The modern NHS is all about choice, so we are told.  Let me give you an anonymised real example of How NHS Choice REALLY Works: a child has an undiagnosed problem, it takes 3 trips to the childs GP before the child is offered a referral to a specialist hospital clinic.

1. A letter is sent out explaining the ‘choices’: You can book your appointment online, or by phone!

2. When booking (via your choice of method) you are offered the choice of hospital X or …er, thats it.

3. You are offered the choice of date X at time Y or …. er, thats it.

So the choice is “Like it or lump it“. Which doesn’t quite fit with the guidelines of:

From April 2008, if your GP advises you that you need to see a specialist, you can choose to go to any hospital in England, including many private and independent sector hospitals. You can choose the hospital with the best reputation or shortest waiting times, or simply the one that is most convenient for you.

The NHS repeatedly says patient choice is guided by the availability of information (see links above).

But when you, the patient or carer, appraise the available information and still make The Wrong Choice, the Department of Health springs into action. Here we see BBQ fearmongering on behalf of HMG:

Experts say MMR is completely safe

The government has launched a campaign to raise MMR vaccination rates in England amid growing concerns about a measles epidemic.

The Department of Health has asked primary care trusts (PCTs) to offer the jab to all children up to the age of 18 not already fully protected.

Extra vaccine supplies and funding are being made available.

An epidemic of measles – which can be fatal – could potentially affect up to 100,000 young people in England alone.

The MMR vaccine protects against measles, mumps and rubella.

The evidence on MMR is absolutely clear – there is no link between the vaccine and autism

Experts say it is perfectly safe, but vaccination rates dipped following controversy about its safety.

This propaganda campaign follows similar localised efforts, similarly reported as ‘news’ by BBQ.

The aim of the Department of Health here is to increase uptake of vaccination. Would it not be simple, instead of trying to scare people into giving MMR to their children, to offer single vaccinations against each disease. To offer, perhaps, a choice.

Instead NeuLiebour are offering the choice (devised by the MP in charge of the party’s health manifesto for the next election) of ‘vaccinate or be excluded from school‘.

Whether its about forced vaccination, ID cards, security theatre, data protection… soon the choice will be yours.

The other night, I listened to the great Alex Jones, who complained rightly and bitterly that his websites are ‘on a government blacklist’, making them inaccessible on the free wireless network at St Pancras Station. thinkprogress.org is also blocked as are many others. These websites are not blocked in China, “public enemy number one” when it comes to web censorship so we are told.

I decided to see for myself what the precise details of this blocking are, and made a few google searches and phone calls.

My preliminary research shows us the following:

St Pancras Wi-Fi is run by a company called ‘CitySpace‘.

This is the press release announcing the contract from 2007.

and here are some of the people they work with:

Cityspace is proud to work with many clients and partners to deliver sustainable urban digital networks, including:

BAA
BBC
Bracknell Forest Borough Council
Bristol City Council
City of York Council
Clear Channel
Cornwall County Council
Department for Transport
Department for Work and Pensions
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council
Ealing Council
Essex County Council
First Group
Gateshead Council
GNER
Hampshire County Council
Islington Council
Kent Fastrack
London Borough of Havering
London Borough of Sutton
London Borough of Tower Hamlets
London Borough of Waltham Forest
London Underground
Met Office
National Rail Enquiries
NEC
Newcastle City Council
Newham Council
Norfolk County Council
North Tyneside Council
Plymouth City Council
Portsmouth City Council
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Royal Borough of Kingston
Serco
South Tyneside Council
South Yorkshire PTE
Southend-on-sea Borough Council
Suffolk County Council
Sunderland City Council
Surrey County Council
Transport for London
Traveline
West Sussex County Council
Yahoo!

Lots of government contracts.

CITYSPACE Company Info:

Industry Consumer Services
Employees 100 – 250
Revenue $50 – 100M
Owership Privately Held

I telephoned CitySpace, and asked wether or not there is a blacklist on the St Pancras station Wi-Fi.

I spoke to a polite man who told me without any hesitation that the people who run St Pancras requested that the service be flittered, and that the list of sites to be blocked comes from a company that provides the blocking software, “it’s an off the shelf product” is how he described it.

He said that he would find out all the details for me and then let me know the who and what and where.

St Pancras Station is run by London & Continental Stations and Properties.

Here is the Wikipedia entry:

London & Continental Railways (LCR) is a railway company based in the United Kingdom.

History

Created at the time of the Privatisation of British Rail it bid for and won the contract from the UK government in 1996 to build and operate High Speed 1 between London and the Channel Tunnel. As part of this deal the European Passenger Services (EPS) and Union Railways sections of British Rail were handed over to LCR as well as key pieces of railway infrastructure including St Pancras railway station and Manchester International & North Pole depots.

EPS was the British arm of the joint Eurostar operation, along with SNCF and NMBS/SNCB. LCR renamed EPS as Eurostar (U.K.) Ltd. (EUKL). Union Railways had been developing plans for HS1 since before the opening of the Channel Tunnel and continued this role as part of LCR.

The original shareholders of LCR were National Express Group, Virgin Group, SBC Warburg, Bechtel and London Electric. As part of the 1996 contract LCR were to finance and construct the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) themselves, funding it from income received from the Eurostar operation.

In 1998 LCR ran into major financial difficulties and appealed to the UK government for support. It admitted that income from its share of the Eurostar operation was not at the level it expected and would therefore not be able to undertake construction of HS1. At this time the future of the high speed line looked in doubt. See here for more details.

In 2006 LCR put forward a proposal to build a domestic high speed line north of London — see High-speed rail in the United Kingdom.

2006 shareholders & status

The current structure of LCR is complex due to numerous reorganisations, for example SNCF is involved in the Eurostar operation at three different levels. Current shareholders in LCR are:

• Rail Link Engineering (RLE)
• National Express Group
• SNCF
• EDF Energy
• UBS investment bank

The construction of the CTRL is being project managed for LCR by RLE. Current shareholders in RLE are:

• Bechtel
• Arup
• Systra
• Halcrow

Since the 1998 reorganisation the operation of EUKL has run as under a management contract by InterCapital and Regional Rail (ICRR). Current ICRR shareholders are:

• National Express Group (40%)
• SNCF (35%)
• NMBS/SNCB (15%)
• British Airways (10%)

Operation of the line will be undertaken by Network Rail under a contract lasting until 2086, when LCR’s concession ends too, and all rights return to the British Government.

Now what we have to hear is which ‘off the shelf product’ is being used as the filter list.

I will update this post tomorrow.

I the mean time, if you ever find yourself in St Pancras or any other place where the internetz are blocked in some way, like a public library, you can get around the censorship very easily. There is no excuse for passively accepting censorship in the age of the internets, and it is up to you to be active, computer literate, and to know the tools you are using so you can free the information that you require for yourself.

First of all, open Firefox (ummm you ARE running Firefox on Ubuntu arent you?) and then, and then do the following:

Install Stealthy for your browser.

You can use Whatismyip.com to check your ip address. http://www.whatismyip.com/

It should display the IP you are using as your proxy and not the IP your ISP allocated to you.

UPDATE 1: August 7th

I spoke to CitySpace today, to the same person I spoke to originally.

He told me that he conferred with people in CitySpace, and they said that, “it was not for them to confirm this” and that “I would have to speak to St Pancras about it. There are 25 people in blue coats at St Pancras to answer these sorts of questions”.

