Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order.

This is a bad start to a bad article. It seems that many american writers are not capable of serious logical thought; there is nothing wrong with sweeping generalizations (as long as they make you laugh) but these sorts of line are nothing more than propagandistic slander words.

And I beg to differ that they are ‘no threat to the established order’. Libertarians and Libertarian ideas are the biggest threat the established order have faced in one hundred years.

But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let’s pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person’s money to someone else?

The libertarian perspective is useful, and undervalued. Why does the government pay farmers not to grow food? Why are medications for fatal diseases sometimes held off the market in case they aren’t safe? (Compared to death?) Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether some government activity or other expands freedom or contracts it.

Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny of the majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring that people with odd Social Security numbers have to give $1,000 to people with even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what the government does is essentially like that.

So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want. We have to decide that together. Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want.

I would say that pollution is a modern example, and it is there because the market for energy is distorted. The free market might have been able to produce a pollution free economy by now if it had been left to do so, just as we would be on Mars had Nuclear engines been allowed to fully develop and fly.

There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference –often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it chooses to intervene is purely pragmatic.

No. The point of principle is the the source of how we consent to ourselves to be governed; we should never allow government to choose to intervene on the basis of what is pragmatic. Governments that do that wind up expelling all ‘foreigners’, treating foreigners like animals, building concentration camps and waging pre-emptive wars.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenues to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to user it — and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency.

That is a straw man argument.

Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection). Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: you are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation — to make inconsistent decisions in different cases. And usually there is no one “right” answer: There is a spectrum of acceptable answers, involving tradeoffs (dirty air versus fewer jobs, etc.) that ought to be made democratically — that is, through government.

This is so wrong I do not know where to start. Sorry, yes, I do!
America is alredy ligigation mad. There is no way that more litigation is possible in that country; there are not enough judges or courts. But that is to use one of Kinsleys poorly formed style of argument. Judges and lawyers and juries are inexpert in everything else that is going on today; just look at the absurd decisions to do with RAM; it is clear that anything technical is out of the depth of most judges; does that mean that we cannot use the courts to settle disputes and that we must turn to Big Brother to solve all our problems? Of course not, one of the chief reasons being that government is as incompetent and science illiterate as any judge and jury. There is no reason why when you have a jury of your peers, the correct decision cannot be arrived at. If we are talking about pollution, then the judge should be a scientist with the correct background. If we are talking about wether a company should store the temporary and fleeting files that are held in the RAM of a server running LigHTTPd then the judge should be someone who knows the difference between ‘Apache’ and ‘an Apache’. As you can see from those links, the Google knows the difference!

To say that, “the solution ought to be made democratically — that is, through government”, is to engage in a dastardly misuse of the English language. It is a form of abuse that has been going on for a long time in both the UK and the USA; the substitution of the meaning of the word ‘fair’ with the word ‘democracy’. What Kinsley is doing is substituting the meaning of one word for another in a modern (and rather nasty) shorthand that connects a system of government to a word meaning goodness.

If we take that sentence literally, it makes no sense. To say pollution problems should be solved democratically means that a vote should be taken on each separate issue; not that the issue should be turned over to government to arbitrate. These subtle linguistic tricks, if they are done deliberately are evil in writing. If they are not done deliberately, then Kinsley is a poor thinker and writer. Either way it is wrong.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competition with other routes keeps it all efficient. And what about, um, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own both roads at major intersections, and when that happened the company would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own, and maintain all the roads, and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government.

This is another straw man. You can come up with an infinite number of different offensive and unworkable proposals, call them ‘Libertarian’ and then say, “see! they are all wacky!”. None of these arguments change the true nature of Libertarianism, and none of them will dent its popularity. This is the dull thinking of the inured, powered by stupid skeptic tricks.

Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the maze at the FDA. The Terry Shiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.

I thought Libertarianism’s greatest moment was the penning of The Constitution…I could be wrong of course…

The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to a right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt?

Or ride a bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet.

The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on others. I would pay good money not to have to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam, or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right like the right to die may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or irresponsible is not.

To say that government should force people to wear seatbelts so that you are not inconvenienced by a traffic jam is patently absurd. It is also absurd to say that government compulsion is justified to spare you the sight of a bloody carcass. These are the words of a selfish and stupid man; a man who clearly doesn’t understand the value of liberty, a squeamish and milk blooded weakling who is terrified of life, who happily runs into the arms of government for everything and anything. This is not the sort of person who would have packed up a trunk and taken the perilous voyage to the new world. This is not the sort of man who built america – or anything else for that matter. People as soft as that last paragraph implies are the Eloi; the human cattle of this age.

They are ‘the problem’.

Perhaps if more americans were exposed to carnage, in other words, real life, they would have a better appreciation of what it means to send their military to other countries to inflict ‘regime change’ on innocent people. More on that below.

Llibertarians are quick to see hidden costs of ignoring libertarian principles and slow to see such costs in adhering to them. For example, Tucker Carlson reports in the Dec. 31 New Republic that Ron Paul wants to end the federal ban on unpasteurized milk. No one should want to drink unpasteurized milk, and almost no one does. Paul himself doesn’t. But it bothers him that the government tells people they cannot do something they shouldn’t do. Libertarians would say that if most people want pasteurized milk, the market will supply it. Firms will emerge to certify that milk has been pasteurized. These firms will compete, keeping them honest.

And that is the difference between people who live by principle and people who do not. A I said above we should only consent to be governed by a government that operates on principle, not by what is pragmatic. This concept is alien to the sheeple like Kinsley. The very idea frightens them; and that is behind this image of people drinking untreated milk.

Fear of untreated milk is symbolic of the programmed fear that the sheeple live in. They are like the hive people in THX-1138, where there is nothing natural; where the only food is processed food. The immediate revulsion felt by most people when they think about drinking milk straight from the cow without being blessed and sanctified by ‘science’ is the same reaction that drives them to run to the government to solve every problem. It is the same perverted instinct that causes them to distrust the flow of life and the market. It is the same force that has created the “Health and Safety” mass hysteria that has overtaken the once sane and rational British.

So yes, a Rube Goldberg contraption of capitalism could replace a straightforward government regulation. But what if you aren’t interested in turning your grocery shopping into an ideological adventure? All that is lost by letting the government take care of it is the right of a few idiots to be idiots. That right deserves respect. But not much.

To say that Libertarianism is comparable to a Rube Goldberg contraption is a complete polar opposite mischaracterization, and Kinsley knows it. This is the sort of line that we are now used to hearing from certain quarters in america: “downsizing” for “firing of many employees”, “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “extraordinary rendition” for the process of kidnapping people from countries where torture is illegal to countries where it isn’t, “wet work” for “assassination”, “collateral damage” for “civilians killed”, “take out” for “destroy”, “red tape” for “bureaucracy”, “area denial munitions” meaning “landmines”, “physical persuasion”, “rough interrogation” and “tough questioning” for “torture”, “illiquid assets” worthless real estate and “detainment of enemy combatants” meaning “prisoners of war”, “regime change” meaning “CIA organized assassination / military coup” and of course, “Democracy” meaning “colonization by the United States”.

Libertarianism is about simplicity, not complexity. Libertarians, and Ron Paul explicitly, unambiguously and repeatedly have said this, and they say it in plain language of the sort that is alien to Kinsley and his ilk.

A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even more moderate libertarians disapprove of government social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers. But freedom is only one of the two core values our nation was built on. The other is equality. Defining equality, libertarians tend to take a narrow view, believing that it means only political equality with no financial aspects. Defining freedom, by contrast, they take a broad view, and see a violation in every nickel a citizen must spend.

Libertarians ask: By what justification does the government concern itself with inequality — financial or otherwise — in the first place? They are nearly alone in asking this question. Even conservatives claim a great concern for equality of opportunity, while opposing opportunity of result. And the reasons seem obvious: some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life; etc.

There is no such thing as an ‘extreme libertarian’. The prefix ‘extreme’ is used as code in this example to tarnish Libertarians as ‘extremists’; and of course, that bundles them in with ‘extremist islam’ and by extension ‘islamic extremists’. Glen Beck said it plainly for joe sixpack.

Theft is immoral, just as murder is immoral. That it is done by the government doesn’t make it not so. Bush Blair and Brown are mass murderers in the same way that Charles Manson is a convicted murderer; none of those three men were physically doing the murdering, and neither did Charles Manson, yet all four are guilty. But I digress. You cannot use force to take something from someone; that is theft. The fact that it is voted upon is irrelevant. This video makes it vividly clear why this is so.

But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians. They force us to think it all through from scratch. Good for them.

