We are almost there. 912 petitions is stating some of the facts plainly, but they fail in that they are ASKING for their rights. This is like a slave asking its master not to be beaten. I will strike out what is bad, and then add what needs to be added:

To the United States Congress, United States Supreme Court and President of the United States:

Whereas, the First Amendment guarantees our right to Petition for Redress of Grievances, and

Whereas, the Senators and Representatives, all executives and judicial officers of the United States are bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution, and

Whereas, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people, and

Whereas, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection of the laws, and

Whereas, Article 1 of the Constitution prohibits both the federal government and the states from passing either bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, and

Whereas, the Supreme Court has insisted that “a Bill of Attainder may affect the life of an individual, or may confiscate his property, or may do both”, and

Whereas, “All laws which are repugnant to the constitution are null and void” (Marbury v Madison, 5 US (2Cranch) 137, 174, 176 (1803)) and,

Whereas, We the People, have been betrayed through treachery and breach of allegiance, by those entrusted with the responsibility to safe guard our liberty and the United States Constitution,

We the People, in seeking Redress of Grievances, as is our right under Amendment I of the United States Constitution, ask this question of each branch of Federal Government:

“Where in the Constitution do you find authorization for each and all of the following?”

1. The redistribution of property by force and subterfuge; and the unequal application of tax laws amounting to punitive action against certain groups of American People and providing favored status to other groups
2. A paper money system that is morally and economically equivalent to counterfeiting
3. Willful and purposeful devaluation and destruction of American currency
4. Deploying military to fight undeclared wars
5. Targeting and labeling law-abiding American citizens as domestic terrorists
6. Declarations that disagreeing with policy is unpatriotic or disloyal to our country
7. Intrusions into the privacy of law-abiding American citizens
8. Perpetual massive indebtedness to foreign countries
9. Infringement upon the rights of the People to keep and bear arms through oppressive regulation and taxation designed for the very purpose of infringement
10. Passing laws and taxes without deliberation and without reading the legislation; said action is tantamount to the American People not having any representation
11. Enacting ex post facto laws and Bills of Attainder
12. Granting Constitutional rights and privileges to illegal aliens and prisoners of war
13. Funding mercenary organizations that engage in voter fraud and paid harassment of law abiding American citizens
14. Maintaining and deploying armies in peace time on United States soil
15. Unprecedented and arbitrary federal power, through the United States Treasury, for government intervention into, control of, and confiscation of, private property, private industry including but not limited to banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming and other sectors of the private economy (current and proposed)
16. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law (proposed)
17. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law (proposed)
18. Acts regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press (proposed)

We the People of the United States of America, who cherish liberty, taking into our most serious consideration, the best means of assuring our continued constitutional rights of self governance, as our ancestors in like cases have done, for asserting and vindicating our rights and liberties, declare,

That the citizens of the Unites States of America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the United States Constitution, Supreme Court case law and the Federalist Papers, have the following Rights:

• We are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and we have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever., a right to dispose of these without our consent.
• The three branches of the United States government derive their just powers solely from the consent of the governed.
• We the people have the right and the obligation to alter or abolish any government that becomes destructive of the inalienable rights endowed by our Creator and rights codified in the United States Constitution.
• We have the right peaceably to assemble, consider our grievances, petition the three branches of the Federal Government; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory and proclamations, defamatory declarations, and commitments for the same, are illegal.
• We the People of the United States of America, do claim, demand, and insist on, as our indubitable rights and liberties that the federal government must be answerable and accountable to the people; which cannot be legally taken from us., altered or abridged by any power whatever, without our own consent, and said consent has never been given.

In the course of our inquiry, we find numerous infringements and violations of the foregoing rights; which demonstrate systemic corruption formed to subvert and destroy our constitutional republic and to enslave the American people.

We submit this Petition for Redress of Grievances in an ardent desire that precious liberty be restored to ourselves and preserved for future generations of Americans.

This Petition for Redress of Grievances serves as notice and demand by the American People to on the federal government, as our agent: 1) To cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of the constitutionally delegated powers; 2) To formally and publicly recognize the natural and Constitutional rights of the American People in a manner appropriate to each branch of government (resolution, proclamation, statement); 3) To answer, point by point the question contained herein; 4) To honor your oaths to support the Constitution or resign immediately from your positions.

That we will no longer obey, since such laws are invalid on their face:

• Any law prohibiting or controlling or monitoring of the ingestion of any substance wether naturally occurring or not.
• Any redistribution of property by force and subterfuge; any application of tax laws amounting to punitive action against certain groups of American People
• Any legal tender law or law governing the type of money Americans can or cannot accept in payment for goods and services
• Any law controlling air travel safety or mandating documentation or unconstitutional search as a prerequisite for travel by air or any other means
• Any law mandating routine and unconstitutional intrusions into the privacy of law-abiding American citizens
• Any law or action causing perpetual massive indebtedness to foreign countries, such debts to be considered forgiven, written off, and not the responsibility of the American People from this moment, retroactively and going forwards
• Any law which controls or regulates arms
• Any laws and taxes passed without deliberation and without members of Congress reading the legislation
• Any laws enacting ex post facto laws and Bills of Attainder
• Any laws granting Constitutional rights and privileges to illegal aliens and prisoners of war
• Any laws creating arbitrary federal power, through the United States Treasury or otherwise, for government intervention into, control of, and confiscation of, private property, private industry including but not limited to banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming and other sectors of the private economy
• Any laws requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law
• Any laws requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law
• Any laws or acts regarding religion; limitations on freedom of political speech; or limitations on freedom of the printing press or any means of mass communication existing or yet to be invented.

You are hereby put on notice that any violation of the above will be met with deadly force as a response.
You are hereby put on notice that maintaining and deploying armies in peace time on United States soil is illegal and any such deployment will be met with deadly force.

—

There. Much better now.

In the end, this is what it will come to: deadly force as a response to any violation of your rights. In fact, we are already there. The 912 people just do not know it yet. The fact that they are creating a petition to ASK for their rights proves that they do not know it. They still think that honorable people are there to be appealed to. That laundry list of crimes proves that the people who did them are the worst type of criminal. Petitions do not work on criminals.

In the end, when the petitioned do not obey, and the 912 people want to live like human beings and not slaves, they will be forced to TAKE their liberty. The amended document above is what they will need to live by if they want to do that.

And by the way:

We are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and we have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of these without our consent.

I struck out ‘, a right to dispose of these without our consent’ and the other line with similar wording because no single generation has the right to dispose of the rights of subsequent generations, no matter how large the majority that votes for it or ‘consents’ to it, and the rights of individuals cannot be voted away by a majority. If that were not the case, the current generation of Americans could, by referendum, enslave themselves and all future generations to a foreign power without any regard for the rights of future Americans. If all people are born with inalienable rights, then those rights cannot be forfeited by anyone on an unborn person’s behalf for ANY reason. This line implies that the current generation has the right to sell future generations into slavery. They count on the ‘immutable laws of nature, the principles of the United States Constitution, Supreme Court case law and the Federalist Papers,’ as the basis of their rights, but then say that it is their right to forfeit the rights of future generations. That is immoral and illogical.

As I said at the beginning of this article, we are almost there. The most important and encouraging part of all of this is that we will not have to wait 70 years for the evil infrastructure to fall to pieces, like the people who suffered under the Soviets had to. Generations of Russians had their lives stolen from them by the Soviet system. As the 912ers and everyone else starts to wake up, it will not be very long before things are put right.

The effects on the world will be profound. Not only will Americans once again reclaim their birthright, but they will, once again, show the whole world ‘how it is done’. Other people around the world will be encouraged to emulate them. And since the world-wide war machine will be de-funded and returned to barracks, this will mean an end to the pointless and ceaseless wars. Strangely enough the greatest beneficiary of the standing down of the empire, in terms of money, will be the Americans.

Everybody wins!

Recently, we posted on ‘why CD was a con’.  Today we find a fabulous example not only of the audio side of that piece, but also the economic side.

The Beatles, Apple Corps and EMI Music have finally, at long last, agreed to rake in several million pounds. After more than two decades of waiting, all of the band’s original studio albums are to be re-released in digitally remastered stereo versions.

Honesty in a newspaper article? Shocking!

Anyway, to quickly skim over the economics, millions of people will now pay through the nose yet again for yet another version of the same thing. This time, they are told, it will be really good.

From Please Please Me to Abbey Road, the Fab Four’s entire run will be reissued on CD on 9 September, the same day that the mop-tops’ first video game, The Beatles: Rock Band, will be released.

Oh. My. Word.  Seems like Mr McCartney is determined to be a billionaire before he dies. However, this is irrelevant.

According to a statement, engineers at EMI’s Abbey Road studios spent four years on the remasters, “utilising state-of-the-art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment [and] carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings”. The recordings were last overhauled in 1987.

Now, if you have read our previous post(s) on the topic of audio ‘integrity’, and the links to Stereophile articles provided, you would spot the obvious non sequitur.  Digital remastering cannot possibly “carefully [maintain] the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings”.

“You really can tell the difference,” said Beatles expert Kevin Howlett, who wrote the new liner notes. “It’s an extraordinary thing to sit there and hear LPs that you know so well and hear little nuances that you hadn’t noticed before.”

To paraphrase Bastiat, the “little nuances that you hadn’t noticed before” are what is heard.  What Beatles expert Kevin Howlett fails to understand is that in order to hear those nuances, something has been altered, and therefore the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings has been lost. This is what is not heard.

The albums will be available individually or as a box set. For traditionalists, a box set of mono recordings will also be available – with each disc styled as a vinyl LP.

So now someone who like to listen to digitally altered versions of analogue music on a CD in a sleeve which looks like an LP (except smaller…) is a traditionalist?

Although the Beatles’ re-remasters have been rumoured for years, most Fab Four fanatics expected them to be part of the Beatles’ entry into online music sales. The Beatles are one of the last major groups to have spurned iTunes Music Store, and their music cannot be legally purchased in MP3 or any other digital form.

Negotiations between the Beatles, their labels, publishers and online distributors appear to have stalled, and these new reissues, among the year’s most important releases, will not be available for purchase in digital form.

Need I point out that CDs are a digital form? Bad writing aside, EMI and the ‘Beatles’ are idiots for not providing downloads. It is presumed they think they will sell more CDs, at greater profit, by denying online sales. This shows again how badly these people understand their market. I would wager that those who would buy the CD would buy it whether or not a cheaper download was available. Moreover, there are probably thousands, possibly millions, of people who would buy the odd album or track on iTunes, but not as a physical format. They will now either (1) do without, or (2) download whatever they like using BitTorrent within minutes of the CDs being released. For nothing. As 192kbps, 360kbps, FLAC or whatever else they could wish for.

On the bright side, Howlett remarked, “they sound louder than previous CD reissues.” Well worth the wait.

Pardon me?

On the bright side, Howlett remarked, “they sound louder than previous CD reissues.” Well worth the wait.

Please refer to our previous posts and linked article to find out exactly how this man has been duped.

Let me conclude by suggesting that if you really wish to maintain the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings, listen to the original analogue recordings. Buy a vinyl copy of a Beatles album – they are almost being given away! –  and listen to it on a record player.

We at BLOGDIAL have blogged about this subject a few times before:

By David Coates, The Detroit News, via AP

In Detroit, three downtown businesses have created a local currency, or scrip, to keep dollars earned locally in the community.

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.
Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

“We wanted to make new options available,” says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. “It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace.”

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

By law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States, says Claudia Dickens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

“We print the real thing,” she says.

Yes, we know; THAT IS THE PROBLEM!

The IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Tom Ochsenschlager of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “It’s not a way to avoid income taxes, or we’d all be paying in Detroit dollars,” he says.

Pittsboro, N.C., is reviving the Plenty, a defunct local currency created in 2002. It is being printed in denominations of $1, $5, $20 and $50. A local bank will exchange $9 for $10 worth of Plenty.

“We’re a wiped-out small town in America,” says Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels, which accepts the Plenty. “This will strengthen the local economy. … The nice thing about the Plenty is that it can’t leave here.”

[…]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-05-scrip_N.htm

Now.

Imagine if all the dimwitted and destructive demonstrators got together to disseminate the ideas behind sound money and then print and promote their own money.

Wouldn’t that be effort better spent instead of smashing an RBS office? Or gathering impotently in the streets to be corralled like cows?

