kept manufacturers from seeking out the Lab’s testing services. For those who appreciate the virtues of private enterprise, the UL insignia is an inspiration.

The Lab was the first to set standards for certifying the safety of pilots and planes before the government intervened. It set the standards for building materials, fire-fighting equipment, air conditioners, and household chemicals. It employs safecrackers and pyrotechnicians to test safes, and a variety of unique machines and devices to test thousands of other products each year. It has been testing multicolored Christmas lights since 1905, and entered the building-code business right after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Despite its unparalleled experience and success, the market economy keeps the Lab innovating. As engineer John Drengenberg of the Lab said,

There’s always some little twist in a new product — an innovative feature or something to make it cheaper — to keep us busy developing the appropriate test procedure.

Its effectiveness in determining safety standards (even for brand-new products) and maintaining them over time has generated an interesting result. Many government regulations, especially at the state level, merely mimic the building codes and insurance requirements of the Lab.

The Lab also “regulates” in a cost-effective way. Companies come to the Lab to present their products and the tests they have already conducted. The company pays a testing fee ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the costs of the tests to be conducted.

If the product passes, it receives one of three designations:

1. To be “listed” means that the product has passed muster for sale as a final product, like a hair dryer.
2. If it is listed as “recognized,” it is safe to use as a component within the final product, like a transformer.
3. To be “certified” means that the product has met someone else’s standards, such as the Chicago building code.

Each product is tested for each use, and the Lab is strict about how its mark is used by manufacturers. For example, Securitron Magnalock sent a new lock to the Lab for testing. New standards had to be established, and the lock was duly tested and “recognized” as a component for a delayed-exit system.

When the company faxed all of its field representatives that the product was “UL approved,” Lab officials suspended the listing. It then required Securitron to inform all employees that UL does not “approve” any product.

To insure continued safety, manufacturers agree to let the Lab inspect their production facilities and to retest on demand. These on-site inspections, often four a year, are unannounced. Lab inspectors can require manufacturers to present data and to rerun safety trials and experiments. Companies, in turn, pay a tiny fee for every UL designation symbol they put on their products.

Manufacturers can modify their products to adapt to market conditions, but the Lab oversees changes that affect product safety. The Lab is inflexible and scientific, but it’s also driven by common sense and realism.

Nothing is perfectly safe, of course. The competitive marketplace and the Lab aim for safety in a framework of rational attention to costs. UL official Drengenberg has noted, “It would be very easy for us to come up with an overly strict standard,” but then no one could afford to buy the product.

In fact, the Lab once built a fireproof office for some of its employees. The expensive room featured ceramic tile on the walls and ceiling, a thick concrete floor, metal furniture, and similar standards. Not only was the cost high, the esthetic results were not impressive. As Robert Yereance, author of Electrical Fire Analysis says, “most of us cannot afford a fireproof dwelling and would not like living in it if we could.”

The Lab notes that 80% of accidents and fires are caused by consumers, not products. It takes this into account in its requirements. In the case of space heaters, for example, the Lab felt that enhanced warning labels would reduce as many fires as an expensive redesign, thus keeping down cost and price.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3440

The Ludwig Von Mises institute keeps pouring out example after example of why we do not need the state for the majority of things that ‘need organizing’. The above is yet another instance showing how the market can solve any problem more efficiently than state regulation. Not only does it work better, but it is sensible, unlike the insane health and safety madness that has overtaken Britain, where, for example, every pest control company operating in the UK will soon have to have two people on hand every time a ladder is deployed…by order of the state. That means that either the companies that are currently working will need to double the numbers of their exterminators and pass the greater expense of these extra wages to the infested customers or the companies will have to do half as many jobs since they are no longer able to send a single man out with a ladder to do his job. Both outcomes will result in greater pestilence in the UK. But the government likes that, because they are the ultimate pestilence.

But I digress.

The above story proves yet again that we are all better off without the state interfering in our affairs. Wether the part of our lives is schools, money, safety or anything you can imagine, when the state is removed from the equation and people are left to organize themselves the optimum and just result emerges.

Someone named Alison has written a brilliant piece on the anti Home Education propaganda war that is under way:

Open season on home education, but we aren’t all game

We will no doubt all remember for a very long time that fateful day, back in January 2009, when the UK Government declared open season on home educators in England by announcing a review of home education with a remit “to consider what evidence there is to support claims that home education could be used as a ‘cover’ for child abuse such as neglect, forced marriage, sexual exploitation or domestic servitude”.

In a vituperative attack on families who refuse to sacrifice their children to daily incarceration, regimentation and bullying, the offensive, uninformed and highly irresponsible Government minister, Delyth Morgan, pronounced that home educators were now all under suspicion, simply because some local authorities who were hostile to the educational freedom enjoyed by a minority group had misrepresented a few cases and made up some others for good measure. It wasn’t long before the NSPCC chimed in with their two penn’orth, making it all up as they went along because it was potentially a nice little earner. Did you know that Victoria Climbie was home educated? Thought not (probably because she wasn’t). When the facts don’t fit, they just make them up.

Let’s look at a some facts and cite some real cases.

Eunice Spry was an abusive parent who happened also to home educate. It is tiresome to hear this case trotted out on a regular basis by local authorities, especially when one of them (Gloucestershire) had approved Spry as a foster parent and the family was visited on a regular basis by an education officer who declared the home education provision satisfactory. This article, written by a Gloucestershire home educator, fills in the details of this appalling case, where the State failed to use existing powers, despite reports of abuse being made by the children themselves and others in the community.

There have been a number of cases where attempts have been made to link child murder to home education, which one parent has described as “tantamount to grave robbing”. Danielle Reid, for example, was a school pupil in Inverness whose mother claimed she had moved to Manchester when in fact she was already dead, murdered by her psychopath stepfather. She was never home educated and was known to be at risk. Details of the State’s failure to act can be found in this TESS article. Victoria Climbie’s death was also preventable, but the authorities, including Social Services and the NSPCC, failed to act to save her and were severely criticised in the subsequent inquiry. Like Danielle, Victoria was never home educated and was known to be at risk of significant harm. Nevertheless, both girls’ deaths have been used to push a universal child surveillance scheme which would have saved neither.

Let’s also look at the track record of the State in spotting or preventing abuse, sexual exploitation, trafficking and some of the other ills they are trying to desperately to pin on home educators in England. It is far from satisfactory, as the following examples illustrate.

According to a secret Border and Immigration Agency report obtained by the Guardian, organised criminal gangs have exploited a children’s home near Heathrow airport for the trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade. At least 77 Chinese children are said to have gone missing since March 2006 from the local authority run home. Surely these highly vulnerable ‘looked after’ children had the right to expect better from the State?

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, eight members of a paedophile network have been convicted of a catalogue of charges relating to child abuse and indecent images of children. One of the guilty was chief executive of a high profile youth work agency, presumably ‘approved’ by the State as suitable to work with young people, but he still sexually abused a very young child, and invited fellow paedophiles to do likewise, after gaining a family’s trust. So much for the effectiveness of Disclosure Scotland and CRO checks.

The number of teachers, social workers, medical professionals and police officers who have been convicted of child abuse and sexual exploitation are too many to list as cases are reported in the media on such a regular basis. Such ‘trusted’ professionals were disproportionately represented in the network of abusers and pornographers uncovered by Operation Ore and are similarly over represented in the abuse conviction statistics in the UK. While home educators are unlikely to be immune from an evil which cuts across the whole of our society, they are most certainly not over represented as child abusers.

Whereas there is no denying that social workers have an incredibly difficult job, they can get things very wrong. On the one hand, children can end up seriously abused, neglected or even dead, while on the other, families may never recover from being subject to statutory interventions, including compulsory measures of care and supervision, based on flawed information, overzealousness and poor professional judgement.

The Baby P case touched the heart of the nation and sparked unprecedented public outrage as it was revealed that there were countless missed opportunities for State agents to save the child’s life by removing him from the family home to a place of safety. It wasn’t long before recriminations started flying and those seen to be responsible were summarily dismissed for incompetence. In the recently broadcast Baby P: the whole truth? Panorama revealed a catalogue of failures on the part of the local authority, the frustration of the police who wanted to take action and the outright failure of the ‘joined up working’ we have all heard so much about.

Baby P is Victoria Climbie all over again. Lessons have not been learned, the most important one of all being that, in order to protect vulnerable children, the State needs to invest money in well trained social workers rather than expensive databases of children, the majority of whom are categorically not at risk from their own parents.

Apart from the headline grabbing cases in which the State has failed to take action to save a child, there are numerous cases where families have been wrongly accused of abuse or worse. Louise Mason’s case was one which made headlines; many others go unreported. Her story makes chilling reading for any parent and demonstrates the extreme fallibility of a system which is supposed to protect children but instead can lead to the persecution of innocent parents. Louise was falsely accused of child abuse when her baby was in fact suffering from a rare form of cancer, and social workers took all three of her children away. Athough two have been returned, one child remains in foster care where she is settled, since it took Louise years to clear her name. What a travesty.