[…]

Washington Post

Actually, Libertarianism is good for YOU, and is superior to your philosophy. Your philosophy works on the presumption that you are correct in everything, and that therefore, everyone should obey you, hand over their cash to you, and live by your standards. Libertarians begin by saying that they only know what is good for them, not for others, and so we can co-exist with you, whereas you cannot co-exist with us. Your philosophy makes violent conflict inevitable as it depends on you stealing from people. Our philosophy is one of peace, since we believe it is immoral to steal.

Once again, that instructional video is one of the best presentations I have seen explaining what Libertarianism actually means, and how it works practically. The ideas behind this are spreading like wildfire because they make sense to everyone with a brain-cell and who doesn’t have something to lose by them being widely adopted and practiced.

Finally!

By Dorothy Thompson
Published August 1941

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

At any rate, let us look round the room.

The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.

He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him…. Why not?

Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why?… Why the one and not the other?

Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class–no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value–success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him–or his wife–to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him–he despises, for instance, Mr. B–because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language–though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal–a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him–intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

[…]

That is half of a very insightful article.

The fact that all of it rings true today means that it should be possible to create a system of government that makes it impossible for ‘the bad guys’ to take over and ruin everything. Sadly, whatever shape that government may take, it requires an educated public to maintain it.

And america does not have that any longer:

It’s called ‘The American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.

The impact of Hilary Clinton’s suggestion in the run-up to the New Hampshire caucus that the US and the UK jointly secure our nuclear facilities suggests that a strong Pakistan policy is a key in this US election. Clinton is far too savvy a foreign policy analyst to champion an idea that undermines Pakistani sovereignty and delivers what many consider our most precious commodity into western hands. But talking big about Pakistan these days is sure to ignite some election heat. Say something provocative about “the world’s most dangerous place”, and you’re sure to make headlines. And while I can’t prove the exact correlation between Clinton’s comments and her subsequent victory in the presidential primary, the media coverage she received is bound to have made a difference.

[…]

At this early stage, non of the presidential hopefuls have tossed up an acceptable vision for a US-Pakistan collaboration in the war on terror. But nuggets of wisdom do exist amongst the tangle of voices. Parsing through the different stances yields a vast middle ground in which US aid and intervention could help bolster democratic reform and undermine the threat posed by terrorism while respecting national sovereignty.

The four Democratic candidates–Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards–are prepared to launch unilateral military strikes if there is “actionable intelligence” of a security threat, or if Osama bin Laden’s location can be verified. Not surprisingly, this stance rankles with many Pakistanis who are horrified at the thought of a US military intervention–or should I say invasion?–against Islamabad’s wishes.

[…]

But just as there’s more to Pakistan’s anti-Americanism, there’s more to the trigger-happy suggestions of presidential hopefuls. Obama is willing to continue hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to Pakistan, but only on the condition that substantial progress is made towards closing down training camps and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan. Obama’s belief that Pakistan ‘needs more than F-16s to combat extremism’ is one that should be adopted by our government as well. For his part, Edwards is willing to maintain ties with Musharraf and continue economic and military aid to Pakistan if our government extends the reach of the legitimate government to the tribal areas. While his suggestion goes against historical trends, Edwards is correct to point out that the Pakistani government needs to exert some authority and regain respect amongst FATA residents to earn their collaboration in the fight against militancy.

[…]

Republican candidates also have a few choice suggestions. Ron Paul, who opposes aid to Pakistan, rightfully emphasizes that extremist militancy exists because US forces have ‘invaded’ and ‘occupied’ Muslim countries and maintained bases across the Muslim world for a long time prior to 9/11. His insightful comments can certainly help inform US foreign policy in the coming years. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has explicitly stated that bombing a potential ally is a bad idea. Finally, John McCain has advocated making “a long-term commitment” to Pakistan, acknowledging that the war on terror cannot be won overnight. Although he has discussed the possibility enhancing Pakistan’s security capabilities, he is more excited about getting children out of seminaries and into schools. In the midst of these myriad suggestions lies a sensible Pakistan policy. It’s our own responsibility to guide the next American president and ensure that unilateral US action does not further destabilize our country.

[…]

http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=90649

And there you have it.

It is completely clear that the Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards are ‘business as usual’ warmongering monsters who want to drag america deeper into the quicksand, everyone understands this except the american electorate.

What is interesting about this piece is that it seems to be written as if under duress; Ron Paul is right, but, “In the midst of these myriad suggestions lies a sensible Pakistan policy”. This cannot be the case either america should be engaged with Pakistan fully or it should withdraw completely. Those are in fact, the only two different choices on the table. I suppose the writer doesn’t want to get in trouble.

For the record, again, the so called ‘extremist’ militancy is not ‘extremist’ at all, these people are really quite ordinary men who simply want to control their own destiny in their own country. If america disentangles itself from them and stops being the puppet master, they will immediately stand down. They are no more insane or extremist than the original american revolutionaries that kicked out the British, or any other freedom fighters that stood and stand firm against invasion and colonization. Ron Paul understands this, and so do a growing number of people in the west who have finally started to wake up to this and see things from their perspective.

ABC News has a fun tool, along the lines of ‘which [thing] are you?’

No surprise there!

Don’t know about the second ‘choice’ however…probably there because there are not enough candidates that fit the bill and all three slots have to be filled!

Any election that can not be audited, i.e., that does not happen on paper, with multiple receipts, is not trustworthy.

That these imbeciles are STILL using Diebold machines to ‘manage’ an election is almost beyond belief. Almost.

Listen to how people in New Hampshire have been disenfranchised.

And look at a programmer giving evidence on how vote rigging with computers is done.

Both Ron Paul AND Obama have had the Diebold network used against them. Even if it is a single vote that has not been counted, if it is your vote, it matters does it not?

by Lew Rockwell
It was always Murray Rothbard’s argument that while we might from time to time be short-term pessimists, we should always be long term optimists, for many reasons from economics and history.

And look at what Ron Paul has done. Building on an unmatched record in public life, and decades of serious study of Austrian economics, foreign policy, American history, and constitutional law and philosophy, he has led a movement that is rightly called a revolution.

That revolution has touched the hearts of young people–and not only young people–across the country and the world. The ideals of peace, free trade, non-intervention, the gold standard, free markets, private property, and civil liberties have never been spread so well and so widely.

The fact that up to 10% of the Republican Party base, people who have historically supported war, empire, managed trade, central banking, business regulation, and the police state–“red-state fascists,” as I have called them–is really something quite extraordinary. Among independents and some Democrats, we will do much better.

Libertarians have long exulted in Ed Clark’s almost-one percent. Ron has improved on Ed by 900%. The political fight is far from done, of course. Ron will campaign hard in Michigan, Nevada, South Carolinia, and all the Super Tuesday states. He will not give up. He will never give up.

From the standpoint of the right and good, Ron Paul and our ideas should have an easy victory. But when has that ever been true, in all of human history?

Ron and his revolutionaries face not only bad ideas from neoconservatism to socialism, but a vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex. There is, we could say, much work to do, and Ron Paul will do it.

Through the primaries, the convention, and beyond, Ron and his movement will stand for liberty against its enemies. He will get more and more votes, and more and more supporters, to add to the hundreds of thousands already onboard. His presence on the national scene will only grow, and so will libertarian ideals. Murray loved Ron Paul, thought the world of him as a candidate in 1988 and as an intellectual, and so do all real libertarians and pro-liberty conservatives.

And now, by the way, on to Michigan, where people are really feeling the pain of the Fed’s deepening recession, and will be especially ready to hear Ron’s message of sound noney and no business cycles under freedom.

“Wilkes and Liberty” was the cry of English and American classical liberals in the 18th century, naming a parliamentary champion of free speech, free press, and civil liberties against government tyranny. From now on, the cry of every libertarian will be, “Ron Paul and Liberty”! We have much work to do.Roll up your sleeves and join our champion!

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018458.html

There are the problems of the vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex, but there is also the problem of the army of sheeple, of Eloi, of nincompoops, of people who are physically incapable of thinking (low IQ), the hard headed, the habituated, the delusional. These people, all of them, HAVE THE VOTE.

People in the 18th century had common sense. Men who did not own property could not vote. What we have today is a population that is too stupid to vote. That anyone, anywhere in the world, other than his relatives, could vote for John McCain is (yet another) testament to the utter stupidity of the american public.