We have been over this again and again and again:

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.
Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

Join Amnesty
Visit and sign up online:
web.amnesty.org/pages/join-eng
Join Liberty
Visit and sign up online:
www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/join
Email Your MP
Demand to know what they are doing about the issues raised in the film:
www.writetothem.com
Join the Mass Lone Demos
Demonstrations take place 5pm to 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, forms [MS WORD] [PDF] must be handed in or sent by recorded delivery 1 week beforehand.
[…]

Joining Amnesty will not cause one law to be repealed, nor will it stop new bad legislation from being enacted.

Similarly, Joining liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

Emailing the very people who pass the laws that enslave you is just STUPID.

And joining demonstrations we know about, don’t we?

Telling the truth is not enough. Acting is not enough. Correct Action is the only thing that will change what you want changed.

But you know this!

If you want to fix a problem, DO SOMETHING TO FIX THE PROBLEM, DO NOT do something THAT WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM.

If your problem is a currency that is being inflated by a criminal government who is stealing your value to give it to their partners in crime, and you cannot change the government, CHANGE THE CURRENCY YOU USE AND ACCEPT, since THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Demonstrating against bailouts is like dancing to stop the damage to your car caused by hailstorms.

GET YOUR CAR UNDER COVER IF IT STARTS TO HAIL.

Demonstrating against taxation is like applauding to stop your drive from being blocked by snow in a blizzard.

IF YOUR DRIVE IS BLOCKED BY SNOW, GET A SHOVEL AND DIG YOURSELF OUT.

Demonstrating against a leaking roof is like waving a banner to stop being hungry.

IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, MAKE YOURSELF A SANDWICH.

It’s simple really, but to my constant amazement, even intelligent people persist in believing that demonstrations are a good thing. They are not, not because they are inherently bad, but BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WORK!

FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME

By Paul Craig Roberts

Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, is not unknown to Americans.

My last column noted the absurdity of Obama lumping the upper middle class in with the rich. The income distribution in the US is so skewed that the rich are found in the top one percent. The truly rich with the accoutrements associated with that class are in the top half of one percent.

Those points were lost on those Americans who regard anyone slightly better off than themselves as “rich.” A slightly bigger house in a better neighborhood, a BMW instead of a Toyota, and the ability to go on vacation without going into debt is all it takes to be rich in the minds of those whose eyes are green with envy.

This observation led me to the realization that freedom has been lost to envy.

Americans no longer know what freedom is. Historically, the definition of a free person is one who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves were not free, because they do not own all of their own labor.

An income tax is inconsistent with the historical definition of freedom. Today in America government has a claim on every person’s labor, just as feudal lords, the government of that time, had claims on the labor of serfs and nineteenth century plantation owners had on slaves.

Understanding that an income tax was serfdom, our Founding Fathers wrote the US Constitution in a way that prevented an income tax. This was altered in 1913 with a constitutional amendment that some claim was not properly carried out.

This first step in the enserfment of the American people was taken in envy. The rich were the targets of the income tax. Once in place, the income tax was extended by law and by inflation until ordinary people were being taxed at rates several times as high as the original top rate for the rich.

After almost 100 years of income tax, generations have been born into serfdom and accept the government’s claim on their labor as normal, even just. Some say they don’t mind paying taxes to help the poor. They should look to see what share goes to the poor and what share to war, armaments, and the bailout of the Treasury Secretary’s rich friends.

The problem with a tax on a person’s labor is that it subtracts from a person’s independence. Without independence, it is difficult to exercise constitutionally protected rights, such as free speech.

In former times, family farms and businesses provided a measure of independence for many Americans. Today, most work for wages and salaries. The only real avenue to independence is to save part of one’s earnings and acquire enough wealth upon which to live. For most Americans, the government’s claim on their labor makes this impossible.

This is even more the case when government fails in its regulatory responsibilities and allows banksters to join in the plunder of the hard-pressed citizens.

The inheritance tax, another product of envy, has also done much to destroy the independence of the citizenry. For example, family owned independent media, once a source of independent power that held government accountable, has been lost to corporate media chains in order that families could pay inheritance taxes.

The same people who complain of rule by giant corporations support the inheritance taxes that transformed the face of American business. A family owned business has community roots and loyalties. A corporation’s owners are spread across the country and abroad. Their interest is the share price. The consequence has been that many corporations no longer even have national loyalties.

A corporation’s existence is not threatened by inheritance taxes, but a family owned business is. An inheritance tax is a tax on assets accumulated from income that has already been taxed. To raise the cash to pay the inheritance tax, businesses have to be sold or taken public. Eventually, their ownership is divorced from the community.

In the past, great wealth accumulations found their way into endowments of private universities, museums and public libraries, institutions that also contributed to the independence of citizens from government control.

Today even private universities and tenured faculty have lost pieces of their independence. There are subjects that cannot be investigated and opinions that cannot be expressed. We can rationalize the inhibitions by saying that they are proper subjects for censorship. However, once the process of suppressing thought and speech begins, it spreads.

The Tax Foundation has calculated that tax freedom day arrives on May 29 this year if the federal government’s budget deficit is included, as it should be, in the tax burden. That means that Americans work 42 percent of the year for the government, a higher tax rate than was endured by medieval serfs and one approaching that of a nineteenth century slave.

In the nineteenth century, there were “underground railways” that slaves could use to escape to freedom. In our time, “underground railways” are known as “tax havens.” Just as slave owners sought to abolish “underground railways,” our owners today seek to outlaw “tax havens.”

Some Americans will reject these analogies. They can test the validity of the analogies by refusing the government’s claim on their labor. Perhaps the best evidence of American serfdom is that most Americans do not even have the ability to test the validity of the analogy, because the government takes its share in withholding tax before wages and salaries are paid to us serfs.

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090405_freedom.htm

Henry Porter has now completely discredited himself, with a shameful piece of luddite nonsense masquerading as a call for justice:

If indeed a new era of global responsibility has come into being with measures that actually restrain banks and isolate tax havens,

See this. The politics of sour grapes is alive and well at the grauniad. Irrational, illogical and destructive, like the rest of the ideas in this misguided, buggy whip cracking article.

it may be time for the planet’s dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.

The greatest invention of the 21st century, equivalent in importance to the invention of the printing press, characterized as ‘destructive’ and ‘anti-civic’. The greatest force for empowering the little guy, thanks to which the playing field is made forever flatter; this is a ‘bad thing’. A set of devices and protocols that allow you to have a private conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world for free…and all the other myriad things it can do and will do. This is something ‘to be stopped’.

Only a total computer illiterate, luddite, anti-freedom, anti-human imbecile could believe such a thing.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs – worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.

The internet and the World Wide Web are two separate things, as this commenter points out:

1) Tim Berners-Lee created the WORLD WIDE WEB, which is a distinctly different thing than the Internet. The World Wide Web is a layer on top of the internet that provides the websites that we see, but the largest portion of the internet is not visible, and does not interact with home computers. The internet is hardware, software, protocols, servers, undersea cables, standards, repeaters, satellites and so forth, all operating on the same protocols (IP, Internet Protocol). Tim Berners-Lee certainly created a revolution with the World Wide Web, but the creation of the Internet is an even grander achievement, which took decades, cost billions, and was mostly the responsibility of three groups: AT&T, Cisco Systems, and The United States Department of Defense.

In the strictest sense, the internet was born in 1971, just under 20 years before Sir Berner-Lee’s breakthrough, when many of the standards and theories that became Internet Protocol were developed.

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

One day we will live in a world where everything that is quantifiable knowledge will be contained and indexed by Google. And it will be a good day for mankind, because all that information will be equally available, so long as you speak the English language.

What Google does, to put it stiffly, is vastly more important than some novelist exploring how much the human condition absolutely sucks.

Thanks to the commenter called ‘Netwrk’.

Google is the most prominent WWM,

Is that something like WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) I wonder? Hmmmmmmm…. Guilt by acronym association!

but let’s start with an American site that is making a name for itself in straightforward misappropriation. Scribd.com offers free downloads of every kind of book, magazine, brochure, guide, research paper and pamphlet to 55 million readers every month. Many have been uploaded illegally. Last week the publishers of JK Rowling, Ken Follett and Aravind Adiga took action to remove books that had been illegally published on the site.

First of all, Scribd is a wonderful service. It is being used by the computer literate to disseminate knowledge. Only the completely ignorant, imagination-less luddites are against it.

Mr. Porter, you are on the wrong side of history. You need, as a matter of priority, to read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘. The arguments you put forward against ‘piracy’ are from an imaginary world before the internet (like buggy whip salesmen before the motor car). The ‘community’ you speak of would be much better off living in a world without patents and copyrights, and Against Intellectual Monopoly proves it. The new services like Scribd, are clearly more beneficial than harmful, even with the present copyright regime in place. No matter how loud you shout, and complain, copyright, like alcohol prohibition is dead, and we are all better off for it.

To add injury to insult, your type of ‘thinking’ is disrupting the flow of materials that are out of copyright. Our own Scribd account was the subject of an attack from your lobby this last week.

On our Scribd account, I publish some of our works, and other historical works that are free of copyright. Because Scribd is under attack from mentally retarded luddites, we were sent the following:

Subject:

Copyright notification

From Jason Bentley, on 2009-04-03:

Message:

Dear Irdial-Discs,

We have removed your document “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd.

Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.

As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms

Jason Bentley
Directory of Community Development
jason@scribd.com

People like you might believe that all works should be copyrighted forever no matter how old they are. The fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally tolerated in the belief that they served society, and rewarded the creators of content whilst promoting innovation and creativity. This is why the term of protection was short, so that the works would pass into the public domain, where they could spread and be of benefit to the public after the creators had reaped the benefit of protection via a state sanctioned monopoly over their ideas and how they could be used and copied.

The work in question above is by Adam Smith, published in 1776:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

[…]

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

In case you are unfamiliar with it.

I replied:

From Irdial-Discs,
on 2009-04-03:

Please restore this deleted document. It is in the public domain:

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

It would be an interesting project for Scribd to add the entire contents of the Project Guttenberg texts to your checking system, so that you can exclude documents like this from being flagged.

./akin
./irdial

Scribd.com complied:

Jason Bentley, Apr 04 10:33 pm:

Hi,

I’m sorry that our automated copyright protection system misidentified your document as infringing. We try very hard to protect the rights of authors, and sometimes our copyright robot get a little oversensitive.

I’ve restored your document and removed all references from your account.

Cheers,

Jason

***

Jason Bentley
Community Director and Copyright Agent
Scribd, Inc.

This is the sort of world Henry Porter wants; a world where everything is unavailable because of the incredibly small number of giant publishers and their prostitute luddite lackeys whining that the old days are over. At the very least, Porter is calling for a web where everything must be screened by copyright police before it is posted. This is the same voice that wants ‘civil liberties’; the very voice that is calling for a fascist regime to enforce the insanity of copyright transposed to the web.

Scribd.com complied, but what is interesting is the company’s institutional lack of guilt when the piracy was exposed.

‘Piracy’ (as it is defined today) only takes place when someone sells a book or movie; a ‘movie pirate’ is someone who copies movies onto DVDs and then sells them instead of buying discs from the manufacturer and re-selling them. People who copy movies are not ‘Pirates’, what they do is not ‘piracy’ and in fact the act of copying music, books and movies is beneficial to society even if they sell copies. Furthermore, the people who make movies, music and who write books are able to make a living without copyright laws (state enforced monopolies) in place. This might come as a shock to people like Henry Porter, who writes in the bosom of a nest of copyright brainwashed computer illiterate vipers, but it is a fact nonetheless. Against Intellectual Monopoly has some illuminating examples of why (in this case patents) are a bad thing:

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts above suggest a different interpretation. Watt is a clever inventor who, after getting one step ahead of the pack, remains ahead not by superior innovation, but by clever exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner is a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, is not a minor help.

The evidence suggests that Watt’s efforts to use the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two. The granting of the 1769 and, especially, of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine:innovation is stifled until his patents expire; and very few steam engines are built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occur immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations in an effort to avoid the fate of Hornblower. Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills are badly allocated: we find him spending as much time engaging in legal action in an effort to establish and preserve a monopoly as he does in actual invention.

Indeed, this story contains most of the important elements of our argument Against Intellectual Monopoly. The sort of wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges we have seen in Watt is one of the greatest dangers of monopoly. It is commonly referred to as rent-seeking behavior. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension is clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Finally,there is the slow rate at which the steam engine was adopted be for the expiration of Watt’s patent. By keeping prices high and preventing other from producing cheaper steam engines, Boulton and Watt hampered capital accumulation and slowed economic growth. Intellectual property, as it is currently conceived, has other damaging social effects but the three listed here and exemplified in Watt’s story are the most serious ones: rent-seeking, innovation suppression, and slow-down in the process of economic growth. We shall see that Watt’s experience is the rule, not the exception.