In another particularly disturbing case, the reputation of a home educating family, whose child had tragically died from natural causes, was deliberately sullied in 2004 by the general secretary of the Association of Education Wefare Managers. In a letter to the then Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge, it was erroneously claimed that the child had been removed from school “then subjected to child abuse”. A retraction was duly made and a full apology issued, but the episode marked a new low in the mud slinging stakes by an opportunist who hadn’t bothered to check her facts in a desperate bid to smear a minority community on the basis of one case twisted to suit her own purposes.

There have been other high profile travesties, such as the Orkney child abuse scandal, the Cleveland scandal and the Rochdale satanic abuse case. On the basis of no more than rumour, hearsay, suspicion and improper medical diagnoses, social workers removed children from their parents who were all subsequently absolved of any wrongdoing.

Social workers are of course carrying an unrealistic workload, the profession is in the midst of a recruitment and retention crisis, and its practitioners make convenient scapegoats when things go wrong. Social workers can and do provide excellent support to families and children, but too many are poorly trained and lack experience of real world diversity, including home education as a lawful alternative to schooling. They tend to eye home educators with suspicion due to a combination of ignorance and prejudice, a situation which has only been compounded by the Government’s latest incitement to discrimination against a law abiding minority.

Liz Davies is probably best known for her whistle blowing in the Islington abuse scandal that exposed the abuse of children within the borough’s care system and is a respected social worker and senior lecturer. In an article published by No2Abuse, she outlines her own experiences of the care system and the problems facing the social work profession. Home educators who have come into contact with social workers share many of her concerns and those of No2Abuse.

Eileen Munro, reader in social policy at the London School of Economics, has pointed to the bureaucratic burden carried by social workers and the need to focus on those who are most at risk rather than surveilling all children. A vehement opponent of the Government’s misguided ContactPoint database which will record the personal details of all 11 million children in England, she argues: “When you are searching for a needle in a haystack – a child at risk – why make the haystack bigger?” Quite.

Coming on to the spurious allegation of home educated children being forced into marriage (or at risk of being forced into marriage?) no cases have ever been cited to demonstrate even a tenuous link. Indeed it is bizarre to pin such a ‘crime’ on home educators, since schooling parents have just as much opportunity during the long summer holidays to seal a mandatory matrimonial deal for their offspring. We can only assume that the Government has no understanding of the difference between arranged marriage (entirely lawful) and forced marriage (criminal), and it seems likely this particular allegation stems from racism and religious discrimination on the part of delusional local authority ‘informants’.

Despite the Government’s stated concerns that home educators might force their young people to marry against their will, some ministers appear to have no such qualms about forcing unmarried parents into wedlock. Their somewhat schizophrenic stance on forced marriage was revealed in a recent Telegraph article which reported the mooting of an idea that couples with children outside wedlock should be automatically married by the State without their consent. An indecent proposal, or just hypocrisy?

Domestic servitude is a difficult one. Does it mean home educators stand accused of being more likely to allocate household chores to their offspring? If so, they are quite possibly guilty as charged as households don’t run themselves and ‘domestic engineering’ is seen by most to be a useful life skill. If, however, it means selling children into slavery, it is difficult to imagine any such case escaping the attention of the media. Since none appears to have been reported, we can safely assume this to be another fabrication designed to smear a minority group. Sigh.

As a matter of record, the Scottish Government makes it abundantly clear in its guidance to local authorities that there is no evidence to suggest that home educated children are any more likely to suffer abuse (or any of the other ills) than their schooled counterparts. It also makes it clear that home educated children are not deemed to be ‘Children Missing from Education’ (CME) and allows eligible home educated young people to claim the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

Why, then, does the UK Government insist that home educating families in England should be disproportionately disposed to abusing their own children? Why does it also insist that home educated children south of the border should be defined as ‘missing from education’ when they clearly are not, and why are eligible young people in England denied the EMA?

No evidence has ever been forthcoming to support these vile allegations, which are aimed exclusively at home educators in England, or to justify their less favourable treatment south of the border, although plenty of smears have been bandied about. What is the real reason for the elective home education review, and how much money is being thrown away by the UK Government on what is simply an exercise in rubber stamping its own pre-decided agenda? We would really like to know.

[…]

http://www.home-education.biz/Blogs/11/82/open-season-on-home-education/

Brilliant, concise, and absolutely true. Well done.

From every corner, come a series of very serious, moral and forthright voices, all incandescent with rage over the state trying to destroy the family.

There are several reasons why the state will not succeed.

Firstly, Labour is about to be sent to the same place where the American Republican party now languishes; complete destruction, desolation and political wilderness.

Second, the economic crisis that is just beginning and which will last for at least a decade, will mean that brutal cuts will be inevitable. There is not enough money for all the fascist garbage that Labour has patiently built – and actually, this means there is not enough money for the projects that the Tories will not cancel outright.

Third, the people of the UK have finally had enough. Everywhere you go and every where you read a comment from the public, the sentiment is the same; unrestrained rage. The Tories, if they are true to form, will not be any different to Labour when they inevitably take power. They will however, be powerless to stop the economic disaster that is on its way. They will have to scale down operations across the board. Councils will have a large proportion of their constituents defaulting on their Council Tax bills. When we combine this with the people who will not continue to finance their own oppression that corrupt system will collapse.

With all of these events going on, there is a real chance that at the very least, the fascist rampage will be delayed by at least a decade or more. Hopefully we can get something much more than that….who knows? One thing is for sure; business as usual is off of the table.

This is the letter posted to Mr Graham Badman of the Elective Home Education Review, on May 6th 2009, calling for the review to be scrapped and including AHEd’s dossier of information and responses:

Dear Mr Badman,

AHEd members call for the Review of Home Education to be cancelled immediately on various grounds, not least because of the illegitimate Terms of Reference. We have completed the consultation document, not in recognition of the value or legitimacy of the review, but as a means of being statistically included and conveying important messages about the errors inherent in the consultation process and questions.

We attach a copy of the response of AHEd members to the six question consultation “Home Education – Your Views” on the DCSF consultation web site.

AHEd object to the claim that this is not in fact a consultation, thereby allowing for avoidance of the regulations governing public consultations set by the Better Regulations Executive. DCSF Public Communications Unit state:

“Mr Badman has decided that he wants his review to be informed by material from a wide range of stakeholders, so he decided to offer the opportunity for organisations and individuals to contribute to the review by filling in a questionnaire.”

Quite how this aim can be achieved by avoiding good consultation practice and thus limiting the scope of those reached is a mystery, especially as the major and only really valid stakeholder group, home educators, are likely to be those most frequently excluded by this methodology. Despite efforts from within the HE community to contact a wide range of home educators, it is not possible to reach anywhere near the majority of the estimated 20,000 to 50,000 home educators.

On the other hand, local authorities who also had access to the six question consultation (and who are known to be often hostile toward and uneducated about home education and who are largely responsible for the calls for unwarranted increases in their powers) have been asked to complete an exclusive 60 question missive. The questions in this document demonstrate a shocking lack of understanding of the law and constitute a blatant incitement to local authorities to illicitly harass and persecute home educating families. They also highlight the DCSF’s and Review Team’s disdain for the Elective Home Education Guidelines for England which were only recently published by the DCSF after an extensive public consultation.

AHEd members believe that the review has been composed in this skewed manner in order to attain predetermined answers for the purpose of supporting the government’s desire to impose compulsory registration, monitoring and tracking of electively home educated children and their families, including state control and prescription of educational method, content and outcome for all children. The government’s motto seems to be “If at first you don’t succeed (in getting the answers you want from your consultation) try, try, try again (using increasingly devious techniques to try to thwart those who oppose you).

Further evidence of the predetermined outcome of this review was provided by yourself in a meeting with home educators when you declared that the “status quo” cannot prevail and changes WILL be made. Saying this before the review is complete is a clear indication that you have a predetermined outcome.

AHEd members are aware of the document “Education Otherwise Prospectus for Improving Support to Home Educating Families” presented to the review and wish to distance ourselves from it and dismiss the proposals out of hand. The document was written by a handful of home educators with no reference at all to the wider home education community or even to Education Otherwise members. In our opinion it does not represent proposals we would be happy to engage with and is extremely unlikely to have support in the wider home educating community. On the contrary, it has caused outrage.

AHEd members insist in the strongest possible terms that the only necessary changes are for LAs to stop ultra vires activity and instead learn to use the legal powers they already have. If changes in legislation that reduce the freedoms of home educators are proposed, this would be an act of the utmost hostility toward home educators and would be rejected out of hand by the home education community.

