by Dr. Ron Paul

We live in one of the most difficult times in history for guarding against an expanding central government. We are seeing a steady erosion of our freedoms. We have arrived here because our ideas, our words-and the actions that follow-have consequences. Homeschoolers, by and large, understand that bad ideas have bad consequences, and even the best of intentions can have unintended consequences. We need to understand exactly what ideas brought us to this point. We can then, I hope, reject the bad ideas and reform our thinking toward a better set of intellectual parameters. Our goal should be to identify what ideas are now shaping our culture and work to sow the seeds of liberty for the generations who will come after us.

Currently, the mood of our country is dominated by a powerful word:fear. Fear is not always the product of irrational thinking. However, once experienced, fear can lead us away from reason, especially if it is extreme in duration or intensity. This kind of fear is a threat to rational liberty. When people are fearful, they are more willing to irrationally surrender their rights. The psychology of fear is an essential tool of those who want us to increasingly rely on "the powers that be" to manage the apparatus of the central government.

Clearly, people seek out safety and security when they are in a state of fear, and the result is often the surrender of liberty. We must remember that liberty is the ultimate security.

Our love for liberty has been so diminished by fear-of everything but God-that we tolerate intrusions into our privacy that most Americans would have abhorred just a few years ago. American history, at least in part, is a history of people who refuse to submit to the will of those who have no rightful authority over them. Yet we have increasingly empowered the federal government and its agents to run our lives, far beyond their jurisdiction to do so. The seeds of future tyranny are being sown and many of our basic protections from government oppression are being undermined. We tolerate new laws that allow the government to snoop on us, listen to our phone calls, track our financial dealings, make us strip down at airports, and even limit the rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury. Like some dysfunctional episode of the Twilight Zone, we have allowed the summits of our imaginations to be linked up with the pit of our fears, all to serve man.

Paranoia can be treated, but the loss of liberty resulting from the fear of man is not easily cured. People who would have previously battled against encroachments on civil liberties now explain the “necessity” of the temporary security measures” Franklin would have railed against. This would not be happening if we had remained vigilant, understood the importance of individual rights, and refused to accept that the sacrifice of liberty is justified by a “need” for security—even if it’s just “now and then.” As Americans, we must confront our irrational fears if we are to turn the current
tide against the steady erosion of our freedoms. Fear is the enemy. The confusing admonition to “fear only fear itself” does not help. Instead, we must battle against irrational fear and refuse to succumb to it.

Fortunately, there is always a remnant who longs for truly limited government, maintaining a belief in the rule of law combined with a deep conviction that free people and a government bound by a Constitution are the most advantageous form of government. They recognize this idea as the only practical way for prosperity to be spread to the maximum number of people, while promoting peace and security. Their thoughts are dominated by a different and more powerful word: freedom.

If we intend to use the word “freedom” in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: freedom is living without government coercion.

If we hope to remain free, we must cut through the fog of rhetoric and attach concrete meanings to the words politicians often use to deceive us. We must reassert that America is a republic, not a democracy, and remind ourselves that the Constitution places limits on government that no majority can overrule. We must resist any use of the word “freedom” to describe state action. We must also teach these truths to our children.

Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a governmental false security blanket beckons. Self-reliance and self-defense are American virtues; trembling reliance on the illusion of government-provided security is not.

Many, if not most, homeschoolers have fought on some level for the freedom to teach their own children. Most have had to stand against a tide of disapproval from friends and family. Some parents have dealt with strife in their church over the issue. Too many have been questioned by local authorities who don’t understand the limits of their jurisdiction; some have withstood the scrutiny of state and federal laws, courts, and law enforcement who have overstepped their constitutional bounds. Still others have suffered fines, imprisonment, and separation from their children at the hands of a government that claims to be “protecting” the children. All homeschoolers have tasted a morsel of freedom that many others still can’t comprehend. Homeschooling parents still regularly face questions such as, “Can you do that?” “Do they let you do that?” “Is that legal?” It all comes down to a proper understanding of jurisdiction and submission to delegated authority. Homeschoolers, by and large, maintain that the authority for determining the education of their children rests solely with parents. This spark of freedom must be fanned into a flame, not just among homeschooling fathers and mothers…but among the generation they are training up in liberty.

Ironically, the Constitution which protects our freedoms was conceived in a time of great crisis. The founders intended to place inviolable restrictions on what the federal government could do even in times of national distress. America must stand against calls for the government to violate the Constitution—that is, to break the law—in the name of law enforcement. America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as, if not greater than, any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must pass it on to our children, showing them how to resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist could ever hope to be.

Remember, a citizen's relationship with the State is never voluntary. Every government edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law is ultimately backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power over us-we're supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means the absence of government coercion. That is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American people. We can't wait for "our man" in Congress to do it. We must accept and take responsibility to keep government within its well defined boundaries, training our children to do the same.

The desire for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate, but something to condemn! The worst tyrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were political figures: men who fanatically sought power over others through the apparatus of the State. They wielded that power absolutely, without regard for the rule of law.

Our constitutional system, by contrast, was designed to restrain political power and place limits on the size and scope of government. It is this system-the rule of law – which we should celebrate, not political power. In a free society, government is restrained, and therefore, political power is less important. As defined by the Constitution, the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system to prosecute acts of force and fraud, and that's all. In other words, the State's role in our society is as referee, rather than an active participant.

Those who hold political power would lose their status in a society with truly limited government. It simply would not matter much who occupied various political posts, since their ability to tax, spend, and regulate would be severely curtailed. This is why champions of political power promote an activist government that involves itself in every area of our lives, from cradle to grave. They gain popular support by promising voters that the government will take care of everyone, while the media shower them with praise for their bold vision.

Political power is inherently dangerous in a free society. It threatens the rule of law and thus threatens our fundamental freedoms. It is the antithesis of freedom. Those who understand this should object whenever political power is glorified.

Our founding fathers understood this and endeavored to create the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else.

It is incumbent on a great nation to remain confident if it wishes to remain free. By no means should we be ignorant to real threats to our safety, against which we must remain vigilant. We need only to banish to the ash heap of history the notion that we ought to be ruled by our fears and those who use them to enhance their own power. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society provides the incentive to protect the liberties we enjoy. The greatest chance for peace and maximum prosperity comes within a society respectful of individual liberty.

It is important to know how we got where we are today. But, rather than focus on where we have failed, we should concentrate on the ideal of freedom. The freedom we enjoy today is the direct result of the commitment of men and women who refused to compromise their ideals. Certainly they failed at times, but they understood that the goal was liberty. We owe the founding fathers of our country a tremendous debt of gratitude. They created a society based on the radical idea that the purpose of government was to protect the rights of the individual-inalienable rights granted by God, rather than privileges granted by the State. Whereas God is "no respecter of persons," the same cannot be said of the State, no matter how well-intentioned it may purport to be.

We can reclaim our independence, not with guns, but with our voices. We can reject creeping statism and encourage the blessings of liberty for our land. It will require work and it will require commitment. It will also require a willingness to stand firm for our beliefs. It will not be done in one election cycle, nor will it necessarily be achieved in our lifetimes. Indeed, as others have done before us, it may require that we give our very lives. But that is a small price to pay compared to the sacrifices made by those who founded the United States of America and fought to give her birth and defend her freedoms.

Liberty. Freedom. Self-determination. These goals are as worthy of our attention today as they were over two centuries ago in a hot convention hall in Philadelphia. Just as devotion to those goals brought forth this great nation, a renewed adherence to liberty, which we teach to our children, can save our nation today.

Our founding fathers felt it was worth pledging their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" to secure and defend liberty. Do we?

[…]

http://homeschooltoday.com/articles/articles/sowingliberty.php

This says everything you need to know about, oh so many things, and what I like about Ron Paul is that he says it all very concisely and beautifully.

The sound of Ron Paul’s words are the sound of what America used to be like; when it was a country of real people, and not cowering frightened children who cannot even find their own land on a map.

I do disagree with Dr. Paul on one point. It is more than possible for us to see the return of the real America and liberty in our lifetimes. Who would have thought that we would see Nelson Mandela 1) out of gaol, and 2) president of South Africa? During the reign of Apartheid, typing those letters in that order would have seemed like the most absurd fantasy, but it came to pass, much quicker than we ever imagined it would.

And there was no blood bath.
And Nelson Mandela is a world-wide hero.

There is no reason that the restoration of America cannot happen within the next eight years. All we have to do is work for it, and not take ‘no’ for an answer. It means doing surprisingly little on an individual basis…but you know this, because you have been reading this blog for the last seven years.

We are already way down the road to it happening, and to many people, the liberation of America will come as a complete surprise.

While we are on this subject, the evil Neil Cavuto has interviewed Dr. Paul again. It is clear by the demeanor of that Fox News mouthpiece, that Neil Cavuto understands that Dr. Ron Paul is the only one telling the truth about the destruction of the dollar. It is clear by his uncharacteristicly quiet and gentle treatment of Dr. Paul that he has done his homework on this and found that the assessment given by Dr. Paul is the absolute truth. Somewhere, deep inside Neil Cavuto, as in the case of Anakin Skywalker, “there is good in him”. He behaves almost as if he is ashamed to be working for Fox as he interviews Dr. Paul; gone is the bombast, the illogical rhetoric, the insufferably rude interrupting – what we get instead, is a respectful introduction, questions quietly put, nodding in agreement and generous space given for all the answers.

Watch it for yourself.

This is how it starts. People start to wake up, and even the enemies cool down, end the rhetoric, listen more than they talk, behave as if humbled, and then all of a sudden, there is a tipping point, and they are on our side.