I said, “so there are 25 COMPUTER LITERATE people in blue coats who are able to tell me what blocking software is being used to filter their Wi-Fi network? I think we both know that is highly unlikely!” He agreed. I thanked him and hung up.

On to St Pancras, phoned them, got the reception, passed to some upper guy, transferred up again, spoke to a woman, who said, “they took advice that certain websites should be blocked.

I said, “well I would like to know who gave you that advice”.

She said, “we chose to block certain websites like pornography, ‘hate sites’ and such…”

I said, “Let me make myself absolutely clear; I accept that this is a private network, and you have the right to block whatever you like on it. What I want to know is why you are blocking certain sites, who sold you the blocking list and why innocuous websites are on that blocking list”

She said, “what website were you trying to get to in particular? Were you a customer of St Pancras or a passenger?”

I said, “I was a passenger and I tried to get to thinkprogress.org”

She said, “and what sort of website is that?”

I said, “its a news website, like bbc.co.uk” ( :o )

She said, “do you have a personal interest in this site, because you seem to be quite agitated about this”

I said, “no, I’m not agitated, I had a double espresso at lunch! I simply want to know why these websites are blocked.”

She then said that she would look into it, and that this is a service that just recently went live and that if there are things that are blocked that should not be they would need to look into that, and that if members of the public call them to comment on the service they would look into how it is working.

She said that if I call her tomorrow morning, she should have some answers for me.

Update to follow!

UPDATE 2: August 8th

I spoke to the woman at St Pancras who told me to call her today. She said that she had spoken to someone about this, and that she had not been given the information, but she was told to give me the mobile number of a person who did have the information.

I spoke to this person for 25 minutes, and during the conversation he divulged the following:

• They are running an off the shelf software product.
• St Pancras, has direct control over the list, and can block and unblock any site.
• They have a review system, whereby people can appeal to have their site unblocked. They then take a decision to keep a site blocked or to unblock it. They will do this on a case by case basis, and in order to make an appeal, a site owner should contact Media at St Pancras.
• They were advised by “independent third parties” as to what shape the provision of the free Wi-Fi should take.
• It is possible that certain political websites may be “caught up in the trawl” of blocked sites.
• He refused to say who provided this list of blocked sites, or who the vendor of the software was.

That last call was the longest of all, taking the total time of all the calls to around 55 minutes.

The fact of the matter is (and this is me talking) that St Pancras free Wi-Fi is a private network, and as such, they can block whatever they like on it. They are under no obligation to provide access to anything whatsoever, and if you want free and unfettered internet access, you have to retain and use the skills and tools that are freely available to you to make the magic happen.

If you rely on the providers of train stations and rail services or anyone other than a pure ISP to connect you with the internet, then you are submitting to the prejudices, ignorance, guidelines and the ‘third party advice’ that govern their networks. It is up to you to find out how things really work and then take the appropriate steps so that your experience is unfiltered.

Think about it this way; if a publisher rejected an advertisement you wanted to publish, you wouldn’t think you have a right to have it displayed in their newspaper or magazine? You absolutely do not have a right to be published in anyone’s magazine, and you also do not have a right to have your content re-transmitted over someone’s private network. You DO have the right to publish what you want, and to distribute it to whoever you like…its up to you to make sure that your content is deliverable. In the past, this meant finding a distributor to get your content to the shops. Now it means making sure that your readers and listeners are well versed in proxy tools so that no matter where they are, they will always be able to connect to you.

You do not even have to write the software to do this yourself. There are toolbars and addons out there that make getting around censorship as simple as a single click of a button.

The distinction between a private and public network, between private and public space, is very important, and many people have a blurry / fuzzy idea in their heads about what these concepts actually encompass.

Censorship in China, which is by the GOVERNMENT and censorship of a PRIVATE WI-FI NETWORK are two different things; it is the difference between self censorship and censorship from above that covers everything everywhere. If what I have been told is true, then this is a case of the former; even if the people who offer the software are a government front, and even if the ‘independent third parties’ are compromised in some way, St Pancras have the final say and fine grained control on what is blocked. This is fundamentally different to China blocking everything at the network level.

Could someone telephone them and tell them to keep certain sites blocked? Of course. But all of this is moot if you are able to use your computer to get around blocking software, which is why it is so important to spread information about how to get around filtering with tools like TOR and setting proxies.

You can expect more and more filtering on private networks that are accessible to the public. The people who run these private networks are not interested in providing access to everything, will actively suppress ‘inaccurate information on blogs’, swallow wholesale the advice of third parties, will deploy banning lists provided to them by third parties unquestioned, see no value in the free flow of information, and in the case of St Pancras specifically, do not think much about it as they are more interested in running trains on time. They feel they are doing you a favor (and really, this is correct) by letting you have access to anything at all for free in the first place; they make no money out of it, it has nothing to do with trains and it means they have to employ people to bluster about their service when something isn’t right.

Finally, do read this page about filtering:

4) INDUCED SELF-CENSORSHIP
Another common and effective strategy to limit exposure to Internet content is by encouraging self-censorship both in browsing habits and in choosing content to post online. This may take place through the threat of legal action, the promotion of social norms, or informal methods of intimidation. Arrest and detention related to Internet offenses, or on unrelated charges, have been used in many instances to induce compliance with Internet content restrictions. In many cases, the content restrictions are neither spoken nor written. The perception that the government is engaged in the surveillance and monitoring of Internet activity, whether accurate or not, provides another strong incentive to avoid posting material or visiting sites that might draw the attention of authorities.

And there you have it!

The front page of The Times has as its story, with a HUGE headline:

The Times
August 6, 2008

Fakeproof e-passport is cloned in minutes
Steve Boggan

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4467106.ece

And Martyn Thomas chimes in, echoing some strange Tory logic:

Martyn Thomas CBE FREng
http://www.thomas-associates.co.uk

The tests also raise serious questions about the Government’s £4 billion identity card scheme, which relies on the same biometric technology. ID cards are expected to contain similar microchips that will store up to 50 pieces of personal and biometric information about their holders. Last night Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, called on ministers to take urgent action to remedy the security flaws discovered by The Times. “It is of deep concern that the technology underpinning a key part of the UK’s security can be compromised so easily,” he said.

The ability to clone chips leaves travellers vulnerable to identity theft when they surrender their passports at hotels or car rental companies. Criminals in the back office could read the chips and clone them. The original passport holder’s name and date of birth could be left on the fake chip, with the picture, fingerprints and other biometric data of a criminal client added. The criminal could then travel the world using the stolen identity and the original passport holder would be none the wiser.

Furthermore, the thief could selectively replace the fingerprints and photo to make the most convincing fake ever. This is something that no one seems to understand; you can replace entries either in the database or the ‘cloned’ documents so that someone can most convincingly ‘become you’.

We have been saying all of this for years, and we have gone further, with more accuracy and prescience.

The fact of the matter is, no matter what anyone says, a database can never be ‘secured’ and no ‘urgent action to remedy the security flaws’ can ever protect these systems.

The only way to fix this problem is to actually make the passports secure. That means:

• Remove the RFID chips from all passports
• Dismantle the NIR
• Take the central passport administration computer offline, so that it is only accessible from inside a single site.
• Issue passports in line with our system, ISLAND.

Securing the passport by removing bad technology does not mean that you cannot use cryptography and modern technology to verify the authenticity of passports; on the contrary, you can have the best of both worlds (the privacy of a paper document and digital authentication) in a single system. We wrote about how to do this previously:

If any document is issued correctly, and is not tampered with, it must be assumed that the holder is the person named on the document, whether it has biometric information in it or not.