[…]

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Anyone with even one brain cell can see the parallels between this story and the others in Against Intellectual Monopoly in the context of Google, Scribd, the services that run on the Bittorrent ecosystem and the other internet services today. The world, ‘the community’ that Porter is so eager to protect and serve would have been far better served if Watt had not been able to use government force to stop other inventors from improving the steam engine. As soon as Watt’s government granted monopoly ended, the efficiency and power of steam engines increased at a rate far greater than when Watt was able to stifle innovation with his patent, and what’s more, when his patent expired, Watt’s profits continued undiminished.

This is a very important lesson for everyone involved in any sort of creativity. We at Irdial knew instinctively that releasing our catalogue for free would benefit us more than keeping it locked up. That is why we freed our works for non commercial use in 1999. If we lived in a society where there were no copyrights at all we would gladly give up the commercial use rights in an instant.

Instead of fighting the reality, resisting the new tools and clinging on to broken models, it made sense to us to embrace it all and use it to get our works in as many places as possible. To us, it’s obvious. To people like Henry Porter, the future and its wondrous tools are a threat to be destroyed, and he doesn’t care about all the historical works that are burned in his insane quest to cleanse the internet of copyrighted works. We see the direct result of people like him in the erasure of Adam Smith’s work from Scribd.

Instead of admitting it and apologising, it issued a statement claiming Scribd possessed “industry-leading copyright management system which goes above and beyond requirements of Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.

So, Scribd should now apologize for innovating, for bringing millions of documents to millions of people, for nothing. They should apologize for having to invent a piece of filtering software thanks to lobbyist bought government pressure, which might never work accurately and which diverts time away from the software developers improving Scribd, and which diverts capital away from improving Scribd. This is totally insane, and exactly what is described in Against Intellectual Monopoly. Thanks to the luddites like Henry Porter and his distant cousin Watt, innovation is being retarded, as companies divert resources to satisfy monopolists.

That’s like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he’s covered by the best insurance company. What matters is the crime, the theft of someone else’s content, which has taken care, labour, money and expertise to publish.

This is wrong. What you are doing is protesting that the internet should not exist so that you can continue to collect a rent on your works at the expense of the entire world’s population and at the expense of the progress of mankind itself.

What matters here is that copying books is in no way ‘a crime’, is entirely beneficial to society, and in no way detracts from an authors ability to make money on the works that they have taken care, labour money and expertise to create. I have no doubt that some non-BLOGDIAL readers will not believe that this is even possible. Not only is it possible, but we have made money from giving our works away for free, and Against Intellectual Monopoly has examples in it where works that are not copyrighted have made millions for publishers; look at the case of the title The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States where the publisher (Norton) printed this rather large book at a huge profit, despite there being no copyright on the text and it being downloaded world-wide by millions of people:

[…] To be clear: what Norton received from the government was the right to publish first, and the right to use the word “authorized” in the title. What they did not get was the usual copyright – the right to exclusively publish the book. Because it is a U.S. government document, the moment it was released, other individuals, and more important, publishing houses, had the right to buy or download copies and to make and resell additional copies– electronically or in print, at a price of their choosing

[…]

Assuming that St. Martin’s has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money, this suggests Norton made at the very least on the order of a million dollars. We also know that their contract with the government called upon them to donate their “profits” to charity – and we know that they did in fact “donate $600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism prevention.”

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[…]

The point is that even if Scribd removes books, it still allows individuals to advertise services for delivering pirated books by email, which must make it the enemy of every writer and publisher in the world. In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

Advertising a service is everyone’s right. The right to publish (or ‘freedom of the press’) is not ‘the right of newspapers and journalists to write what they like without restriction’. In this case, ‘The Press’ means not ‘the press corps’ but THE PRINTING PRESS as in a device to disseminate writing to a large audience. Journalists always make this mistake; they go berserk when their newspapers face censorship, but when its Bloggers or individuals who claim their right to print and distribute whatever they like, then it’s another story. Shameful.

Scribd is the friend of every writer and publisher in the world, wether they know it or not. Copyright law needs to be abolished, not just turned on its head, and the internet has made this progress begin to happen. If it does not take place before hand, the deaths of the luddites like Henry Porter and his employers and their replacement by ‘The Pirate Generation’ will spell the end of copyright, and the removal of all related legislation from the statute books. As it is, if these laws remain on the books, hundreds of millions of people will be and are being criminalized at the behest of luddites, lobbyists and the corporations they serve…people like Henry Porter.

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community.

This is so absurd I actually LOL’d. Google makes it easy to find authors; easier than it has ever been before. It makes all sorts of research easier by orders of magnitude; every link on this page was found for me by Google. Henry Porter wants a world where this, the greatest research tool ever invented is deliberately broken, just like Scribd is being broken. This is the ‘benefit’ he wants to bring to ‘the community’, and it is laughable that he thinks that ‘commercial institutions’ work for the benefit of ‘the community’… only when they work for HIS benefit… which community PRECISELY is he talking about? I think it’s the community of published authors and publishing houses; the intellectual monopolists, who want to strangle innovation and hold humanity back.

One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

This is called ‘rent seeking‘; the artists concerned, Socialist Billy Bragg and his strange bedfellow, falsetto Robin Gibb, intellectual monopolists both, threatened Google that if they did not pay the rent for videos on YouTube they would face action. Google removes the videos, the infringement, and then is accused of ‘playing very rough’. Do they want their material infringed or do they not? They complained, and their wishes were acceded to; why are they complaining? The fact of the matter is that they want to collect rent. They would like their music to be posted and hosted on YouTube without them having to lift a finger, but they want the rent also. 22p per play is absolutely ridiculous, and if every rent seeker asked for and recieved this money, there would be no YouTube. YouTube is turning out to be one of the most potent political tools available from, the UK to Saudi Arabia. Henry Porter wants it killed so that his (completely irrational) rent seeking socialist friends can make money they do not deserve.

Socialists really are ridiculous creatures; they claim that they are for the masses being empowered, but when something comes along that gives them more power than anyone has ever had EVER, they are AGAINST IT, and want to DESTROY it. The fact is that Socialists are not for anyone other than themselves; they want to be the bosses, the controllers with absolute power. Billy Bragg is a perfect example of this. A luddite that would smash the internet so he can collect rent. Robin Gibb is at least consistent; he is a rich man who doesn’t want the party to end – at least he is honest.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

This is total garbage. Google can in no way be characterized as putting a boot on anyone’s windpipe…though in the case of Billy Bragg, that would save us from hearing his ‘singing’.

Secondly, songwriters have everywhere else to go. This is because the internet is essentially infinite; they can set up their own site and sell their wares; they have had over a decade to do it, and have failed miserably to meet this new challenge. Instead of buying Napster, they destroyed it. Instead of working with Mininova and The Pirate Bay, they are trying to outlaw them. Even Apples iTunes store, where they were making money, met with fierce resistance from them. The fact of the matter is, these people, Henry Porter, Billy Bragg and the entertainment industry are collectively unintelligent and unimaginative. Were this not the case, they would have seen the opportunity for super-distribution of their works and embraced the internet at the beginning.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

That is incorrect; what we are seeing IS heroic young enterprise, being misunderstood and slandered by old rent seeking luddites, who are the REAL monopolists in this story, the Intellectual Monopolists. It is Henry Porter that is trying to destroy industry’s enterprise – new industries – Google, Scribd and all the other content services empower individual enterprise by allowing the creative to circumnavigate the luddite gatekeepers at the Guardian and the major record labels.

Google make profits and the entire world benefits from a tool unprecedented in human history, that no one has to pay for to use, and which helps authors and publishers make more money and reach more people than they ever dreamed possible. Only a total fool would be against it, and given the facts of the history and nature of copyright and patents, only the evil and utterly selfish would try to destroy it.

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is covered by the comments on this very bad and revealing article:

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

[…]

To say that Google produces nothing is ridiculous. As many people have mentioned the search algorithms they have developed make the internet useful for millions. One might as well dismiss Dr Johnson for compiling a book of other people’s words.

Beyond search they have produced some of the easiest to use and most compelling software available. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Calendar have reset expectations for what can be done in internet applications.

They may not be the perfect institution and I love to know if one ever existed. I want to live in a world of Newspapers and Google but if Newspapers don’t survive it won’t be Google’s fault.

[…]

“… Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time”.

This is utter blindness. It’s like arguing that the Ordinance Survey have never done anything useful, because everything on their maps was created by other people, or that Henry Ford added no value because he only shuffled around metals, wood and leather into different shapes.

Google have made searching on a vast scale incredibly easy, and they are the only company who has done so, covering everything from Ethiopian restaurants to the notebooks of Leonardo, at any time, from anywhere. In fact, for absolutely nothing, they provide me with a service worth several times more than any other company does, bar none. If this puts them in a position to earn a lot of money, good on them. If Billy Bragg would still prefer to be back in the workers’ paradise of the GDR, he’s welcome to it.

Closer to home, I note that 95+% of what the Guardian provides overlaps several times over with what is provided by the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Economist, etc, and that the marginal value of any one of these is minimal. The challenge for newspapers is to make themselves distinctively useful, (e.g. the New Yorker’s employment of Sy Hersh), rather than, like the Guardian, recycling a huge amount of content from the AP in manner that makes it, “in the final analysis, a parasite …”.

[…]

What a bitter and twisted load of oldschool, oldfashioned, defensive Fleet-Street-Journalist dinosaurian rubbish this article really is.

Just listen to the decription of the Internet and Google: “amoral”, “destructive, anti-civic”, “exuberant contempt”, “threat to livelihood of individuals”, “a parasite that creates nothing”, “delinquent”, “sociopathic”, “invaded the privacy of millions”, “needs to be stopped in its tracks”.

This is the typical rant of the dying newspaperman – yes, mate, your “power” as a “journalist” with your beholden readers IS on the wane, your influence IS falling, your role IS diminishing – I can understand why you see the Internet and Google as bad.

But this isn’t journalism – like so much we now see inthe papers against the Internet, it’s massively ill-informed, superficial, frightened, self-serving invective. I fear it will do nothing more than to confirm the authors as dinosaurs who have received the last rites.

[…]

And there you have it.

On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

Twitter, if they want to be bought by Google, is a private matter. It’spurchase will benefit the users of that service…in any case, that has nothing to do with the thrust of this article, intellectual monopoly. It does point however shine a light on Henry Porter’s hatred of the rich and innovative, his sour grapes politics. As for ‘contested by academics’, this is ‘some people say‘. That is the company that Henry Porter keeps.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.

Newspapers are dying because they do not provide what people need. If the Guardian provided what people want, the truth, then it would be a thriving business. The fact of the matter is, as the commenter says above, the Guardian’s content overlaps with every other newspapers content. they run the same stories, from the same point of view, and everyone is sick of it. This is why readers have turned away from newspapers:

Definitely the most ill-informed piece of propaganda I have read in a very long time and a great example of why nobody wants to pay for newspapers

Well said commenter. This is an absurd article that flies in the face of reality and the truth; why should anyone PAY to be lied to when they can get the truth for free and unfiltered from the internets?

Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Newspapers, if they were to remove their content, would be committing suicide. They should do this, and go out like an hero instead of whining like spoiled brats. They have executed themselves by prostituting their non advertising column inches for anyone with money, and the Guardian is the biggest whore of them all. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google no one would notice; the content in all the papers is the same, and so it is already like there is only one newspaper… no breach of competition rules is possible between those bird cage liners.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

I think this Thomas Jefferson quote is more appropriate:

“Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Quote found by Google of course.

Sharing knowledge is just like sharing a light from a candle; Henry Porter and the intellectual monopolists want us all to live in darkness.

If, at a time of profound challenges, newspapers fall out with Google, it could be pretty serious for British society, which is why I referred earlier to anti-civic forces.

British society is in trouble because the newspapers have utterly failed to raise the alarm about the police state. They have failed to rally the people into revolt. They have failed in the very task that Henry Porter believes is their raison d’etre and sacred duty. The internet has done more than any newspaper to galvanize inform and solidify the revolt against the police state, as we are well aware; even email circulars are more powerful than newspapers in properly informing the public. Then there are the Blogs which have changed the game entirely. And now, YouTube, which shamed television news into playing catch up on one of the most important speeches delivered in front of a sitting Prime Minster ever. That is a blog post, by the way, NOT a newspaper article. No, newspapers are an irrelevance now thanks to their prostituting their power, and this article, this shameless, vulgar piece of transparent propaganda, is a perfect example of it.

Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 – now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand – does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

The only delusional people in this story are Henry Porter and the lobby he represents and is shilling for. The only people without conscience are the ones who would retard or destroy man’s progress for their personal profit. It is Henry Porter who is acting like a breast fed 11-year-old, whining that the world is changing and he can no longer get his ‘bitty’….”I want my rent mummy!!! WAAAAH WAAAHHH WAHHHHH”

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience.

Henry Porter is painfully unaware about the history and true nature of intellectual monopoly, and how it is damaging to society. He wants to prevent failure of fossilized and sclerotic businesses by strangling innovators so that methods can never change and business and culture remain in stasis.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

Henry Porter perfectly conveys spoiled and ignorant immorality that poses as righteous indignation. He chastises Google for obeying the laws of other countries while whining that Google does not better obeying the insane laws of the UK. This is hypocrisy, but when it comes to China, all journalists at the Guardian are in the same boat.

And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain’s civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

And yet, all the journalists who jumped on Google for Streetview, which everyone can use equally, did not make so much noise when the CCTV started to go up, which no one can access but the state. How is it that CCTV, ANPR etc is not as bad as Google Streetview? Henry Porter has been making the right noises about CCTV to be sure, but the newspapers as a whole have totally FAILED to make the right noises about CCTV. Google Streetview is NOTHING compared to the real-time CCTV and ANPR that the state has, and yet, where is the universal moral outrage? Where are the pig ignorant little Britain villagers taking down the surveillance cameras en masse? Oh, I remember, Henry Porter says:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499

which means that he is FOR CCTV as long as the democratic state is behind it, acting on behalf of us. Those villagers are FOR CCTV as long as its the government behind them! They are all as thick as two short planks.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy?showallcomments=true

I am happy to say that articles like this are the death rattle of the pure evil that is newspaper journalism.

I am also happy to report that the majority of the comments on his article are entirely against it, for all the right reasons.

Farewell newspaper journalism, don’t let the door slam behind you.

1. We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, met in London on 2 April 2009.

This, we know.

2. We face the greatest challenge to the world economy in modern times; a crisis which has deepened since we last met, which affects the lives of women, men, and children in every country, and which all countries must join together to resolve. A global crisis requires a global solution.

FALSE. It is not true that all countries must join together to resolve this ‘crisis’, and it is also false that this ‘crisis’ reqires a global solution.

The adage ‘Think locally act globally’ applies here. Each country needs to have its own sovereign currency that is based on Gold coins. That is the long term solution to this problem.

3. We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible;

FALSE. Prosperity is the byproduct of liberty. It is liberty that is indivisible.

that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared;

FALSE. Not only is the idea of sustained growth not an absolute, but the idea that it has to be shared is also absurd.

and that our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too; and must reflect the interests, not just of today’s population, but of future generations too.

If that is true, then priority number one must be the adoption of a monetary system where the hard earned work value of the people cannot be arbitrarily destroyed by the fallible leaders of the G20. If that is true, then no one anywhere should accept a fiat currency or legal tender laws that make it impossible for people to preserve their wealth and prosperity in the long run.

We believe that the only sure foundation for sustainable globalisation and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions.

It is not at all agreed that ‘sustainable globalisation’ is a desirable outcome. Rising prosperity, for sure, many people on the earth are living lives that are not optimal; the question is what is the best way that they can serve their own interests. Market principles create the prosperity that the leaders of the G20 are now able to squander. ‘Effective regulation’ is code for total market regulation, which means the death of market principles. ‘Strong global institutions’ means global governance, anathema to the free market and a death blow to it.

4. We have today therefore pledged to do whatever is necessary to:

LIE. If this were the case, they would immediately cease and desist from interfering in the process of the market.

restore confidence, growth, and jobs;

They cannot do this. The market is more powerful than any of them or even 1000 of them.

repair the financial system to restore lending;

They cannot do this. They do not have the ability to do this. If they could do this, it would be the wrong thing to do because credit was the cause of this problem.

strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;

Trust is not the problem. More onerous regulation will not restore it; it will further damage the market.

fund and reform our international financial institutions to overcome this crisis and prevent future ones;

You do not have the money to fund and reform international financial institutions. You can only print money or tax citizens. You cannot tax any further without a global revolt, so you will steal the money by printing more fiat currency. This will worsen the ‘crisis’, hasten and increase the severity of the implosion.

promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism, to underpin prosperity; and

Global trade does not need promotion. Companies are very good at selling their wares world-wide. Investors do not need encouragement to find places to put their money. If you get out of the way and remove regulations and restrictions money will flow at the speed of light to where it is needed.

build an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery.

These are weasel words, inserted to placate the adherents of the new secular religion ‘Environmentalism’.

By acting together to fulfil these pledges we will bring the world economy out of recession and prevent a crisis like this from recurring in the future.

And if you fail, will you all collectively resign and cease to interfere in matters beyond your understanding?

5. The agreements we have reached today, to treble resources available to the IMF to $750 billion, to support a new SDR allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs, to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed IMF gold sales for concessional finance for the poorest countries, constitute an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy.

Selling Gold? Anyone with common sense will see this as a great buying opportunity. The price of Gold (real money) is going to go down on this announcement, and then, once these insane measures fail to work, it will skyrocket.

This paragraph fails to say where the $1.1 trillion dollars promised is going to come from. It also does not say who is going to receive these fiat funds.

Together with the measures we have each taken nationally, this constitutes a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale.

LIE. This constitutes theft on a scale previously unknown to mankind. This $1.1 trillion has to come from somewhere. It can either come from the printing press, or the savings of a nation or from taxation. Either way, it is going to come from somewhere, and then it is going to be given to someone at the diktat of a small handful of people. This is more than insanity. It is criminal. We note that none of the citizenry of the G20 were asked to vote wether or not ‘their’ money was to be used in this way. This ‘solution’ was arrived at in secret and delivered as a fait accomplit. No one with any decency would accept such a thing. And to top it all off, this solution WILL NOT WORK.

6. We are undertaking an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion,

You cannot make something out of nothing. Value cannot be created out of nothing. Any fiscal expansion must come from the production of work; governments are unproductive – they cannot produce anything, they can only take from the productive and give to the unproductive. This is called ‘stealing’.

which will save or create millions of jobs which would otherwise have been destroyed, and that will, by the end of next year, amount to $5 trillion, raise output by 4 per cent, and accelerate the transition to a green economy. We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained fiscal effort necessary to restore growth.

This plan will not save or create real jobs. It will in fact, destroy real jobs and capital.

7. Our central banks have also taken exceptional action. Interest rates have been cut aggressively in most countries, and our central banks have pledged to maintain expansionary policies for as long as needed and to use the full range of monetary policy instruments, including unconventional instruments, consistent with price stability.

Central banks and fiat currency are the cause of this problem. They do not have perfect knowledge, and therefore are not able to set the interest rates correctly. Only the market can do that. It was the artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve that started this crisis. The fact that you do not know this disqualifies you from being able to present a solution.

8. Our actions to restore growth cannot be effective until we restore domestic lending and international capital flows. We have provided significant and comprehensive support to our banking systems to provide liquidity, recapitalise financial institutions, and address decisively the problem of impaired assets. We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system and ensure the soundness of systemically important institutions, implementing our policies in line with the agreed G20 framework for restoring lending and repairing the financial sector.

You cannot be for the market and also be for forcing people to lend money where they do not feel that it is prudent to do so. Trying to expand access to credit to people who had no business buying a house was one of the factors that caused this situation. When you get out of the way, money will begin to flow instantly. By standing together as you are, you are in fact acting like a dam, blocking the flow of capital. Money is like information; it wants to be free. When you finally give up your delusion that you understand economics and get out of the way, the dam will burst and money will flow and wash away this problem.

9. Taken together, these actions will constitute the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus and the most comprehensive support programme for the financial sector in modern times.

And it will fail spectacularly. Stimulus packages will not work, cannot work, and have never worked.

Acting together strengthens the impact and the exceptional policy actions announced so far must be implemented without delay.

Acting together intensifies the storm, increases its devastating power and will make everything 1000 times worse.

Today, we have further agreed over $1 trillion of additional resources for the world economy through our international financial institutions and trade finance.

What is the ultimate source of the money? It can only be tax or printing press or savings. Why is it that you cannot speak plainly? Say you are going to do one of the three!

10. Last month the IMF estimated that world growth in real terms would resume and rise to over 2 percent by the end of 2010.

They could not predict this crash, and yet, we are to believe that they can predict the future now?

We are confident that the actions we have agreed today, and our unshakeable commitment to work together to restore growth and jobs, while preserving long-term fiscal sustainability, will accelerate the return to trend growth.

And this is why you FAIL. Confidence is not enough; confidence does not get work done, it does not create value. What confidence DOES do, is deceive the confident into believing paper money is real, that it has value, and that by printing it, you create value out of thin air. Commitment to a false idea is suicide. In this case, that is a good thing. Long-term fiscal sustainability can only be had with gold coins as the money. The trend growth that you refer to was produced by the printing of fiat currency. Those graphs should be thrown out immediately, as they represent an unattainable goal.

We commit today to taking whatever action is necessary to secure that outcome, and we call on the IMF to assess regularly the actions taken and the global actions required.

If you want to fix this, you need to STOP TAKING ACTIONS. It is your taking of actions that has been and which is causing the problem!

11. We are resolved to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability and price stability and will put in place credible exit strategies from the measures that need to be taken now to support the financial sector and restore global demand.

Long term pice stability can only be had with a gold coin standard for money. Since gold cannot be printed, its value cannot be corrupted – the money cannot be debased. When denominated in gold, the price of almost everything has not changed in decades. Global demand is not your affair. You do not have the competence to engineer it, and everything you do to try and generate it causes more problems.

We are convinced that by implementing our agreed policies we will limit the longer-term costs to our economies, thereby reducing the scale of the fiscal consolidation necessary over the longer term.

People used to be convinced that the earth was flat. You are all in the same camp. You all believe that paper money has value, that you can control ‘the economy’, and that your insane spending measures will fix this, when every indicator says that it will make things worse. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein.. What you are doing, is, by this definition, INSANE. It was debt that created this problem. You cannot borrow your way out of debt.

12. We will conduct all our economic policies cooperatively and responsibly with regard to the impact on other countries and will refrain from competitive devaluation of our currencies and promote a stable and well-functioning international monetary system.

The only way to create “a stable and well-functioning international monetary system” is to get out of the way and allow the market to determine what money should be and how it should work.

We will support, now and in the future, to candid, even-handed, and independent IMF surveillance of our economies and financial sectors, of the impact of our policies on others, and of risks facing the global economy.

The IMF did not see this crisis coming. They are not omniscient. They do not have the ability or the right to supervise the private affairs of nations.

Strengthening financial supervision and regulation

13. Major failures in the financial sector and in financial regulation and supervision were fundamental causes of the crisis.

This is a LIE.

Confidence will not be restored until we rebuild trust in our financial system.

This is FALSE.

We will take action to build a stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and citizens.

This is NONSENSE.

Global consistency means the absence of a free market, where the individual can choose the best jurisdiction to do business. A world run by incompetents at the IMF and the G20 is a world where innovation and business will be stifled. The needs of business and citizens are best served by each of the two groups acting without onerous regulation laid down by incompetent people.

14. We each agree to ensure our domestic regulatory systems are strong.

They already are strong. So strong in fact, that people spend all their time thinking up ways to get around the regulations so that they can make a profit. No one would put their money into risky derivatives if there was a less risky alternative that paid the same returns. The fact of the matter is that the already overburdened regulatory and taxation system makes it very hard to earn a profit; this is the true mother, the genesis of the exotic financial products.

But we also agree to establish the much greater consistency and systematic cooperation between countries, and the framework of internationally agreed high standards, that a global financial system requires.

The ‘global system’ does not require this. Greater consistency means a playing field where no one has the incentive to win, much less step out onto the field.

Strengthened regulation and supervision must promote propriety, integrity and transparency; guard against risk across the financial system; dampen rather than amplify the financial and economic cycle; reduce reliance on inappropriately risky sources of financing; and discourage excessive risk-taking.