The Third Wave was an experimental demonstration of fascist movement^[1][2] undertaken by history teacher Ron Jones with sophomore high school students attending his Contemporary History class^[1] as part of a study of Nazi Germany.^[3] The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, during first week of April 1967.^[1] Jones, unable to explain to his students why the German citizens allowed the Nazi Party to exterminate millions of Jews and other so-called “undesirables”, decided to show them instead.^[3] Jones started a movement called “The Third Wave” and convinced his students that the movement is to eliminate democracy.^[1] The fact that democracy emphasizes individuality was considered as a drawback of democracy, and Jones emphasized this main point of the movement in its motto: “Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride”.^[1]

The experiment was not well documented. Of contemporary sources, the experiment is only mentioned in Cubberley High School student newspaper “The Cubberley Catamount”. It is only briefly mentioned in two issues^[4][5], and one more issue of the paper has articles about this experiment, but without much detail.^[1] The most detailed account of the experiment is an essay written by Jones himself some six years afterwards.^[3] Several other articles about the experiment exist, but all of them were written after a considerable amount of time had passed.^[2]

Chronology
Jones writes that he started the first day of the experiment (Monday, April 3 1967^[2]) with simple things like proper seating, drilling the students until they were able to move from outside the classroom to their seats and take the proper seating position in less then 5 seconds without making a sound.^[3] He then proceeded to strict classroom discipline emerging as an authoritative figure and improving efficiency of the class dramatically.^[3]

On the second day he managed to meld his history class into a group with a supreme sense of discipline, community.^[3] Jones named the movement “The Third Wave”, after the common belief that the third in a series of ocean waves is last and largest.^[3] Jones made up a salute similar to the one of Nazi regime^[1] and ordered class members to salute each other even outside the class. They all complied to this command.^[3]

The experiment took on a life of its own, with students from all over the school joining in: on the third day the class expanded from initial 30 students to 43 attendees. All of the students showed drastic improvement in their academic skills and tremendous motivation. All of the students were issued a member card and each of them received a special assignment (like designing a Third Wave Banner, stopping non-members from entering the class, etc). Jones instructed the students on how to initiate new members, and by the end of the day the movement had over 200 participants.^[3] At this point first Jones was surprised that some of the students started reporting to him other members of the movement who failed to abide by the rules.^[3]

On Thursday, the fourth day of the experiment, Jones decided to terminate the movement because it was slipping out of his control. The students became increasingly involved in the project and their discipline and loyalty to the project were astounding. He announced to the participants that this movement is only a part of a nationwide movement and that on the next day a presidential candidate of the movement would publicly announce existence of the movement. Jones ordered students to attend a noon rally on Friday to witness the announcement.^[3]

Instead of televised address of their leader, the students were presented with an empty channel. After few minutes of waiting, Jones announced that they have been a part of an experiment in fascism and that they all willingly created a sense of superiority that German citizens had in the period of Nazi Germany. He then played them a film about Nazi regime. That was the end of the experiment.^[3]

See also

• Milgram experiment
• Stanford prison experiment
• Peer pressure
• Jane Elliott brown-eye/blue-eye demonstration

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

[…]

A gradual, subtle use of these techniques has been done with the mythical ‘911’ and ‘the war on terror’, ‘staying the course’, ‘flip flopping’ Fox News etc etc. That is how we can explain lines like, “they hate our freedoms”, and all the other bizarre bullshit over the last seven years and more.

What is so sad is that this experiment was not repeated throughout america….but then, some of those people would probably carry The Third Wave on in private, and then join the Murder Inc Cabal!!!

Watch the film re-creation of the expeirment.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come – G. Edward Griffin – Freedom Force International

This is a lecture, where G. Edward Griffin says everything we have said on BLOGDIAL for the past seven years is repeated point for point.

You should watch it.

Then check out his website:

http://www.freedom-force.org/

Where you can read his ‘Freedom Creed’:

THE CREED OF FREEDOM

Intrinsic Nature of Rights
I believe that only individuals have rights, not the collective group; that these rights are intrinsic to each individual, not granted by the state; for if the state has the power to grant them, it also has the power to deny them, and that is incompatible with personal liberty.
I believe that a just government derives its power solely from the governed. Therefore, the state must never presume to do anything beyond what individual citizens also have the right to do. Otherwise, the state is a power unto itself and becomes the master instead of the servant of society.

Supremacy of the Individual
I believe that one of the greatest threats to freedom is to allow any group, no matter its numeric superiority, to deny the rights of the minority; and that one of the primary functions of just government is to protect each individual from the greed and passion of the majority.

Freedom of Choice
I believe that desirable social and economic objectives are better achieved by voluntary action than by coercion of law. I believe that social tranquility and brotherhood are better achieved by tolerance, persuasion, and the power of good example than by coercion of law. I believe that those in need are better served by charity, which is the giving of one’s own money, than by welfare, which is the giving of other people’s money through coercion of law.

Equality Under Law
I believe that all citizens should be equal under law, regardless of their national origin, race, religion, gender, education, economic status, life style, or political opinion. Likewise, no class should be given preferential treatment, regardless of the merit or popularity of its cause. To favor one class over another is not equality under law.

Proper Role of Government
I believe that the proper role of government is negative, not positive; defensive, not aggressive. It is to protect, not to provide; for if the state is granted the power to provide for some, it must also be able to take from others, and once that power is granted, there are those who will seek it for their advantage. It always leads to legalized plunder and loss of freedom. If government is powerful enough to give us everything we want, it is also powerful enough to take from us everything we have. Therefore, the proper function of government is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens; nothing more. That government is best which governs least.

Lib Dems plan tax for super rich

That gaggle of nimrods the Lib-Dems, are lashing out with the cut vines that provide them with year round sour grapes.

Lib Dem treasury spokesman Vince Cable says he wants to end the “ridiculous anomaly” which sees the owners of homes worth millions paying only council tax.

The only ‘ridiculous anomaly’ here is that these morons still make noises like they matter to anyone. They have no ideas of their own, do not even have a original twists on old ideas, and time after time demonstrate that they have even less understanding about what is really going on in the world.

These are the same idiots who are totally against the ID card because it will probe into people’s private lives and give snooping powers to every Tom Dick and Harry, but who with the same tongue, push for a local income tax to replace the rates. Duh; the same council workers who would run that ‘service’ would be into your most personal business on an unprecedented scale under such a wicked and stupid idea much worse than in the ID card scenario.

These cretins couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag.

Mr Cable told BBC News he had scrapped plans for a levy on properties worth £1m – but he was still considering a tax on the homes of the “super rich”.

Sour Grapes, jealousy, ignorance, disregard for consequences. That is what these fools and this fool in particular are all about. This announcement and its language are the most base sort of call to gutter emotions and SHAME on anyone who sinks to this level, or who thinks that people are so stupid that they will go along with the ‘politics of jealousy’. This is not the 1970′ you stupid fool.

He said he would be announcing detailed proposals later this year.

And in a speech to the party’s spring conference, Mr Cable told wealthy non-domiciles to “pay up or pack up”.

These catch-phrases betray his simple mindedness, and his disregard for the British people. Everyone has had enough of this sort of garbage, this trash talk, this empty rhetoric, these recycled ideas stapled together on pieces of scrap paper in steering meetings.

Thank heavens these jackasses do not have a hope of being elected.

Labour and the Conservatives have both outlined plans for a levy on non-domiciled foreign nationals who pay no tax on their overseas earnings, but Mr Cable said they had not gone anywhere near far enough.

The Tories will drop these insane plans. Labor…well, we know all about them don’t we?

He said: “After 10 years of dithering Gordon Brown has decided to act.

As a veteran of the struggle against Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax, he has decided – you’ve guessed already – to introduce a poll tax.

“Billionaire Lakshmi Mittal is to pay the same tax as a non-dom shopkeeper.

“Not surprisingly, the Tories agree that this is fair, indeed, they claim to have thought of it first.

The non-dom fiasco has already blown up in the face of Neu Labour, and London is going to suffer as a result of it. This is nothing to be happy about or to trumpet, unless you are a delusional half-wit like Cable.

“Yet there has been an almost hysterical reaction from the City. How dare British politicians query the tax privileges of the rich?

“If we are not careful, they say, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs living in 80m houses will no longer feel welcome and go somewhere else.

This is the sort of nonsense that has caused the flight from London. This is what happens when you let pinheads get onto a microphone or even worse, into the legislature. These petty minded, unexposed, foolish, and unthinking monkeys are hell bend on dismantling what is left of Britain, all for a few symbolic pennies. The whining speech, the stereotyping and the base thought of this bad man are actually THE PROBLEM.

‘Pay up or pack up’

“That’s tough. Let them go. We say that foreign expatriates are welcome to live and work in Britain.

“But when they have been here seven years, they pay British tax like the rest of us. Pay up or pack up.”

And, you total idiot, that is exactly what they are doing. They are taking themselves, their businesses, their clients, their art, their patronage, EVERYTHING with them, and they are NOT COMING BACK. They are firing their British employees, closing their offices, moving their bank accounts. They are leaving nothing behind; they are moving all their company registered offices…they are not leaving a single pencil behind.

You have what you wanted. They are packing up and leaving.

Mr Cable also said he wanted to be more “radical” in his approach to taxation.

“I would like to see a much tougher approach to the windfalls on property and land values enjoyed by the super rich,” he told delegates.

At last year’s Lib Dem spring conference Mr Cable floated the idea of an annual 1% levy on homes worth more than £1m.

Not only is this insane, it is immoral and very probably illegal under EU law.

‘Anomaly’

He told BBC News he had dropped that idea as unworkable – but he still wanted to devise a way of extracting more tax revenue from the owners of very high value homes.

Why?

He said the fact that some houses in London were worth £80m or more but the owners only paid council tax on them was a “ridiculous anomaly that has to be addressed”.

Why?