The public, especially those actually involved and likely to be affected by the outcome, do not have a taste for accepting such invasion into their private business. Our members will not co-operate with their own oppression and will continue to act and speak for our historic freedom to raise and educate our children in accordance with our personal philosophies, religious beliefs and conscience. Please see our Parents’ Declaration, attached.

You may also be aware of our petition which gathered 3,126 signatures in a short time plus that of the petition creator: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Homeedreview/

Further material supporting our call for cessation of the review is included.

Yours sincerely,

[…]

This is a great thing.

It draws a line in the sand, and gives the enemy a chance to back down. Sadly, they will not back down.

We all know that petitions do not work, that the declaration is flawed because it relies on the law as a basis of rights, etc etc, but in the main, this is probably the best thing a Home Education group has ever produced.

What needs to happen next is that every parent in Britain should be made to understand what this review really means. It is actually about the rights of all parents to look after their own children in any context, wether they are in school or not:

There is no current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home. There is no need for such a system, there never has been a need and there never will be. Children who are educated at home are exactly the same as those who are educated at schools. If you think there is a need for a system to safeguard children who are educated at home, then you need to start one to safeguard children who are educated at school. All schoolchildren have home lives just like home educated ones do. There is no more risk in either type of education. This consultation is the result of the fantasies of ignorant aparatchicks who are desperate to destroy the family, and to put every child in a government brainwashing centre. It simply will not wash. All the assumptions of this are completely wrong, and everyone knows it.

[…]

Home educating families should not be monitored, any more than families who send their children to schools should be monitored. Both of these groups have family lives; the only difference being that home educating families have more of a family life than those that send their children to school. Once again, this question is borne out of complete ignorance of what Home Education is, why it is done, who is doing it, what the proper role of government is, and what the fundamental rights of parents are.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1528

I will give you an example.

There is talk about provision for kindergarten being made available nation-wide for children of three. Imagine that you do not want your child to attend one of these state kindergartens, and that you want to keep them at home…just because you want to.

If your child is in ContactPoint (if they do not scrap it) the Local Authority will know that your baby has reached the age of three. They will also know that you have not registered your child at one of the local kindergartens. They will then assume that you are an incompetent child abusing parent because you will not avail yourself of their ‘free’ ‘service’.

This is essentially what they are saying to all parents; you are not capable of looking after your own children – only we have the necessary skills to look after children…THE STATE.

This is why I have been privately advocating for a professional PR company to engineer the reality of Home Education; to put it into its proper context and head off the inevitable smear campaign that is going to go into full gear once the review is nearing completion and the results published.

Now for the hard questions

Our members will not co-operate with their own oppression

What does this actually mean? You will have several options, and the Germans are years ahead of you when it comes to this.

You will be obliged, first of all, to ignore any and all legislation that attempts to take away your rights.

You will then have to make a choice.

You could go into hiding. In police state britain, that will be a great challenge. People are being encouraged to tattle on their neighbors over garbage – literally – and so it will be a simple thing to convince a propagandized public to report home schoolers, since, ‘everybody knows….’. You would have to restrict your movements, only going out when school is out, lest the truancy officers spot you. It would be a difficult existence to say the least.

You could opt for taking a stand and Home Educating no matter what. As in the case of the Germans you can expect huge fines, jail, and being threatened with the loss of custody of your children. Without a large fighting fund behind you to give the authorities pause, we could call such a strategy a ‘Martyrdom Path’. It might actually be a good thing, as it could wake the nation up to the insanity of the State raising all children from the age of three, wether the parent likes it or not.

Finally, you could opt to flee the country with your family. Iran is a nice place to live compared to the UK if you Home Educate and they change the law. Certainly going to another western country is not a good idea. France is out of the question (for example) since:

In France, homeschooling is legal and requires the child to be registered with two authorities, the ‘Inspection Académique’ and the local town hall (Mairie). An inspection is carried out twice yearly once a child reaches the age of six (it is obligatory from the age of eight).

[…]

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

Not very nice. Its exactly what you do not want; the state interfering in your private business through invasive and pointless registrations and inspections.

Take a look at this map:

(Green) Legal
(Yellow) Mostly Legal; may be disputed in most political subdivisions
(Orange) Generally considered illegal, but untested legally
(Red) Illegal

All the places in red are where Home Education is illegal. The Brutish government wants to join all the bad places on this map. Absolutely SHAMEFUL.

According to that map, and the Wikipedia page it came from Austria looks like the best country to move to if you have an EU passport. Home Education is just legal; no registration, no interference, no nonsense. You will not have any problems with immigration, you can travel anywhere in the EU…

Which gives me an idea.

Why not take an address in Austria, and say that you live there? Think about it; how long do you have to be in the UK before the State requires that your children attend school? If you are from Austria, and you decide to spend some time in different parts of the EU as a family exploring Europe, how can the State expect you to register your children in every country as you move around? Its completely ABSURD.

Which brings us to the final conclusion of all of this. Eventually, the government is going to have to implement exit visas for all UK subjects. You will have to apply for permission to leave Britain with your children, so that they can make sure that you are not leaving during term time, or so they can catch Home Educators. When you apply for a visa, you will of course, have to get a signature from your schools headmaster, confirming that you have his permission to leave the country with ‘your’ child. The E-Borders project will facilitate this nicely.

Think about it; it is the logical end to all of this madness. As long as you have the right to leave the country at will and relocate anywhere you like with your family, their law means nothing. As long as you are free to live anywhere in the EU and can return to Britain at will, and there is no rule about how long you have to be in Britain before you must send your children to school, all of their Home Education laws will have no meaning. In order for these laws to be enforceable, what I have just described needs to be rolled into the equation.

This is why everything that they are planning now needs to be stopped. Once all these pieces are in place, they will have a system of total control over everyone. The keys to it all are the databases. Never before in the history of man has such a comprehensive grid of control been possible. Never before have such an evil group of monsters been in a position to make it a reality.

The war on Home Education is only a part of this. All groups, need to stand their ground in their own corner, and absolutely refuse to cooperate with anything that destroys their rights. Together, as we act individually, we will be transformed by emergent behavior effects into an unstoppable force for good.

Thankfully, it appears that this is actually happening!

BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.

There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.

Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution’s principal tasks was “to alter people’s actual psychology”. Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people’s psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years’ prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the “global baggage of empire” was linked to soccer violence by “racist and xenophobic white males”. He claimed the English “propensity for violence” was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were “potentially very aggressive”.

In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government’s anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: “If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you.” Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: “If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings.” It took him five years to clear his name.

Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police!” Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.”

A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya “Paki” and “bin Laden” during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan Finestein, said: “Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There are major crimes out there and the police don’t bother to prosecute. This is nonsense.”

[…]

The Australian

The case of the 14 year old girl is one we can call a ‘Hot Potato’ case.

The teacher knew that if she did not react, the ‘Hot Potato’ in her hands (the ‘racist incident’) would cause her third degree burns. The Urdu speaking students would have reported her and she would have gotten the sack. In order to avoid this, she passed the hot potato to the police, who had no choice but to react to avoid being burned themselves. The headmaster had to react since the police did not prosecute (they sent the Hot Potato back to him).

Certainly, the police would have thought that it is utterly ridiculous that a teacher calls the police to solve a matter of classroom discipline. Perhaps the teacher in her innermost thoughts would have preferred not to be in the position of having to call the police every time a schoolgirl says something that might be construed as ‘racism’. The same goes for the headmaster, who probably has enough on his hands with all the problems of running a failing school.

Whatever way you paint it, all of this is total unbridled insanity.

Think about it; can you reasonably expect someone to do a science project in French if their native language is Mandarin? How is it ‘racist’ by any stretch of the definition (and that would be stretching it to one molecule thick) to want to do your work in your own language?

One thing is for sure; home educated children and their parents do not have to put up with any of this. When they get together for functions or learning, the parents select children with the appropriate skills and manners to facilitate learning. They do not care about anything else. And if they DO care about other stuff, like exposing their children to ‘other cultures’ they can do that. The point is, it’s THEIR BUSINESS, and no one is going to call the police if they do not want their children to sit in a room with people who cannot speak english when their children are trying to learn in groups.

Anyone who calls that ‘racist’ is just retarded.

As Education Othewise become less and less important for various reasons, other more focussed groups are forming and asserting themselves. Action for Home Education is one of those groups. They have a ‘Parent’s Declaration’ online that they are asking HE parents to sign. This is a good start. It shows that finally, HE families are beginning to feel the very real threat to their families and are girding their loins for the upcoming confrontation with the evil state. The first step is to do this; declare your rights and your unalterable position.

Whilst its great to have a declaration, it is important that it makes sense, and does not contain any language that allows the state to assert in any way that they are the source of your rights. They are not. Your rights have nothing to do with the state, or its myriad pieces of legislation, or fake types of right that are in vogue today, like ‘children’s rights’ or ‘patients rights’ etc etc.