Am I advocating the disenfranchisement of vast swathes of the american public? Hmmm! What is the inevitable outcome of the current crop of imbeciles having the vote and unthinkingly electing anyone other than Ron Paul? It means the disenfranchisement of ALL americans forever, as america is dismantled and its broken carcass subsumed into a North American Union and then a world government like human flesh absorbed into The Blob. Wouldn’t it be better if we took away the vote from these cretins BEFORE america is lost forever? In the final analysis the phrase, ‘live free or die’ if taken literally means that a free man could not and can not tolerate what the mass of dunderheads are unleashing upon him and his family.

And there you have the thinking behind the people who are determined to absolutely control everyone everywhere. They came to this conclusion decades ago, and are making sure that no one can ever cast a vote that will take away their liberty, which in this case, is predicated upon their absolute control over the population. Either that, or its all happening at random and I’m not sure if that is a worse proposition to contemplate.

Back to John McCain…

This is a man who says that it “would be fine with me” if the americans stay in Iraq for 100 years. Out loud. In public. Quite apart from all of his other insane policies, this one phrase alone should scare the flesh off of any american. What he is advocating is literally, the complete extinction of America. This is the same public that now knows that the pretext for invading Iraq was a lie. This is the same public that now believes that ‘911 was an inside job‘. Wether or not you believe that 911 was an inside job or not, if the majority of people believe that it is true, how is it possible that anyone other than Ron Paul is getting the majority of votes in these primaries? How can he possibly be equal in numbers to Judy Ruliani, arch warmonger / fearmonger whose whole campaign centers around the very 911 that they all believe is at the very least, fishy?

It boggles the imagination.

A very clever man said just before he died:

[…]

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history – Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.

Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.

[…]

Daily Mail

When The Daily Mail prints an article saying that the only solution left is assassination, you know that there has been a sea change.

Live free or die. That phrase doesn’t mean ‘live free or commit suicide’. It means that you are willing to do anything unto death in order to be free. Disenfranchising the population, assassination, secession, suddenly people are actually talking about these options; not through desire for carnage and chaos and upheaval, but because every decent person has been backed into a corner and there is no way out.

A decent man with sons would not let the bovine majority cast a vote condemning his boys to be drafted into an insane man’s insane war. He has a few choices, and we all know that these choices have all been exercised in the recent past:

• Assassination,
• Disenfranchisement,
• Secession,
• Mass murder,
• Escape,
• Run for office and change the world (work in progress!),

Have I left anything out?

Oh yes:

• Join the winning side in the new feudal system!

Think about it; you keep everything you own, you get to own whatever else you like, you become one of the bosses, and there are no repercussions because the long pigs are too stupid to understand what is going on right in front of their faces.

Now, less of the horrorshow.

There have been great movements on this planet that have achieved monumental change without catastrophic bloodletting. I have said it before over and over, the only thing that you need to do to defeat the warmongers is NOTHING. No marching, no confrontation, simply remove yourself, (O.U.T.), no more participation, no more contribution, no more cooperation, no more passive obedience, no more of anything or action that helps the system work, unless the country is completely restored, all unconstitutional laws struck down and America returns. This ‘Do Not’ idea, when propagated widely is so profoundly disruptive, so powerful and unstoppable, it can topple any infrastructure. Since it is an idea, you cannot kill it. No on is marching in the streets to be arrested. No one is pitting themselves against armored personnel of the war machine. There is nothing to attack, no one to peruse, no head to cut off and nothing to capture..except the minds of your neighbors.

I do not believe that violence is right or necessary. You can get everything you want without so much as a fist fight. Assassination, disenfranchisement and other forms of violence are what our enemies use; they are the solutions of the imagiiantionless, the weak minded, mean spirited…the bad guys.

Thanks to the way democracy works, there is going to be a permanent unrepresented majority who are fed up to the teeth. It is this huge population of people, numbering in the high tens of millions, who are the constituency of the free, the people who can tip the balance and force change. They are the artists, the writers, business men, scientists, the better educated, the smart; they are the ones who make everything run, and they are the ones who can bring it all to a halt should they choose to do so.

All without firing a shot, clenching a fist or appearing in public.

The dream scenario is that the system works and America changes course and the world is put off of high alert. But I have always said that, “dreams are for those who sleep” either way the power to end this is in our hands, at the ends of our fingertips.

So let’s end it.

Every person living in a sovereign state on the continent of Africa wants Ron Paul to be the next president of the USA.

Why?

Because he is going to dismantle the evil american empire. That means that plans for the Imperial outpost and control nexus AFRICOM will be scrapped, and they will be spared what many countries have suffered for decades; an invading army of bored soldiers pestering the local women, the CIA operating freely to topple governments and directly manipulate elections and business, etc etc. Had AFRICOM gone ahead as planned, it would have been….’a bad thing’.

The Way Ahead
AFRICOM is still in its early planning stages. The command began initial operations in October 2007 and is still formulating mission, staffing and location options.

[…]

AFRICOM

No, ‘jar heads’, that is not ‘the way ahead’, it is another step down the road to DISASTER and the end of America.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

All people all over the world want the old America back; the America everyone looked up to and cherished. This is probably our last chance to bring it back in our lifetime, and the enemy is trying its best to stop it from happening. They are getting desperate and brazen, like the people who control FOX News and their excluding of Dr. Paul.

Which brings us to…

The american mainstream media is digging deep to try and derail and smear Ron Paul; this time around the hideous grimacing jelly joweled troll they have put in the center of the tracks in front of the oncoming train with a ‘STOP’ sign is named ‘Jamie Kirchick’.

He has instantly been discredited thanks to the internets.

Ron Paul is not a racist. And just for the record, I would rather have an honest, strict constitutionalist racist in the white house than any of the people who are currently running for president.

Thankfully, that hypothetical scenario does not apply in any way to Dr.Paul:

January 8, 2008 5:28 am EST

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – In response to an article published by The New Republic, Ron Paul issued the following statement:

“The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

“In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’

“This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

“When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”

[…]

http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

It is interesting however, that the only things they can dig up about him are the things that he says, or is alleged to have said, and they can never attack his policies.

What this tells us is that his policies are 110% sound and unassailable.

Many years ago, May 1995 to be accurate, we dedicated a large section of issue 4 of our superb magazine Rivendell (named after a BBS, not LOTR btw!) to ‘Constitutions of the World’ – here are the parts:

Part2 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part3 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part4 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part5 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

Part6 of Rivendell 4 in PDF Format. ‘Constitutions of the world’

You can see from the content of that issue why people like us want Ron Paul to become president; he stands for everything that we believe in and that we have believed in for a very long time.

The recent discussions in the media about Ron Paul’s comments regarding Lincoln and his political legacy got me to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst, would weigh in on the subject. I had this thought because Judge Napolitano included a chapter entitled “Dishonest Abe” in his brilliant book, The Constitution in Exile. Judge Napolitano is a very busy man, hosting a radio show as well as appearing on television, making speeches all around the country, writing books, and practicing law – in addition to (hopefully) having a private family life. Since I am a big fan of his writing I thought I would try to pique our readers’ interest in what the judge has to say on this subject.

The first two sentences of the “Dishonest Abe” chapter of The Constitution in Exile are hard hitting: “The Abraham Lincoln of legend is an honest man who freed the slaves and saved the Union. Few things could be more misleading.” He then goes on to say exactly what Ron Paul told the Washington Post, and which seemed to mystify and confuse Tim Russert in his “Meet the Press” interview with Congressman Paul: “In order to increase his federalist vision of centralized power, ‘Honest’ Abe misled the nation into an unnecessary war. He claimed that the war was about emancipating slaves, but he could have simply paid slave owners to free their slaves . . . . The bloodiest war in American history could have been avoided.” And, as Ron Paul would likely add, all the other countries of the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century, including Britain, Spain, France, Denmark, the Dutch, did so without a war. This, by the way, included the Northern states in the U.S. There were no “civil wars” to free the slaves in Massachusetts, New York (where slavery existed for over 200 years), or Illinois.

Lincoln’s “actions were unconstitutional and he knew it,” writes Napolitano, for “the rights of the states to secede from the Union . . . [are] clearly implicit in the Constitution, since it was the states that ratified the Constitution . . .” Lincoln’s view “was a far departure from the approach of Thomas Jefferson, who recognized states’ rights above those of the Union.” Judge Napolitano also reminds his readers that the issue of using force to keep a state in the union was in fact debated – and rejected – at the Constitutional Convention as part of the “Virginia Plan.”

He also discusses Lincoln’s Confiscation Act of 1862, under which “any slaves behind the Union lines were captives of war who were to be freed and transported to countries in the tropics. This was in keeping with Dishonest Abe’s lifelong position (his “White Dream,” according to Ebony magazine managing editor Lerone Bennett, Jr, author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream) of deporting all blacks from the U.S. “Colonization” was the euphemism that was used for this.