He said the cash generated should be used to cut tax on low- and middle- income families, with the aim of taking some of them out of the tax system altogether.

This is a LIE because the amount of money raised will not be enough to cover what he is planning, which is, in essence, “I will steal from the rich to give you money so vote for us”.

An appalling and disgraceful sentiment.

Mr Cable also used his conference speech to set out proposals for an increase in tax on “high alcohol” drinks to be offset by a cut in the VAT on fruit juices from 17.5% to 5%.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7284895.stm

More tweaking and coercion. Sad and pathetic.

I hear the sound of toilets flushing.

It is the sound of the Liberal Democrats being disposed of with their intellectual bedfellows; SHIT.

Heathrow airport first to fingerprint

By David Millward and Gordon Rayner

Millions of British airline passengers face mandatory fingerprinting before being allowed to board flights when Heathrow’s Terminal 5 opens later this month.

For the first time at any airport, the biometric checks will apply to all domestic passengers leaving the terminal, which will handle all British Airways flights to and from Heathrow.

The key here is domestic flights; that you are being treated like a criminal to travel in your own country.

These measures are extra and unnecessary and are the result of the collaboration of the architect and the vendors of fingerprinting technology.

The controversial security measure is also set to be introduced at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminal 1, and many airline industry insiders believe fingerprinting could become universal at all UK airports within a few years.

These are not ‘security measures’ they are Security Theatre none of these measures can predict how a person is going to behave, and in order to stop bad behavior, that is what fingerprinting has to do, and it cannot do that.

This is a measure to control and track the movement of people, pure and simple. It is being introduced to soften up the public to the idea of universal fingerprinting. Since no one who goes through this airport is being checked against a criminal register, you will always be able to get onto your plane at Terminal 5, after having been fingerprinted. This will reduce the apprehension that many people have about being fingerprinted. The trap will be sprung however, when they instantly check your identity against the NIR when you ‘finger in’ and you are not allowed to board a plane because you have not paid your Council Tax.

That is the ultimate aim of all of this, and they can afford to throw away millions of scans in the first years of operation because what they will be gaining is a change in perception, and that is worth the lost data. In any case, they will start storing the fingerprints eventually and since no one will care, it will simply just be announced and that will be that. Even if people do care, no one in the UK seems to have the will to resist this garbage.

All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in.

To ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person, the fingerprinting process will be repeated just before they board the aircraft and the photograph will be compared with their face.

First of all, you have the right to refuse to do this.

Secondly, we have written about this before in detail.

BAA, the company which owns Heathrow, insists the biometric information will be destroyed after 24 hours and will not be passed on to the police.

They might not do this NOW but they could easily do it in the future at any time, and also, if the police demand it, they will comply instantaneously.

It says the move is necessary to prevent criminals, terrorists and illegal immigrants trying to bypass border controls.

This is an absolute LIE and they know it. See the two BLOGDIAL posts for a full explanation.

The company said the move had been necessitated by the design of Terminal 5, where international and domestic passengers share the same lounges and public areas after they have checked in.

Without the biometric checks, the company says, potential criminals and illegal immigrants arriving on international flights or in transit to another country could bypass border controls by swapping boarding passes with a domestic passenger who has already checked in.

They could then board the domestic flight, where proof of identity is not currently required, fly on to another UK airport and leave without having to go through passport control.

The truth of this is that Terminal 5 was built with this deliberate design flaw by Richard Rogers; instead of using walls to control passengers like every other airport, they made the deliberate decision to create a single area for all passengers, and then to use biometrics to segregate the domestic and international passengers.

This building was designed in this way specifically because they believed it was possible to do it and maintain immigration controls through biometrics instead of walls. They deliberately intended to have millions of people fingerprinted. This is why, in the two BLOGDIAL posts above, I call this one of the worst buildings ever made.

Most other airports avoid the problem by keeping international and domestic passengers separate at all times, but the mixed lounges exist at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminal 1.

And all of a sudden, there is a need for this security theatre at Gatwick and Terminal 1? For decades people have been traveling through these airports without problems, despite the experience becoming increasingly unpleasant over the years, and the immigration controls have been enforced properly.

The fact of the matter is that fingerprint technology vendors have hoodwinked the government and industry. They have almost successfully pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes the world of business has ever seen. They have nearly succeeded in the greatest snake-oil transaction that has ever been.

Gatwick and Manchester currently deal with the problem by photographing all passengers as they pass through security, and checking the picture against their face at the departure gate.

This is less intrusive than being photographed AND fingerprinted. The fact of the matter is though that it is better to use walls; ARCHITECTURE to control people and enforce immigration laws.

Terminal 1 will soon introduce fingerprinting.

Civil liberties campaigners have raised concerns about the possibility of security agencies trying to access the treasure trove of personal data in the future, adding that fingerprinting “will make innocent people feel like criminals”.

Correct. It really is a treasure trove. Think about it: They be able to capture every travelers (British or not):

• fingerprints
• photograph
• passport details
• destination
• other itinerary data
• traveling companions

and through connection with other databases,

• credit card details
• spending habits
• home address

If you believe that the police do not want access to this, and to take it further, the MI5 will not have realtime back door access from day one of operations, you are COMPLETELY DELUSIONAL. This data is worth the weight of all the airplanes in the British Airways fleet. There is no way that they are going to passively sit back and let it evaporate.

There are also fears that fingerprinting will add to the infamous “Heathrow hassle” which has led to some business travellers holding meetings in other countries because they want to avoid the sprawling, scruffy airport at any cost.

Its already happening, and this fingerprinting nonsense, Fascist in nature and intent, is already putting off americans and others.

Although fingerprinting is carried out at some foreign airports – most notably in the US – as part of immigration checks for international arrivals, Heathrow will be the first to fingerprint domestic passengers before they board their flights.

Britain always seems to be the country trying hard to look toughest without understanding the real nature of the problems and the forces involved. Britain brings in ID cards; they are the worst, most invasive, most Fascist in the whole world. Britain brings in fingerprinting at airports; it is the only one fingerprinting for domestic flights, a totally unnecessary, stupid, over the top measure.

Britain is better than this, and the British are smarter than this.

Even if domestic passengers have a passport with them, they will still have to go through the biometric checks.

Which demonstrates that all of this is total Security Theatre. They are not interested in correctly identifying people so that the immigration rules are adhered to; were that the case, British Citizens carrying British Passports with them would be allowed to board domestic flights without being fingerprinted. It also shows that they do not trust the new Biometric Passports as a way to verify the identity of the holder.

Think about how ridiculous this is. These are the same vendors who say that the biometric fingerprint scanning identifies the holder and secures the passport, but when it comes to Terminal 5, this is suddenly not good enough, and the passport is useless for the purpose of identification!

Dr Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, an expert on the impact on technology on civil liberties, is one of the scheme’s strongest critics.

He said: “There is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records of who has travelled within the country will not be, and it will provide a rich source of data for the police and intelligence agencies.

Correct.

“I grew up in a society where you only fingerprinted people if you suspected them of being criminals. By doing this they will make innocent people feel like criminals.

It will turn them into suspects. It will violate them on an unprecedented scale.

The real question here is, “What are you prepared to do to bring back the society that you grew up in”.

“There will also be a suspicion that this is the thin end of the wedge, that we are being softened up by making fingerprinting seem normal in the run-up to things like ID cards.”

This is not a suspicion, it is a plain fact. This IS the thin end of the wedge, and it is one of several wedges that are going to meet together to slice the british public into mincemeat.

Mr Hosein claimed automatic fingerprint technology is only 90 per cent accurate at best, and clear fingerprints can be difficult to obtain.

True, but irrelevant. Even if it worked 100% of the time, the principle of it is wrong.

Simon Davies, of campaign group Privacy International, suggested a photograph alone would be a perfectly adequate – and much cheaper – way of identifying passengers.

“If they are photographing people anyway, why can’t that be used as a means of identifying them, rather than taking biometric data?” he said. “It would probably be 50 times more reliable at a 50th of the cost.

True, but what they will counter with is the studies showing that staff do not check photographs in IDs properly. “Only a machine can be trusted” they will say.

“Fingerprint recognition technology is far from perfect, and the experience in the US has shown that the information can only be used retrospectively, not in real time, as it takes so long to match a fingerprint to the one held on the database.

“I think once again we are seeing the introduction of technology whose benefits are illusory.”

The only thing that is not illusory about this is the money made by the vendors. Follow the money, and every time you come face to face with the real culprits, and on this particular trail, you will pass by Richard Rogers before you come face to face with the devil.

A spokesman for British Airways said: “We are supportive of the use of fingerprinting at Terminal 5. We need to make sure the right people get on the right flights and this will definitely help us to ease check-in and boarding procedures.”

They would say that wouldn’t they? What are they going to do, call it all off?!

BAA said the fingerprinting scheme was decided upon after consultation with the Home Office, and the company is keen to reassure passengers that their fingerprints will not be made available to any outside agency.

WTF?

“Fire is hot, but you can put your hand in it and not be burned”.

As I have been saying, this is a softening up exercise.

A spokesman said: “The data will be destroyed after 24 hours. It will not be made available to the police or anyone else. This is purely for border and immigration control.”

Immigration control is being re-imagined as a part of the police force. They are even calling it ‘Border Control Police’.

They cannot even lie convincingly.

International passengers will not be fingerprinted, as they must show a passport when they check in and before they board their flight.

So now, a passport is OK for identification!!
It is only BRITISH passports that are not good enough to identify the holder!!

YOU CANNT MAKE STUFF LIKE THIS UP!!!

However, the fingerprinting of domestic passengers is expected to be the first step in the increasing use of the technology for people coming to and from Britain.

Within the next few weeks BAA will announce plans for voluntary fingerprinting under a so-called “trusted traveller” scheme.