If the document has been tampered with, then the holder might not be the person named in the passport. This is the only type of check that needs to be made in passports.

Biometrics are not needed to ensure that the holder of a passport is the named person in the passport. Certainly, there is no need for a central database of all biometrics (photograph, fingerprint, iris scan) to check the identity of each person every time a passport is used. A simple test to see if the passport has been tampered with is all that is required.

This is how you do it.

1. Each passport or ID document contains a cryptographically signed digital portrait of the holder, signed by the passport issuing authority.
2. When your passport is swiped, your picture comes up on the screen, loaded from the passport, and NOT a central database
3. The digital signature of the passport photo is also downloaded.
4. A PGP-like signature check is done against the public key of the national passport issuing authority, which is stored on the keyring of the swiping device.

If the signature is good, the document is genuine. If the signature is bad, the document is a forgery.

This system does several things.

• It decentralizes the management of photo authentication.
• It stops the inevitable abuses of centralized databases.
• Each passport photo is digitally unique. This means that every time that you get your photo taken for your passport, it is a different cryptographically signed number that ends up in your passport. You will never have a unique identifier tied to your identity, even though its your face in every photograph.
• Big brother gets a kick in the balls.
• Passport/ID fraud is basically eliminated, except for the fake ones made to order at the request of MI6 and the like.

There is no need for the centralized passport biometrics database that they are planning; the means exist right now, with military grade crypto and digitally signed photographs that will create a rock solid, absolutely authenticatable, user friendly, non big brother solution to passport fraud, that protects documents and does not further erase our rights as free people.

The crypto to do this is in the public domain, and so zero-cost license wise. My solution is cheaper than the centrally held database solution.

Now of course, there is nothing to stop people from collecting these signature numbers, but if that is the only part of the passport that is readable, and this readable part does not contain your name or any other personally identifiable information, it will be harder for people to create a database connected to your biometric ID. If you are the nervous type you could change your id every month; in any case, I devised this ID scheme to demonstrate that there is no reason to create a centralized database from the outset. There are other, better ways to manage document authenticity. All someone has to do is simply THINK about the problem. Unfortunately, the people who are behind the deployment of this disaster are the companies that sell the systems that will be used to fleece the population for decades to come. Money is the true root cause for centralization, that and the lust for absolute control that slobbering pigs like David Blindkid and John Asscroft dreamed about.

It is only a matter of time now, before both RFID passports and ID Cards are scrapped.

They are not only perfect examples of the misapplication of technology, but they are immoral, illiberal, ineffective, not cost effective and socially corrosive.

I just heard (at 10:08AM) two air raid siren test bursts, lasting approximately twenty seconds each, here in South West London.

The council knows nothing about it, “very strange” they say, and, “there is no emergency going on right now, otherwise we would have been flashed immediately”.

I have never heard such a test being carried out, and neither has anyone else who has lived here (some for decades).

For the record.

Batman fails it, as does Lucius Fox, or rather we should say the Nolans fail it.

The Dark Knight obviously wants to comment on the nature of contemporary policing/governmental security and the portrayal of Batman as a hot headed vigilante on the side of ‘good’ has parallels with leaders of various western governments.

But the failure is not so much the vigilante/unilateral actions of Batman which include unlawful extradition, money laundering to amass an armoury and numerous traffic offences. Thanks to Bruce Wayne’s R&D department Lucius Fox has developed a technology which uses cellphone tracking technology to create a sort of sonar system for the caped crusader to use in his exploits.

Towards the end of the film we see this technology has been reconfigured by Wayne to make every cellphone in Gotham act as a sonar device giving him, actually Fox, the ability to track the movements of everybody in Gotham. Quite rightly (for it is Morgan Freeman and he usually represents ‘truth’ wherever he lands) Lucius Fox tells Bruce Wayne that this use of technology is horrendous and evil. So far so good, but then the Nolans make him fail it by saying ‘OK, but just this once’.

However, ‘just this once’ is not a stand, it is a fall. and if you are indeed sending a message to millions of people about Bush on a futile hunt against Osama Bin Laden by indiscriminantly unfair means you have to portray it as such. To have people think that ‘Just this once’ is either a principle or a way to counter wrong headedness is dangerous, irresponsible and part of the problem.

It is also irresponsible to allude to the generalised surveillance which has happened over over a period of years to no good result with an evening of Batman/Fox surveilling the population with a known and credible pay off.

Anyone can say ‘just this once’ which then slides into ‘the end justifies the means’ and ‘if I don’t do it someone else will’, bad attitudes one and all.

So*. I read about the ‘Climate Cops’ campaign created by Npower, that

…encourage(s) children to sign up as “climate cops” and keep “climate crime case files” on their families, friends and neighbours.

The ads, run by Npower, promote a website at www.climatecops.com where “trainees” must complete three missions before they can join the “elite cadets” and “train to become a climate cop”.

These missions basically consist of a barrage of eco propaganda which the child must simply engage in in order to be accepted as a special agent of the green brigade.

The site offers a selection of downloads, including a pack of “climate crime cards“, which instruct recruits to spy on families, friends and relatives, encouraging each of them to build up a written “climate crime case file”.

[…]

http://www.infowars.com/?p=3613

Sounds nasty ay?

I surfed over to the Climate Cops website, played some of the dreadful Flash games, and read some of the propaganda. Its all as described by Infowars; pure Orwellian propaganda, junk science and brainwashing.

What piqued my interest was the offer of a ‘teaching pack’ available for the asking. So I asked.

A few days later, I received a 450g package in the post, 2nd class, filled with gloss varnished paper. I will now do an Apple product style ‘unboxing’ for you:

The package consists of:

• 1 A4 sheet printed on one side in two colors (letter)
• A CDROM holding folder, printed on both sides, 4 color process, UV varnish
• A CDROM
• A 16 page A4 pamphlet, cover thick UV varnished card, interior pages unvarnished, 4 color process throughout, staple bound (teacher notes)
• 1 A4 sheet (teacher evaluation form)
• 8 A4 sheets, printed 4 color process both sides (information cards)
• 3 A2 sheets on thick card,, 4 color process, UV varnished, folded twice (posters)
• 1 A3 envelope, one color (freepost response envelope)

The smell of ink and solvents from this package was very strong, as you can imagine.

This is an extraordinarily wasteful product, completely unnecessary in the age of the internets, which also asks teachers to print out materials for their students wasting toner and even more paper once this paper bomb arrives at its target.

Now, lets go into some of the detail of what is printed in this appalling package.

This teaching resource uses PowerPoint presentations and games to guide the student into believing Global Warming propaganda. It leaves out a staggering amount of science, uses gutter street talk in an attempt to appeal to the illiterate student, and is a transparent and foul instrument of deception.

Lets take lesson 3 as an example.

In ‘Lesson 3 – GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE’ the stated learning objectives are:

The fourth item is the one that is interesting to us; to do it, they use a series of lies and glaring omissions. Lets take a look at one or two.

The first glaring omission. Nowhere in this pack is the carbon life cycle mentioned. There is no mention of photosynthesis, or the fact that plants convert CO₂ to O₂. There is no chemistry, only the most dumbed down talking points.