“The Confiscation Acts,” writes Judge Napolitano, “show that Lincoln did not have much concern for the slaves. He did not suggest to Congress that freed slaves should be granted civil rights or citizenship in Northern states. Once the freed slaves were transported out of the United States, they would no longer be Lincoln’s problem.” This is also why Lincoln tinkered with proposals for compensated emancipation in the border states while they were under U.S. military occupation during the war. These proposals included immediate deportation of any freed slaves. He saw the occupation of the border states during the war as an opportunity to begin ridding the country of “The Africans,” as he referred to black people, as though they were from another planet. Judge Napolitano quotes Lincoln in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas as saying what he repeatedly said throughout his adult life: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes.” “Lincoln was more concerned about the failure of [the seceding] states to collect tariffs than he was about slavery, ” says Napolitano.

Unlike all those hopelessly miseducated neocon pundits who sneered at Ron Paul’s statements regarding how Lincoln did tremendous damage to the principles of the American founders, Judge Napolitano is well schooled in constitutional history. He writes of Lincoln’s complete trashing of the Constitution by “murdering civilians, declaring martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing . . . private property without compensation (including railroads and telegraphs), conducting a war without the consent of Congress, imprisoning nearly thirty thousand Northern citizens without trial, shutting down . . . newspapers, and even deporting a congressman (Clement L. Vallandigham from Ohio) because he objected to the imposition of an income tax.”

“Saying that Lincoln abolished slavery and calling him the ‘Great Emancipator’ are grossly inadequate mischaracterizations,” writes the judge. “Lincoln was interested in promoting his political agenda of centralizing government power, and freeing the slaves was only a means of advancement of that end.”

Lincoln destroyed the union of the founding fathers. He “replaced a voluntary association of states with a strong centralized government. The president and his party eagerly lifted the floodgates to the modern thuggish style of ruling that the U.S. government now employs” (emphasis added). This “opened the door to more unconstitutional acts by the government in the 1900s through to today.”

The next time you see Lincoln’s portrait on a five-dollar bill, the judge concludes, “remember how many civil liberties he took away from you.”

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo138.html

!!!!!

Clarkson stung after bank prank

TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column.

The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs.

He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.

But Clarkson admitted he was “wrong” after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.

Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.

“All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I’ve never known such a palaver about nothing,” he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.

“I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,” he said.

“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

“I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake.”

Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.

They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination – the National Audit Office.

The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.

Clarkson now says of the case: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm

Like I said before Jeremy Clarkson is a total idiot.

What amazes me about people like Clarkson is that he thinks people should take his advice both before AND after his authoritative articles. He is the same breed of moronic ‘journalist’ that will not believe in anything unless he sees it himself. He is the same breed of person who supports war until he gets into the trenches himself, whereupon he becomes an ardent pacifist. He is the sort that is an atheist until he has his own religious experience, thereafter becoming a total fanatic. Now he is calling for the people who lost the discs to be tortured. Bravo Mr. ‘Face of Agromegly’; lets see how you react to the actual act of ‘sticking cocktail sticks in their eyes’. I wager that a total coward like Clarkson could not even watch a video of real torture, much less carry it out himself.

This is a man without a clue, without principles, without common sense. And this is the best that The Times can dredge up to publish on a regular basis. No wonder blogs and bloggers are so popular; for once, everyone with more common sense than Jeremy Clarkson (which means 90% of people in Britain) can publish clear headed thinking to millions of people for the price of some electrons.

The good thing about this is that the people who need an extra little push to understand why this, the NIR and ID cards are such a disaster will learn from Clarksons imbecile antics. And the lulz.

Joseph Somsel
American Thinker
January 4, 2008

“There is nothing wrong with your thermostat. Do not attempt to adjust the temperature. We are controlling your power consumption. If we wish to make it hotter, we will turn off your air conditioner. If we wish to make it cooler, we will turn off your heater. For the next millennium, sit quietly and we will control your home temperature. We repeat, there is nothing wrong with your thermostat. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… SACRAMENTO!”*

Building codes and engineering standards are generally good things. Updating and improving codes and standards better protect us against earthquakes, for example, as we better understand the weak points and failure modes of existing construction techniques. Requirements that ensure proper handling of sanitary wastes can be largely credited with the increased life spans in industrialized countries through the reduction of communicable diseases.

In California, we have 236 pages of state-mandated standards for building energy efficiency, known as Title 24. This prescribes methods for calculating the sizes of your home windows, the capacities of your air conditioner and heater, the thickness of the insulation in your attic. A small cottage industry has sprung up to perform these engineering calculations that are required for any new commercial or residential construction or major change to existing structures. While I’ve never personally been involved in this branch of retail professional engineering, I’ve had colleagues who would moonlight doing Title 24 calcs. It is now just part of the mandated paperwork involved in the construction business these days in California.

A new revision to Title 24 is in the works for 2008[2] and it includes a number of improvements and enhancements that are largely good sense items and should be non-controversial. For example a new swimming pool will probably need larger diameter pipes between the pool, the filter and the pump than was former practice. This will reduce the fluid friction losses that your pump must overcome and hence reduce the pump’s consumption of electricity, albeit at a minor increase in first cost for the larger pipes and fittings. Another good idea is a requirement for lighter colored shingles, the “Cool Roof Initiative.” That is intended to reduce heat loss over cold winter nights by emission and heat gain on summer days by absorption. My neighbor and I both recently discovered that it is difficult to get roofers to NOT use dark colored shingles for some reason. Having a little state muscle behind us will help, especially for renters.

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

[…]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/who_will_control_your_thermost.html

???!!!

One of the most important qualities a human being can posses is empathy:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) – Cite This Source – Share This
em·pa·thy [em-puh-thee] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

A human being that lives without a capacity for empathy is able to remorselessly torture dismember and kill other humans, in the way that mass murderers and serial killers do.

Ron Paul keeps asking the ‘Republican’ candidates running against him to imagine what it would be like if america was invaded by the Chinese, in a vain attempt to make them understand the true source of the bitter hatred that exists against america. He tries to get them to imagine that the Chinese occupy america with troops for the best of good reasons, and that they, in their occupation, say to all americans, “you must adopt our system of government and way of life because its for your own good”.

Any human being with an intact capacity for empathy with other people would shudder at the thought of invading another person’s country and telling them how to live. That Ron Paul even has to bring this example up is astonishing, (though hardly surprising given the low quality of his competitors).

They would also instantly understand the Iraq Freedom Fighters and their struggle to evict the invading american crusaders. Anyone with imagination problems should see the film ‘Red Dawn’ if they want a vivid example of how the americans would respond to a successful invasion of their country.

Americans resisting a colonizing army on american soil would blow up enemy vehicles with IEDs, snipe enemy soldiers with hunting rifles, blow up bridges, assassinate enemy officers, execute collaborators (puppet government traitors, ‘Quislings‘), take to the hills and then film it all, edit it into stirring calls to arms with amazing music and distribute it on DVDRs and over the internets to all loyal and patriotic americans.

This is EXACTLY what the Iraqis are doing; they are doing what the americans would do if their country were occupied by a foreign power. The Iraqis said time and time again that there were no WMDs in their country, and that the pressure being put upon them was unfair, unwarranted, immoral and motivated by the lust for oil. They were invaded anyway. Imagine if that happened to YOUR country? You would not just sit down and do nothing, you would do what the Freedom Fighters are doing, you would fight back with everything at your disposal. There was no justification for this attack, they knew it, even if everyone everywhere else did not. The pain they must feel at this injustice must be almost beyond understanding; its such an outrage though it should be easy for anyone to feel just a small part of it.

Anyone who does not understand this does not have an intact sense of empathy. He must, by definition, think that Iraqis are inferior to americans, and that they have less rights to self determination than americans do.

That is what the Fred Thompsons of this world cannot do. The Giuliani’s of this world are just insane warmongers, as an insane person, we cannot expect rational thought from his mind or reason to emanate from his mouth. Mitt Romney is a reanimated Richard Nixon. Mike Huckabee is the most terrifying prospect out of the bunch. I believe that he would be a worse president than ‘W’. And that is saying something.

Speaking of Mike Huckabee, I was curious to see wether or not he had ever travelled outside the USA; he seems to be an unexposed, parochial ‘never been out of the usa’ type of man. To find out, I used the googles, and stumbled upon one of his more outrageous and insane policies; he wants to stop americans with dual nationality from using their other passports, and he wants to forbid dual citizens from voting in the elections of other countries.