Actually, the whole thing is voluntary. You can refuse to submit to it, and they accommodate you. This article is incorrect in saying that it is mandatory.

Those willing to have their fingerprints and passport information stored would be able to bypass immigration queues by placing their finger on a scanner instead of waiting to have their passport checked.

And people WILL DO IT, which is the shocking thing.

The move follows a trial of the technology, known as “miSense”, at Heathrow last year.

non-sense more like!

In the long term, fingerprinting could become even more widespread when the Government introduces tighter embarkation controls next year, which have not yet been specified but could range from having to show passports more often before boarding or using biometric checks.

Officials began talks with the aviation industry within months of an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airlines in August 2006.

You see? an ALLEGED plot, not even a real one (not that that is a reason to give up your liberty). They do not even have to blow up the planes to push these measures through.

At the time, the Home Office refused to rule out the use of fingerprint and biometric checks as part of routine embarkation controls, and some industry insiders believe universal fingerprinting may be brought in when biometric passports are introduced in 2012.

One option could be to routinely check fingerprints against the criminal record database – a step which is currently only taken when immigration officers have a reason to be suspicious.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/07/nheathrow107.xml

And there you have it. At the end, an admission that they want to be able to run your prints against the criminal database every time you travel. This is not about immigration, this is about controlling the ordinary person. As the system marches on, and like US-VISIT, they catch only 1000 people at a cost of FIFTEEN MILLION dollars each, pressure will grow for the system to be used to catch any criminal of any kind, meaning that they will broaden the definition of criminal to people who have parking tickets, fines, ‘CCJs’ and any manner of ‘offense’ no matter how trifling.

We already know these systems are not about catching ‘terrorists’.

What else can I say, other than, “you have been warned”.

All the world’s a stage at some of Minnesota’s bars.

A new state ban on smoking in restaurants and other nightspots contains an exception for performers in theatrical productions. So some bars are getting around the ban by printing up playbills, encouraging customers to come in costume, and pronouncing them “actors.”

The customers are playing right along, merrily puffing away — and sometimes speaking in funny accents and doing a little improvisation, too.

The state Health Department is threatening to bring the curtain down on these sham productions. But for now, it’s on with the show.

At The Rock, a hard-rock and heavy-metal bar in suburban St. Paul, the “actors” during “theater night” do little more than sit around, drink, smoke and listen to the earsplitting music.

“They’re playing themselves before Oct. 1. You know, before there was a smoking ban,” owner Brian Bauman explained. Shaping the words in the air with his hands, like a producer envisioning the marquee, he said: “We call the production, `Before the Ban!'”

The smoking ban, passed by the Legislature last year, allows actors to light up in character during theatrical performances as long as patrons are notified in advance.

About 30 bars in Minnesota have been exploiting the loophole by staging the faux theater productions and pronouncing cigarettes props, according to an anti-smoking group.

Health department ends the show
“It’s too bad they didn’t put as much effort into protecting their employees from smoking,” grumbled Jeanne Weigum, executive director of the Association for Nonsmokers.

The Health Department this week vowed to begin cracking down on theater nights with fines of as much as $10,000.

“The law was enacted to protect Minnesotans from the serious health effects of secondhand smoke,” Minnesota Health Commissioner Sanne Magnan said. “It is time for the curtain to fall on these theatrics.”

At The Rock earlier this week, a black stage curtain covered part of the entrance, and a sign next to it with an arrow read, “Stage Entrance.” Along the opposite wall, below a sign saying “Props Dept.,” was a stack of the only props needed: black ashtrays.

At the door was a printed playbill for that night’s program, with a list of names of the people portraying bartenders and security guards. Playing the owner: “Brian.”

Courtney Conk paid $1 for a button that said “Act Now” and pinned it to her shirt. That made her an actor for the night, entitling her to smoke. She turned in an understated, minimalist performance, sitting with cigarette in hand and talking to a bass player with the band.

“I thought it was funny that they found a loophole,” Conk said. “I’m more of an activist-actor tonight, you could say. I think it’s kind of this way of saying what we think about the ban.”

While The Rock asks nothing of its actors by way of creativity, a few other bars have been a little more theatrical.

Some ‘actors’ go all out
At Barnacles Resort and Campground along Lake Mille Lacs, a “traveling tobacco troupe” dressed in medieval costume on the first theater night. Mark Benjamin, a lawyer who pushed bars to exploit the loophole, wore tights, a feathered cap and black boots.

“Hey, I’m a child of the ’60s. I can do a little improv,” he said. His improv amounted to speaking in medieval character to other patrons.

In Hill City, Mike’s Uptown owner Lisa Anderson has been offering theater night once a week. The bar had a Mardi Gras theme last Saturday, attracting about 30 patrons, most of them in costume.

“I was dressed in a Victorian dress with the old fluffy thing that weighs 500 pounds,” she said. “We had some fairies and some pirates and a group of girls — I’m not sure what they were, but they had big boas and flashy makeup.”

Though there were no skits, Anderson said some people “start talking with different accents.” She added: “It’s turned into the funnest thing I can imagine.”

One bar on northern Minnesota’s Iron Range, the Queen City Sports Place, calls its nightly smokefest “The Tobacco Monologues.”

Theater nights pay off
Proving anew there’s no business like show business, Anderson said her theater-night receipts have averaged $2,000 — up from $500 right after the ban kicked in. Similarly, Bauman said revenue at The Rock dropped off 30 percent after the ban took effect, then shot back up to normal once the bar began allowing smoking again.

He and other bar owners said they plan to continue putting on theater nights.

“There’s no question we were struggling,” he said. “And we are extremely nervous that this is going to go away, and we will be back to the way it was.”

[…]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23505802/

A simulation inside a simulation.

As they pile on the legislation, the weight on the patience of the citizens increases. One day, the weight will become unsustainable, and the strain will cause not a collapse, but a loud ‘SNAP!’ and all of this will be over. The economic pressures bearing down like a giant hand on top of the legislative pile only serve to hasten this snapping.

Many people have already had enough and have acted.

It is going to spread at the speed of sound once the loud ‘CRACK!’ is heard; and it is not a sound that will diminish as it propagates. It will get LOUDER as it travels until it will be the only sound that anyone can hear.

I can’t wait!

ID card retreat as new passport option offered
By Andrew Porter, Political Editor
Last Updated: 7:10am GMT 06/03/2008

British citizens will be able to choose between having an ID card or a new biometric passport, under new plans to be unveiled by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.

In what will be seen as a watering down of the scheme, Miss Smith will stress that there is still a case for compulsory ID cards but that the scheme needs to be implemented gradually.

The Home Secretary will insist that Gordon Brown has not decided against the introduction of ID cards – a move which both Opposition parties are against.

But a previous plan, stating that by 2010 anyone applying for a new passport would be given an ID card as well, has changed. Now passport applicants will be given a choice.

Ministers will then wait to see how this voluntary scheme progresses before any expansion.

Personal details from both passports and ID cards will still be entered on the National Identity Register, Miss Smith will say. New biometric passports contain fingerprints and iris scans.

In particular, ministers want to see whether the technology works. Opponents of ID cards have argued that Government has a very poor record with IT systems and complicated Whitehall projects.

Under the plans, foreign nationals who want to settle in Britain from later this year will have to have an ID card.

And by next year certain workers in “key sensitive areas” like airports and ports will have to carry the new document. That will be part of long-term anti-terrorist measures…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/06/nid106.xml

Jackqui Smith Washes down her filthy Kebab with some Kool Aid.

This is not a retreat or a voluntary scheme as this newspaper mistakenly claims. It is however, an extraordinary article, and it reveals the long term plans of the government. They are not ‘waiting to see if the technology works’ they are waiting for it to mature so that the error rates are acceptable.

One thing is abundantly clear: they are planning to allow foreign governments access to the NIR. That is the only way that foreign ports will be able to see if an ID card holder is carrying a genuine ID card, and it is the only way that they can sell the idea of people accepting an ID card instead of a passport. Who would take an ID card that is useless for travel over a passport? And by the way, where are they going to store the record of your border crossing? How will you be able to prove that you entered and left Germany? They will doubtless keep a record; how will they keep this record, what will it consist of, and how does this method of border crossing benefit you, the traveller? It seems to me that the only entities that benefit are everyone OTHER than you, the traveller and citizen!

With a passport you have a record of where you have been, accessible by you without any need to cooperate with a third party. With an ID card only system, in order to see where you have been, you will have to swipe your card in a government terminal, whereupon they will show you a list of where you have been, in the same way that Oyster does. Something to think about, isn’t it?

This is how using an ID cart at a German airport will work:

• Your card will be swiped at the German border.
• The card reader will access the NIR.
• Your record will be displayed to the passport officer.

That is the only way that this choice of getting an ID card OR a passport will work. And of course, once your data is displayed, it is capturable by the Germans or anyone else who has access to the NIR. In fact it needs to be capturable so that the Germans have a record of your crossing, otherwise, there will be no record at all; not kept by you (no place on the card to keep it) and not by them.

Now to the part about the NIR itself. It is clear that someone has sat down with that Kebab scoffing scumbag and explained to her that…

THE FINGERPRINT IS THE ID CARD.

She has finally understood that if the NIR is in place, it does not matter that people have the physical card, which is a vestigial artifact of the days before ubiquitous computing. Your fingerprints are the card, and swiping the card in a reader, like a chip and pin reader, is no different to putting your fingerprint on a reader. It is only a slight modification to be able to show the name and face of whoever has their finger on the reader to the person who is trying to prove that,”you are who you say you are”. The one watt light bulb has lit above her pea brain, “Why do we need the card at all? its just a huge expense, and a symbol of resistance around which they can rally! If we quietly put them all in the NIR, when that process is finished, we can roll out the fingerprint readers and have the same system in place without the card step!!”.