The word ‘plant’ does not appear in the worksheets and related materials; the phrase ‘tree planting’ appears once, in the Sustainable Development slideshow (PDF), which is given as the answer to the question, “2) List three examples of carbon offsetting”. The phrase tree planting is left by itself, without any explanation of why it would work to ameliorate the ‘problem’. Of course this answer is in the context of the plan to measure everyone’s ‘carbon footprint’ the pretext and basis for world wide taxation and micro-management of every aspect of life.

Look at this page:

The astonishingly over-simplified diagram in the centre makes no mention of the plant life of the earth that absorbs the very gas that these liars say is causing all the problem. Why? Because the schoolchildren will instantly conclude that if plants absorb greenhouse gas (CO₂), then all we have to do is plant like crazy to solve the problem. Every pre idiocracy schoolboy knows about the carbon life cycle. By leaving out the truth about the carbon life cycle of the earth (a lie of omission) they are disarming these hapless students, removing their ability to argue logically about this subject.

The makers of this package put the following pseudo disclaimer into a slideshow to be shown to students (PDF):

But then on the subsequent page are still propagating the now discredited IPCC report as if its claims are the absolute truth:

I think you get the gist of all this.

It is nauseating propaganda for the educationally submnormal.

“My house is proper old; and it is not insulated or double-glazed”.

That is the sort of English in this pack. That is the ‘thinking’. Of course, Etonians and Hone Schoolers will not be subjected to this garbage; the latter may do so only to demonstrate how utterly stupid the masses are, and how they are being corralled like pigs into the squeeze chutes….but I digress.

Finally, lets look at a particularly odius section.

Now, the person who was operating Adobe InDesign CS3 (5.0) on this occassion, forgot to put the image of the star beneath the list of Climate Change created disasters, so here they are:

2004 tsunami in South East Asia
2005 earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir
2005 flooding in New Orleans, USA
2005 tornado in Birmingham
2006 drought in Australia
2006 eruption of the Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador
2007 flooding in the UK
2007 flooding in South East Asia
2007 forest fires in Greece
2006 drought in Australia
2006 eruption of the Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador
2007 flooding in the UK
2007 flooding in South East Asia
2007 forest fires in Greece

Now, at the bottom right of this page, in the smallest possible type:

comes this disclaimer:

*This activity is speculative. It is not currently possible to provide concrete scientific evidence to suggest that climate change is responsible for any of these events.

I wonder how many people would not bother to read the disclaimer, or who would read it and dismiss it. The sort of children who are spoken to with phrases like ‘Our house is proper old’ are not the fine print reading sort.

Make of it what you will.

The propaganda push for the Global Warming hoax is still going strong. They are repeating the same discredited lies over and over, and what is worse, they are recruiting an army of Orwellian snoops to enforce the new and completely insane regulations, so that everyone goes around with unwashed clothes, unwashed bodies, no fun, no freedom and a standard of living so reduced as to render this and the other technologically advanced countries unrecognizable to its citizens that will remember what life used to (and should) be like.

Of course, none of this needs to happen; what is for sure, is that the way out will not come from the classrooms where this propaganda is being spread.

* I loathe writing that contains sentences that begin with the word “so” don’t you?

July 30, 2008

Rep. Ron Paul, M.D.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution, which is yet another meaningless but provocative condemnation of China . It is this kind of jingoism that has led to such a low opinion of the United States abroad. Certainly I do not condone human rights abuses, wherever they may occur, but as Members of the US House of Representatives we have no authority over the Chinese government. It is our Constitutional responsibility to deal with abuses in our own country or those created abroad by our own foreign policies. Yet we are not debating a bill to close Guantanamo , where abuses have been documented. We are not debating a bill to withdraw from Iraq , where scores of innocents have been killed, injured, and abused due to our unprovoked attack on that country. We are not debating a bill to reverse the odious FISA bill passed recently which will result in extreme abuses of Americans by gutting the Fourth Amendment.

Instead of addressing these and scores of other pressing issues over which we do have authority, we prefer to spend our time criticizing a foreign government over which we have no authority and foreign domestic problems about which we have very little accurate information.

I do find it ironic that this resolution “calls on the Government of the People’s Republic of China to begin earnest negotiations, without preconditions, directly with His Holiness the Dalai Lama or his representatives.” For years US policy has been that no meeting or negotiation could take place with Iran until certain preconditions are met by Iran . Among these is a demand that Iran cease uranium enrichment, which Iran has the right to do under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is little wonder why some claim that resolutions like this are hypocritical.

Instead of lecturing China, where I have no doubt there are problems as there are everywhere, I would suggest that we turn our attention to the very real threats in a United States where our civil liberties and human rights are being eroded on a steady basis. The Bible cautions against pointing out the speck in a neighbor’s eye while ignoring the log in one’s own. I suggest we contemplate this sound advice before bringing up such ill-conceived resolutions in the future.

[…]

http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2008/cr0730a08h.htm

Have you ever seen magnesium ribbon burning?

It is one of the most pure and bright white lights you are ever likely to have to hand.

That’s what Ron Paul is like, compared to everyone else in american politics.

We have our Recommended Films and Documentaries list posted now; by all means take a look, and leech away.

Some things we’ve been playing to feel cool:

Oval – Dok
Biosphere – Substrata
The Hafler Trio – Hljóðmynd
Morton Feldman – String Quartet II
CM von Hausswolff – Operations of Spirit Communication
Scott Walker – Tilt
Mika Vainio – Kajo
Esther Venrooy – Shift Coordinate Points
Coil – ANS

First, lets start with a word from a QC:

‘I refuse to be fingerprinted’

Nigel Rumfitt QC, terrorism specialist, explains why he is opposed to compulsory fingerprinting at Heathrow.

Everyone using the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow for domestic flights will have to be fingerprinted. Who says so? Not Parliament. The British Airports Authority, a Spanish-owned private company, and British Airways say so. Why? It’s a government requirement, they tell us. But in free societies, government requirements come in the form of laws. Who made the requirement, when and in what terms?

Fingerprinting has been around for more than 100 years. In this country it has been used only to catch and identify criminals. No doubt that is why it carries a stigma. Compulsory mass fingerprinting is regarded as “unBritish”, but the present Government seems determined to change our attitude.

A few years ago, with little publicity, the law was altered to allow the indefinite retention of fingerprints and DNA taken from suspects later acquitted or even released without charge. Police powers of arrest have been extended recently, allowing the more widespread obtaining of this data. Nonetheless, the Government has not yet dared to make mass fingerprinting compulsory. What this Government fears to do openly it tries to do by stealth.

Because you cannot be compelled to provide your fingerprints, both BAA and British Airways are saying that by choosing to fly through Terminal 5 you are “consenting” to the taking of your prints. That is disingenuous, to put it mildly. True, some people will not mind; others will object, but will not be prepared to abandon an important journey in order to register that objection. In practice, and without legislation, we will have become a nation that restricts the internal movement of its citizens by government decree.

Imagine how people would have reacted in the 1950s to the proposition that before boarding the Flying Scotsman at King’s Cross you had to provide your fingerprints because the Home Secretary thought it a good idea.

These measures, it is said, will protect us against terrorism. That is nonsense. Modern Islamist terrorists want the world to know who they are. That’s why they make video wills to show everyone exactly who has been martyred for the cause. Would any recent terrorist outrage have been prevented by ID cards or fingerprint records? If it would, why bring in vital security measures by the back door and confine them to domestic flights?

Another danger is that, at Terminal 5, illegal immigrants can swap boarding passes with domestic passengers and get into the country unchecked. This is because greedy BAA wants all passengers – domestic and international – to mingle in the same shopping mall before flying.