I’m not making this up:

Now, in the midst of a Republican nomination battle in which many voters seem strongly opposed to illegal immigration, Governor Huckabee has veered to the other extreme, and proposes to crack down on legal immigrants, as well as native-born Americans. Item 8 of his “[1]Secure American Plan” promises to:

Impose civil and/or criminal penalties on American citizens who illegitimately use their dual status (e.g., using a foreign passport, voting in elections in both a foreign country and the U.S.).

Let’s consider the second item first: a few countries (such as Italy) which recognize dual citizenship allow non-resident nationals to vote in their elections. Indeed, the Italian parliament even has [2]several seats which are elected by Italian citizens living abroad. It seems obvious that encouraging American citizens who can vote in foreign elections to do so would be in the strategic interests of the United States. A person who resides in America, and who is a citizen of both of the United States and Italy, is probably going to be a stronger supporter of Italo-American friendship than is an Italian-only citizen living in Italy.

[…]

Like I said before, this man is not qualified to be the president. This becomes more and more clear as you dig deeper and deeper into his insane ‘policies’ and his ‘Islamo Fascist’ war forever speak. Even the green Obama would be a better candidate than Huckabee; at least he will have SOME understanding of cultures other than america’s, and that is what is sorely needed in the White House.

After reading this dual citizen nonsense I didn’t bother to try and find out if that bumpkin had ever left the usa or if he even has a passport.

Some of the panelists on the recent ABC News Republican Debate From New Hampshire talked about fingerprinting all foreigners and giving them tamper proof ID cards, and being able to push a button and check someone out at ‘Homeland Security’ and employers being able to see if someone is employable upon presentation of a secure card. None of these people of course, say the words that we have been saying for ages; if you give one group of people ID cards, then EVERYBODY has to have them or the system cannot work. If an employer is required to check if you are legally entitled to work in the USA, then ALL workers must be verified in this way, and EVERYONE must be ‘in the system’ for it to work. That means a National ID card for all americans. Period. If any of them say otherwise, then they are LIARS and should not be in office or they do not understand the implications of what they are proposing and they should not be in office. Either way, anyone who proposes identity management as a solution to social problems is an enemy of Liberty. Full stop.

Our new Holford Myths site is launched today – this has been developed to counteract false information about Patrick Holford.

Anyone who challenges today’s drug-based medical paradigm effectively is a likely target for attack. Notably, since the publication of Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne, certain drug industry funded organisations and drug-oriented individuals have campaigned to discredit Patrick Holford by spreading false allegations. The main opponents have been Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, pharmacology professor David Colquhoun, the anonymous Holford Watch and certain dieticians.

The associations with the pharmaceutical industry and/or organisations funded by the pharmaceutical industry are explored in the free e-book Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacre, Quackbusters and Corporate Science by Martin Walker for those who want to understand the modus operandi of the organised lobby against alternative and nutritional approaches within medicine.

Responses to false allegations about Patrick Holford plus direct links to extracts about Ben Goldacre, David Colquhoun, Holford Watch and certain dieticians from the above e-book can be found on www.holfordmyths.com

[…]

Patrick Holford is a man who owns a company that makes and sells vitamins and dietary supplements. He writes books, and sells them.

This is an affront to people like Ben Goldacre and his ilk. The only food you should be eating is the food that SCIENCE says you should be eating. The only thoughts you should be thinking are the ones that SCIENCE says you should be thinking. Anyone who eats anything else, who thinks anything else, who says anything other than what they believe, who does not swallow the dogma is ANTI-SCIENCE and is to be…

BURNED AT THE STAKE

Rational people are not frightened of Vitamin Sellers or book writers. They make their case cleanly and then STFU. If the thinking behind Bad Science is so great, then let them write a diet book, sell it, and then make people thinner…[booming voice] WITH SCIENCE [/booming voice]; what need have you to personally attack, ridicule and seek to destroy other people? What do you gain out of it? Who appointed these sub human monsters the protectors of the general public? Once again, if they have something better to offer, OFFER IT, do not pump the world full of negative vibes (man [or is that hairless monkey?]).

The fact of the matter is, none of these people have anything to offer, other than rancid bile, calls to disbelief and personal attacks. It goes like this; you have posts on your blog about UFOs, therefore, ALL your stuff is garbage. That is a stupid skeptic trick. That is junk science. I say “God does not exist” and so you are a fool to believe anything else. That is how they work; they do not have a better diet for you, or a better set of supplements, a different, greater belief to follow (except their utterly fallable, incomplete, and downright deadly dogma) the only thing they have to offer is ‘DO NOT DO THAT’ ‘DO NOT BELIEVE THAT’ ‘DO NOT EAT THAT’, and of course, there is nothing that you can DO with that negativity, and the newspaper it is printed on is fit only to light up your fire.

I can tell you something straight – anyone who writes a column like ‘Bad Science’ is on my shitlist from the first speck of ink on the paper. Anyone who runs other people down, who uses Stupid Skeptic Tricks is a TOTAL SCUMBAG.

Lets be clear:

Should they be burned at the stake? No.
Should they be stopped from writing in that RAG the Guardian or any other rag? No.
Are they the worst examples of human trash ever? Yes!

The point is, these attacks on Vitamin Sellers are direct attacks on MY LIBERTY. They are an affront to decent people everywhere, who just want to mind their own business and who do not want to be told what to do, what to think and what to eat and who to trade with.

People who are against Patrick Holford are Fascists. They want to forbid you from taking vitamins, they want the law to ban the sale of dietary supplements. They want you to not read his books; in effect, they want to censor him, and prevent the free flow of information across the world. They are as bad as the Chinese Government, or those guys who burned books in the 1930s.

All free people have the absolute right to publish what they want, and free people have the right to read what they like. Free people have the right to control what goes into their bodies; that means that they can eat whatever they like, inject whatever they like, smoke whatever they like, and it is no one’s business. It is not the business of Ben Goldacre and the corprophiliacs at The Guardian. It is not the business of Bayer, GSL, Novartis, Monsanto, Uncle Sam, HMG or anyone else.

Anyone who tries to shut down writers like Patrick Holford are on the side of Fascists and Fascism. They are against Liberty and against the freedom to read and to learn (and no, learning does not mean only learning what is ‘right’).

I am fed up to the teeth of the attacks on vitamins and food supplements. I am tired of reading about the weasel words of the corporate shills defending the indefensible, trying to take away my right to interact with whomever I want in whatever way I want.

In the end, these people must be put down like diseased dogs. Fox news is learning what it means to defy the force of Liberty unleashed. Their stock has taken a dip thanks to the boycott that is now running against all the sponsors of that evil station. This can be done to any company, and certainly, if the vitamin eaters and supplement takers decide to boycott a newspaper that is attacking them, the effects will be felt. Newspapers can publish whatever they like, and everyone has the right to buy and sell whatever they like…including stocks.

Some may say that I go in too hard on these subjects; part of the style of this blog during its nearly seven years of operation is to go in with all guns blazing if thats what you like. Nevertheless, in the past, when people tried to take away the liberty of free men the result was war and killing and that is what The Guardian, Skeptics and corporate shills are doing; literally attacking millions of free people; trying to erase their liberty, poison them and destroy their lives. That they are subjected only to some bad language and shouting is very lucky for them; in another age they would lose their lives…in any case, they have lost. More people than ever are turning away from Industrial Pharmaceutical Medicine and The Medical Industrial Complex. This is why they bring out the big guns to try and shoot down people like Patrick Holford – though in the case of Goldacre we are talking about a .22 not The Guns of Navarone… but I digress; the publishers of that garbage had better think twice about running hit pieces against people who are doing nothing but mind their own business – there could be big economic consequences for them, just like Fox is feeling right now.

For those morons out there who say that vitamin sellers are defrauding the public, that is not your business. There is plenty of legislation dealing with poisoning and poisoners to take care of people who sell things that actually harm buyers under the guise that it is medicine. We have enough law on the books to take care of almost every possible situation. It is you baying and whining morons who create the monster governments that stop at nothing to control everything that you do down to how and when you piss.

Make up your own minds, eat what you want, publish what you want, read what you want, think what you want and DOWN with the anti vitamin fascists!

UPDATE!

a lurker sends this

> this snippet should have been in your post:
>
> At this point it is perhaps worth pointing out
> that Goldacre won a British Science Writers (BSW)
> award, in 2003. At this time, the BSW was funded
> by Glaxo Wellcome and called the Glaxo Wellcome
> BSW Award, the very year that he began working
> for the Guardian. The drug AZT was made by
> Burroughs-Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline.
>
> and check out this book:
>
> http://www.slingshotpublications.com/dwarfs.html

What a nasty, foul and loathsome piece of work!