This is very much how the conversation would have gone I imagine.

The above example now turns into this:

• Your fingerprints will be swiped at the German border.
• The fingerprint reader will access the NIR.
• Your record will be displayed to the passport officer.

same result, only without the card.

They are now going to be able to claim that the cards are voluntary, and they will not be lying. The power and evil of this system in in the NIR, and that is still on the cards. Yes, I typed that!

What is so great about this plan is that no one will take an ID card over a passport. Passports are familiar, have a far greater utility and perceived value. You get to take away a record of where you have been. Everyone will be fooled into thinking that they have made a choice against ID cards as they blithely put their fingerprints into the NIR; the actual goal of this system. The government will be able to claim that ID cards have been rejected, and are being dropped because the public does not want them, not because the government was wrong in trying to introduce them. They will have the NIR in place, with everyone in it, and they will have had their cake and eaten it.

It is clear that the focus should now turn completely to the NIR, as the card is being abandoned. Without the recent missing DVDR scandal, I would have said that this is going to be a harder thing to sell; in the VietNam War era, draft dodgers burned their cards as a symbol of resistance. The public can understand the idea of ‘not wanting a card’. Making them understand what a database is is a different matter entirely.

I am surprised (not) that the Unions are not making a noise about their members being discriminated against; why should they be singled out for abuse and violation before anyone else?

To sum up, in order for the ID card to be interchangeable with a passport, you need to give access to the NIR to foreign governments. That means the entire NIR will eventually exist in other governments databases, and in the hands of criminals.

There is absolutely no reason to manage document security in this way; and there are methods of issuing documents that make them secure but which do not have any of the negative side effects of centralized databases and unique numbers assigned to individuals.

Eventually, the NIR too will be abandoned as the understanding of precisely what it means dawns upon the public. It will probably take some more missing laptops or DVDRs to make it happen. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be to all the members of the lower house having their bank details published on the internets.

Then they would understand first hand what all of this really means.

Courtesy of Web Of Evil

The Proms attract too narrow a section of society, culture minister Margaret Hodge has suggested in a speech.

Margaret Hodge biography includes:

Margaret entered politics in 1973 as a councillor for the London Borough of Islington where she was Chair of the Housing Committee from 1975 to 1979 and Deputy Leader from 1981 to 1982, before becoming Leader from 1982 to 1992. She spent two years as a consultant for Price Waterhouse from 1992 to 1994.

She was educated at Bromley High School and Oxford High School before obtaining a BSc at the London School of Economics. Margaret Hodge is married with four children and one grandchild.

So, the qualifications to be a Minister for Culture are…? I would prefer to see Brian Sewell, Mark Kermode, Jon Wozencroft, Bruce Gilbert.. even Rolf Harris!

She praised “icons of a common culture” from Coronation Street to the Angel of the North and said culture could “enhance a sense of shared identity”.

Icons of a common culture? The Angel of the North? To share a liking (or a dislike!) for a particular sculpture does not ‘enhance a sense of shared identity’.

As for Coronation Street, Hodge clearly misinterprets a commercial vehicle designed to attract the largest audience of a particular category in order to sell premium advertising time as a piece of ‘art’ through which one can connect with peers from all manner of social backgrounds.

But the Proms was one of several major cultural events many people did not feel comfortable attending, she said.

So by extension, any public performance (or ‘major cultural event’) should be dragged down to the lowest common denominator. Is classical music, as a part of culture, not intended to push boundaries, to increase our understanding of each other and ourselves through the generation of shared emotions? Why then should anyone feel excluded? Everyone has the personal choice to go or not. When the Hodges of this world start telling you what you may and may not enjoy as part of our ‘culture’ then something is seriously awry.

Tory leader David Cameron said she did not “get it” and said the Proms were a “great symbol of our Britishness”.

He is kind of right, but he only really means that non-skinheads get to wave the Union flag without getting beaten by policemen. The Proms are certainly a symbol of openess. Look at this list of concerts at last year’s Proms, the sheer breadth of music should be lauded as a wonderful acheivement, moreover since every night is sold out. That does not strike me as a series of concerts failing in their task.

He also stressed the numbers of other Proms during the concert season – such as Proms in the Park and the Electric Proms.

‘Feel at ease’

In a speech to the IPPR think tank on Britishness, Heritage and the Arts, Mrs Hodge said a “shared sense of common cultural identity” was a key part of social integration and cohesion.

Since the rise of the British Empire, how can the population of Britain possibly have a shared sense of common cultural identity? This statement is either based on a misunderstanding of ‘cultural identity’, possibly mistaking ‘living in Britain’ with ‘being British’, or a misunderstanding of what constitutes ‘culture’. Living near Stamford Hill in London did not let me share a cultural identity with the Jewish community. My living in Hackney did not encourage my muslim neighbours to drink ale or eat black pudding, things I may place as part of my cultural identity. By not choosing to get hideously drunk on tasteless lager while wearing a short-sleeved shirt in all weathers and letching at anything with 2 X chromosomes every Friday and Saturday night I am culturally alienated from a large part of my generation. What should I do?

But then what does Hodge mean by ‘culture‘? It is a word with a particularly broad meaning, and I would very much like to hear her definition.

She said she wanted to “challenge our sectors square on”.

I would also like to hear what the blue blazes “challenge our sectors square on” means!

“The audiences for some of many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking particularly of the Proms – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this,” she added.

Just as culture pushes the boundaries it can make some people proud to belong, it can make others feel isolated and deeply offended Margaret Hodge Culture minister

“I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can.”

Hodge should try reading Lydgate (and Lincoln) …

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

If one point of art (and culture, of which art is a part) is to challenge, then not everyone will like everything. It’s no more than common sense, Margaret. Is she determined to demonstrate exactly why Rolf would make a better Minister than her?

In her speech, Mrs Hodge praised other institutions for “creating the icons of a common culture that everybody can feel a part of” – such as the Angel of the North, the British Museum and the Eden project as well as TV and radio shows “from Coronation Street to the Archers” and shared public holidays.

Well, I can take or leave the Angel… I’m certain some of Britain’s Greek, Mexican, Egyptian, Italian, Indian (et al.) communities are offended by the contents of the British Museum (or, rather, by the fact that the British Museum contains THEIR stolen cultural artefacts while portraying them as part of Great Britishness … the Eden project (if one can call it a cultural ICON is highly doubtful) is simply dull compared to the natural landscape of Bodmin Moor, for example, or the Cornish Coast, or Yorkshire Dales, Highlands… Coronation Street we have covered, and I abhor it… and if there is one programme which has a particular and non-inclusive audience then it is the Archers on Radio 4!

National motto

But she acknowledged that culture could also be divisive – citing the examples of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which Christians said was blasphemous and Behtzi, a play which depicted sex abuse in a Sikh temple and was cancelled after protests.

“Just as culture pushes the boundaries it can make some people proud to belong, it can make others feel isolated and deeply offended,” she said. […] From BBQ.

Did she not notice as The Point Of It All flew right over her head? “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”

I can’t dissect further. Her idiocy is certainly all-inclusive. Her sectors are undoubtedly challenged square-on. Yet this woman has powet to decide ‘cultural priorities for museums and funding projects supported by you and I. It is not funny and it could be very damaging. I would not be surprised if the only culture Margeret Hodge is familiar with is thrush.

By the end of the year in 2133, it had become obvious to some of the more experienced observers of human history that the “Raman Boom” was leading mankind toward disaster. Dire warnings of impending economic doom started being heard above the euphoric shouts of the millions who had recently vaulted into the middle and upper classes. Suggestions to balance budgets and limit credit at all levels of the economy were ignored. Instead, creative effort was expended to come up with one way after another of putting more spending power in the hands of a populace that had forgotten how to say wait, much less no, to itself.

The global stock market began to sputter in January of 2134 and there were predictions of a coming crash. But to most humans spread around the Earth and throughout the scattered colonies in the solar system, the concept of such a crash was beyond comprehension. After all, the world economy had been expanding for over nine years, the last two years at a rate unparalleled in the previous two centuries. World leaders insisted that they had finally found the mechanisms that could truly inhibit the downturns of the capitalistic cycles. And the people believed them-until early May of 2134.

During the first three months of the year the global stock markets went inexorably down, slowly at first, then in significant drops. Many people, reflecting the superstitious attitude toward cometary visitors that had been prevalent for two thousand years, somehow associated the stock market’s difficulties with the return of Halley’s Comet. Its apparition starting in March turned out to be far brighter than anyone expected. For weeks scientists all over the world were competing with each other to explain why it was so much more brilliant than originally predicted. After it swooped past perihelion in late March and began to appear in the evening sky in mid-April, its enormous tail dominated the heavens.

In contrast, terrestrial affairs were dominated by the emerging world economic crisis. On May 1, 2134, three of the largest international banks announced that they were insolvent because of bad loans. Within two days a panic had spread around the world. The more than one billion home terminals with access to the global financial markets were used to dump individual portfolios of stocks and bonds. The communications load on the Global Network System (GNS) was immense. The data transfer machines were stretched far beyond their capabilities and design specifications. Data gridlock delayed transactions for minutes, then hours, contributing additional momentum to the panic.

By the end of a week two things were apparent-that over half of the world’s stock value had been obliterated and that many individuals, large and small investors alike, who had used their credit options to the maximum, were now virtually penniless. The supporting data bases that kept track of personal bank accounts and automatically transferred money to cover margin calls were flashing disaster messages in almost 20 percent of the houses in the world.

In truth, however, the situation was much much worse. Only a small percentage of the transactions were actually clearing through all the supporting computers because the data rates in all directions were far beyond anything that had ever been anticipated. In computer language, the entire global financial system went into the “cycle slip” mode. Billions and billions of information transfers at lower priorities were postponed by the network of computers while the higher priority tasks were being serviced first.