Let’s do it:

PARENTS’ DECLARATION

WE DECLARE our independent status and affirm our responsibility for the upbringing and education of our children in accordance with our lawful rights and natural justice.

First of all that is ‘sole responsibility’. Secondly, any rights you have come from nature, and not from the law, therefore we can only talk about our ‘natural rights’ as opposed to ‘lawful rights’, since the state can declare anything it likes to be unlawful; like drinking orange juice. If, all of a sudden, your ‘lawful rights’, in this case, to drink orange juice, are declared unlawful, are they taken away from you? Obviously not. Your rights exist with you, and cannot be legislated away. The state may make you an outlaw, but that does not erase your rights. For a particularly nasty example of the law making criminals of people who merely exercise their rights, see this. The ‘natural justice’ part is redundant. If you are exercising your rights without interference, that is just.

WE ASSERT our right to choose the place, form and content of the educational provision for our children in accordance with the following:

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—

(a)to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b)to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.
(Section 7 of the Education Act 1996)

In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Once again, if the law changes, do your natural rights disappear? What if parliament revokes Section 7 of the Education Act 1996? That is a very real possibility, especially as all UK HE people rely on this piece of law heavily. If that is one of your pillars then you are in serious trouble if they remove it. Your right to choose the place, form and content of the educational provision for your children has nothing to do with any legislation. The Germans do not have this legislation on their books, do they not have the same rights that you do? Of course they do, because rights do not come from the law.

(Protocol 2 Article 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights)

The european court has already declined to defend the rights of German parents to Home Educate, so I would not put too much store in using them to defend your rights in the UK.

WE WILL protect the rights of our children to own their own lives, to privacy and freedom from undue official interference in accordance with the following rights:

The right to respect for a private and family life, home and correspondence

(Human Rights Act 1998)

The right to be free from “arbitrary or unlawful interference with [their] privacy, family, home or correspondence” and from “unlawful attacks on [their] honour and reputation”

(Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)

Once again, Britain chooses to ignore what it likes when it comes to the EU, and in any case, as I say above, you cannot rely on European courts to defend what is naturally yours.

WE DEMAND that state officials remain within the bounds of the powers already conferred upon them under current law in their dealings with us, the people.

WE WILL UPHOLD AND DEFEND the above principles without fear or favour where the state forgets its legitimate function, oversteps its bounds or seeks to exert undue influence or power over our lives and those of our children against our traditional freedoms and natural justice.

Finally. This translates to (if we are taking it seriously) “we will not comply with anything that violates our rights.” That means that whatever nonsense the state comes up with, all the signatories of this declaration will simply disobey.

Once again we have some troublesome wording; freedoms are not traditional, they come from you by virtue of your existence. Traditions can be broken, are arbitrary and fleeting. Your rights are not breakable, are not arbitrary, and are eternal. Natural Justice we have already dealt with.

The next obvious step is to create a fighting fund for the inevitable lawsuits that will need to be brought, as LAs pick off the most vulnerable families to make examples of. A list of things that will not be obeyed could come in handy for those who are not up to speed on just how intertwined the monsters tentacles are.

This is good news all in all. Hopefully the numbers in HE crowd that are not willing to compromise will increase and the others who would sell their children for a pat on the head or a job in government will dwindle to a handful and then be permanently sidelined.

Snarfed from Renegade Parent.

UPDATE

The declaration has been translated into Portuguese, including all the references to British Law. Clearly this doesn’t make any sense, since the laws in the UK do not apply to Portugal. Had this document been written more carefully, it could have been adopted world-wide by any parent, since it would have dealt unambiguously with rights that everyone has in common and nothing to do with any particular state and its bogus legislation.

Airline pilots are to become the first group to refuse to take part in the national identity scheme when compulsory trials start at Manchester and London City airports this autumn.

The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa), which represents more than 80% of commercial airline pilots, is to mount a legal challenge to Home Office plans to use “critical” airside workers as the first compulsory “guinea pigs” for the scheme.

MPs are shortly to be asked to approve the powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register for the national ID card scheme as part of their “pre-employment” checks. The £30 fee is to be waived as an incentive for them to sign up.

The pilots’ union has protested to ministers that the £18m scheme cannot be regarded as voluntary when they are being told they will not qualify for an “airside pass” without them: “ID cards will have absolutely no value as far as security is concerned. This is nothing other than coercion and promises that ID cards would be voluntary have been broken,” Jim McAuslan, Balpa general secretary, has told ministers. “We will resist.”

These behind the scenes preparations and the recent signing of two 10-year contracts worth £650m to get the ID cards programme under way undermine recent speculation that the cabinet is considering axing the scheme as part of the general Whitehall spending squeeze. The speculation took off when a suggestion by David Blunkett, the former home secretary, that the ID card programme should be repackaged as a biometric passport scheme to reassure the public was misintepreted as him turning against the idea.

But the details of the two contracts awarded in the last few weeks show just how far the ID cards scheme has become embedded in the introduction of “biometric” passports. For 80% of British citizens their identity card will be their passport.

The Home Office describes the two contracts as “bringing the large scale deployment of ID cards a step closer”. The first contract, worth £385m and awarded to a US computer company, CSC, will cover processing applications for passports and ID cards and dealing with any subsequent changes in personal details . The second contract, awarded to IBM, and worth £265m, is to build and run the database that will store the digital fingerprints and facial images for the ID scheme and the new generation of passports.

The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the modernisation of the passports means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.

Two further contracts will be awarded this year for the design and production of identity cards and the next generation of passports to be introduced from 2011.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/04/identity-cards-airline-pilots

So, IBM is at it again:

During the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II, IBM had relationships and contracts with the German military/industrial technocracy. IBM’s punch card machines were used by Germany to keep track of people who were to be subjected to the Holocaust.[7]

[…]

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

and

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany — beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

[…]

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

Google it for yourself.

I’m surprised that no one is pulling up these companies, especially IBM for participating in this absolutely appalling and fascist scheme and of course, there are no companies in the UK who are capable of pulling off this nefarious project.

The grauniad betrays its secret pro ID card stance (not surprising, since they are pure statists in every other way) with this paragraph:

The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the modernisation of the passports means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.

This is a lie.

Lets try it this way:

“The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the mandatory barcode tattooing of the British public means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.”

It doesn’t work does it? And it doesn’t matter how much money they have spent, or how the system has been designed; it can be dismantled, and WILL be dismantled. The money they have spent on this project will be written off, and the companies will get compensation for the cancellation of the contracts. GAME OVER.

We have just seen the climbdown on keeping the DNA profiles and samples of innocent people, resulting in the destruction of the information on 800,000 completely innocent people, including children. Do not think for one second that the ID Card system can not be dismantled completely and sanity restored.

The only people who write like that, saying that it will be a fait accompli are those who want to carry these noxious and purely evil documents. It is not an excuse for Alan Travis to say that he is “merely reporting” when he writes this, because it is a lie to say that it cannot be, or will be ‘difficult’ to, “cancel the ID scheme separately”. Difficult by whose measure? Who said this? And if, as it is, it is not the case, why is there no counter argument saying that it is in fact not ‘difficult’ at all to cancel the project…just expensive, which when we are talking about human lives and dignity, means nothing. ‘Expensive’ itself is a relative term; Number 11 can just push the speed of their printing press up to 10.5 from 10 for an hour to pay off IBM and CSC….but I digress.

As for MPs asking for “powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register” they are just going to further solidify the resolve of the people who they have chosen to attack first. Everyone in the country will get behind them; there is no way that the government can possibly win.

They have already threatened to strike. I hope that the other airport staff are also ready to come out on strike at the same time. Both airports should be completely shut down until the government announces that the scheme is permanently cancelled.

I have been pointed to the Renegade Parent blog, as something worthwhile. It is:

Can you live my life for me, please?

by Renegadeparent

It was G’s birthday yesterday, and we enjoyed some well-earned family time together. I am wondering if in the not-too-distant future we might have to submit a timesheet to the DCSF in order to demonstrate the daily “positive activities” we’ve undertaken, thus warding off the over-zealous local authority workers who will no doubt be adding us to the at risk list for branding their endless interventions as UNNECESSARY, DUPLICATIVE NONSENSE of which we want no part, thank you very much.

As part of the celebratory fun, I bought a donkey piñata; I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they are banned for encouraging violence towards animals. I am not joking: Asda’s policy on teaspoons has recently been brought to my attention. In order to buy these items one must now produce valid ID. Because, apparently, someone has been murdered with a teaspoon. So lock up your cutlery drawers folks!

In a similar vein, JuliaM has written about the paramedic who was refused service by Tesco because he happened to be in uniform. Despite being heavily pregnant, I regularly buy alcohol from our local supermarket – perhaps, soon, I too will be refused – in order to protect my unborn child from the possibility of me downing a bottle of Grey Goose in the car park. In which case, I might take a leaf out of the paramedic’s book and confront them wearing nothing but a thong and a pair of socks.  As I am now the size of a young adult hippopotamus, it might shock them into compliance, if nothing else.