By STAN GOFF

For starters, I have become a single-issue voter. The two-front war in Iraq-Afghanistan continues to drag on; and I am thoroughly convinced that no viable Democratic nominee will stop these occupations.

The recent analysis by Allan Nairn shows that even the putative anti-war Edwards (who the press is smothering because of his anti-corporate declarations) has a backroom full of defense contractors. Clinton is a ruthless war-monger, period. Obama is employing on the sorriest, pro-Zioinist, neoliberal trash on the market, i.e., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross, on his core advisory staff.

No one listens to me much, but in some fantasy world where they might, I would suggest that others follow suit with me here. In open primary states, cross over to vote in the Republican primaries for Ron Paul. In closed primary states, switch fast to Republican (like in the next few days).

Vote in the Republican primary; and vote for Ron Paul. Turnout will be dismally low for Republicans this year, because they have been demoralized by the Bush loons’ performances. Independents will vote Paul. The other Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal melee.

I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, “I won’t endorse this-n-that position” liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was anti-war before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.

Cynthia McKinney is running Green, though she hasn’t got the nomination yet. Remember Cynthia McKinney? When she broke with the DLC diktat, her own party fronted another Black woman (Denise Majette) to run against her in an open primary, and Republicans crossed over massively to vote in the Democratic primary to unseat her in a foregone Democratic Congressional district.

Two can play that game. If Cynthia McKinney runs in 2008 for President, I’ll write her in if I have to just to burn a vote for Clinton or Obama. But meanwhile, Ron Paul is on our primary ballot (North Carolina), because he is running as a Republican (we have draconian ballot access conditions here for thrid-parties, thanks to — of course — Democrats).

Ron Paul is running for President. Just what are the capabilities of a President, and what are his likely courses of action… in the unlikely event he wins?

Well, he is the Commander-in-Chief, so he can bring the troops home immediately, as well as order the military-industrial complex to radically scale back. In case anyone on the left has missed the implications of this, this would be a profoundly anti-imperial development that would take the US boot off the necks of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He is a libertarian who dislikes corporate subsidies, so he would veto the mega-billion dollar subisidies for Big Agra, Big Pharma, nuclear power company insurance policies, Weapons-R-Us, the ADM/Cargill Great Ethanol Scam,et al. He could veto the federal highway spending that is promoting sprawl. He has also stated that he opposed so-called free trade agreements.

Hello?

Don’t argue with libertarians when they are right. Many of them say that the leviathan-capitalists that dominate the world’s economy could not get as big as they are in an unfettered and unsubsidized market. Newsflash: that is actually true.

Ron Paul is a Gold Bug. For the uninitiated, that means he believes dollar-value should be pegged to a gold-standard. The implications of a return to the gold standard by the Fed are grim… for Wall Street and the military, both of which depend on massive foreign loans convered by runaway printing presses. Putting a stop to this is a Good Thing. What is the net effect?

Ron Paul may have the most outrageous personal account of race you might imagine; but what is the most horrific social catastrophe in the United States for Black and Brown folk? You guessed it: the criminal (in)justice system. The malignant growth of the American Gulag has been fueled — more than by any other cause — by the ever-more-punative criminalization of drug use and drug addiction, and the ability fo the criminal justice system to apply this criminalization with special force against African America and Hispano-Latinas. Here’s the thing. Paul opposes the criminalization of drugs. What is the net effect?

When we are at the point in history where we cannot change the electoral system, then we need to think tactically about what we can do right now. What will a Paul victory in the primaries do? Not whether a vote for Paul in the Republican primaries endorses his decentralizing philosophy on reproductive choice. President Paul will not be writing legislation. The Executive Branch decides how strongly to enforce legislation… like domestic spying fer-instance.

President Paul would close Guantanamo, halt CIA kidnappings, and gut the enforcement capacity for the PATRIOT Act.

Nominee Paul would give 2008 voters a choice between a real anti-war candidate and a phony Democratic equivocator. The intensity of anti-war sentiment in the country already forced ex-war-hawk Edwards to adopt an out-in-nine-months position to left flank his Democratic opponents.

Don’t ask yourself “what are the ideas?” If your toilet backs up, you can come up with a thousand ideas while shit-water cascades onto the floor. The question is not about ideas; it is, “What will be the net effect?”

Wanna throw a monkey wrench into a fixed electoral system? Here’s a chance.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and “Sex & War” which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com

[…]

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff01042008.html

And there you have it. Snarfed from Lew Rockwell who describes the above as:

Another Left-Liberal Supports Ron Paul
And smacks down some of the left’s dumb arguments against him.

Points of order; Ron Paul’s ideas on ‘race’ are not outrageous in any way – and the fact that Stan Goff calls people ‘black’ demonstrates that he knows less about people than Ron Paul does. But I digress. The rest of this is almost BLOGDIAL in its absolutely pure common sense.

I especially like the bit about your loo overflowing with shit; of course, on BLOGDIAL we say, “if your loo is overflowing and the poop, pee water and used partially disintegrated loo roll is about to spill over the edge, you do not sit there and call for a white paper, go on a demonstration or write to your MP…you get the plunger and start MAKING IT GO DOWN!” … and you do this BEFORE the ‘shit-water’ even gets to the edge; as soon as you see it rising, you ACT QUICKLY.

Sadly, for america and the rest of the world, the loo has already overflowed and we are all walking in an inch of filthy water. Its not too late to call in the plumber though, and his name is RON PAUL.

An educated lurker writes:

>>From BBC reportage:
>
> For Mr Huckabee, the key word was “values”,
> with many Republican caucus-goers saying
> the former Baptist minister was someone
> “who shares my values”.
>
> His win was built on the support he got
> from evangelical voters. More
> than half of Republicans interviewed as
> they attended the caucuses said
> they were either born-again or evangelical
> Christians, the Associated
> Press news agency reported.

This report, and most brits have missed and are missing the big news of the campaign; Ron Paul.

Not everyone in the states is an ‘Evangelical’ and if it is the case that ‘more than half’ of the idiots who voted for Huckleberry are those types, then that caucus is skewed.

read this:

http://www.ronpaulnews.net

every day, and watch ALL of the videos on that site going back through the weeks. ITs worth the effort, because this man is causing a revolution in the usa, and its effects are spreading outside the usa also.

> This won’t be good for reasserting the
> separation of church and state,
> obviously.

Ron Paul advocates TOTAL separation of church and state.

> No more freedom of choice on abortion,

Ron Paul is for removing the federal jurisdiction on the abortion matter.

> but more people on
> death row.

Ron Paul is for abolishing capital punishment

> Less big government, but more diktats.

Ron Paul is for a constitutional sized federal government; ie, no diktats.

> And more ‘keeping up with the Muhammeds’

Ron Paul is for removing ALL of america’s 570,000 troops from ALL bases all over the world.

> when it comes to creating an indoctrinated
> population capable of supporting
> faith-based conflict (sick)

Ron Paul is for home schooling and the abolition of the Department of Education.

> in all
> aspects of trade, migration and power-grabbing.
> (Remember the nice lady pastor talking about
> creating an army to combat ‘The Muslims’ at the
> beginning of jesus camp? Heart-warming stuff)

Ron Paul is for open trade and cultural exchange on the personal level with all countries and all peoples without exception and without restriction.

> And the alternative?

Ron Paul!

> Blandness Inc., an everyman for the
> head-in-the-sand generation. A man as strong,
> stand-uppish and resilient
> as the celery sticks in my fridge no longer
> fit even for stock.

You mean Obama of course :)

> Gah!

Ditto.

America is undergoing a volcanic change, and now, even the Main Stream Media is beginning to get on board with the revolution, whereas before, they were entirely dismissive and even openly hostile to Ron Paul.

Why?

Because everyone of them knows that business as usual is off the table, and if America (with a capital ‘A’) is to re-emerge, then Ron Paul is the only candidate that they have who will do the job.

The media in Britain is completely clueless about what is happening over there. Just look at how The Times has been reporting it. Even British journalists in the USA are completely blind to it; read the amazingly blinkered writings of Justin Webb for a tea soaked taste.

Something BIG is happening in america; America is making a comeback, as I said it could, and its about time.

Mike Huckabee is a fraud. He is a two faced, opportunist, hypocritical, tax loving, preacher of false religion.