Regulation cannot promote propriety or integrity. Regulation in fact, promotes and exacerbates the tactics of evasion. Transparency already exists in the place that it matters; between the client and the entity that offers a financial product. You cannot “risk across the financial system” AND be in favor of fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, the latter being the most dangerous. The economic cycle (which is actually The Business Cycle) is the creature of governments with their bad money, regulations and interference in the market. The state cannot decide what is and is not inappropriate. Only individuals can make this determination. When the state involves itself in legislating risk-taking, moral hazard is the result.

Regulators and supervisors must protect consumers and investors, support market discipline, avoid adverse impacts on other countries, reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage, support competition and dynamism, and keep pace with innovation in the marketplace.

Regulators failed to spot Madhof (the scapegoat). They are incapable of protecting consumers, even if it was appropriate for them to do so, which it is not. Markets are self disciplining, just like the weather. No doubt you at the G20 would like to control that also. Avoiding adverse impacts is also impossible. If it were possible to do it, the IMF would have stepped in to stop the current crisis from emerging.

You cannot,”support competition and dynamism” and also be FOR regulation and the sort of fine grained supervision you are advocating. We understand what you mean by ‘keep pace with innovation in the marketplace’; stop any and all new internet based payment systems from taking root and supplanting the ossified, corrupt, sclerotic financial system over which you preside, or pretend to preside.

15. To this end we are implementing the Action Plan agreed at our last meeting, as set out in the attached progress report. We have today also issued a Declaration, Strengthening the Financial System. In particular we agree:

to establish a new Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a strengthened mandate, as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), including all G20 countries, FSF members, Spain, and the European Commission;

Pointless.

that the FSB should collaborate with the IMF to provide early warning of macroeconomic and financial risks and the actions needed to address them;

This will never work. The IMF did not see this crisis coming, the biggest ever in world history, and they will not see the next one, if there is going to be a next one.

to reshape our regulatory systems so that our authorities are able to identify and take account of macro-prudential risks;

This will be used to blackmail institutions that are the personal enemies of the insiders.

to extend regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets. This will include, for the first time, systemically important hedge funds;

Total control by incompetent unproductive over the productive.

to endorse and implement the FSF’s tough new principles on pay and compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms;

This is UTTER NONSENSE. There is no such thing as a ‘sustainable compensation scheme’, and executive remuneration has nothing to do with this problem. The fact that this childish, sour grapes scapegoating language is in this document demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the problem, its root cause and the steps that need to be taken. It proves that you are incompetent, dull witted and doomed to failure.

to take action, once recovery is assured, to improve the quality, quantity, and international consistency of capital in the banking system.

recovery will not be assured by this plan, and even if it were possible, by what metric are you going to declare that it has happened? Improving the international consistency of capital in the banking system means a global currency. We are not stupid!

In future, regulation must prevent excessive leverage and require buffers of resources to be built up in good times;

It is not the place of the state to say what is or is not excessive leverage. Banking is a private business. So is risk. Neither is the business of government.

to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens.

Tax ‘havens’ have nothing to do with this crisis. You would do better to ask why it is that money is fleeing your jurisdictions; once you address that problem, no one will have the incentive to remove their money from your shores. As for non co-operative jurisdictions, this means that the G20 is now going to act as if it is the de-fact world government, and there will be no more national soverignty. People will not be able to choose places to invest based on thier own requirements, and nations will not be able to organize their affairs as they see fit. All laws will now pass through the filter of G20, and if you do not agree, you will be listed as an ‘outlaw nation’. This will be the case even if the country, through the democratic process, decides that it wants nothing to do with the G20 and its absurd and destructive policies.

We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems.

This is a non sequitur. You do not use sanctions to protect YOUR public finances, you use YOUR LAWS to do that. Sanctions are used to disrupt OTHER PEOPLE’S finances and financial systems. The money in sovereign nations is not YOURS it is the property of the OWNERS of that money, and the responsibility of the sovereign nation where the funds are stored.

The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information;

None of this has anything to do with the financial crisis. Banking secrecy has no effect on anything, other than the ability of the venal government’s ability to steal the wealth from its beleaguered citizenry. You are using this crisis to extend your reach into places where you have no business being.

to call on the accounting standard setters to work urgently with supervisors and regulators to improve standards on valuation and provisioning and achieve a single set of high-quality global accounting standards; and

None of this will work. You will not have enough time to roll it out; the collapse will see to that. Barring the collapse, there will be a ground-swell of rage that will permanently scupper your plans.

to extend regulatory oversight and registration to Credit Rating Agencies to ensure they meet the international code of good practice, particularly to prevent unacceptable conflicts of interest.

16. We instruct our Finance Ministers to complete the implementation of these decisions in line with the timetable set out in the Action Plan. We have asked the FSB and the IMF to monitor progress, working with the Financial Action Taskforce and other relevant bodies, and to provide a report to the next meeting of our Finance Ministers in Scotland in November.

The only confilct of interest that matters here is the prevalence of financial insiders in the corrupt governments.

17 to 24, snipped, as it is repetitive and refuted.

Ensuring a fair and sustainable recovery for all

25. We are determined not only to restore growth but to lay the foundation for a fair and sustainable world economy. We recognise that the current crisis has a disproportionate impact on the vulnerable in the poorest countries and recognise our collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis to minimise long-lasting damage to global potential. To this end:

The state cannot determine what is ‘fair’ and what is not ‘un-fair’. Global potential, like gravitational potential energy, is storable. Sound money stores value; it is called capital (potential to invest). If you want to minimise long terme damage to global potential, sound money must replace fiat currencies that can be printed and debased at the will of incompetents.

we reaffirm our historic commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and to achieving our respective ODA pledges, including commitments on Aid for Trade, debt relief, and the Gleneagles commitments, especially to sub-Saharan Africa;

Others haver written about this, Google them.

the actions and decisions we have taken today will provide $50 billion to support social protection, boost trade and safeguard development in low income countries, as part of the significant increase in crisis support for these and other developing countries and emerging markets;

Where is this money coming from, for the thousandth time, and is this not giving fish to people instead of teaching them how to fish?

we are making available resources for social protection for the poorest countries, including through investing in long-term food security and through voluntary bilateral contributions to the World Bank’s Vulnerability Framework, including the Infrastructure Crisis Facility, and the Rapid Social Response Fund;

More failure on the cards.

we have committed, consistent with the new income model, that additional resources from agreed sales of IMF gold will be used, together with surplus income, to provide $6 billion additional concessional and flexible finance for the poorest countries over the next 2 to 3 years. We call on the IMF to come forward with concrete proposals at the Spring Meetings;

Who is going to buy this gold, and what will they give in exchange for it? Gold is money. The people who want to buy it have fiat currency. People who want to protect the value of their money will line up for this bargain price gold, hand over their worthless dollars and euros and then sit back and watch the spectacle unfold.

we have agreed to review the flexibility of the Debt Sustainability Framework and call on the IMF and World Bank to report to the IMFC and Development Committee at the Annual Meetings; and

we call on the UN, working with other global institutions, to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable.

A waste of money.

26. We recognise the human dimension to the crisis. We commit to support those affected by the crisis by creating employment opportunities and through income support measures.

How is this going to be paid for?

We will build a fair and family-friendly labour market for both women and men.

It is not the place of the state to build labour markets. While we are at it, a ‘family-friendly’ labour market would be one where the mother gets to raise her children full time, instead of being forced to earn money because the prices of houses is so great (which is a direct result of interference in the market by the state).

We therefore welcome the reports of the London Jobs Conference and the Rome Social Summit and the key principles they proposed. We will support employment by stimulating growth,

Growth cannot be stimulated.

investing in education and training, and through active labour market policies, focusing on the most vulnerable. We call upon the ILO, working with other relevant organisations, to assess the actions taken and those required for the future.

More nonsense.

27. We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure. We encourage the MDBs to contribute fully to the achievement of this objective. We will identify and work together on further measures to build sustainable economies.

28. We reaffirm our commitment to address the threat of irreversible climate change, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Utter, unscientific garbage.

Delivering our commitments

29. We have committed ourselves to work together with urgency and determination to translate these words into action. We agreed to meet again before the end of this year to review progress on our commitments.

It is the prayer of every free man on this planet that you meet with TOTAL FAILURE.

Anti G20 ‘Rioters’ display total ignorance, impotence, incompetence, idiocy and irrationality:

A comment from The Times:

To be fair to the protesters, one this occasion they have paid for the damages in advance.
David Masu, Zürich, Switzerland

And check this out:

I have a better idea chubby: Why don’t you get yourself out of the government’s economy??!?!

And of course, the police agent provocateurs were in full force:

Snarfed from The Daily Mail.

Now for some common sense:

NEW WORLD DISORDER

The G-20 meeting begins this week in England. Here, political leaders from 20 major nations meet to share ideas on how to solve an international financial crisis that their central banks created, following the lead of Alan Greenspan’s FED. They never saw it coming. Not any of them – not the central bankers, not the politicians, not the regulators. They were all caught flat-footed.

Then they assemble at a meeting and send out press releases. These press releases are designed to assure the investing public that they, the creators of this crisis, know what went wrong – they don’t – and that by discussing the causes of the crisis, which they don’t understand, they will be able to come up with a joint solution that does not involve either (1) mass inflation or (2) a worldwide depression that lasts for years.

It is a song and dance. It is shuck and jive. It is bait and switch. It is Custer’s last stand.

These people don’t know what to do. If they did, there would be two or three well-defined, fully documented proposals out there, each with national co-sponsors. All of them would have major flaws. They would be mutually exclusive. Economists of various schools of opinion would be mobilizing behind one or another program.

Instead, there are no published plans. There are no working papers. There are only vague promises of joint action. Like what?

There are no detailed plans out of which this team of egomaniac politicians might conceivably hammer into an acceptable plan.

There is no centralized international planning agency.

There is no international enforcement agency. There is no agreement among central bankers.

There is no unanimity to do anything.

There is not going to be, either. The G-20 meeting will issue some sort of bland statement of hope, and everyone will go home.

They refuse to adopt the only system that every brought unity to governments and central banks: an international gold coin standard. The politicians and central bankers could not control the movements of gold out of inflating nations and into non-inflating nations, 1815–1914. They resented the ability of common people to exercise control over domestic monetary policy simply by going down to a bank and demanding payment in gold coins. They all took away this authority in the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out.

These deal-doers, these politicians, these seekers of power don’t trust each other. That is the famous bottom line. They do not trust the common people, which means that they do not trust a gold coin standard. But they do not trust each other.

They are trapped by the dollar standard. They have told their voters that their nations can get rich by exporting to the United States. They have not explained that in order to export lots of goods to the United States, their central banks must create fiat money to buy depreciating dollars at a favorable rate of exchange. They have not told the voters that modern mercantilism depends on lending tax money and central bank fiat money to the U.S. government, which will not pay back the loans. Ever.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north700.html

All BLOGDIAL readers know why this protesting and violence is pointless / futile / stupid /.

That which is seen …. if you have the right equipment.

That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen

If you have the right equipment.

A member of Congress is warning the Obama administration to keep its hands off the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s international currency.

U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has introduced a resolution that would bar the U.S. from recognizing any other currency than the dollar as its reserve currency.

Her action comes in response to suggestions from China, Russia and the United Nations that another currency be explored. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has admitted he would be open to the idea, although he quickly backtracked when the stock market plunged on his announcement.

“During a Financial Services Committee hearing, I asked Secretary Geithner if he would denounce efforts to move towards a global currency and he answered unequivocally that he would,” Bachmann said. “And President Obama gave the nation the same assurances. But just a day later, Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table. I want to know which it is. The American people deserve to know.”

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the president has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the president is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution, according to the congresswoman.

As a result, legislation prohibiting the president and Treasury Department from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements, she said.

“If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom,” Bachmann told the Glenn Beck program on the Fox News Channel today.

Her proposal, H.J.R. 41, isn’t complicated:

It is titled: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States ”

Already with several dozen sponsors, it states:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:”

It would add to the Constitution:

The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest voice to endorse an “alternative” to the dollar was the head of a U.N. expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis.

“The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.”

[…]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=93086

Incredible.

These people can smell that something is wrong, but are not sure what it is. They feel that they have to protect ‘their currency’, but they are not sure what it is that they need to do.

This amendment, as tabled, would actually outlaw the Dollar as it exists today.