The net result of these data delays was that in most cases individual electronic bank accounts were not properly debited, for hours or even days, to account for the mounting stock market losses, Once the individual investors realized what was occurring, they rushed to spend whatever was still showing in their balances before the computers completed all the transactions. By the time governments and financial institutions understood fully what was going on and acted to stop all this frenetic activity, it was too late. The confused system had crashed completely. To reconstruct what had happened required carefully dumping and interleaving the backup checkpoint files stored at a hundred or so remote centers around the world.

For over three weeks the electronic financial management system that governed all money transactions was inaccessible to everybody. Nobody knew how much money he had-or how much anyone else had. Since cash had long ago become obsolete, only eccentrics and collectors had enough bank notes to buy even a week’s groceries. People began to barter for necessities. Pledges based on friendship and personal acquaintance enabled many people to survive temporarily. But the pain had only begun. Every time the international management organization that oversaw the global financial system would announce that they were going to try to come back on-line and would plead with people to stay off their terminals except for emergencies, their pleas would be ignored, processing requests would flood the system, and the computers would crash again.

It was only two more weeks before the scientists of the world agreed on an explanation for the additional brightness in the apparition of Halley’s Comet. But it was over four months before people could count again on reliable data base information from the GNS. The cost to human society of the enduring chaos was incalculable. By the time normal electronic economic activity had been restored, the world was in a violent financial down-spin that would not bottom out until twelve years later. It would be well over fifty years before the Gross World Product would return to the heights reached before the Crash of 2134.

AFTER THE CRASH
There is unanimous agreement that The Great Chaos profoundly altered human civilization in every way. No segment of society was immune. The catalyst for the relatively rapid collapse of the existing institutional infrastructure was the market crash and subsequent breakdown of the global financial system; however, these events would not have been sufficient, by themselves, to project the world into a period of unprecedented depression. What followed the initial crash would have been only a comedy of errors if so many lives had not been lost as a result of the poor planning. Inept world political leaders first denied or ignored the existing economic problems, then overreacted with a suite of individual measures that were baffling and/or inconsistent, and finally threw up their arms in despair as the global crisis deepened and spread. Attempts to coordinate international solutions were doomed to failure by the increasing need of each of the sovereign nations to respond to its own constituency.

In hindsight, it was obvious that the intemationalization of the world that had taken place during the twenty-first century had been flawed in at least one significant way. Although many activities-communications, trade, transportation (including space), currency regulation, peacekeeping, information exchange, and environmental protection, to name the most important-had indeed become international (even interplanetary, considering the space colonies), most of the agreements that established these international institutions contained codicils that allowed the individual nations to withdraw, upon relatively short notice, if the policies promulgated under the accords no longer served the interests of the country in question. In short, each of the nations participating in the creation of an international body had the right to abrogate its national involvement, unilaterally, when it was no longer satisfied with the actions of the group.

[…]

It all sounds very familiar doesn’t it? It is snarfed from Rama II, by Arthur C. Clarke.

If you change some of the dates and the technical details, it could apply directly to today; banks collapsing thanks to bad loans, no one believing a mega crash can happen, etc etc.

We must remember that the author is the man who not only wrote 2001 A Space Odyssey but he also invented the telecommunications satellite. Insightful does not begin to describe the imaginative powers of this man, which is why I have always been curious about the strange disconnect between his obvious intelligence and his skepticism about UFOs being Alien Spacecraft. It is clear to anyone who has done their research that Aliens do come here and have been coming here. Arthur Clarke is not someone to make a pronouncement without doing his research, and so how can we explain his irrational skepticism?

That was a major digression. The reason why I posted this is that this man is good at predicting the future, and I do not like what he is predicting; World Government, INEPT World Government, population control, the disappearance of the family; in fact, every New World Order wet dream is portrayed by Clarke as inevitable, and mostly desirable. The passages where he does this stick out from the story (in Rendezvous with Rama) like spikes on a cactus. They are jarring, so much so, its like they have been peppered into the story as an afterthought.

In any case, whatever writers and futurist predict, the future is not set, and there is no reason to assume that the future will be cashless, Fascist and bad. The future could be Cashed, free and sustainable, and Clarke and his NWO=GOOD Science Cult Papacy buddies proved mercifully wrong. One thing we all agree on, as demonstrated in the above passage; government cannot control the market, and no matter what happens, there WILL be crashes in the absence of hard money and real economic freedom.

The ThreeBallot Voting System
Ronald L. Rivest
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge,
MA 02139
October 1, 2006?

Abstract

We present a new paper-based voting method with interesting security properties. The attempt here is to see if one can achieve the same security properties of recently proposed cryptographic voting protocols, but without using any cryptography, using only paper ballots. We partially succeed. (Initially, I thought the proposal accomplished this goal, but several readers discovered a vote-buying attack (see Section 4.4) that appears to be rather di?cult to fix without making the resulting system much less usable in practice. Currently, this paper should thus be viewed more as an academic proposal than a practical proposal. Perhaps some variation on these ideas in this paper might still turn out to be of practical use. The &lquot;OneBallot with Exchanged Receipts&rquot; system sketched at the end of Section 5.3.1, looks particularly promising at the moment. . . ) The principles of ThreeBallot are simple and easy to understand. In this proposal, not only can each voter verify that her vote is recorded as she intended, but she gets a &lquot;receipt&rquot; that she can take home that can be used later to verify that her vote is actually included in the final tally. Her receipt, however, does not allow her to prove to anyone else how she voted. In this &lquot;ThreeBallot&rquot; voting system, each voter casts three paper ballots, with certain restrictions on how they may be filled out, so the tallying works. These paper ballots are of course &lquot;voter-verifiable.&rquot; All ballots cast are scanned and published on a web site, so anyone may correctly compute the election result. A voter receives a copy of one of her ballots as her &lquot;receipt&rquot;, which she may take home. Only the voter knows which ballot she copied for her receipt. The voter is unable to use her receipt to prove how she voted or to sell her vote, as the receipt doesn’t reveal how she voted. A voter can check that the web site contains a ballot matching her receipt. Deletion or modification of ballots is thus detectable; so the integrity of the election is verifiable.

? The latest version of this paper can always be found at http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~rivest/ Rivest-TheThreeBallotVotingSystem.pdf

Introduction

Designing secure voting systems is tough, since the constraints are apparently contradictory. In particular, the requirement for voter privacy (no one should know how Alice voted, even if Alice wants them to know) seems to contradict verifiability (how can Alice verify that her vote was counted as she intended?). The proposal presented here is an attempt to satisfy these constraints without the use of cryptograpy. We get pretty close… Like most cryptographic proposals, ThreeBallot uses a public &lquot;bulletin board&rquot;–a public web site where election officials post copies of all of the cast ballots (there will be 3n of them if there are n voters) and a list of the names of the voters who voted. (Some states might use voter ID’s rather than voter names.) One key principle of ThreeBallot is to &lquot;vote by rows&rquot; and &lquot;cast by columns&rquot;. The ThreeBallot ballot can viewed as an array, where the voter places marks in rows corresponding to candidates, but then separates the columns and casts them separately, keeping a copy of one. ThreeBallot provides a nice level of end-to-end verifiability—the voter gets assurance that her vote was cast as intended and counted as cast, and that election officials haven’t tampered with the collection of ballots counted.

Background

We assume that the reader is somewhat familiar with voting systems. For more background, the following readings are recommended:

• Roy Saltman’s new book, The History and Politics 1 of Voting Technology [19] is an outstanding scholarly history of the evolution of voting technology.
• Andrew Gumbel’s book Steal This Vote [9] is an excellent, entertaining, and very readable review of election fraud in America.
• The Brennan Center for Justice has published an excellent report [1] on voting system security, with detailed discussions of specific threats and assessments of the risks they represent.
• Randell and Ryan’s recent excellent article, &lquot;Voting Technologies and Trust,&rquot; [15], which, like this paper, explores paper-based voting system architectures similar to those of cryptographic voting systems.
• Ben Adida’s recent PhD thesis [3] (particularly Chapter 1) reviews voting system requirements and cryptographic voting systems, before giving improved cryptographic voting systems.
• There are numerous web sites with information and links about voting and voting technology, such those of Doug Jones [10], myself [16], the CalTechMIT Voting Technology Project [14], ACCURATE [2], or the Election Assistance Commission [7], to name just a few. (Try googling &lquot;voting technology&rquot;.)

Each ballot has two parts: the upper &lquot;voting region,&rquot; and then the &lquot;ballot ID region&rquot; on the lower part. The voting region of a ballot contains the candidate names, each with an op-scan bubble that can be filled in by the voter. Each ballot has a distinct ballot ID, di?erent from the ID’s of other ballots on its multi-ballot and from all other ballot ID’s. The ballot ID’s on the three ballots of a multi-ballot are unrelated in any way to each other, they are merely randomly assigned unique ballot ID’s, with no cryptographic or other significance. The ballot ID might be a long (e.g. 7-digit) number which is essentially random, or some other unique identifier, possibly in barcoded form. For now, we’ll assume that the ballot ID’s are pre-printed on the ballots, but we’ll see that there are security advantages to having them added later instead by the voter or by the &lquot;checker&rquot; (see Section 3.4).