Of course, he is free to believe whatever he wants and he is free to preach it, but anyone who wants high office and who also wears his religion on his sleeve like a brat with a cold who keeps wiping his nose and showing it to you is simply unfit. The only thing the candidates should be talking about is The Constitution, nothing else; not morality, ‘values’ or any other bogus nonsense. Lets look at what this man is ‘for’:

Faith and Politics
My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them. For example, when it comes to the environment, I believe in being a good steward of the earth. I don’t separate my faith from my personal and professional lives.

That should make loud sirens sound in every americans head; the only thing that should GUIDE the presidents decisions is THE CONSTITUTION not your own religious beliefs. THat he explicitly does not separate his faith from his professional life(, in this case, his profession is politician and potential president of the united states, ) should signal his immediate disqualification as a candidate – this man is a religious leader who doesn’t understand the separation of church and state. People like Mike Huckabee are extremely dangerous, not because they are religious, but because they do not know what their job is meant to be and what its necessary constraints and limits are.

Marriage
I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. As President, I will fight for passage of this amendment. My personal belief is that marriage is between one man and one woman, for life.

Marriage is not the business of the state. Period. This is a perfect example of religious fanaticism creeping into policy. It is also a perfect example of why this man cannot be president; his own views and not the constitution are the basis of his policy decisions. Furthermore, he has the effrontery to want to change the Constitution to reflect his own religious beliefs. The president’s job is to protect our liberty, which includes our right to express our religious beliefs, even if you believe marriage means polygamy. This man is dangerous because he believes he knows what the absolute truth is, and hence, what is good for everybody; rather like a Communist or a Fascist Dictator.

Energy Independence
The first thing I will do as President is send Congress my comprehensive plan for energy independence. We will achieve energy independence by the end of my second term.

Mike Hukcabee is a religious preacher, not a scientist. He doesn’t understand anything about the dynamics of energy supply (or judging by this statement, economics) and has no business trying to organize it for the entire usa. Only the market can correctly supply energy at the greatest efficiency and lowest cost. That is true for everything, and whenever the government gets involved in a market it creates a distortion and ruins everything. Mike Huckabee is dishonest because he is saying that he can solve something that he cannot. Government needs to get out of business and let people take care of themselves. It is presumptuous that he thinks he can solve this problem, and doubly presumptuous that he thinks he is going to get a second term as president.

National Security/Foreign Policy: Iraq
Iraq is a battle in our generational, ideological war on terror. General Petraeus and our troops are giving their all to provide a window of opportunity for the Iraq government to succeed, while the Democrats are running for the exit doors.

There is no ‘war on terror’. Huckabee saying this means that he is committed to war without end, thats what ‘generational’ means in this context. Mike Huckabee is a suicidal maniac who wants to keep america at war, in other peoples business, and he wants americans to continue to pay for it in blood and cash…only there is no more cash to do it; america has to BORROW money or fraudulently PRINT IT to run its insane wars and 300+ bases around the world. There is also no more blood available, meaning that there is going to have to be a draft to replenish the soldiers for his insane quasi religious war.

National Security/Foreign Policy: War On Terror
I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war. Radical Islamic fascists have declared war on our country and our way of life. They have sworn to annihilate each of us who believe in a free society, all in the name of a perversion of religion and an impersonal god. We go to great extremes to save lives, they go to great extremes to take them. This war is not a conventional war, and these terrorists are not a conventional enemy. I will fight the war on terror with the intensity and single-mindedness that it deserves.

We are NOT engaged in a world war. That is a lie. If Huckabee believes that, he is delusional and unfit for command. There is no such thing as a ‘Radical Islamic fascist’ and no one has ‘declared war on the american way of life’. No one has sworn to annihilate those who believe in a free society. These are the words of the fantasy prone, warmongers, the ignorant and imbeciles. This sort of talk is the talk of Neoconservatism and insanity, and Mike Huckabee is clearly insane for believing it. A promise to fight the war on terror is a promise to destroy america utterly, by eliminating the last vestiges of its Constitution, cementing soft fascism, and murdering millions more innocent people round the world as Bush, Cheyney, Blair and Brown just have.

Cuba Policy
As President, I will enforce and implement all provisions of U.S. law governing policy toward Cuba including the Libertad Act. I will continue President Bush’s policy of pursuing indictments against any Cuban officials, including Raul Castro, responsible for crimes against U.S. citizens.

He really IS insane!!!!

Crisis Management
You need to know that your President will calmly and confidently lift you up in a crisis. During the massive emergency of Hurricane Katrina, when local, state, and federal governments were in melt-down, I stepped forward and directed the rescue and relief of 75,000 victims. Our island of success in a sea of failure was one of the reasons Time magazine named me one of America’s five best governors.

No, we need to know that our president is there defending our LIBERTY and nothing more you idiot!

Vertical Politics
Vertical Day is here and I want you to be a part of it.

Straight up to heaven?

All of this from Huckabee’s website.

If you didn’t think so before, now it must be absolutely clear; Huckabee is a totally INSANE and unfit candidate!!!!!

Barak Obama is no better; all we need to know about him is that he would invade Pakistan to find OBL. Another business as usual big government warmongering nutcase. His website’s issue page is full of meaningless twaddle, and on his foreign policy page, the word ‘constiution’ only appears once, in reference to Iraq’s Constitution.

I think that says all we need to know about that very young man.

America continues to be in VERY BIG TROUBLE. They and thanks to them, the entire world has been in a nightmare for decades. Now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Mike Huckabee and Barak Obama want not only to blow up the tunnel, but they want to douse the light as well.

What a life!

‘Riders told they face having their homes raided and bikes confiscated if they post clips of speeding bikes on the web’

Riders who post clips of themselves speeding on the internet face having their homes raided and computer equipment and even motorcycles seized police have warned.

They say that are monitoring film sharing sites such as YouTube and will leave no stone unturned in the search for culprits.

The warming came after a clip emerged of a motorcyclist hitting an indicated 180mph.

The clip on the website LiveLeak.com appears to show a Kawasaki ZX-10 at 110mph over he national speed limit on a dual carriageway in Buckihghamshire. It is thought to be the most serous speeding offence ever recorded on UK roads.

The rider overtakes one car with 170mph on the clock and wheelies past others at over 140mph. It has been viewed more than 112,000 times.

The police warning came after officers raided the home of a man who posted a 176mph clip on the same site.

[…]

He denies being the rider.

He said, “I had it on a CD that was given to me with other motorcycle clips on it. After seeing clips on Liveleak.com I thought I would share it.”

His home was searched after he volunteered to cooperate with a police investigation.

[…]

South Yorkshire Police said, “As part of the investigation we traced the person who had uploaded the footage on the internet and siezed the computer for examination.”

[…]

Last year a man whose home had been searched by police over yet another clip told MCN he felt he had been treated like a peadophile or murderer.

John Parrott said police had told him to either admit to being the rider in the clip or, “We rip your house apart, seize your computer, your motorcycle, and your video camera.”

[…]

Motorcycle News

I’m not going to type any more of this article, it is SO OUTRAGEOUS it is dirtying my hands transcribing it.

The police cannot raid a person’s house because they upload a clip of someone speeding; uploaded clips do not constitute sufficient evidence that the uploader was the speeder.

Its almost as if the police are running under one set of laws and the public are running under another. Do the police have such a light caseload that they can actually spend time ‘monitoring’ YouTube and LiveLeak for speeding offences? I can scarcely believe the words as printed.

There is no speed limit in Germany. The same sort of speeds on a German road would not raise an eyebrow, but here, people are THREATENED by the police; not after being caught speeding, but because they have FILM OF MOTORCYCLES SPEEDING IN THEIR POSSESSION. It is totally absurd that there should be speed limits on any highway anyway; are German drivers better than drivers from other countries ones? Use the googles and read for yourself.

In any case, this is not about wether or not speeding is good or bad; this is about the rules of evidence, the rule of law and the police making up the law as they go along.

Here are two clips of the police doing just that; making up bespoke law on the spot to suit their mood. In that case, the cameraman knew his rights. This guy knew his rights, but was arrested anyway.

The police do an amazing job. There are countries in the world where you cannot just pick up the phone, call the police and then five minutes later they turn up to help you. They should be paid more money, and have better perks. The majority of the police are decent people, doing a hard job with an intact sense of duty. They are harassed, put in danger, sometimes killed, vilified and disrespected by all sides as thanks. What is entirely wrong is that they are used badly by the state, made to enforce laws that are at best petty and at worse completely insane. It is a waste of their time, and a part of the reason I am sure, many of them act like they are completely ga-ga.

What they should not be doing, is making things WORSE by engaging in stunts like this ‘YouTube Racer’ farce.