The Federal Reserve is not ‘the United States’; it is a private bank. That means that ‘US Dollars’ are not issued by the United States, but by an entity other than the United States.

If this amendment is added to the Constitution, the US Dollar, AKA Federal Reserve Notes, will instantly cease being legal tender.

Interesting.

Are these people smarter than they appear to be, and are they trying to kill the Federal Reserve and its worthless fiat currency by a checkmate maneuver?

I doubt it.

It is more likely that they do not understand the nature of the money in their pockets; I would bet that Michelle Bachmann doesn’t know anything about the dollar, the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, commodity money, or anything about any of the real issues behind the problem at the center of what she is clumsily trying to address.

Until you understand the nature of money and currencies, it is impossible to draft legislation (or in this case, REMOVE LEGISLATION) that will permanently fix the problem.

FAIL.

The company that sells Gardasil is engaged in a propaganda push to peddle their poison to BOYS as well as girls.

It seems however, that there is another, less expensive, less dangerous way to prevent HPV infections spreading from males to females:

Circumcision reduces risk of herpes and HPV infection

Men who are circumcised are less likely to get sexually transmitted infections such as genital herpes and human papillomavirus (HPV), but not syphilis, according to a study of adult African men published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The finding adds to the evidence that there are health benefits to circumcision. It was already known that circumcision can reduce the risk of penile cancer, a relatively rare disease. In a previous study, the same research team found that adult circumcision could reduce the risk of HIV infection.

Efforts to increase the practice of male circumcision in areas with high rates of sexually transmitted infections, including Africa, could have a tremendous benefit, say the study’s authors. Genital herpes has been associated with an increased risk of HIV, and HPV can cause genital warts as well as a higher risk of anal, cervical (in women), and penile cancers.

In the United States, infant circumcision is declining. About 64 percent of American male infants were circumcised in 1995, down from more than 90 percent in the 1970s. Rates tend to be higher in whites (81percent) than in blacks (65 percent) or Hispanics (54 percent).

Some opponents say the removal of the foreskin is an unnecessary surgical procedure that may reduce sexual sensitivity in adulthood. In Jewish and Muslim cultures, young or infant boys are routinely circumcised for religious reasons. Circumcision rates have traditionally been higher in the U.S. than in Europe, but the American Academy of Pediatrics currently says that the medical benefits are insufficient to recommend circumcision for all baby boys.

In the new study, a research team at the Rakai Health Sciences Program in Uganda — in collaboration with researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and Makerere University in Uganda — conducted two clinical trials involving 3,393 uncircumcised men ages 15 to 49. All the men were negative for HIV and genital herpes (also known as herpes simplex virus type 2); a subgroup of men also tested negative for HPV.

Roughly half of the men underwent medically supervised circumcision at the start of the trial, while the other half were circumcised two years later.

Overall, circumcision reduced the men’s risk of genital herpes by 28 percent (10.3 percent of uncircumcised men developed genital herpes compared with 7.8 percent of circumcised men) and HPV infection by 35 percent (27.8 percent of uncircumcised men were infected with HPV compared with 18 percent of circumcised men). Circumcision did not, however, protect against syphilis. (About 2 percent of men in both groups contracted syphilis.)

Study coauthor Thomas C. Quinn, M.D., professor of global health at Johns Hopkins University, says that choosing circumcision, whether it’s the parents of an infant or an adult male for himself, is and should remain an individual decision.

“But the critics need to really look at the benefits versus the risks,” he adds. “By now a large body of evidence has shown that the health benefits clearly outweigh the minor risk associated with the surgery. In our study, we didn’t see any adverse effects or mutilation. We’re recommending supervised, safe, sterile environments — not circumcision out in an open field with rusty instruments.”

[…]

Roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults have had at least one HPV infection, according to an editorial by Matthew R. Golden, M.D., and Judith N. Wasserheit, M.D., both of the University of Washington. Although vaccines against some of the most dangerous HPV strains have been approved for girls ages 13 to 26, the vaccines are expensive and routine Pap tests are still necessary to pick up cervical cancers.

Golden and Wasserheit note that “rates of circumcision are declining and are lowest among black and Hispanic patients, groups in whom rates of HIV, herpes, and cervical cancer are disproportionately high.” Medicaid, which insures many low-income patients in these populations, does not pay for routine infant circumcision in 16 states.

[…]

CNN

And there you have it. Chop is cheaper than Gardasil.

I wonder how many chops you would be able to purchase with the cost of a full round of Gardakill?

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM—–CHOP!

Other BLOGDIAL posts on Guardakil

The Oxford Libertarian Society is hosting a talk:

Thursday, 12th March – 8pm – Christ Church (Lecture Room 1)

DOUGLAS CARSWELL MP – ‘The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain’

Conservative Member of Parliament for Harwich and Clacton since 2005, Douglas Carswell is one of the leading advocates for limited government in Westminister. As a contributor to ‘Direct Democracy: an Agenda for a New Model Party’ and author of ‘The Localist Papers,’ he established himself as amongst the vanguard of the highly effective localist movement within the Conservative Party. He strongly favours the devolution of most functions of government to the local level, and greater participatory democracy through referendums and citizens’ intitiatves. He will speak about a book he has recently coauthored with Daniel Hannan MEP, ‘The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain,’ a set of policy proposals to radically change the role of the central government in a single legislative session. Amongst the key ideas proposed are health savings accounts, school vouchers, and elected sheriffs. He blogs at http://www.talkcarswell.com, and the book can be downloaded from http://www.renew-britain.com.

As long time readers of BLOGDIAL will know, we believe that the only purpose of legislative bodies in the 21st century should be to remove legislation from the statute books. Now it seems that some more people are starting to wake up.

Sadly, this particular group is still completely deluded.

From Douglas Carswell’s blog:

Sir Paul Judge is setting up a new “open source” political party – which aims to make great use of the internet and direct democracy.
He seems to have grasped that the internet will remove barriers to entry in politics as surely as it has done already in business and commerce. In order to retain market share, the big, established political parties are going to have to either adapt – or lose out.

[…]

http://www.talkcarswell.com/show.aspx?id=521

‘Direct Democracy’. Can you imagine what that would be like? Imagine the mobile phone generation being able to decide how you can or cannot live? The generation that cannot even speak in complete sentences, thanks to a device that has created a new form of english. Chicken nugget eaters voting by text message on wether or not foi gras should be eaten or not.

This is just about the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

What makes people free are concrete rights, not access to voting. Democracy IS turkeys voting to outlaw Christmas. Democracy IS three wolves and two sheep voting on what is for dinner. Spreading it into the hands of every uneducated, ignorant moron with a mobile phone is absolute insanity. It is the technical perfection of mob rule; ‘mobocracy’…or ‘mobileocracy’ or ‘txtrcsy’…you get the idea.

Even if increasing democracy were a good idea, we all know that all voting should take place only on paper, and should never be done electronically. There have been recent scandals about this, as you may recall.

In any case, here is the last part of the article in The Times by Sir Paul Judge. The emphasis is mine:

[…]

Everybody knows that the system is broken, everyone agrees that reform is required. However turkeys do not vote for Christmas. It seems that if we want to change the system we have to change the turkeys.

On Monday 16th March, we shall be launching the Jury Team – an organisation that will run a web-based Open Primary to let anyone put themselves forward as a candidate. If they win the popular vote, conducted using mobile phones, they will be selected to head the list of candidates we are putting up for the European Parliamentary elections in June.

Other than prohibiting our platform from being used by extremists, we will demand of our candidates only that they support our principles of good governance. Beyond that, they are free to vote on issues unburdened by any party whip.

With the newspapers filled with stories of sleaze and corruption and with political apathy spiraling, we are in the midst of a perfect storm. The European Parliamentary elections offer the electorate the opportunity to show that there is an appetite for change and a longing for British politics to be cleaned up by people selected from the general population, rather than from the political class. We shall then build on this for the general election. All we need is your support.

You can make a difference by going to www.juryteam.org.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5864626.ece

Any system that can exclude people because they are ‘extremists’ is broken by definition. There is no such thing as an ‘extremist’, and in a free country, where conduct between people is based on rights, it doesn’t matter what you or your neighbor believes; as long as you do not cause harm to anyone, you can believe and do what you like in a free country.

That means you can publish whatever you like, smoke whatever you like, drink whatever you like and so on and so on. None of these people are awake enough to grasp this. Furthermore, when they talk about ‘our platform’ they give the game away completely. They will be using ‘their’ platform to make sure that only their points of view are expressed; of course, its their right since they own the platform, but the guiding principle is all wrong, and trying to create something to fix a problem should not be made from the same problems that it is trying to fix. You cannot say that ‘anyone can put themselves forward as a candidate’ when in fact, there will be a vetting process to weed out ‘extremists’. This is called ‘FAIL’.

The problem with everything the way it is is that it is owned by one group that exploits other groups by force. They create the contexts, the definitions (like ‘extremist’ or ‘the five outcomes’ or ‘the social contract’) make the rules and everyone is expected to obey. Truly Open Source Politics would accept all ideas and all candidates as equal, and then allow the market (the electorate) to decide which ideas and candidates have merit.

These computer illiterate people have seized on the idea of Open Source software, and are trying to squeeze their increasingly discredited careers into the new paradigm. It is not going to work. They do not even know where to start, as can be seen by how they price their ‘plan’. See below.

Of course, we know that this cannot work because democracy is mob rule and a form of tyranny, so even if this project was open to all ideas, it is fundamentally flawed and a part of the problem.

This is something that cannot be tweaked, adjusted, fixed or set right. The best you can do, if you want to keep the present system in anything like the shape it is currently in, is to pare it down to almost nothing. Other than that, with all the laws, regulations, controls and bureaucratic infrastructure intact, all schemes like an ‘Open Source Political Party’ are failures precisely because they are political parties that dovetail into and amplify the present mess.

And now, from the Renew Britain site:

Britain is heading in the wrong direction. The Plan shows how to put our country on the right track. Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell show how a future government could actually shift powers back, from Brussels to Westminster, from Whitehall to town halls, from the state to the citizens. Their plan aims to restore honour and meaning to the ballot box. It would disperse power among communities, through localism and through referendums. Things do not have to be as they are. The Plan shows how we can change our country for the better.

[…]

http://www.renew-britain.com

Point of order m’lud; the book is for sale at £10. The download is on sale for £5. These people need to read this book. Going ‘Open Source’ means giving away the source of the idea so that other people can copy it without restriction. You utterly FAIL!@!@

Britain has been heading in the wrong direction for generations. This plan cannot put britain on the right track, because they want to shift an immoral power from one group to another group. In order to put Britain on the right track, the train and the rails need to be dismantled completely. Even if the plan could work, these people are doing everything they can to prevent people from reading it, by charging for a download of a digital copy.

But I digress…

Moving power from Brussels to Westminster leaves Westminster with power. FAIL.
Moving power from Whitehall to town halls leaves town halls with power. FAIL.
Moving power from the state to citizens leaves the citizens with power. FAIL.
Restoring meaning to the ballot box means empowering the dictatorial electorate. FAIL.
Dispersing power amongst communities puts power in the hands of back burner vigilantes. FAIL.
Referendums are mob rule, otherwise known as tyranny. FAIL.

Things do not have to be as they are. This is the only thing we agree with. Everything is going to change, like it or not, and the shape it is going to take will be not what the ruling elite want:

A silent $1 trillion “Run on Britain” by foreign investors was revealed yesterday in the latest statistical releases from the Bank of England. The external liabilities of banks operating in the UK – that is monies held in the UK on behalf of foreign investors – fell by $1 trillion (£700bn) between the spring and the end of 2008, representing a huge loss of funds and of confidence in the City of London.

[…]

The Independent

People are quitting the over legislated, super socialist, police state Britain, and they will not be bringing their money or their businesses back. Not only have New Labour / Tory Britain cut out the heart of the city with their sour grapes attack on Non Domiciled people but the pound, being printed into hyperinflation is being run away from like the plague has legs and is chasing investors.

In the end, the only people who will be left in the UK will be those who cannot afford to leave, those too fat to leave and the delusional politicians scrambling around with crazy ideas of how to rule over this impoverished, dumbed down, hopeless and trapped population.

Britain will become the next Portugal.

What a pity.

Way back in 1992, we wrote the following piece, printed it on 12″ square pieces of card and shipped it with thousands of 12″ singles:

What is the essence of digital recording/reproduction?
Digital recording systems work on the principal of turning a signal into a series of binary numbers, which are then stored for reproduction. This system of encoding averages the input signal to minimize the amount of data generated. It was believed that 44,100 samples per second was a high enough resolution to sufficiently encode any music signal without the listener being able to detect the inevitable degradation.