H/T Ambush Predator and Nanny Knows Best

[…]

http://www.renegadeparent.net/

See what I mean?

My kind of blogger, and my kind of parent!

29 Apr 09, 2:23am

Can you imagine how awful it would be if Britain was run by Fascists?

They’d make sure everyone carried identity papers and you’d be arrested if you failed to show your papers to a policeman, a policeman who would be armed with stun guns and two handled billy clubs and who’d beat unarmed demonstrators to the ground if they protested government policy. The police would be granted the right to intern suspects without charge for months and if anyone spoke out against the government they’d be arrested as “terrorists”.

There would be constant monitoring of every citizen by CCTV on every street corner, the government would have access to your emails and phone messages, Jesus, they might even do crazy stuff like implanting computer chips in your bins to monitor your rubbish!

Anyone who happened to dislike some aspects of the government’s social policy would be forced out of business and making jokes or speaking your mind about certain protected classes of people could see you losing your job or even your children. The state would gain control over the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of citizens and anyone who deviated from “acceptable” standards of behaviour would be punished by being deprived of health or welfare assistance.

The state run media would be intimidated into parroting government spin and lies and everyone from doctors and nurses to teachers and neighbours would be expected to report to the government any behaviour which was deemed to be outside government decreed standards.

Who knows they might even go crazy and start invading other countries.

Er. . .

Hang on a minute.

[…]

A comment on this utter trash in the Grauniad.

Every day brings us closer to GAME OVER.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington.

In email, some people said….

*******wrote:
Beacuse Monkton is missing the point. Nobody is trying to inform him or fool him.

Did you read the article?

The Democrats ‘…rescinded his (Monkton’s) scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing’. If anything, its the Democrats that are trying to fool and misinform the public by not allowing open debate and the submission of evidence.

Monkton is not missing any point at all, he was prevented from making any point in the first place!

We need to prepare the ignorant mass for a massive change in life style and this includes what gore has done and will continue to do

First of all, who is ‘We’ in this instance?

Secondly, lets define terms:

“Ignorance is the state in which a person lacks knowledge and is unaware of something. This should not be confused with being unintelligent, as one’s level of intelligence and level of education or general awareness are not the same. The word “Ignorant” is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware. The term may be used specifically (e.g. “One can be an expert in math, and totally ignorant of history.”) or generally (e.g. “an ignorant person.”) — although the second use is used less as a descriptive and more as an imprecise personal insult.”

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

So, in order to not be ignorant, we must not lack knowledge, or be unaware of something. In order to be aware, we need to learn, and that means listening and reading.

By blocking Monkton, Al Gore and his democrat friends are fostering ignorance. They are doing this deliberately to boost their social engineering agenda, that they know is based on junk science and outright lies. That is how they have got the ignorant to say by rote, “the debate is over and there is scientific consensus about anthropogenic global warming”, which is of course a bald faced lie. There is no scientific consensus on AGW, they know it, you and I, the people who are not, by definition, ignorant, know it, and they want to stop anyone else from finding out what we both know to be true.

whilst scientists debate in private what to do about the various environmental issues such as , oil depletion, ice melt, co2 rise, population increase, water shortage, food shortage, soil erosion, etc

We know better than to conflate different subjects, and I know that you are playing devils advocate, so lets go there:

• ‘oil depletion’ is a technical problem that will be adapted to by the market.
• ‘Ice melt’ is not happening like the environmental Fascists keep saying it is; you and I both know that, because we study the facts.
• ‘C02 rise’ is not the cause of ‘global warming’ and is not a problem; you and I both know this, because we have been exposed to the facts.
• Water shortage is a problem of efficiency not supply, the same with food shortage. If they are a problem of supply, the market will adjust accordingly.
• Soil erosion is a problem of mismanagement (even vandalism) by a very small number of companies, and is not related to the other things in that list.
• Finally, population increase is not a problem related to oil depletion (even if there were only one car on earth, the oil would still run out since it is a finite resource) or ice melt (AGW lie), or food shortage (there is enough food to feed everyone on earth; this is a problem of will not supply) or water shortage (once again, this is a problem of efficiency not abundance) or soil erosion.

Waste disposal, water pollution, pollution by genetically modified organisms, electromagnetic spectrum poisoning and many other unrelated items could have been on that list obviously.

Ignorant environmentalists who do not have a grounding in or basic understanding of science, or the history of science and technology, or any experience in growing crops or taking care of the land, regularly bundle all of these things together under the banner of ‘the environment’ when they are quite separate and only very tangentially related.

If we are going to talk about AGW, we must stick to AGW and the evidence for or against it, without conflating it with anything that is not related directly to the scientific evidence. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory (hypothesis). It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. When people try and stifle observations that destroy the AGW hypothesis, as in any scientific matter, the people trying to suppress evidence are normally lying about their work or trying to preserve their positions and prestige. This is exactly what is happening, and the Monkton affair is just the latest example.

We either win this battle or we’re all to the dogs

This doesn’t make any sense, and it is certainly not ‘a battle’. If the AGW hypothesis is true, then the effects of AGW can be corrected by taking action to cut emissions. If it is not true, then trying to stop it by cutting C0₂ emissions is a waste of time and will represent a huge distortion in the progress of man, changing the future irrevocably and unnecessarily. The hypothesis has not been proven; what we have are a bunch of non scientists shouting very loud that the AGW hypothesis is correct, and who want to silence anyone with data that says it is not correct. That is not how science is done, and it is not how decisions that change ‘society’ should be made. If society is to be run on the basis of science, then the scientific method must be applied without distortion. What we are seeing is a denial and shutting down of the scientific method for political ends. That is a fact.

and monckton should know better.

This doesn’t make any sense either. Either he is lying and someone has proof of this, or he is genuine and wrong, and what he is saying can be disproved. Either way, the correct way to win debate is not to silence someone with evidence that challenges a hypothesis, but instead to provide evidence. The AGW side does not have this evidence, and Al Gore in particular, has been found to be a consummate liar, his film totally discredited as junk science and propaganda. The ignorant, unlike you and I, are emotionally invested in Gore and his unscientific garbage; that is the true reason why they hang on to all of this and him in particular, not because of any facts, but because they refuse to listen to the facts when they run contrary to their secular religion, ‘environmentalism’, the high priest of which is Al Gore.

he knows that life style needs to change.

Everyone knows that waste is bad, wether it be wasting paper or wasting water. What we must never do is throw away science in a blind ignorant panic and start to mix up things that do not belong together. We must also never run into the arms of the state for our solutions; they do not have any (competence or solutions); all they can offer is tyranny, violence and destruction.

What do you see in a decade?

This is an interesting question, and an interesting time horizon. I know some very ignorant people who thought that the world would be in total chaos, “in twenty years”….in 1980. Doomsayers have been with us for generations, environmental doomsayers are only the latest in the breed. The world is still going to be here. Technology is going to be better than we can imagine. The economy will be very different. AGW will be totally discredited as a hypothesis, and we will probably be back to ‘new ice age’ theories like the crackpot junk scientist James Hansen predicted in 1971 when he helped create the model that told us of the coming ice age. When that didn’t happen, he turned to global warming. Of course, it could be possible that the environmental fascists could stifle science with some absurd, ‘environmental hate speech’ statutes, effectively killing science in this field. Who knows? What I do know for certain, is that if the state and ignorant environmental religious fanatics set the agenda, we will be living in a sub optimal future constrained by the lack of imagination and prejudices of a small coterie of nutcases, cult leaders, power mad control freaks and their brainless followers.

How do you see yourself and your children?

That is a good question. I have five children. I do not want their fertility controlled by the people who I describe in the paragraph above. I do not want them taxed in a bogus ‘carbon trading’ scheme whose only goal is to enrich criminal bankers. I do not want their ability to travel to be restricted on the false pretext of AGW. I do not want them to live in a fascist world where science cannot be practiced because the ignorant masses forbid it out of religious fervor. It is my wish that my children are protected from the people who would make this planet a nightmare place. Anyone who wants their children to be caught in such a system, cannot possibly understand what it is they are asking for, and of course, once it is in place, it might never be removed for generations. We need only look at how long it took for the Soviet system to fall; seventy years. Millions of lives wasted and ruined by people who believed the theories of Marx and Lenin. Now we have Al Gore and his new religion of ‘environmentalism’; just as poisonous as Marxism Leninism, only now, it is not the proletariat against the capitalists, it is man against himself. In the environmentalism religion, man is is own enemy, and so he must destroy himself and his way of life to save himself. It is, like Marxism Leninism, utter, unscientific nonsense from beginning to end. If the environmentalists are not struck down, it will take until the models are disproved by the march of time to finally put to rest their wild imaginings. By that time, like Russia, all that will be left of the great civilizations will be wastelands of destroyed emasculated populations of cowed slaves.