MAJOR UPDATE

CNN says:

China limits Internet video to state-controlled companies

HONG KONG, China (AP) — China has moved to restrict videos online, allowing only state-controlled sites to post any — including those shared by users — and requiring Internet providers to delete and report a variety of content.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the new rules would affect YouTube and other providers that host Web sites based in other countries that are accessible from China.

A spokesman for San Bruno, California-based YouTube said the restrictions “could be a cause for concern, depending on the interpretation.”

Tudou.com, which claims to be China’s largest video sharing Web site, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail requesting comment.

The new regulations, which take effect on January 31, were approved by both the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Information Industry and were described on their Web sites Thursday.

Under the new policy, Web sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled.

The majority of Internet video providers in China are private, according to an explanation of the regulations posted on Chinafilm.com, which is run by the state-run China Film Group.

Video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography will be banned. Providers must delete and report such content.

“Those who provide Internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism … and abide by the moral code of socialism,” the rules say.

The permits are subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit “major” violations may be banned from providing online video programming for five years.

Adhering to the new rules could be daunting for YouTube, where about 10 hours of online video covering a wide range of topics is uploaded to the site every minute.

The video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc., already faces allegations that it should do more to block the distribution of clips that infringe on copyrights.

None of YouTube’s video-hosting computers is in China, but the government there could still block access to the site from within China.

YouTube hopes the rules won’t cut it off from the rapidly growing number of Chinese residents with Internet access, spokesman Ricardo Reyes said.

“We believe that the Chinese government fully recognizes the enormous value of online video and will not enforce the regulations in a way that could deprive the Chinese people of its benefits and potential for business and economic development, education and culture, communication, and entertainment,” Reyes said.

China ranks as the world’s second largest Internet market with a total audience of about 164 million, including people who surf the Web from public computers, according to the research firm comScore Inc.

Only the United States, with about 182 million Internet users, boasts a larger online audience.

YouTube says people around the world watch more than 200 million videos on its site each day. It declined to specify how much of its traffic comes from China.

[…]

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/01/03/china.internet.video.ap/index.html

I am not for or against what the Chinese do in their own country; that is their business, and good luck to them. What that country does, if it were to apply to me however, is another matter, and any government that emulates them in a country where I have interests is pure evil.

This YouTube Racer / motorcycle story is yet another sign that US/UK is desperate to move to a Chinese style of government, where they simply ban anything they do not understand, do not like, or think is a threat to their absolute power.

And today on El Reg, there is a story saying that UK wants to outlaw “Hacker Tools”:

By John Leyden
The Register
2nd January 2008

The UK government has published guidelines for the application of a law that makes it illegal to create or distribute so-called “hacking tools”.

The controversial measure is among amendments to the Computer Misuse Act included in the Police and Justice Act 2006. However, the ban along with measures to increase the maximum penalty for hacking offences to ten years and make denial of service offences clearly illegal, are still not in force and probably won’t be until May 2008 in order not to create overlap with the Serious Crime Bill, currently making its way through the House of Commons.

A revamp of the UK’s outdated computer crime laws is long overdue. However, provisions to ban the development, ownership and distribution of so-called “hacker tools” draw sharp criticism from industry. Critics point out that many of these tools are used by system administrators and security consultants quite legitimately to probe for vulnerabilities in corporate systems.

The distinctions between, for example, a password cracker and a password recovery tool, or a utility designed to run denial of service attacks and one designed to stress-test a network, are subtle. The problem is that anything from nmap through wireshark to perl can be used for both legitimate and illicit purposes, in much the same way that a hammer can be used for putting up shelving or breaking into a car.

[…]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/02/hacker_toll_ban_guidance/

This is the same inept, computer illiterate and incompetent government that lost two DVDRs of of peoples personal and sensitive data. The first image that poops into their minds when you use the word ‘web on computers’ is a TV screen with cobwebs all over it.

But I digress.

China is trying to make water run up a waterfall; once they are on the internets, and everyone has a mobile phone, there is going to come a point where viral propagation will make it impossible to stop information flowing. They might be able to execute a couple of people for being seeders or introducers, but once the idea is out, they can never get it back. Trying to control video sites like this is simply absurd, and will do nothing to stop the flow of information that will eventually topple that country’s leaders – that is the tactical error they are making, if their aim is to maximize the amount of time they are able to stay in control as a group.

As for Britain, their government is already universally despised by anyone with a single brain-cell, which is the majority of the country. They are despised precisely because of measures like the one above, and the countless other betrayals and interferences that they have initiated, Chinese style, on this beautiful island.

Or:
Paedophiles must guard Children
Fire must guard Gasoline
etc etc

MPs say losing computer data should be made a crime

Tania Branigan, political correspondent
Thursday January 3, 2008
The Guardian

Recklessly or repeatedly mishandling personal information should become a criminal offence, a committee of MPs urges today in the wake of the child benefit fiasco.

no, the COLLECTION of personal information under certain circumstances, should become a criminal offence.

A report from the justice select committee says there is evidence of a widespread problem within government and expresses concern that further cases of data loss are still coming to light, adding that concerns about systemic failings were raised two years ago by the man now in charge of the government’s review of security. The committee says that companies should be obliged to report information losses.

They have been warned repeatedly about the problems inherent in centralized databases which are in fact, not needed to improve services or provide greater ‘security’ of documents. These people, these computer illiterate dimwits are the criminals; they push on ahead at the urging of vendors without any care about the consequences or the wishes of the electorate, in a deliberate and evil bid to do this ‘Transformational Government’ magic trick, which will increase their power by orders of magnitude and enrich their friends. Yes indeed, these people are the criminals, and there are no two ways about it.

“The scale of the data loss by government bodies and contractors is truly shocking, but the evidence we have had points to further hidden problems,” warned Alan Beith, chairman of the committee. “It is frankly incredible, for example, that the measures HMRC [HM Revenue & Customs] has [now] put in place were not already standard procedure.”

What is frankly incredible, is that they have been warned about this specifically and everyone in both houses has read the details written in crystal clear english. There is no way that they can claim that they did not understand the consequences of this diabolical plan hatched by the vendors to make victims of the virtuous villigers of England by the voratious vacuuming of their vital data. They are guilty of not heeding the warnings, and going along with it in an act of flagrant negligence.

The committee says the government must find ways to minimise the risks inherent in maintaining large databases to which a large number of people have access and suggests that new offences might strengthen security procedures.

All the comittees and white papers that they can sit at and print will not stop this headlong rush into disaster. All centralized databases of innocent people must be destroyed. All planned databases like ContactPoint and the NIR must be stopped. Everyone everywhere must refuse to cooperate with any document or process that has been derived from an unreasonable use of their personal data. Everyone everywhere must refuse to allow their biometric data to be harvested for collection into these databases. That means no fingerprinting for any reason, no iris scans and no DNA swabs for anyone except those convicted of a violent offence.

Criminal offences under the Data Protection Act – such as unlawfully obtaining or disclosing personal data – only apply to people who are not the “data controller”. That means that although third parties who misuse the details can be prosecuted the people holding the information, such as large businesses or government departments, cannot be held responsible for breaches. Beith said: “Clearly, criminal sanctions are not the only ones you want to use. But perhaps the issue would be taken more seriously if there was a criminal offence at the end of the line.”

These are the words of a total imbecile.

Once the data is out, no criminal sanction can make it private again.. Its like trying to put an egg back together once it has been broken, you know the story Beith, Humpty Dumpty? Does that make this easier for you to understand?

The report also argues that the information commissioner needs more resources. At present his office’s budget is just £10m a year.

[…]

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2234448,00.html

Well, what a surprise. They want MORE MONEY from the TAXPAYER to solve a problem that THEY CREATED out of THIN AIR by using the TAXPAYERS MONEY.

These people really are the criminals, that is absolutely clear.

2007 was a year of movement – finally made the move from one big city to another, a relief to ‘start from scratch’ again, shed off a lot of mental detritus and antipathy. Trying to find new paths still barely scratching the surface.
So then resigned and reemployed, the focus shifts and the outcome of working becomes a delight again.
In boxing things up realised there are some records I no longer like and may have reached the point where others I probably won’t listen to again, but which ones? The eternal question… perhaps. As a result bought hardly any new music, on the plus side a whole year without earphones.
The sad feeling that hearing is getting worse, still able to hear better than some but finding that sounds don’t ‘resonate’ as they used to.
More domesticity as a result of going out less, putting effort into better cooking and baking.
Reappraising the meaning of ‘disturbance’, rattled by not getting things done or learning new things, not finding the right word, losing the memory.

Online presence in various places peters out to a blip on the outer circle, the thought of whether it ‘matters’ flickers. This shall be remedied.