If this is only about verifying identity at the gate, why take four prints and not just one? Why keep these prints on file for “only” 24 hours instead of destroying them at the gate? To what use will the prints be put in that time? The Data Protection Act, quoted by BAA, in fact allows police access to this material.

This is not about security. It is about paving the way towards the database state, making it easier to force us to “consent” to giving our fingerprints when we apply for a passport. That’s the final step before the compulsory ID card.

I already refuse to visit the United States because of oppressive security and I have indicated to BAA that I shall refuse to provide fingerprints unless I can be satisfied that it has a legal right to demand them. If the law has been changed to allow BAA to behave in this way, I shall find another airline.

Nigel Rumfitt QC is a specialist in serious crime, including terrorism.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/839199/Comment-%27I-refuse-to-be-fingerprinted%27.html

And this is the offending news:

Millions of passengers flying from British airports will be fingerprinted from next year under the latest controversial Government anti-terror plans.

The measures, which will apply to both domestic and international passengers, are being introduced despite opposition from the Information Commissioner, Britain’s privacy watchdog.

The Commissioner forced Heathrow to abandon a similar plan earlier this year after warning that it was potentially illegal under data protection laws.

Critics say the main reason for the scheme is that airport operators want to maximise profits by ensuring all passengers are able to spend money in ‘duty-free’ shops.

[…]

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

Courtesy of Richard Rogers, BAA, BBC, Fascist new Labour and millions of sheeple.

Another great post from George Washington:

Fearmongering As a Form of Warfare

We often think of psychological warfare as meaning disinformation. See, for example, this.

But psychological operations also include efforts to induce and spread fear, because fear immobilizes people more than any other emotion. Make people afraid, and they won’t take any action to challenge those in power.

We all know that false flag terror is a form of psyops to intimidate people. Likewise, the real reason that our government tortures innocent people is to spread fear. And we already know that the Pentagon employs bloggers to spread its propaganda (indeed, even private companies appear to do it).

I’ve increasingly recently run across a form of fearmongering psyops on the web. Specifically, whenever anyone posts a hopeful idea or a promising strategy for fighting tyranny, someone will post a fear-inducing comment like:

“If you sign the impeachment petition, the government will put you in its terrorist database”

Or

“If you show up to the anti-war rally, you’ll be tasered”

You’ve seen this, right?

These kind of statements can do no possible good. They are not intended to convey any useful information. They are merely meant to discourage people from taking any action.

Given that the Bush administration tortures innocent people, tramples on the Constitution, and spies on everyone, many people are already cowed and intimidated. What we need more of is courage and hope. Those are the qualities which will enable us to save our country.

Anyone sewing unreasonable seeds of fear is either a psyops agent or a coward who is trying to justify their own cowardice by infecting others with the virus of fear. Either way, their fearmongering should be countered with comments about the importance of courage in saving our country and with reasons to have hope that we can change things if we are committed to creating a saner world. Fear may be contagious, but so is courage and hope.

Because those trying to save our country outweigh the psyops agents by millions-to-one, we will win the battle if we take a stand for courage and against fear.

There are several posts on BLOGDIAL about what and what not to do about ‘our problems’.

Before the illegal, immoral, unjustified war crime of the invasion of Iraq, I said categorically that a demonstration against the invasion would have no effect, and that the invasion would happen anyway.

Sadly, I was proved right.

Now we have people calling for more demonstrations, public rallies and such like, and whilst I defend everyone’s right to assemble, I disagree that these actions will be of any lasting value.

I call the sentiment behind these actions ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’. It is something that americans are particularly fond of, and which keeps everyone in line, preventing them from making the final leap to real solutions that will actually solve the problems.

This is the only sphere of human activity where the solution is not tailored to the problem. At any other time and in every other instance, a normal, rational human being addresses a problem or crisis in a way that is designed to produce a discrete result; if there is a fire, you bring water or a fire extinguisher. If you want to fly to the moon, you design a space craft. If there is a leak in your roof, you patch it. If it is raining, you get out your umbrella. If you are hungry, you get yourself a sandwich.

In not one of those examples would any rational person put forward as a plan that a demonstration against the rain should be held, or that a candle lit vigil should be organized, should we become hungry, or that we should play music if there is a fire, or that we should dance around with plastic wings to reach the moon.

People should not attend anti-war rallies not because they might be tasered; they should not attend them because they do not work to stop war. If they did, they would not be in Iraq and planning an attack on Iran right now.

People should not sign petitions, not because you might get on the government’s ‘terrorist’ database, but because they do not work to effect permanent change. If petitions worked, we would not have 99% of the bad legislation on the books that we have now.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. Only a fool keeps doing something that doesn’t work. All of these tactics that are very old, tried and tested, have been shown to be ineffective against the sort of tyranny we are facing today. If you keep doing them, you are a fool. If you are calling for them, you are either a fool, or are working for the enemy.

The contention that psy-ops are working to stop people from protesting and signing petitions is probably 100% true; but those psy-operatives are also inside the delusion that protesting and petition writing have power. The fact that they are out there trying to stop it adds to the ‘meta psy-op’ that is being promoted; the one geared to making you think that demonstrations, petitions and all other ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’ is useful and effective, when in fact they are not. That is the Matroska trick that is being played on the public; it keeps them two levels down inside the doll from discovering the real truth, which is that even if everyone in the entire USA were to sign a petition it wouldn’t be worth the ink used to scratch out the signatures; the bad stuff would still happen. By keeping people from signing and demonstrating, they are keeping everyone from waking up and realizing that these tactics are worthless; going through a failure on the path to achieve your goal is an essential step before creating the next generation of tools that are actually effective in getting to your goal, which in our case is (partial list):

• A permanent end to the war machine
• Sound money
• An obedient congress
• Obedient law enforcement staff
• A properly restrained executive
• Full, unassailable and enforced individual rights
• Full, unassailable and enforced property rights

It seems that today, in response to tyranny, fascism and the police state, the only ‘solutions’ that anyone can come up with are ones that simply will not work. Only a small minority is actually fully awake and doing something concrete and focussed, like the war tax resistors, the people who have turned their backs on ‘the system’ and the many others who have found their own way to escape.

we will win the battle if we take a stand for courage and against fear.

I agree that fear is being exploited to an unprecedented level today. The first step on the road to defeating this is for everyone to understand the true nature of life, risk and the probability of anything bad happening to you.

The fascist ‘Health and Safety’ culture that has engulfed the UK (for example) needs to be explained, confronted and disobeyed at every point that it is touched. ‘Health and Safety’ culture is one example of fear running wild, and how it is used to engineer control. The same goes for Anthropgenic Global Warming.

The fear of ‘terrorism’ is the other bogeyman being trotted out on a minute by minute basis to scare everyone into line. All Security Theatre and its related nonsense must be countered, defied and disobeyed at every point that it is encountered. That means refusing to comply with anything that has been introduced ‘because of terrorism’.

Finally, people have to stop acting like simpletons, and stop using the language of simple minded people. There is alot of this language about; it is unfocussed, nebulous and actually, very dangerous; when your house is on fire, you do not talk about ‘taking a stand’ or ‘standing up for what is right’ against fire. You get a fire extinguisher and PUT OUT THE FLAMES. That is why, whenever I talk and have talked about this I try and make sure that I do not use this in nubibus thinking and offer another way of thinking and acting as a solution. Even if what you offer is wrong, by iterating out the failures we come closer to the solution. The most important part is that you are iterating, and not doing the same thing over and over again.