Analogue encoding systems work by taking the musical information as it is and turning it directly into mechanical movements ~as in the case of vinyl or directly into magnetic modulations (as found on tape) which in the replay stage do not have to be decoded or mathematically reconstructed. There is no trickery involved; what you hear is what you had.

Reductionism
The scientific community has, over the past 10 years, slowly come to the startling revelation, that there are many systems in nature that cannot be broken down or reduced to a set of simple component parts. This realization has overturned the prevailing paradigm of nature which as ruled for the last 200 years. T he death of reductionism has direct implications for the field of audio, and confirms what everybody has been feeling and saying in private for some time about digital music systems; the resolution obtained at 44.1khz is not high enough to reproduce music properly.

The resolution of analogue systems however, depends on the quality of the materials and components used in the audio chain; in the case of vinyl, the resolution goes down to the molecular level. It is millions of times more sensitive than any digital system that has ever been manufactured.

Upgradability
Because digital systems irretrievably reduce the input musical signal to a series of numbers that is insufficient to encode all of the music, there is a limit to how much you can upgrade your reproduction system (hi fi) to obtain a better sound. No matter how much money you spend, the original musical signal can never be retrieved belong the fidelity at which the encoding took place. With analogue recording however, the amount which you can gain is enormous. I he molecular resolution of analogue tape and vinyl facilitate this upward mobility, and even if you don’t choose to upgrade your equipment, the quality of the signal is still preserved in your recordings, if you should ever desire to take advantage of it. Digital denies you this potential.

What’s happening in the studios: engineers reactions
Studio engineers are consistently confirming that digital systems do not measure up under close scrutiny. At a world famous audio mastering facility which specializes in the preparation of lacquers and PQ encoded tapes for CD production, the verdict has been that digital must be treated with extreme caution. At this facility, the production of masters is carried out from many different sources; DAT, Sony PCM 701, analogue tape @ 15ips and 30ips, 1630 U-Matic and Cassette. The Monitoring systems that this studio employs are among the finest in the world, custom built and calibrated by hand by an audio genius. Constant exposure to different kinds of music, heard through an exceptional reproduction system, from different source tapes, has given these engineers the experience to be able to judge audio. Here is the testimony of one of their senior engineers. . .

“There appears to be an unquestioning attitude to digital audio. It is generally and wrongly accepted that digital recorders provide a true to original sound, however there are many variables that can drastically alter the audio signal and there is a widespread ignorance to the various permutations. On the simplest level, one finds that comparable DAT players of different makes have markedly different sounds. The variety of digital interfaces also gives rise to further differences. The idea that a digital copy is an exact copy of the original music is simply not correct. One can look at all of the variables and reach a good compromise but manufacturers still have a long way to go. There is also a growing feeling that the digital sound is conditioning people to accepting the digital sound as the TRUE sound whereas in reality digital systems impart a texture to the sound which is invariably 'restricted' and 'stifled' as opposed to 'open' and 'breathing'. Sound engineers seem to be subconsciously working around the problem, working towards a compromise that 'sounds good on digital'.”

The analogue infrastructure
The knowledge gained in the manufacture and operation of analogue recording systems is invaluable and irreplaceable. Research and development into further improving the near perfect world of analogue audio reproduction has virtually stopped, due to the destructive influence of digital. It is not only the patents and designs that must be carried into the future, but also the personal expert knowledge of engineers, gained over many years, which must survive; knowledge which can never be replaced once lost – the knowledge of what quality to expect from the best possible analogue reproduction system.

Analogue computing
Digital computing is only an evolutionary step in the development of computers. There exists today, the working components of a new type of analogue computer which will revolutionize computing, and make digital computing obsolete. With the establishment of analogue computing, all tasks that are now being handled by digital computers will be switched to analogue computers, including the recording and reproduction of music. Much experience has been gained in the field of optical discs. High density optical discs will, without doubt, be a major resource for data storage and retrieval when analogue computers come on line. I he advantages of optical disc storage (when the disadvantages of digital encoding are stripped away) are many; durability, pitch stability, low distortion and track numbering to name a few. When these advantages are combined with the perfection of analogue encoding, we will have a system of playback and recording with a quality beyond all expectations. Such a system however will be of no use to anyone if the analogue infrastructure has been dismantled, and there is no one left who knows first hand what real, true to life audio sounds like.

The mass destruction of masters
For the moment, digital is here with us, and a terrible price is being paid. l he entire history of recorded sound and music is being systematically ‘saved’ into digital formats . . . at 44.1 khz. This disaster is taking place because of the life span of recording tape; the glues that have been used to bind the magnetic material to the flexible substrate of most recording tape have been found to be decomposing, putting at risk most of the master tapes that have been recorded in the last 50 years. In what seemed like a sensible move, all of these master tapes have been scheduled for saving to digital; (also, conveniently, this ties in with the re-releasing of the back catalogues of most record companies onto CD) I. What nobody bothered to tell these companies, is that digital sounds like shit; and so, thinking that they have permanently saved their masters, the record companies are THROWING AWAY their original analogue master tapes. . . to save space. When the penny drops it w ill be too late. All of~our favorite music will be lost forever in a quanitized quagmire of brittle, cold, shitty sound, and for no good reason, because analogue machines could just as easily be used to preserve decomposing masters.

The proper place for CD
CDs are very useful, just as cassettes are useful; they have a place in the audio chain, and should be used and sold; BUT NOT TO THE EXCLUSION OF ANY OTHER FORMAT, and certainly not to the exclusion of vinyl, which is the best mass produced reproduction carrier ever made.

Who’s in control?
You have to wonder how this sham has continued for so long, and of course, we all know who is behind this insane state of affairs. The audio equipment manufacturers have realized that if they design and manufacture the hardware i.e. CD players, mini-disc, l)CC, they must control the manufacture of the software I music) to ensure that their investment in time and R&D pays off. Sony learned this the hard way, with the failure of Betamax; it failed because there was no software available to watch; they tried to push the system, licensing movies from film companies at huge cost, but it was too late. NOW Sony owns Columbia Pictures, and every picture they have ever made, so if they want to launch any type of new hardware to play movies, the availability of software will be no problem, no matter how good or bad the system is; they can even release films on reels of spaghetti if they want to. Sony also own CBS records and the CBS back catalogue. Phillips own Phonogram and A&M. This is a terrible situation, not only because the production of music is in the hands of a small number of giant companies that are also the exclusive manufacturers of all audio equipment, but because these companies are deaf to sound quality, due to their need to launch more and more new playback formats. Mixed with the profits to be made from re releasing hijacked back catalogues, the resulting brew is poisonous; companies that profit from reissuing old music again and again into a never ending stream of different and inferior devices to a public addicted to electronic novelty. GOD SAVE US ALL.

It’s not too late
Most of the engineers and companies involved in the production of analogue recording systems still exist and are working. If we stop the digital disease now, music and sound in all of its intricacy will be saved for everyone. Keep buying turntables and vinyl records. Keep buying cassettes. Boycott any release that is on CD only for no good reason. Make sure that the labels you buy from are not controlled by the manufacturers of music systems. It is the only way we are going to save sound.

A MESSAGE FROM THE PUBLIC SERVICE INFORMATION DEPARTMENT OF IRDIAL-DISCS

Now, in 2009, we read in The Times, the following…lets go through it together shall we?

Young music fans deaf to iPod’s limitations

Many people complain that pop music was better in the good old days. Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen are poor substitutes for the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the argument goes.

Older fans also insist that songs heard through iPods just don’t rock as they used to, compared with the clarity of CDs and the crackling charm of vinyl.

Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.

This is nonsense. Young people no longer appreciating high fidelity has nothing to do with the ease of getting a hold of music. They do not appreciate high fidelity for the reasons I outlined in 1992.

The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.

He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.

False. ‘Our’ perception has not changed; the human ear is the same as it has been for generations. What has been changed are what young people are used to; they have been inured to the sound of garbage masquerading as music. They think that music IS what comes out of ear-buds.

He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said.

No one has EVER preferred the noise of dust particles. Clearly this man has no idea of why vinyl and analogue are superior to compressed digital. Noise is something you sometimes have to put up with in order to hear music, which is what you get from a properly operating turntable and amplification system. It is important not to conflate the faults of vinyl playback and nostalgia for the facts about those high fidelity systems. They were and are good because of how they work and the audio chain, not because of their faults, which is why

“I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”

is total nonsense. The quality of analogue reproduction is not an illusion; it is real and the emotional response you get from music that is played back correctly is your response to the music, which is being relayed to you faithfully.

Music producers complain that the “compression” of some digital music means that the sound quality is poorer than with CDs and other types of recording. Professor Berger says that the digitising process leaves music with a “sizzle” or a metallic sound.

First of all, music producers and mastering studios started compressing tracks so that when they are replayed over the radio they sound louder and more exiting. Tracks that were not compressed in this way sounded weak and not exiting next to those that had been pumped up, and so there has been a loudness war going on in pop music for a very long time. The only thing that has changed are the tools being used to do the compressing; now everyone uses ProTools to get this job done.

That is one sort of compression.

The OTHER type of compression is the Procrustean Bed type, which all young people are now suffering. As was said in that article from Sterophile, not only are we being subjected to sound that is destroyed by being sampled at 44.1khz in multiple passes from the multitrack down, but then these mangled, sterile tracks are then data reduced by the MP3 algorithms that reduce the file sizes to one tenth their original size, in lossy formats that sound nothing like music.

Some people say that the loss of fidelity is worth the trade off; there is more access to music than ever, it now costs nothing to listen to everything, and you get it the instant you want it.

As far as I am concerned, its like being offered immortality, but with the price being you can never eat food or have sex ever again.

Not such a good bargain is it?

Producers complain that as modern listeners hear their songs through iPods and their computers, music has to become ever-louder to hold their attention.

Not so.

“Now there’s a constant race to be louder than other people’s records,” said Stephen Street, who has produced records for Blur, the Cranberries and Kaiser Chiefs. “What you are hearing is that everything is being squared off and is losing that level of depth and clarity. I’d hate to think that anything I’d slaved over in the studio is only going to be listened to on a bloody iPod.”

Sorry Stephen, but your productions will never be recorded or heard properly again.

Other musicians have said that compression robs a song of its emotional power by reducing the difference between the loudest and softest sounds. Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine recently that modern albums “have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no thing, just like — static.”

Completely correct Bob.

Ken Nelson, producer of Coldplay’s first two albums, said: “An example of overcompression is the last Green Day album. If you try listening to it from beginning to end it’s hard work. After three songs you need to put something on that’s been recorded in the 70s.”

You NEVER need to listen to a Green Day album. For ANY reason. No matter how it was recorded.

Rennie Pilgrem, a dance music producer, said that he mixed his tracks while listening to them through iPod headphones to cater to the less refined tastes of today’s youth. “To my ears iPods are not even as good quality as cassette tape,” he said. “But once someone gets used to that sound then they feel comfortable with it.”

Cassette is a great format, and if you used it carefully, you could produce some really fantastic sounding masters with it. One of our most popular tracks was mastered directly from cassette, without any attempt to reduce the nose. It rocks.

Advances in technology have often resulted in profound changes in the style of popular music. Music historians point to keyboards in the 18th century moving from the plucked string of the harpsichord to the hammered string of the piano. For the first time, composers could devise songs that got progressively louder from note to note, something that was impossible on a harpsichord.

And yet, the Goldberg Variations are mostly known and loved through piano performances today, not harpsichord, which is the correct instrument for that work. It is the music of the Goldberg Variations that is great; it can be played on any keyboard and evoke its emotions. This is a completely bogus analogy. What we are talking about is the reproduction of recorded music not the technology of instruments.

In the early 20th century, the cylinders on Thomas Edison’s phonograph could play recorded music for only four minutes at a time, something that listeners became used to. Today tracks are still generally about four minutes long.

The Times

Well, that was a typically uninformed piece. Still, it confirms what we predicted; that one day, there would be no one left who knows what music sounds like. That day has now come to pass.

If you have any interest in this subject at all, do read the Stereophile article. It really is a nightmarish proposition that you are living in right now, and a most prescient piece of writing.

And who knows what is next? No doubt someone somewhere is working on a brain cap device that will allow a computer to directly stimulate the auditory processing parts of the brain so that ‘sound’ never has to pass through your ears at all.