Filling Out The Multi-Ballot

• The voter is given the following instructions for filling out the multi-ballot. See Figure 2 for an example of a filled-out multi-ballot.
• You have here three optical scan ballots arranged as three columns; you will be casting all three ballots.
• Proceed row by row through the multi-ballot. Each row corresponds to one candidate. There are three &lquot;bubbles&rquot; in a row, one on each ballot.
• To vote FOR a candidate, you must fill in exactly two of the bubbles on that candidate’s row. You may choose arbitrarily which two bubbles in that row to fill in. (It doesn’t matter, as all three ballots will be cast.)
• To vote AGAINST a candidate (i.e., to not vote FOR the candidate, or to cast a &lquot;null&rquot; vote for that candidate), you must fill in exactly one of the bubbles on that candidate’s row. You may choose arbitrarily which bubble in that row to fill in. (It doesn’t matter, as all three ballots will be cast.)
• You must fill in at least one bubble in each row; your multi-ballot will not be accepted if a row is left entirely blank.
• You may not fill in all three bubbles in a row; your multi-ballot will not be accepted if a row has all three bubbles filled in.
• You may vote FOR at most one candidate per race, unless indicated otherwise (In some races, you are allowed to vote FOR several candidates, up to a specified maximum number.) It is OK to vote AGAINST all candidates. 2

Details

We now describe the ThreeBallot voting system in more detail.

[…]

Read the rest of this paper at Scribd.

He will not dance with Brazil:
Barak Samba Heinous

We knew this:
Barak Bias Houseman

The Cult leader:
Barak Mania Bus Hoes
Amen Hub Barak Oasis

His very own 911 is coming:
Shaken Airbus Obama
Obama Airbuses Khan

Anointed by the Illuminati:
Obama Skin Bush Area
Barak Aims Bush Aeon

Don’t even THINK about it:
Obama Akin Base Rush

For his first trip to Japan as President:
Obama Saki Anus Herb
…but it will all go wrong: Obama Hear Saki Snub

Uh Oh:
Burka Sambas Ani Hoe
Burka Oasis Bah Name

Armageddon coming?:
Amok Abase Bash Ruin
Bush Bias Amok Arena
Sahib Snub Amok Area

He is, in fact, ANTI GAY:
Obama Bars Anus Hike

There are no anagrams for ‘Change’.

And now, when we spell it right:

He will eat Putin’s Noodles:
Babushka Macaronies

The number of abortions will skyrocket:
Caesarian Kabob Mush

Haloween with Obama:
Marihuana Cakes Bobs

Obama in Secret Russian Uranium mine Scandal!:
Babushkas Caiman Ore

Get out of Iraq, or:
Obama Airbase Chunks

It’s Bobby all over again:
Obama A Carbine Husks
Oak As Carbine Ambush

Big in Japan…again:
Obama A Saki Brunches

The cultists are at it again:
Obama Ascribe As Hunk

When he lunches with Jacqui Smith:
Ass Macaroni Uh Kebab

You asked for change, you am going to get it:
Sharia Backbone Am Us
‘War on Terror’ will continue tip: No Amuck Sharia Babes
oil tanker spills coming: Sharia Nabob Sea Muck
his breakfast: Sharia Bacon Bakes Um
abu ghraib ‘OB’ style: Sharia Abuse Cam Knob

there will be food and music:
Usa Harmonica Kebabs

the rumors will persist:
Hi USA Bareback Mason

sellout to Mexico:
USA Cambia Bankers Ho

STILL COMING:
Barack Samba Heinous
Barack Bias Houseman

iCancel: beautiful silence from your iPhone

iCancel is a new piece of native software that brings the gift of silence to your iPhone.

It uses the microphone in your iPhone to generate an “antinoise” sound wave that blots out the noise of the outside world. Normally wearers of iPods and the other portable music players plague their fellow bus and underground riders with the tsch tsch tsch of the latest Timbaland tune; now the tables are turned, and the iPhone is being used to block the brain mushing concentration destroying wall of noise that is a byproduct of city living.

Now you can put your iPhone on, fire up iCancel, open that book and actually absorb what you are reading.

SONY’s S7XXF has this feature also.

Obviously not for use when driving a car with screaming children in it, or when riding your bike in heavy traffic.

iMoog

The name of this juicy app says it all.

This is a fully working Moog Synthesizer emulator for your iPhone.

This alpha version is monophonic, has a 16 step sequencer and a keyboard like i-Ano’s. Very impressive and fat sound.

By John E. Dunn
Techworld
27 February 2008

Criminals have assembled a huge database of hacked FTP server logins belonging to some of the worlds leading companies, a security company has revealed.

Finjan said it had stumbled upon a database containing account usernames, passwords and server addresses for a staggering 8,700 FTP servers, many of which were being used by US Fortune 100-level enterprises.

The hacked servers could be used to distribute crimeware by injecting iframe tags into any webpage stored on the compromised FTP servers. Indeed the server accounts were themselves being traded by a web application able to rank and price them according to their Google page rank for re-sale to other criminals.

The company found the database while examining what appears to be a sophisticated Russian crimeware hub built using a newer version of the Neosploit crimeware toolkit, sophisticated enough to offers its criminal users a SaaS (software as a service) interface for carrying out attacks.

The company didnt name the domains involved for obvious reasons, but the range of sectors and countries reads like a whos who of big business. FTP details for telecoms, media, online retail, and government agencies were all present, across every leading economy and beyond.

Using the Alexa.com domain ranking, Finjan found 10 of the top 100 domains in the database, 100 of the top 500 domains, and 50 of those between 500 and 1,000.

Breaking these down by location, 2,621 were in the US, 1,247 in Russia, 392 in Australia, 354 in Asia/Pacific. The rest were covered Eastern Europe, with only a handful in western European countries such as Germany and the UK, which accounted for 80 and 78, respectively.

“With this new trading application, cyber-criminals have an instant ‘solution’ to their problem of gaining access to FTP credentials and thus infecting both the legitimate websites and unsuspecting visitors, said Finjans Yuval-Ben Itzhak.

[…]

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=11561

I could have used substitution here to make this an article about ID cards and how ‘criminals’ are going to create tools to trade in the ‘identities’ of people, but this article was just too juicy as it stood.

Back in the day there were the forerunners of these tools, like ‘cc master’ (at least thats what I think it was called; it was something around on the old [1994/5] BBSes that you could play with if you wanted to get your machine virus’d). Now of course, they are running everything on the internets as services, like bugmenot, only much more serious.

The same thing is going to happen with ID details. Underground supermarkets are going to be created where you can buy the ‘identity’ of just the sort of person you need to commit a crime, and this will include fingerprints that will be used in software that uses playback exploits to fool the back ends that are being attacked. Even without that, simple Social Engineering will be made possible by collecting and studying the detailed identity records of some sheep, that can be inserted into a script for reading out, and all of this will be done in a slick service that you pay to access.

Imagine, you pay a subscription to a service that generates scripts for you to read over the telephone. You log in. You select your gender and accent type. The system then generates some scripts for you to read, and sets up VOIP calls for you to activate with a click of your mouse. The scripts are filled with the personal details of someone (bought on a DVD) and the call is made to their bank or building society, and the script provides you with a spiel that lets you transfer money to your own account.

You are paying for the right to use these identities and the related generated scripts; if you have success or not thats down to your mad skillz as a social engineer. Recommended Reading, ‘The Art of Deception’ by Kevin D. Mitnik.

The more scripts you read and the better you get at it, the more money you collect. Snarfed profiles are charged by how many people have used them; fresh, unused profiles are the most expensive (like fresh leads; they are for closers). Identities that have been passed around alot are nearly worthless, so you can read scripts generated for these in their thousands for only a few euros.

“I’m here from downtown, and I’m here on a mission of mercy….”

True!

In the hills east of Sacramento, California, Folsom State Prison stands beside a man-made lake, surrounded by granite walls built by inmate laborers. The gun towers have peaked roofs and Gothic stonework that give the prison the appearance of a medieval fortress, ominous and forbidding. For more than a century Folsom and San Quentin were the end of the line in California’s penal system; they were the state’s only maximum-security penitentiaries. During the early 1980s, as California’s inmate population began to climb, Folsom became dangerously overcrowded. Fights between inmates ended in stabbings six or seven times a week. The poor sight lines within the old cellblocks put correctional officers at enormous risk. From 1984 to 1994 California built eight new maximum-security (Level 4) facilities. The bullet holes in the ceilings of Folsom’s cellblocks, left by warning shots, are the last traces of the prison’s violent years. Today Folsom is a medium-security (Level 2) facility, filled with the kind of inmates that correctional officers consider “soft.” No one has been stabbed to death at Folsom in almost four years. Among its roughly 3,800 inmates are some 500 murderers, 250 child molesters, and an assortment of rapists, armed robbers, drug dealers, burglars, and petty thieves. The cells in Housing Unit 1 are stacked five stories high, like boxes in a vast warehouse; glimpses of hands and arms and faces, of flickering TV screens, are visible between the steel bars. Folsom now houses almost twice as many inmates as it was designed to hold. The machine shop at the prison, run by inmates, manufactures steel frames for double bunks—and triple bunks—in addition to license plates.

Less than a quarter mile from the old prison is the California State Prison at Sacramento, known as “New Folsom,” which houses about 3,000 Level 4 inmates. They are the real hard cases: violent predators, gang members, prisoners unable to “program” well at other facilities, unable to obey the rules. New Folsom does not have granite walls. It has a “death-wire electrified fence,” set between two ordinary chain-link fences, that administers a lethal dose of 5,100 volts at the slightest touch. The architecture of New Folsom is stark and futuristic. The buildings have smooth gray concrete façades, unadorned except for narrow slits for cell windows. Approximately a third of the inmates are serving life sentences; more than a thousand have committed at least one murder, nearly 500 have committed armed robbery, and nearly 200 have committed assault with a deadly weapon.

Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom—like old Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system—now operates at roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.

Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars. “We have embarked on a great social experiment,” says Marc Mauer, the author of the upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. “No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control.” The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation’s incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America’s prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.