False Flag terror is the number one tool of the fear-mongers. They have been using it for decades. That means we must put false flag terror in its proper context and ignore it whenever it happens. No matter how big the outrage, we must all refuse to change our opinions, change our behavior, accept new regulations of any kind, get all ‘patriotic’, ‘get behind the president’ or do anything that is expected of us. Once we accept that and behave correctly, false flag terror and the fear they try to create with it loses all power, and it loses the power to change the way we live.

There are probably an infinite number of solutions to our problems. All we need to do is find one and then ruthlessly execute it.

Whatever one we choose to use, it must be done with a clear goal and deliverables and it must be unstoppable. We certainly have many models of how it can be done; as I said above, in every other sphere of life, complex problems are addressed successfully. If this were not the case, we would not have put man on the moon or done anything that requires engineering.

In fact, this is an engineering problem, and it must be attacked in precisely that way.

Spreading information and educating people about what is really going on is essential. You can do this without wasting your time marching in the streets. Context is everything; that is why I support and personally distribute DVDs of the crucial documentaries. Once the critical mass of informed people is reached, it will be much easier to deploy the final maneuver, which should not be something that has been seen before, like a demonstration or a rock concert. For the record, I do not believe that asking foxes to investigate a raid on a chicken coop is sensible, logical, rational or smart. Impeaching Bush will achieve nothing, except the justice that he is gaoled for his war crimes…what about the next war criminal?

That is the question that needs to be asked and addressed.

We need a solution that takes care of the next war criminal, and all other possible followers, on a permanent basis.

Thankfully, it is not an intractable problem.

Illegal downloaders to get warning letter in government clampdown

Internet service providers have struck a deal with government and the music industry to help clamp down on illegal downloading.

The deal, to be announced later today, is thought to include an agreement for ISPs to send out hundreds of thousands of letters to account holders responsible for illegal downloading.

The memorandum of understanding, struck with the BPI, the body that represents record labels, and the government, will be announced today ahead of the launch of a consultation on the introduction of legislation to clampdown on offending.

The memorandum of understanding has been struck with the UK’s six biggest ISPs – BT, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BSkyB – and includes a deal for all parties to work together to develop ways to deal with repeat offenders.

The agreement has been reached ahead of an announcement expected later today by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform of a consultation on regulatory options to punish ISPs if they fail to take action against the illegal downloading of music, films and TV programmes.

“We have looked to ISPs to acknowledge their responsibility to help deal with illegal filesharing, engage in communicating the issue to their customers, and put in place procedures necessary to effectively tackle repeated unlawful filesharing,” said a spokesman for the BPI.

“Achieving this would represent a significant step forward and demonstrate clearly the collective will that exists to tackle this serious issue.”

It is thought that BSkyB’s announcement of a digital music joint venture with Universal Music earlier this week – the venture has no name, no pricing and no launch date – could have been a move to prove that ISPs are supporting new, innovative, legal digital models ahead of the announcements today.

In February, the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to crack down of illegal filesharing as part of a wide-ranging strategy paper designed to look at ways of supporting the UK creative industries and digital intellectual property.

At the time Burnham said that the government preferred to find “voluntary, preferably commercial, solutions” but that it would look to introduce legislation next April if necessary.

The strong stance by the government has alarmed ISPs, which believe that regulation is a step too far.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/24/digitalmedia.piracy

The Grauniad is up to their usual slack jawed shenanigans again, this time, acting as the mouthpiece for arch criminal Andy Burnham and the buggy whip entertainment industry.

What’s that you say? You recognise that name?!

You should.

Andy Burnham is the musical chairs minister who used to be in charge of the most illiberal, invasive, dehumanizing and wrong ID card in history. The card that prompted Danny Kruger to write in the Telegraph, in a headline, that New Labour are acting like Nazis.

Andy Burnham is the imbecile that tried to lie about the true capabilities of the ID card, as outlined in ‘Frances Stonor Saunders” email.

Andy Burnham is a bad guy, no doubt about it, and now this monster is in charge of Culture. Given his past, the title of this post is entirely appropriate.

First of all, file sharing is not stealing. The BBC had to do a big climbdown about this after transmitting a completely absurd ‘hit piece’ on file-sharing which equated it with theft, terrorism and … pedophilia. This is how the apology read:

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

If copyright infringement was theft then I’d be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting “Pictures from Sky Sport” in the top left corner of the screen. And I’m not. So it isn’t.

This groveling apology was needed because the first lines of this bogus ‘report’ started like this:

Now how could downloading a film affect the fight against terrorism or indeed paedophiles?

Well, it goes something like this; getting hold of movies, ‘Bittorrent File Sharing’ in the jargon…

So, child raping, mass murder, the name of a protocol and ‘File Sharing’ all in the first two sentences of one of the most scandalous reports ever on Newsnight. A report so absurd that even the ‘deny everything’ BBC had to climb down.

But I digress.

File sharing is not stealing. It never has been stealing. Anyone who says so (or who repeats it unchallenged like the Guardian just has) is either in the direct employ of the entertainment industry or computer illiterate.

In the case of Andy Burnham, we can safely say that he is in the direct employ of the music and film industry, just as he was in the direct employ of the ID card contract holders when he worked at the Home Office.

I do not need to go any further in this post about how filesharing is not stealing. We have been over this before on BLOGDIAL.

What is new is that Andy Burnham, a corporate enforcer and dongle without shame, is in the right place to introduce legislation that will be penned by the music and film industry – the buggy whip salesmen – to tax everyone with an internet account, and to prosecute those who are file sharing.

To bottom line it:

• It is completely wrong that ISPs have been blackmailed into sending these letters at their own expense.
• ISPs are not responsible for the actions of their users. The users are responsible for what they do. This is well understood by most people.
• It is not for ISPs to, “…support(ing) new, innovative, legal digital models”. The internet is a level playing field; it is up to the music industry to adapt or die, and it is completely wrong for them to use prostitutes like Andy Burnham to apply pressure or introduce legislation that harms the majority that are doing nothing illegal or wrong and industries that are changing the world for the better.

There is nothing that any of these people can do about file sharing, any more than they can stop sunlight from reaching the earth; the users of the internet will always have the upper hand if the entertainment industry takes this approach.

These morons should take a page out of Apple’s book; look at what just happened with native applications on the iPhone.

Apple wanted everyone to write web apps for the iPhone, keeping native apps exclusively for Apple itself in order to maintain complete control over the platform. Within a short amount of time, developers cracked the iPhone and created a set of tools making it possible for any developer to write native apps. They also created a way to explore, distribute, install and manage these apps that was simplicity itself.

Many developers wrote apps for this ‘black market’ of iPhone applications, and Apple didn’t like it.

Instead of running to the legislators to fix their problem, they did something smart, which the likes of the entertainment industry and Andy Burnham are incapable of doing.

They gave the people what they wanted.

Give the people what they want, and what you don’t want will go away.

Apple opened up the iPhone and created its own way to distribute apps. You can even make money from distributing an app with Apple’s App Store. Every developer that used to write apps for the old ecosystem now writes apps for the ‘legit’ Apple ecosystem. Apple gets what it wants (control over what apps go onto the iPhone) and the developers get what they want (the freedom to write apps for the iPhone and distribute them), and the users get what they want; the functionality of their iPhones exponentially multiplied.

This solution has something for everybody, and it even pays Apple and the developers.

Now that is smart.