The fact of the matter is that recorded music is a phenomenon that is very recent, that has not existed for the majority of the history of man and it may even disappear altogether. One thing is for sure, it is not going to remain the same. What I maintain is that you should be aware of what things are, why they are good or bad, what their value is to you and so on. What I am against is someone dictating how things should be for their own interests and not in the interests of music or the people who love it, which is exactly what happened with CD. It was designed and pushed (on the back of lies) for the benefit of companies without any regard for music or the public.

International criminal court issues warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity

Xan Rice in Tikrit

The ex British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been charged with war crimes over the conflict in Iraq, adding to the list of heads of state issued with an arrest warrant by the international criminal court (ICC).

The court, based in The Hague, upheld the request of the chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to charge Blair with war crimes and crimes against humanity. More than 1,600,000 people have died and 4,000,000 displaced since 2003 in the country’s various regions.

Judges dismissed the prosecution’s most contentious charge of genocide. Prosecutors had alleged Blair tried to wipe out three non-Arab ethnic groups.

Within minutes of the announcement, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Bagdad, the Iraqi capital.

Gordon Brown, an aide to Blair, described the decision as “neo-colonialism … They do not want Iraq to become stable.”

The ICC spokeswoman, Laurence Blairon, said the indictment, drawn up by three judges, included five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape. The two counts of war crimes were for directing attacks on the civilian population and pillaging.

Blairon said Blair was criminally responsible as the head of state and commander of the British armed forces for the offences during a five-year counter-insurgency campaign against three armed groups in Iraq.

She said all states would be asked to execute the arrest warrant and if Sudan failed to cooperate the matter would be referred to the UN security council.

Human rights groups hailed the ICC decision to pursue Blair, who is accused of ordering mass murder, rape and torture in Iraq.

“This sends a strong signal that the international community no longer tolerates impunity for grave violations of human rights committed by people in positions of power,” said Tawanda Hondora, the deputy director of Amnesty International’s Africa programme.

Britain does not recognise the ICC, and Blair yesterday said the court could “eat” the arrest warrant, which he described as a Al Quaeda plot to hinder Iraq’s development.

Despite his defiance, the court’s decision will raise immediate questions over his political future and he will find it difficult to travel abroad without the risk of arrest.

The case is by far the biggest and most controversial that the ICC, which started work as a permanent court in 2002, has taken on.

Blair, who is 55 and held power for 10 years, joins the likes of the former Liberian president Charles Taylor and the late Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who were indicted by special international tribunals while still in office.

Both were subsequently forced from power and put on trial in The Hague.

Few independent observers doubt Blair’s large share of responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq.

Moreno-Ocampo says the Iraq strategy of Blair caused 1,000,000 violent deaths, and alleges that Blair wanted to eliminate the Fur, Marsalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, whom he deemed supportive of the Al Quaeda.

“More than 30 witnesses will [testify] how he [Blair] managed to control everything, and we have strong evidence of his intention,” Moreno-Ocampo said yesterday.

But some Iraq experts were not convinced by the genocide charge, which is normally extremely difficult to prove. Equally contentious was the decision to pursue Blair while he still heads an international envoy to an unstable region.

The US, UK and France were not in favor of the arrest warrant, and fear it may push Iraq’s government away from reforms and ending the six-year conflict.

But Arab states and the African Union had pressed for a acceleration of the charges to allow Blair a final chance to atone for the Iraq conflict while not under duress.

Under the ICC statute, the United Nations can still pass a resolution to defer the prosecution for 12 months, but this seems unlikely given the stance of leading African powers.

Street protests against the ICC decision are expected in London, but the government has insisted there will be no impact on national policies.

Some observers fear, however, that Brown will crack down on opposition groups in the coming months if he feels his power is at stake, and that bailout plans to end the economic crisis could also be in peril.

The UN, aid agencies and western embassies have made emergency plans in case of violence against foreigners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/04/omar-bashir-sudan-president-arrest

I first heard these words on an Album by ‘The Pop Group’, called ‘For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder …‘. It is by The Last Poets, and it is called ‘E Pluribus Unum’.

Reading it again today, you could mistake the writers of these inspiring, insightful and brilliant words for a group of Austrian Economists:

Selfish desires are burning like fires
among those who hoard the gold
As they continue to keep the people asleep
and the truth from being told
Racism and greed keep the people in need
from getting what’s rightfully theirs
Cheating, stealing and double dealing
as they exploit the peoples fears

Now, Dow Jones owns the people’s homes
and all the surrounding land
Buying and selling their humble dwelling
in the name of the Master Plan

Cos paper money is like a bee without honey
with no stinger to back him up
and those who stole the people’s gold
are definitely corrupt

Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills
real-estate, stocks and bonds on coupon paper bills

Now the US mints on paper prints, millions every day
and use the eagle as their symbol cos it’s a bird of prey

The laurels of peace and the arrows of wars
are clutched very tightly in the eagles claws
filled with greed and lust,
and on the back of the dollar bill,
is the words IN GOD WE TRUST

But the dollar bill is their only God
and they don’t even trust each other
for a few dollars more they’d start a war
to exploit some brother’s mother

Now ANNUIT means and endless amount stolen over the years
and COEPTIS means a new empire of vampire millionaires
And NOVUS is a Latin word meaning something new
an ORDO means a way of life chosen by a few
SECLORUM is a word that means to take from another
knowledge, wisdom and understanding stolen from the brother

Now there are thirteen layers of stone of the pyramid alone
an unfinished work of art
for thirty-three and a third is as high as a mason can go
without falling apart

Thirteen stars in the original flag!
Thirteen demons from the Devil’s bag!
Thirteen berries and thirteen leaves!
Thirteen colonies of land-grabbing thieves!
Thirteen arrows in the eagle’s claws!
Sixty-seven corporations wage the Devil’s wars!
Thirteen stripes on the eagle’s shield!
And these are the symbols on the US seal!

Now on the front of the dollar bill
to the right of Washington’s head
is a small seal in the shape of a wheel
with the secret that’s been left unsaid
The symbols in the middle represent the riddle
of the scales, the ruler and the key;
the square rule is a symbol
from the craft of masonry
The scales represent Libra
the balance of the seventh sign
They also represent the Just-Us
which you and I know is blind
The key unlocks the mysteries
of the secrets of the seal
So that only the Govern-u-men
would know what they reveal

The four words apart form the last parts of
the secrets of the seal
and tells how they fooled the people
into thinking paper money was real!

Now, THESAUR means the treasury
where they store the gold they stole
and AMER means to punish
like the slaves they bought and sold
Then SEPTENT means seven
like seventeen-seventy-six
when the thirteen devils gathered
to unleash their bag of tricks
The SIGEL means the images
they’ve created to fool the world
like the colors on Old Glory
the flag that they unfurled

Now the red was the color of the Indian man
White was the devil’s who stole the land
Blue was the eyes that hypnotized
with the tricks and traps they sprung
and even to this very same day
they all speak with forked tongue!

And so the power is in the hand of the ruling classes
playing god with the fate of all the masses
so the people don’t get any in the land of the plenty
'cause E PLURIBUS UNUM means 'One Out Of Many'

And it is only balls that will solve this problem.

Editorial
The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
Article history
It was never in a Labour manifesto that individual freedom should be surrendered in the interests of collective security. Nor was it written that society should submit itself to a blanket of surveillance by the state.

It was never announced as a political creed of the current government that trial by jury is an expensive inconvenience that modern democracies can, in certain circumstances, do without. Nor was it proclaimed that the principle of habeas corpus, that prohibits the crown from detaining a free individual without his or her knowing the charge, was redundant in the face of terrorist threats in the 21st century. And yet, one way or another, all of those views have been expressed in laws introduced by Labour since it came to power.

Whether by complacency, arrogance or cynical design, the government has erected an edifice of legal constraint to liberty that would suit the methods and aims of a despot.

That is not to say, of course, that we have become a police state, or that a slide to authoritarianism is inevitable. It is simply a matter of fact that basic freedoms, conceptions of the moral autonomy of the individual to act without impediment by the state, have been systematically disrespected. Vigilance and resistance to that process is an obligation that rests with every citizen in a democracy.

Crucial steps towards the fulfilment of that obligation were taken by the Convention on Modern Liberty yesterday. Hundreds of people, representing a spectrum of political affiliations and a wide plurality of opinions, gathered to express a single response to the erosion of civil liberties: enough! It is the message that Henry Porter, one of the convention leaders, has urgently conveyed from the pages of this newspaper many times.

Delegates included representatives from all major political parties, non-governmental organisations, local councils, media organisations, trade unions, and – most important – private citizens concerned about the vandalism to the constitutional order is being done in their name.

Until now the government has by and large scorned the civil liberties lobby, seeing it as a peripheral and largely irrelevant fetish of the chattering classes. That arrogant disregard for democratic principle has been uncovered. The call for liberty is rapidly migrating from the margins to the mainstream of politics, and it is time for the government to listen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/01/civil-liberties-surveillance

FAIL FAIL FAIL.

Like we have been saying, all the conferences, meetings and articles have already been done. There is no need for any more that do not result in a concrete plan of action to finally and totally restore the liberties that have been stolen from the people of this once great Island.

Henry Porter and his cohorts now all feel very satisfied that they ‘pulled it off’. They think this is the start of a movement. If the only thing to come out of this is an unnamed editorial saying, “its time for the government to listen”, then they are doomed to fail.

Government must be TOLD.

This government does NOT LISTEN. You have had many MANY examples of this, from the nauseating government run petitions that are ignored, to the biggest ever demonstration of TWO MILLION PEOPLE against the immoral, illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was also completely ignored.

How many times do you people have to be ignored before you understand what it is that you are dealing with?

Let me help you.

The Guardian, if it is really serious, needs to organize its own civil disobedience campaign, where it makes a list of things that will not ever be obeyed, because they are in violation of their readers civil liberties.

1. Absolute refusal to comply with any aspect of the ID Card scheme. This also means that all Guardian staff must also take the pledge to not comply with any of its measures also.
2. All CCTV cameras that point into the street are to be removed by members of the public on sight. That includes all speed cameras.
3. Any and all actions of the state derived from surveillance systems, that do not involve violent crime, are null and void, are to be disobeyed. That means (for example) you cannot be accused by the evidence of a CCTV camera, even if it is operated manually (automatically generated tickets), and also (for example) that if your council tries to prosecute you and used surveillance to ‘catch’ you, the whole case is null and void.

Do you get the picture?

Not only must all the technical apparatus be physically destroyed, but any action brought about by the police state should be null and void and unenforceable.

That is how you TAKE your liberty back.

I’m sure that you can insert your own measures into that list. No more fishing expeditions. No more mass surveillance. No more huge databases of personal information. This is a zero tolerance strategy. The state will cease to function if it is done, and everything that the population does will remain unaffected.

If you are not willing to do this, to have some balls, then NOTHING will ever change. If you are like Henry Porter and The Guardian, who are servants of the state in thought, word and action, then you may as well stop now and save yourself the bother. You will LOSE.

Finally, as we have said many times before. The root of all these problems is bad money. The Guardian cannot have it both ways. They cannot on the one hand be FOR the fiat currency fueled welfare warfare state and ALSO against the police state. The aspects are inseparable. Even the super socialist George Monbiot has had a Eureka moment where he suddenly seems to understand that the root of the problem is fiat currency, and that commodity money is a way out. When someone like Monbiot starts talking about Austrian Economics as being a good idea without knowing he is talking about Austrian Economics, you know we have reached a tipping point.

It’s up to everyone to push it right over the edge; to tip it over. That means taking some ballsy actions en masse, and not just talking about the problems, which we have all been doing for ages.

Finally Jack ‘Mass Murderer’ Straw says that Britain is not a police state, and if you do not like the government, you can always vote it out. Well, we all know how that works.

When, for example the BNP gets votes, democratically, everyone goes berserk, saying how they should be banned or at the very least controlled etc etc. On the other ‘extreme’ you have the LibDems who can never get into power, and even if they did, they would be an unmitigated disaster. That leaves them with two parties that are essentially interchangeable. Face the facts; democracy is hopelessly broken and can never be fixed. The only answer is a de fanged government that is so powerless that it doesn’t matter who is in charge; your rights trump everything they could possibly come up with.

If you do not face this fact, there will always be another Jack Straw or Tony Bliar on the horizon, waiting to destroy your money, take away your rights and sell the sovereignty of your country to foreigners for nothing.