And it will all have been for nothing.

As for me, I hope to be alive to see the utter destruction of all of this nonsense, from the insanity of Keynsian economics to the environmentalism religion and everything that flows from them. I live for the day when collectivism is dead and buried, where socialism and all of its masks are consigned to the garbage bin of history. There is a more than good chance that I am going to get my wish.

Neslon Mandela, president of South Africa. ANC in total control.
Barack Obama, for all his many fatal flaws, faults and failings, President of the United States of America.
The Dollar about to go the way of the hyperinflation Deutchmark.
The Internets…
Neodymium Magnets…
Cloned pets…
Cloned humans…

Oh yes, ANYTHING is possible, more than we expect.

Tough question! we really need to try and think about it because we are not part of the ignorant mass and we can go beyond some small propaganda.

I agree. Thinking about it is crucial. In order to do it, to think, we need to hear all of the evidence, not just the evidence that we like. We need to understand and apply the scientific method, and adhere to it strictly. We need to be mindful of the state, and its lust for power and absolute control over the individual and every aspect of life. Science is not propaganda, and neither is the truth. There are people out there who do not want anyone to have access to the facts. We must be suspicious of these people, and make sure that we really have all the facts to hand in spite of what they want. That is the only way that we can come to any sort of correct judgment, and think correctly.

Being rational thinking people, we are rightfully outraged that Monkton was not allowed to speak at the eleventh hour after having been invited to give evidence; what is Al Gore afraid of? That his hoax film would be exposed for the nonsense that it is? Thankfully, due to the internet that he invented, it is impossible to herd people anymore. Whatever the truth is about AGW, it will out.

What is more galling is that Gore and his religious fanatics are appealing to the legislature to enshrine their religion in the law. If they are making an appeal to the legislature, which ostensibly represents all of us equally, it is absolutely outrageous that a person offering scientific data that counters AGW was prevented from speaking. Quite apart from the debate surrounding AGW, this is an attack on Democracy and openness in government. People who believe in those two things are disgusted by this action.

If this were simply an academic debate, it would not be so important, but this is about the creation of law and the use of force on the population in order to carry out the environmentalist agenda. That evidence exists that Al Gore and his gang are dead wrong, and that this evidence is deliberately suppressed when evidence is about to be presented for the record is inexcusable.

Anyone who is reasonable, as you and I are, cannot be for such a suppression of facts.

It is only by the seeking of truth that we have had the technological means to manage our future placed into our hands. It is only through the seeking of truth that we will overcome all the myriad and very real problems that face us.

Suppressing truth, giving into irrational fear and running to the state is not going to solve anything; instead, it is going to make everything much worse, in every aspect.

From For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

[…]

All right, we are to have education through both theory and a movement. But what then should be the content of that education? Every “radical” creed has been subjected to the charge of being “utopian,” and the libertarian movement is no exception. Some libertarians themselves maintain that we should not frighten people off by being “too radical,” and that therefore the full libertarian ideology and program should be kept hidden from view. These people counsel a “Fabian” program of gradualism, concentrating solely on a gradual whittling away of State power. An example would be in the field of taxation: Instead of advocating the “radical” measure of abolition of all taxation, or even of abolishing income taxation, we should confine ourselves to a call for tiny improvements; say, for a two percent cut in income tax.

In the field of strategic thinking, it behooves libertarians to heed the lessons of the Marxists, because they have been thinking about strategy for radical social change longer than any other group. Thus, the Marxists see two critically important strategic fallacies that “deviate” from the proper path: one they call “left-wing sectarianism”; the other, and opposing, deviation is “right-wing opportunism.” The critics of libertarian “extremist” principles are the analog of the Marxian “right-wing opportunists.” The major problem with the opportunists is that by confining themselves strictly to gradual and “practical” programs, programs that stand a good chance of immediate adoption, they are in grave danger of completely losing sight of the ultimate objective, the libertarian goal. He who confines himself to calling for a two percent reduction in taxes [p. 300] helps to bury the ultimate goal of abolition of taxation altogether. By concentrating on the immediate means, he helps liquidate the ultimate goal, and therefore the point of being a libertarian in the first place. If libertarians refuse to hold aloft the banner of the pure principle, of the ultimate goal, who will? The answer is no one, hence another major source of defection from the ranks in recent years has been the erroneous path of opportunism.

A prominent case of defection through opportunism is someone we shall call “Robert,” who became a dedicated and militant libertarian back in the early 1950s. Reaching quickly for activism and immediate gains, Robert concluded that the proper strategic path was to play down all talk of the libertarian goal, and in particular to play down libertarian hostility to government. His aim was to stress only the “positive” and the accomplishments that people could achieve through voluntary action. As his career advanced, Robert began to find uncompromising libertarians an encumbrance; so he began systematically to fire anyone in his organization caught being “negative” about government. It did not take very long for Robert to abandon the libertarian ideology openly and explicitly, and to call for a “partnership” between government and private enterprise — between coercion and the voluntary — in short, to take his place openly in the Establishment. Yet, in his cups, Robert will even refer to himself as an “anarchist,” but only in some abstract cloud-land totally unrelated to the world as it is.

The free-market economist F. A. Hayek, himself in no sense an “extremist,” has written eloquently of the vital importance for the success of liberty of holding the pure and “extreme” ideology aloft as a never-to-be-forgotten creed. Hayek has written that one of the great attractions of socialism has always been the continuing stress on its “ideal” goal, an ideal that permeates, informs, and guides the actions of all those striving to attain it. Hayek then adds:

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibility of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote . . . . Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may rouse [p. 301] the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.¹

Hayek is here highlighting an important truth, and an important reason for stressing the ultimate goal: the excitement and enthusiasm that a logically consistent system can inspire. Who, in contrast, will go to the barricades for a two percent tax reduction?

There is another vital tactical reason for cleaving to pure principle. It is true that day-to-day social and political events are the resultants of many pressures, the often unsatisfactory outcome of the push-and-pull of conflicting ideologies and interests. But if only for that reason, it is all the more important for the libertarian to keep upping the ante. The call for a two percent tax reduction may achieve only the slight moderation of a projected tax increase; a call for a drastic tax cut may indeed achieve a substantial reduction. And, over the years, it is precisely the strategic role of the “extremist” to keep pushing the matrix of day-to-day action further and further in his direction. The socialists have been particularly adept at this strategy. If we look at the socialist program advanced sixty, or even thirty years ago, it will be evident that measures considered dangerously socialistic a generation or two ago are now considered an indispensable part of the “mainstream” of the American heritage. In this way, the day-to-day compromises of supposedly “practical” politics get pulled inexorably in the collectivist direction. There is no reason why the libertarian cannot accomplish the same result. In fact, one of the reasons that the conservative opposition to collectivism has been so weak is that conservatism, by its very nature, offers not a consistent [p. 302] political philosophy but only a “practical” defense of the existing status quo, enshrined as embodiments of the American “tradition.” Yet, as statism grows and accretes, it becomes, by definition, increasingly entrenched and therefore “traditional”; conservatism can then find no intellectual weapons to accomplish its overthrow.

Cleaving to principle means something more than holding high and not contradicting the ultimate libertarian ideal. It also means striving to achieve that ultimate goal as rapidly as is physically possible. In short, the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them?

In short, to really pursue the goal of liberty, the libertarian must desire it attained by the most effective and speediest means available. It was in this spirit that the classical liberal Leonard E. Read, advocating immediate and total abolition of price and wage controls after World War II, declared in a speech, “If there were a button on this rostrum, the pressing of which would release all wage and price controls instantaneously, I would put my finger on it and push!”²

The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty. Of course, he knows, too, that such a magic button does not exist, but his fundamental preference colors and shapes his entire strategic perspective.

[…]

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

You need to buy that book.

Long time readers of BLOGDIAL know about ‘the button‘ and the number of times I have pressed it. Hard.

Flour, water & salt.

I watched closely all the tea parties all over the country Wednesday. What a showing of national pride and solidarity. What a showing of subservient compliance and casual indifference. What a joke.

In Lafayette Park, Washington D.C., of all places to protest, the plan was to dump one million tea bags in the park, but the brave dissidents never did it because they forgot to get the proper permits. Are you kidding me? What is civil disobedience without civil disobedience? They even went so far as to say that they were willing to put down plastic tarps and clean up after themselves.

That’s like saying we don’t agree with your oppressive, unconstitutional despotism of our nation and to show our ire in no uncertain terms we’re going to break public law and disrupt the peace so take that, nah- nah-ne-boo-boo. But don’t worry because we’ll put everything back when we’re done as if nothing happened cuz we don’t want any trouble!