Andy Burnham is not smart. He is the opposite of smart.

If he were smart, he would tell the entertainment industry to go back to the drawing board before it’s too late (which it already is).

Instead, he is trying to put the genie back into the bottle with his puppet hands flailing about in the wind of change.

Yes, I wrote that.

Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister and one of the world’s most wanted men, has been arrested, British government and judicial sources have said.

The office of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, confirmed that Blair had been arrested in London. He was detained and taken to see judges of the war crimes court.

Blair, leader of the British Parliament during the Iraq war, was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in July 2010 for authorizing the killing of civilians during the “Shock And Awe” bombing of Iraq.

He was indicted for genocide a second time four months later for orchestrating the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in Falluja in eastern Iraq.

He went underground in 2007 after losing power.

Blair was one of three fugitives wanted by the UN Iraq war crimes tribunal who were still at large. He refuses to accept the legitimacy of the UN tribunal.

If Blair is extradited, he would be the 44th British suspect extradited to the tribunal. The others include former Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who was ousted in 2006 and died in 2007 of morbid obesity while on trial on war crimes charges.

The arrest of Blair and other indicted war criminals and their delivery to the Hague war crimes tribunal has been one of the main conditions of British Government’s progress towards legitimacy.

The West is also pressing for the arrest of the former American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/21/warcrimes.internationalcrime

The face of a traitor:

Selling land by the acre to be banned under new EU ruling

People in Britain will lose the right to sell land in acres under a new Brussels ruling nodded through by the Government.

In a low-key meeting, a junior minister agreed last week to abolish the ancient imperial measurement and replace it with the metric equivalent ‘hectare’ from 2010.

The UK previously had an opt-out, technically known as a ‘derogation’, from the EU’s use of some metric measurements, which allowed the continued use of acres for the pruposes of land registration.

But from January 1, 2010, the unit, which dates back to the 13th century, will be banned.

The decision was buried deep within the small print of EU directive 80/181/EEC on agriculture and fisheries and revealed by the Tories.

‘This is this kind of pointless interference into the nooks and crannies of our national life that frustrates people about the EU,’ said shadow Europe minister Mark Francois.

‘Whether we use hectares or acres should be a matter for Britain to decide, not the EU.

‘Once again this weak Labour Government has meekly given up yet another of Britain’s rights to Brussels.

‘They need to think again and insist that we must keep our right to use our ancient traditional measure of land if we wish.’

Successive British governments have been under pressure from Brussels to announce a date for phasing out imperial measures altogether, with the latest deadline set for 2009.

Last year, however, the European Commission and Parliament announced that it would no longer be seeking their extinction.

It followed campaigns by Britons dubbed ‘Metric Martyrs’ who have fought for years to stop the march of new measurements from Europe.

In 2001, Sunderland market trader Steve Thoburn was convicted of selling bananas by the pound.

He died in March 2004, aged 39, just days after learning his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights had been rejected.

But the move consigning the acre to history – rubber stamped by Jonathan Shaw, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Marine, Landscape and Rural Affairs – will alarm those who believe many eurocrats are still intent on forcing Britain to swap the pint for the litre, ounce for the gram and mile for kilometre.

Neil Herron, campaign director of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, told the Mail: ‘This is what happens when you allow yourself to be ruled from Brussels. We are being governed by people we cannot remove from power and have a weakened Parliament in Westminster.

‘The acre is an instantly recognisable unit to Britons. How is the farming industry going to cope? They will all still talk in acres so this is just meaningless.’

An acre is equal to 4,840 square yards or 43,560 square feet. A hectare is more than twice the size at about 107,639 square feet.

The first law setting out an exact statutory size for the acre was passed under Edward I’s reign between 1272 and 1307. The word is derived from the Latin ‘ager’, from which we also have words like agriculture.

Public consultations launched by the commission, which confirmed that allowing imperial measures to be used alongside metric measures would not disrupt trade and commerce – and would help to counter anti-EU sentiments.

But loose goods still have to be sold in metric quantities, with imperial measures only allowed to be displayed alongside, rather than instead of, them.

No one from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was available for comment.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1036895/Selling-land-acre-banned-new-EU-ruling.html

Remember the woman who was in trouble for selling by the pound?

We can take comfort in one thing; all of this is going to come to an end, and sooner than you think, because we are winning:

History shows that people usually don’t know when we are about to win. We are lousy at knowing whether we have a chance at victory.

When people struggling for liberty and justice face seemingly overwhelming power and impossible odds, they can suddenly breakthrough and win when things seem most hopeless and they least expect victory.

Why We Underestimate Our Chances

Why?

Well, for one thing, it is impossible to know what’s going on in the other camp. The oppressors might seem invincible, but there are often schisms and rifts which are tearing the enemy apart from within. The bad guys might be extremely vulnerable because they are busy fighting with each other. They might be merely putting a false public image of unity . . . one which is dropped the minute the cameras stop rolling.

In addition – as I learned as a kid in karate class – even the toughest opponent has vulnerabilities. No matter how big the lug you’re fighting is, hit him in one of his vulnerable spots, and he’s going down. In struggles for freedom and justice as well, if you identify and focus on the bad guy’s vulnerabilities, you can win no matter how poorly the fight seems to have been going.

Moreover, the opponent might be affected by what we do a lot more than we realize. You’ve seen it in horror and martial arts movies. The good guy has given his best shot at the monster. But the monster doesn’t seem to be fazed in the least . . . he glowers and starts walking threateningly towards the good guy, who is flat on his back. It seems like the good guy is finished.

But at the last minute, the monster falls over and dies, and we see for the first time that the good guy had earlier mortally wounded the monster in some way.

There is often a lag time between what we do and our ability to see the effect on our opponents. It may be that our activism is having a tremendous effect and is pummeling the forces of tyranny, but that the weakened and wounded tyrants are simply bluffing and putting on a strong front to keep us intimidated. Don’t stop fighting just because the effects of our actions haven’t yet become visible.

In addition, it is often difficult at any given time to see which historical trend will end up being the most important one. In other words, there are always competing trends and forces, and something which doesn’t seem very important at the time can end up winning the battle in the long-run.

As just one example, the Soviet Union collapsed partly because Russians watched images of prosperity on American tv, and decided they weren’t going to put up with what they had. The communist leaders didn’t think that letting in American tv programs would have such a huge influence on their population’s willingness to put up with communist repression. But it did.

There are historical trends which we are not even currently aware of which might end up ensuring our victory.

(Finally, while the enemy might appear to have overwhelming force, they may be “paper tigers”, with much weaker resources than it seems. More on this in a later essay.)

Don’t Quit Now

Bottom line . . . don’t quit now.

It is possible that we are mere days away from starting to hold the tyrants responsible for their war crimes, false flag terror, illegal spying, and other unlawful acts. The Red Cross finding Bush guilty of war crimes is significant (while it is not a U.S. institution, it is an important one).

[…]

George Washington

The people who have systematically sold Britain to the EU are traitors, and the banning of selling by the pound and now the acre are the latest outward symptom of this deeply offensive trend that is wrecking this country.

It WILL come to an end, and ALL the bad legislation and the insane treaties that have been introduced to destroy Britain will be repealed and nullified respectively, leaving us once again in a place worth living in.

For now, it is your duty to sell by the pound and by the acre and by the foot or by the pea weight if that is your desire. Private transactions are exactly that, PRIVATE and the state, any state, has no business interjecting itself into your exchanges of goods and services.