The economist and legal scholar Michael K. Block, who believes that American sentencing policies are still not harsh enough, offers a straightforward explanation for why the United States has lately incarcerated so many people: “There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing too many crimes.” Indeed, the nation’s prisons now hold about 150,000 armed robbers, 125,000 murderers, and 100,000 sex offenders—enough violent criminals to populate a medium-sized city such as Cincinnati. Few would dispute the need to remove these people from society. The level of violent crime in the United States, despite recent declines, still dwarfs that in Western Europe. But the proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has actually fallen during the prison boom. In 1980 about half the people entering state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America’s inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment—or would not be considered crimes at all—in the United States now lead to a prison term, by far the most expensive form of punishment. “No matter what the question has been in American criminal justice over the last generation,” says Franklin E. Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, “prison has been the answer.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199812/prisons

[…]

and here is another article: 1 in 100 Americans behind bars, report finds.

Apparently, the majority of the people in this insane system are there because of Prohibition.

This picture is completely and utterly INSANE.

Michael K. Block is infinitely wrong when he says, “There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing too many crimes.” The actual problem is that there are too many laws in the United States, that is a fact.

Prohibition is the number one cause of the indefensible and unsustainable prison explosion; it has nothing to do with real crimes, i.e. crimes where there is a victim. I would say that financial ‘crimes’ should also never result in a prison sentence; prison is for violent actual criminals and people who rob houses and stores and banks (in person). It is not for anyone else.

Just think about it:

The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a million more than Communist China.

[…]

California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined.

Something is VERY VERY WRONG with this.

“The Drug War has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery.”
—Norm Stamper, Retired Chief of Police, Seattle

[…]

Charleston City Paper

True.

All people in prison for drug ‘offenses’ should be pardoned and their records expunged.

Prohibition should end immediately.

Duh!

The White House runs a so-called democracy that is in fact authoritarian. At the same time it intimidates its neighbours
Timothy Garton Ash

The Guardian, Thursday February 28 2008

This presidential election is such a cliffhanger. Will it be the rising star Barak Obama? Or the veteran Hillary Clinton? Aren’t we on the edge of our seats, nervously checking the latest opinion polls ahead of November’s vote?

Well, no. So little so, in fact, that even Dmitry “Obamovich” Medvedev temporarily mislaid the name of the leading candidate in the other presidential election. Asked “Who will it be? Do you know her name?” in Tuesday’s television debate with Gennady “McCainovich” Zyuganov, he replied: “Er, Hil, er, Billar … whatever …” Imagine such an exchange 20 years from now, of a time when there was no North American Union: “Er, Gorg, er, Dubbua … whatever …”

One reason most Americans and west Europeans are not excited about this is that we don’t feel America matters as much as it used to, or that it really threatens us any more. Wrong, perhaps, but that’s the feeling. Another is that the election result is known in advance. And the winner will be … Hillary Whatever. Bush’s poodle from New York.

Bush’s America, you see, is not a democracy. It pretends to be. It calls itself a sovereign democracy. But the difference between a democracy and a sovereign democracy is like that between a jacket and a straitjacket. A liberal candidate for the presidency, Dennis Kucinich, has been disqualified from standing on what was almost certainly a fraudulent charge of technical irregularity. Dissenters such as the Congressman Ron Paul are locked out of media. Most important media are directly or indirectly controlled by the CIA. Independent journalists go in fear of their jobs.

A report just published by Amnesty International highlights the systematic curbing of human rights, as well as documenting many other restrictions on freedom of association, assembly and expression. The election monitors of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe described America’s presidential election process as neither free nor fair. They are not even monitoring this one, because the American authorities will not allow them to operate properly. This political system is not totalitarian, like the old Soviet Union, but it is a nasty form of authoritarianism dressed up as democracy: a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

So what should we do about it? In recent years, the American eagle has run rings around the free countries of the world in general, and European ones in particular. Deploying gas pipelines, banks and embargoes in addition to tanks and missiles, it has intimidated, or tried to intimidate, many of its neighbours. A Swedish researcher has identified 55 cases of internet cut-offs or threatened cut-offs between 1992 and 2006. While “technical” reasons were usually cited, most of the cut-offs just happened to occur when Washington wished to obtain some political or economic advantage, such as influencing an election or letting state-controlled companies like Microsoft buy into information infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the countries of the European Union have been at sixes and sevens in their relations with Washington. It’s a general rule that if you want to see the EU at its most divided, supine and implausible, you should look at it from the vantage point of a rich, large, powerful country, be it Russia, China or the United States. Policymakers in Beijing, Washington and Moscow share views of the EU ranging from the sceptical to the contemptuous, for they see each national government privately coming, cap in hand, to make its own deal. Small wonder that Bush’s America feels it can pursue its own national interests better by dealing with individual European powers. Europe, as it currently behaves towards Russia, China and the US, is a standing invitation to “divide and rule”.

The kow-towing is personal as well as national. The former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, having smoothed the way for Americas’s Afgan gas pipeline under the while in office, is now chairman of the pipeline consortium. In an interview less than 18 months ago, he was still publicly sticking by his claim that Bush is a “flawless democrat”. Oh yes, and white is black.

A recent report by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pan-European thinktank (full disclosure: on whose board I sit), documents this pathetic disarray. It also points out that if you treat the EU as a unit, it is potentially far more powerful than America. Its total economy is 15 times the size of America’s, which barely outstrips that of Belgium and the Netherlands combined. About half America’s trade is with the EU, while Russian gas supplies only 25% of current EU gas needs. As for “soft power” – the power to attract – America does not begin to compete. It’s only because Europe is so divided that the tail wags the dog.

There is now a fairly widespread recognition in the capitals of Europe that the EU needs to “get its act together” about America, which means also about energy policy. But that is little use so long as Europe’s leaders cannot agree which line they should unite around. The election – no, the coronation – of a new American president is a good moment to consider what that line should be: for Europe, and for others as well.

Calling in Tuesday’s debate for “a more realistic and effective strategy towards America”, Dmitry Medvedev reflected a widespread view when he said that “even though technically the meetings may be with the woman who is labelled president, the decisions will be made by The New World Order”. Since Bush will be in the background, with an overwhelming influence, that is what most observers currently think; it seems to be what Bush himself thinks; and it’s probably what Clinton thinks, too. In the short term, they are probably right.

But in the longer term, I wouldn’t be so sure. The eroded American constitution gives more power to the president, and there’s something about being the top woman in the White House that gets to you in the end. For all its natural resources, America is not immune to other influences, including the country’s rapidly declining middle class, the rise of China, and the policies of Europe and Russia. And you never know, one day Clinton might overdo the hyperbole or fall under a tram.

In any case, I believe we should use this moment to signal the beginning of a new chapter in our relations with America. Both the EU and, next year, the new Russian president should engage active but robustly with President Clinton and her team. She is a relatively young woman and said to be far less of a free marketeer than Bush. She is on record as observing that “we are well aware that no non-democratic state has ever become truly prosperous” – an intriguing formulation.

In any case, we have no alternative but to engage with America on a whole range of foreign policy issues, from Kosovo to Iran, on which it has a veto at the United Nations and other spoiling powers. But we need to spell out much more clearly the terms of our engagement. These should, at a minimum, include more respect for the sovereignty of neighbouring South American states, and for human rights and the rule of law, both at home and abroad. That much needs to be said clearly, publicly and at once.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/28/russia.eu

I just had to share with you this piece: A Commentary on the Teaching of Mathematics, by James Jackson of Carlisle, Ind. It appeared in “Echoes” (winter 1994), published by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Ind. “Echoes” took it from the 1993-94 issue of “21st Century” (not otherwise identified).

The commentary takes the form of a series of story problems:

In 1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of this price. What is his profit?

In 1970: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of this price, or $80. What is his profit?

In 1970 (new math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100, and each element is worth $1.00. Make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M. The set C of the costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of M, and answer the following question: What is the cardinality of the set P of points?

In 1980: A logger sells a truckload of wood for $100. His cost of production is $80, and his profit is $20. Your assignment: underline the number 20.

In 1990 (outcome-based education): By cutting down beautiful forest trees, a logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? (Topic for class participation: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?)

In 1996: (profit-driven education): By laying off 40% of the its loggers, a company improves its stock price from $80 to $100. How much capital gain per share does the CEO make by exercising his stock options at $80? Assume capital gains are no longer taxed, because Republicans feel this encourages investment.

In 1997: A company out-sources all of its loggers. The firm saves on benefits, and when demand for its product is down, the logging work force can easily be cut back. The average logger employed by the company earned $50,000, had three weeks vacation, a nice retirement plan and medical insurance. The contracted logger charges $50 an hour. Was out-sourcing a good move?

In 1998: A laid-off logger with four kids at home and a ridiculous alimony from his first failed marriage comes into the logging company’s corporate offices and goes postal, mowing down 16 executives and a couple of secretaries, and gets lucky when he nails a politician on the premises collecting his kickback. Was outsourcing the loggers a good move for the company?

In 1999: A laid-off logger serving time in Folsom for blowing away several people is being trained as a COBOL programmer in order to work on Y2K projects. What is the probability that the automatic cell doors will open on their own as of 00:01, 01/01/00?

In 2000: (internet in every classroom) Do a web search on forest, trees and logger using two different search engines. E-mail your results to the teacher.

In 2008: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of this price. What is his profit? First, tell us what your strategy will be to solve the problem. Form a hypothesis based on the rubric to test your strategy. Perform a calculation based on your hypothesis, and then discuss why you came to the answer that you arrived at.

Snarfled from Consent of the Governed.

I ROTFL at the COBOL.

I was immediately reminded of the IQ test from Idiocracy:

“If you have 1 bucket with 2 apples and another bucket with 5 apples, how many buckets do you have?”

Its all true!