Videos on the Internet of Lafayette Park show people standing around in their trendy turtlenecks and Tommy Hilfiger and North Face jackets, chatting, socializing, drinking coffee and talking on their cell phones. Some dressed in colonial garb (how cute) and waving flags. Others even break into a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner followed by a chant of “USA, USA, USA.” What a terrific show of meaningless symbolism.

Who are they chanting to? The buildings in front of them? The birds in the trees? Themselves? What was this supposed to do, because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that it did NOTHING! All the politicians were inside, smugly and comfortably seated in their expensive leather chairs that we paid for. They were discussing their next round of special interest pandering and deficit spending at our expense while we mingled as if at a, well, tea party. But not the sort of 1773 but rather more like the sort at 4 p.m. in England that is served with crumpets.

The politicians could have cared less about the goings on outside and NO ONE took it to them. Shame on us. No one made sure they took notice. No one was put out one bit. No economic loss to the government whatsoever, as was the purpose of the original tea party, so why should they notice?

Is this like giving to a charity? You write a check to feed a starving child for 10 cents a day in some far off, nameless, faceless country and you feel better about yourself?

I attended a “tea party” in the Midwest on Wednesday and there were only about 200 people there. And it was literally a tea party: people came with their coffee mugs and sandwiches, holding signs and standing around and chatting and socializing and then everyone went home. No passion. No signs of real frustration or discontent. No real commitment to changing anything. You know why? Because nobody wants to fire the first shot! Everybody wants change, but only if they don’t have to pay for it. Only if their comfortable lives don’t have to be disrupted for their freedom. What a bunch of crap.

Then I see all these political pundits ( idiots ) on CNN talking about how the tea party movement is nothing more than a partisan, Republican, conservative movement against the Obama administration and how the majority of Americans agree with the taxing and borrowing and spending. Some numb-nuts CNN political (anal)yst named Jeff Toobin says that the Texas state legislative resolution to reaffirm their state’s sovereignty is a fantasy. Are you kidding me? State’s sovereignty is a fantasy? Well I guess that says it all. Come on everyone, down the rabbit hole.

[Background music] One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small…

Welcome to the other side of the looking glass everybody. My name’s Alice and I’ll be your host for the mad tea party today. Let me introduce some other guests: the Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, John McCain, Rod Blagojevich, Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton all the AIG executives and many, many more. Don’t worry you’ll have time to get to know them all since you can’t leave no matter what you do so might as well just get used to it. Resistance is futile.

No doubt the majority of Americans didn’t want to go to war against the British in 1776. But would anyone say now that it was the wrong thing to do? No doubt the majority of Americans didn’t want a civil war. Both those wars were, at their core, about state’s rights. About oppressive governments trying to overreach their authority and impose unlawful mandates on the states. It was about their freedom to do what they wish with their lives.

I think we have met the enemy and it is us. We’re a bunch of fast food nourished, MTV anesthetized, shopping mall, plug-in-drug (aka television) addicts who will do anything to preserve that way of life at least until we die. After that who cares?

We’re a clinically obese, socially disconnected, politically inept and intellectually bankrupt nation of douche bags who deserve everything they get.

The movement has no leader. When I listen to anyone other than Ron Paul, Peter Schiff or Lew Rockwell speak about the issues we discuss on LRC I might as well be listening to any other political party spokesperson. They sound just the same. They dress just the same. They say the same old tired things. Ron Paul has even mentioned at times that the Libertarian party has become just another political party interested more in their political posturing rather than liberty. They have all the same sorts of infighting and power struggles that are symptomatic of the fact that they have lost their way.

Rallying the troops to vote more like-minded individuals into office won’t work. That’s an old, failing strategy. When will someone step forward with the courage, character, wisdom and intelligence to lead our nation into the 21st century the way our forefathers led it into the 19th century?

Will it be Texas governor Rick Perry? Perry is using rhetoric about seceding from the union. That is EXACTLY the kind of thing we need. I believe, given the other states with similar resolutions in their legislatures, that it would begin a domino effect. It would give people a chance to actually have a clear reason to fight: their state’s rights of sovereignty and they would know that they have the state’s resources behind them. Unfortunately, even though it’s clear what a boost Texas seceding would be in uniting us, I have no doubt that Perry is not up to the task and is using the issue as nothing more than a rallying point for reelection.

Where have all the heroes gone? Where are all the pioneers? Where are the visionaries? Where are the true statesmen? Where are the defenders of freedom? What has happened to the American Spirit of life and liberty? I guess they’re all at the mall or Starbucks and are too fat to get up out of their chair and fight. Or they’re looking forward to retirement and the “good life” after spending their life being a good soldier and playing by the rules and saving for the “golden years” while their real golden years of youth were passing them by. Certainly they can’t be asked to risk all that for something as silly as their children’s futures. How selfish of me.

Or maybe we don’t want to risk our children’s well-being now, so we defer it until they’re adults and let them deal with the fact that they can’t afford college or health care or a home without going into enormous debt and we never teach them the importance of things like: character, honor, integrity, truth and freedom but rather teach them how to live in fear and how important it is to get a “good job” and play by the rules and to go along to get along and that will be safe.

We’re pathetic.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/cooper/cooper14.html

Don Cooper… one of the last remaining real human beings.

This quote is for you:

“Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna run?
Where you gonna hide?
Nowhere, cause there’s no one like you left.”

http://www.mininova.org/tor/570383

Who Sampled is a fascinating site; when they start documenting the ‘DNA’ of House Music and all its decedents, it will be…just incredible!

http://www.whosampled.com/

Sites like this are under threat from the Intellectual Monopolists. This tool, if applied to all music could eventually show us where every musical idea came from…its just BRILLIANT!

And while we are at it, take a look at this heart squeezing comparison. Here is the instrumental.

It is sweet perfection.

http://thepiratebay.org/

In today’s Grauniad, a very pleasant letter has been published:

Boycott these checks on students

The Guardian,
Tuesday 14 April 2009

As academics involved in research on the uses and abuses of state power, it is becoming increasingly apparent that members of staff in universities and colleges are being drawn into a role of policing immigration (Universities weigh up new fraud unit to thwart bogus applications, 11 April). For example, academic and administrative staff are being asked to monitor the attendance of students at lectures and classes (whether compulsory or not), and we are being asked to check the ID of students and colleagues, while external examiners and visiting lecturers are also now being asked to provide passport details.

We strongly oppose the imposition of such changes in the way that academic institutions are run. We believe these practices are discriminatory and distort academic freedoms. The implementation of UK immigration policies is not part of our contractual duties and we will play no part in practices which discriminate against students and staff in this way. We support our administrative colleagues in their refusal to engage in such practices. Thus we pledge to refuse to co-operate with university requests for us to provide details on our students or participate in investigations of those students.

As a first, and highly practical, step, we pledge not to supply any personal details – such as passport or driving licence details – in our role as external examiners, and urge all of our colleagues across higher and further education to join this boycott. We will also forward motions to our respective union branches in support of this position. A boycott would undermine immediately the system of external examining at all levels, which operates almost exclusively on the basis of goodwill, and thus strike a significant blow against both the pernicious drift of government policy, and university managements’ acquiescence to this.

Dr Elizabeth Capewell
Professor Ben Bowling
Professor Penny Green
Professor Gerry Johnstone
Professor Scott Poynting
Dr Anandi Ramamurthy
Professor Phil Scraton
Professor Joe Sim
Professor Steve Tombs
and 28 others

In The Devil’s Home on Leave by Derek Raymond (aka Robin Cook), published in 1986, the main character, a detective sergeant, refers at one point to a proposed police special powers bill. Noting it would allow police to detain a person for seven days without access to a lawyer, he says: “If it ever passed on to the statute book we [the police] would effectively be released from any serious accountability to the public.” He adds: “I could stop and arrest a man on the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged.” He notes that the bill had been rejected (did it exist?), but he predicts that it would be back, “perhaps in a different form, perhaps looking more innocuous – not tomorrow, possibly not even the day after, but doubtless the day after that” … and he was right.

Peter Hames
Bideford, Devon

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/14/immigration-higher-education

At last, the people with some backbone and brains are saying, “No”.

Like we keep saying, all it takes is for everyone to stop obeying; in this case, the ‘Academics’ are going to stop obeying and get on with minding their own business, which is the business of being an Academic.

If what the government is doing is really evil, and it is, then ALL professionals should take the same stance, and make the following pledge:

There is a broad consensus that the potential for abuse of human rights is massive with ID cards.

Whilst governments may be able to issue them, it is businesses and the professionals that run them who will be the main interface administering their use and pushing their widespread adoption.

We all have a moral responsibility to protect the welfare of others by refraining from doing evil ourselves.

We therefore call upon all members of Facebook, LinkedIn and all other professional networks to sign this pledge that they will not integrate ID Card requirements into their interactions with their clients, colleagues or customers.