Sent to me by a lurker, this image:

seen today on a church noticeboard behind the national gallery

and if you Google “have stood aside watched”

You get:

I have stood aside and watched while the once greatest, most civilized, and most humane nation in history was being converted into a jungle.

I have stood aside and watched white the greatest good will the world has ever seen between multiple white nationalities within one nation, was being deliberately changed into suspicion, dissension and hatred.

I have stood aside and watched while this “land of the free and the home of the brave” was being conditioned by traitors to seek peace at any price-even at the price of independence and freedom.

I have stood aside and watched while our courts encouraged and our press glorified the perpetrators of crime who have spread riots, vandalism, robbery, and murder across our land.

I have stood aside and watched while our colleges have been taken over by misguided children without the slightest understanding of the civilization they have inherited, or of the evil forces by which they have been duped by.

I have stood aside and watched while our great system of public education has been turned into a propaganda agency for revolution and spawning ground for homosexuality, race mixing, sex abuse and crime.

I have stood aside and watched while meretricious scoundrels, using our television media, our motion picture screens, our newsstands, and other available means, have contrived to bring about a breakdown of morality that is reducing millions of Americans to the level of animals.

I have stood aside and watched while the basic human loyalties- loyalty to God, loyalty to country, and loyalty to family- were being destroyed by evil forces, which now permeate every segment of American life.

And I have had enough. I am only one person, but I shall no longer refuse “to get involved” what about you? How much longer will you stand aside????

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to unveil plans to shock the Cabinet of Gordon Brown into a greater awareness of the impact of reckless warmongering on victims.

His proposals include visits to hospitals where people are being treated for shrapnel wounds.

The measures form part of the Iranian government’s response to a spate of saber rattling.

A man in his 30s was blown to pieces at a wedding in Deh Bala in the early hours of Sunday morning.

On Thursday, a five year old girl was killed in Bagdad and another died after a bomb attack in Amman.

I want to ensure that the British government is taking the issue of war crime very seriously
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Mr Ahmadinejad’s proposals will see members of the Brown Cabinet who are contemplating an attack on Iran being made to go to accident and emergency wards in Iraq, to see for themselves the consequences of bombings.

They will meet families of victims, and make prison visits to people convicted of war crimes.

The measures will focus on a number of areas including Iraq, Afganistan, Somalia, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Angola and Darfur.

President Ahmadinejad said: “I am absolutely shocked at the tragic and senseless loss of life we have seen recently.

“I want to reassure everyone that the Iranian government is taking the issue of war crime very seriously.

“I am particularly concerned about the young age of the victims – that is why I am again emphasising what action we have taken and what new action we are demanding.”

President Ahmadinejad also revealed he has written to all the members of the UN Security Council, reminding them of their powers to require rogue nations like the USA and those that are associated with state sponsored terror to refrain from such actions.

Early warnings

Iranian Ministers are also looking at how citizens of rogue nations might work to help the victim nations identify potential attacks without breaking national security oaths.

The announcement comes ahead of the publication on Tuesday of the Iranian government’s €100m war crime action plan to be launched by President Ahmadinejad, chairman of the Iranian parliament Ali Ardashir Larijan and the chairman of the Assembly of Experts Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the recent un-justified war deaths were “niether shocking nor tragic,” and promised the obliteration of Tehran in furtherance of the ‘New World Order’.

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said children should be targeted in the first strikes to prevent them from turning to Jihad later.

He said there are primary targets where “we can point out… children who are going to be a serious problem”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7503845.stm

[…]

And there you have it.

Do you not wonder how it is that Gordon Brown can show images of people beaten to death to the G8 to ‘convince’ them to vote for sanctions against Zimbabwe, but this same inhuman monster can be FOR the bombing of Iran AFTER having participated PERSONALLY in ordering the rape of Iraq?

I wonder if any of these subhuman beasts have ever seen photographs of the carnage they unleashed in Iraq; if they are so squeamish that they can be swayed by the image of a single beaten up man, or even think that such images can sway opinion, how is it that they can STILL have an attack on Iran ‘on the table’ when there are so many graphic images of Iraqi children blown to bits? Children blown to bits BY THEIR OWN HAND.

IT DOESNT MAKE ANY SENSE!

Defective by design have just sent out a call to not buy the new iPhone. Lets pull it to bits:

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DefectiveByDesign.org DefectiveByDesign.org
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The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G

* iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can’t be on everyone’s phones.

The iPhone OS has been reverse engineered, by people who are not defeatists. There are literally millions of Jailbroken iPhones in circulation, all of them making and receiving phone calls and running free software, the source for which is available under the GPL. Instead of complaining about this brilliant hardware platform, perhaps Defective By Design should spend time developing or promoting the development of software for the iPhone so that they can realize their goals. Certainly, asking people not to buy an iPhone is not going to work in any meaningful way.

* iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology.

Once again, this is solved by writing software, not by complaining.

* iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.

ALL cellular telephones do this. If this is the level of expertise that these people have then their movement is doomed.

* iPhone won’t play patent and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.

Then write a player for it. Even better; why don’t you port Videolan to iPhone and distribute it via Installer.APP? You would have access to millions of users in a very short amount of time, and you would not be exposing yourself to legal attack from Apple, because someone else is actively developing Installer.APP and its ecosystem; you would be interfacing with the iPhone community by that means and not directly. It could not be easier for you. The development tools are out there, the source for robust players to decode the formats you love is available, all it takes is the will to do it or to pay someone else to do it if it is that important.

There are alot of things that the iPhone cannot do, and you can solve any of them that you like, by writing some software.

* iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don’t spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software — like the FreeRunner (http://www.openmoko.com).

A phone in the hand is better than two on the horizon. Especially if you want to make phone calls. And I would love to see how those ‘on the horizon’ phones connect to the GSM network without knowing where you and your phone are.

We can trade our freedom and our money to get something flashy on the surface, or we can spend a little more money, keep our freedom, and support a better kind of business. If we want businesses to be ethical, we have to reward the ones that are. By not enriching companies that want to take away our freedom and by rewarding those that respect us, we will be helping to bring about a better future.

OR we can use our imagination and expertise to fix the problems in products like the iPhone so that they work in the way that they want, give us the shiny phone we want, AND preserve our freedom. We can have our cake and eat it. This has been very successfully done by the people who have created the Jailbroken iPhone community. Really, you should understand this.

In solidarity,

John, Josh, Matt, and Peter

Calling for solidarity, demonstrations, boycotts are all fine, but in the end, it is the people who have an imagination that make a difference in the world. The Jailbreaking of the iPhone is a perfect example of how active people with skill and imagination can force change to happen. The only reason why Apple is allowing developers to write native software for the iPhone is the explosive and unprecedented success of Jailbreaking and Installer.APP. Everyone knows that 25% of all iPhones in circulation have been jailbroken. Because of their work, there are more telephones running free software than ever before, and this will continue with the new iPhone. Because of their work, the iPhone is now open to developers through the closed system, whereas before Apple wanted everyone to develop web apps that ran in Safari. Because of their work we now have a platform that will ensure that the iPhone is always open to developers of free software going forward.

At the end of the day, all the complaining in the world will not stop DRM. Only the writing of software will defeat it.

What we have to ask is this; what are you actually offering? You are not offering any solutions, you are not offering any new philosophy or any sort of strategy that will produce results, and you are completely ignoring the heroic work of the Jailbreakers and the millions of phones they have liberated as if it has not happened at all.

That is odd, to say the least.