For generations man has succeeded brilliantly without ID Cards in every sphere of life. We actively reject the mistaken ideas, claims and outright falsehoods made by the governments that want to introduce ID Cards, and we commit ourselves to reinforcing normal, moral interactions with our clients, customers and colleagues.

We actively reject the ‘Zero Trust Society’ that governments are trying to create through ID Cards.

We pledge that:

We will not require ID to provide our services.

We will choose professionals and service providers that have taken this pledge over those that have not.

We will not cooperate with any mandate that requires us to identify our clients, colleagues or customers.

When you take payment for a service, you pledge that you will not ask for ID. Your client or customer should not have to produce a document in order to buy products or receive services from you.

Example Scenario
The guiding principle here is not that our clients, colleagues or customers need to prove that, “they are who they say they are”, but that, “I am who I say I am” is good enough as long as they pay you.

If you are offering a hotel room, and the person hiring the room pays with a credit card or cash, there is no need for any other information; you are in the business of renting hotel rooms, not collecting information about your clients on behalf of governments.

Policy Example
Any form that you print that you require your clients, colleagues or customers to fill out should not contain fields for ID card numbers, passport numbers or any other number from an ID document.

If we all refuse to interface with the ID Cards they will be of little use to anyone, and will eventually be abandoned. If however we integrate them into our systems and processes, they will become indispensable and the Zero Trust Society will come into being.

Think of this pledge as a Hippocratic Oath for the 21st Century.

Spread it far and wide!

And now we have a new policy example; Academics refusing to demand ID before they teach, enroll or interact with students. Each professional body can come up with its own scenario and policy example; the most important thing is that everyone has a policy, and that that policy is to reject the Zero Trust Society and all the apparatus that enables it. Everyone everywhere must avoid doing the administrative work of the police state, and they must shun anyone that does do that nasty work.

Do you know someone who needs to read this pledge?

Celente Calls for “Revolution” as the Only Solution

Kingston NY — Taxed to death, angry at government bailouts, outraged by Wall Street greed, and bitterly resentful of a system that rewards the undeserving rich, the American public is ready to revolt.

“The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution,” said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute. “But they are not enough. Much stronger and directed action is required. Our call for ‘Revolution’ will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.”

The Revolution Celente proposes is unique in concept and bold in execution. It is about a lot more than just “taxation without representation.”

“Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America,” said Celente. “We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system. Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds. These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative. Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

The country is restless, and ripe for radical reform. There is no doubt protests will proliferate and intensify. In response, the government will call out the troops and bring in the police. They will use the Patriot Act to silence, detain, harass, persecute and prosecute groups and individuals exercising their Constitutional rights.

But Celente’s Revolution need not degenerate into violence or open warfare.

“Intellectual Revolution”

“I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’. I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’ This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades. It’s about brain power – not brute force.”

For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up. Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.

What are America’s prime information sources? CNN, “The most trusted name in news”? Fox, “Fair and balanced”?

CNBC, “First in Business Worldwide”? The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”?

Who do the people listen to? A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions. Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats, pretending they’re the people’s voice.

Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.

TV tough guys, broadcast big mouths and Beltway blowhards have now been joined by featherweight comics throwing powder puff punches at sitting targets.

[…]

Yonkers Tribune

We like people who can predict the future; it means that they have all the facts to hand and are able to synthesize a very small number of highly probable futures that must result from those facts. It means they are more likely to know what they are talking about now, in the present, since they knew what they were talking about before. Those are the people who will reward your scarce attention.

What I imagine people like Celente are waiting for is the tipping point of popular outrage, after which they will be able to openly call for a physical rather than intellectual revolution.

Calling for a physical revolution too early is pointless; no one will stand up and you will be picked off. At the same time however, calling for feel good actions pushes the tipping point back, since it is the opposite of feeling good and secure that is the fuel for revolution. If the criminals manage to finish the job before everyone wakes up and the tipping point occurs, they win. The question is, do we have time to wait for a tipping point that might arrive too late?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

Imagine a country where this intellectual revolution had happened, and everyone from coast to coast knew the entire facts and was informed to the level that Celente is. Once that point is reached, clearly there has to be a second step, the ‘real revolution’ that puts a stop to the criminals once and for all.

The media and all the know nothing (as opposed to the know everything bloggers) clowns who work in it are never going to change sides (either because they are too thick or are deliberately keeping a lid on public outrage). That means every chance we have to ‘go viral’ with a message should be taken as an opportunity to organize a real action that ‘fixes the hole in the roof’. Anything that is just a protest, which is a feel good, ‘Yellow Ribbon Moment‘, or which will have no effect is not a good thing. It is in fact, quite the opposite.

Its like draft dodgers in the 70’s having a tea party to protest going to VietNam and then showing up obediently for basic training and shipping off to fight ‘Charlie’. No, what you do is BURN YOUR DRAFT CARD and then do not show up.

Imagine 10 million people all having a ‘tea party’ and then BURNING their 1040 forms. Imagine millions of people demanding that they be paid the full amount of their wages, without any withholding of any kind, or they all go on STRIKE. Those two actions when done in the tens of millions are not something that can be ignored; demonstrations, tea parties, rock concerts, petitions – all of those things can and will be ignored. That is why we keep saying that it is pointless to do them.

Without a doubt, there is an information war going on, and educating the great mass of television fed flesh is an ongoing task. It is the furnace in the steam ship that needs to be constantly stoked. It is not however, the end goal; the end goal is Liberty in Perpetuity, and education is a means to that end.

And as for protests causing the police to be called out, once again, protesting is pointless.

Lets try and imagine an optimal revolution.

Its a revolution where no one is killed, and there is no violence. It would look something like the fall of East Germany.

All that is required for this revolution to take place is for everyone to stop obeying. That means everyone, to a man, refusing to obey anything and everything to do with the state.

That would be a revolution, an amorphous, nebulous, static swarm of disobedience, which could not be countered, any more than a truncheon wielder can batter a cloud to sweep it away. Without the compliance of everyone, the state would simply cease to exist; the monsters who control it would scream and shout hysterically at first, but would very quickly want to associate with the static mass as they desperately try to reposition themselves for a role in the new disorder. Those creatures are very good at sensing the right time to jump ship – when its about to do down – they are after all ‘political animals’ (rats).

I heard the other night, a commenter saying that if we start to win, “these people (the rats) are not going to go quietly into the night…”. That’s probably true. They will make a huge noise, but just like the aparatchicks in East Germany who lost their status and jobs, they were defeated and they did lose power there is no reason why this cannot happen via an unprecedented campaign that reaches tens of millions of people at the end of their tether. Many millions of people are ripe for it, ready for it, and as things get worse, will prefer it to having to take up arms.

The means to make this happen are at the tips of our fingers. Every month a new tool is written that shortens the time to critical mass. There is no reason why a peaceful transition to… something resembling a free country, cannot be done. It would happen in a very small amount of time; it may coincide with this event:

The Fed’s plan to increase the money supply 15-fold

But the real story starts to unfold when you realize the Federal Reserve is now hell bent on multiplying the U.S. money supply by a whopping fifteen times in 2009! This excellent article explains how this number is derived: http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/…

Now think about this: If the Federal Reserve increases the U.S. money supply by a factor of fifteen, that means your dollars will be worth only 1/15th the value they represent right now. So a loaf of bread that costs a dollar right now could cost $15 when all this extra money ripples through the system. (Which will obviously take a couple of years, but 2009 will be the beginning of it.)

This is called “hyperinflation.” We’re talking about a loss of over 93% of the purchasing power of the dollar. That, my friends, is called a collapse of the currency.

And once it starts, the floodgates will be opened and the tsunami of investors and nations offloading dollars will be catastrophic and irreversible. By the time it’s all done, the dollar might end up losing 99.9% of its value, and you can use greenbacks to light a fire or wipe your back side, as they will be useless for anything else.

[…]

http://www.counterthink.com/025688.html

Unbelievable. It’s still hard to accept that the money really has already been wiped out, and that hyperinflation is already on its way like a mudslide coming to destroy everything in its path. It seems that either way, wether there is a revolution or not, the dollar is toast. People will either kill it trying to get out of it, or they will have their purchasing power wiped out by this 15-fold story high wave of dollars that are going to devastate everything in their path.

Anyone old enough to remember Pan Am knows what it is like to have to imagine life without something so huge, so integral to an industry, something so ‘too big to fail’, that its non existence seems an impossibility, and yet, Pan Am is no more, its just a memory…only its beautiful corporate identity remains. Pan Am also teaches us that nothing is too big to disappear from the face of the earth. No company, no system of money, including the dollar, no government (history should already have made THAT clear); literally nothing that exists is going to last forever, or even a few years if the conditions are right.

Once you accept that, the possibility of restored liberty does not seem like something in the far distance, but instead takes on the appearance of something within striking distance.