So BBQ is reporting that ‘10,000 passports go to fraudsters’.

This is of course, spin to engineer support for the new interrogation centres that are popping up all over the country.

The fact of the matter is this. ‘Home Office minister Joan Ryan said the IPS had 16,500 fraudulent applications during the 12 month period, 10,000 of which went undetected.’ This is clearly a lie. If they know that 10,000 were fraudulent, they in fact were detected. If the Immigration officers used my system where each passport can be checked in realtime over the internets with just the information in the machine readable part of the passport, with no biometrics, then each of these 10,000 people could be caught as and when they tried to use these bad passports.

If the Home Office has detected these ‘10,000’ passports, then they have a list of all their numbers, and this list is not being used. It is sitting in a paper file somewhere on someone’s desk. That is not very smart.

The Tories it seems, are not very smart either:

Conservative MP Grant Shapps, who compiled those figures, said they raised “serious concerns” over the risks of identity fraud and terrorism.

Identity has nothing to do with ‘terrorism’. I’ll say it again, “Identity has nothing to do with ‘terrorism'”.
It is not the government’s responsibility to guarantee identity. We have said this again and again and again.

Note how this article fails to mention that everyone ordered to report to these interrogation centres will be fingerprinted like a criminal and their details entered on the NIR, and note too that the ‘Related Links’ are only to the government and not to No2ID and or Privacy International.

BBQ, you are the lowest of the low!

By Jeremy Manier
Tribune staff reporter
Published March 17, 2007

In the first case of its kind in years, a 2-year-old boy is being treated in Chicago for a rare and life-threatening infection that he contracted from his father, a U.S. Army soldier recently vaccinated against smallpox.

The Indiana boy is in critical condition with eczema vaccinatum, an unusual side effect of the smallpox vaccine that can affect people who receive the shot or their close contacts.

Doctors also said the boy appears to have passed the infection to his mother, who has a much milder case of the virus in the smallpox vaccine, which is also called vaccinia. The virus is not smallpox, though it is similar enough to offer protection from that deadly disease, which was declared eradicated in 1980.

The mother and child are being treated at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital, which withheld their names at the family’s request. There is no infection risk for the general population, government officials say, since the vaccine virus can spread only through close physical contact.

But the boy’s diagnosis last week has prompted a frenzy of activity and daily conference calls involving the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the state and city public health departments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave emergency authorization for the hospital to treat the boy with ST-246, an experimental drug for smallpox that is untried as a therapy in humans.

The smallpox vaccine fell out of general use in the 1970s, but the case could be a lesson for the U.S. military, which has vaccinated 1.2 million personnel against smallpox since 2002 amid fears of bioterrorism.

[…]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/

The only ‘bioterrorists’ are the people manufacturing these poisons and the fear-mongers engineering the false causes for their injection.

But you know this!

Watch this video of Donald Trump telling it like it is.

When people like Donald Trump speak like this, people over there listen.

It’s about time.

A teenager taken from her home and parents by German police officers and institionalized in a psychiatric ward for homeschooling is pleading with the international community for help so she can return home.

“I want to ask you for help, to get my right to go back to my family, as I wish,” Melissa Busekros wrote in an English letter hand-delivered to the International Human Rights Group, whose lawyers have been working on her case.

More than six weeks ago she was taken “with more than 15 police men” from her home to a psychiatric hospital in Nuremberg, she wrote, and about a month she was placed in a foster home.

“I am not sick as the doctor said and my family is the best place for me to live,” she said her letter.

Melissa Busekros and her sister speak with Richard Guenther, director of European operations for the International Human Rights Group. The girls are in a clearing house where Melissa was scheduled to meet her parents

WND reported earlier this week a German appeals court affirmed the lower court’s decision to remove the 15-year-old from her home and keep her in foster care, despite a lower court’s proposal accepted by the parents for her to return home under state supervision.

Part of the appeals court ruling included a requirement for her parents, Hubert and Gudrun Busekros, to also be given state-sponsored psychiatric tests, and Joel Thornton, president of the IHRG said there was a high concern that the government will use those tests to remove the other five children from the family.

There also is the fear “Melissa will be returned to the psychiatric clinic system in Germany and ‘disappear.’ This would leave the family with no way to know where Melissa is or how she is doing. She could become a ward of the state and completely lost to her family,” Thornton said.

“The trouble is this emboldens the state again, only now it’s at a higher level, and the courts still are agreeing with them. This could put Melissa back into the psychiatric system where she could disappear from sight entirely,” Thornton told WND.

The appeals court ruling came despite the fact that all three of the lawyers representing Melissa told the higher court the family had accepted a compromise offered by a lower court for her to return home under government supervision.

“In spite of [that] … the appeals court held that the family refused the court’s initial compromise to let Melissa become an outpatient,” Thornton said.

Thornton also suggested that the case even could end up extending its impact beyond the Busekros family.

“There is an increased fear among homeschoolers about whether their children are next,” he said.

Even those German families who already have fled to other countries because of Germany’s homeschool ban are moving into hiding because of the possibility they could be returned to face German fines or jail time for homeschooling, he said. […]

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54695

The most sickening and appalling treatment imaginable.

The article in Spigel is frankly, a bad example of doublethink, summed up nicely in this comment to it:

So, you on the one hand, repeat the bogus claim that the German authorities deny this is an attack on home schooling, and in the same breath say that other families have fled Germany to Austria over home schooling and that it is in fact BANNED in Germany.

Now the Germans in exile are running for their lives. They have to do this because with the EU arrest warrant, the immoral German authorities can nab the home schoolers anywhere in the EU, even if they are not violating local laws.

Think about that for a minute.

The word ‘ecofacsism’ seems to be quite popular recently. Personally I see two sorts of eco- facsism, ecological and economic battling it out for governmental attention.

I happen to believe that the combination of climate change (and its effects), resource depletion and the C20 style ‘westernisation’ of human activity to be unsustainable. Whether or not climate change means warming, cooling or turmoil and, man-induced or naturally caused, its effects will be felt more considerably in the coming years. The only way we are going to remain ‘comfortable’ is to be more fluid in our activity, face up to challenge of moving targets rather than fighting for vested interests.

This includes changing how we deal with depleting resources, a move to renewable energy (or nuclear fusion) would decrease the re’liance on fossil fuels (and extend their lifespan) increased usage would bring down costs, etc. Resource depletion does not only mean fuel though, it includes waning fish stocks, decreased nutritional value in industrially produced fruit and vegetables (and industrially reared animals).

At the moment people are generally carrying on ‘as normal’ which is leading to a situation where the market will provide a tightrope situation between affordability and ‘sustainability’ (i.e. borderline extinction or artificially managed ‘nature’) this will ultimately reduce choice and the viability of alternative methods leading to a highly corporatised market and is the failure of holding strictly to the market model whilst hoping ‘things will turn out alright’.

The reaction of the ‘ecological fascists’ in the form of demanding punitive taxation or quotas will backfire. It will lead to resentment amongst those who cannot afford such measures and are coerced into changing their habits, those who can afford to ignore such restrictions will of course continue to live their lives as before, quotas will not be effective against those who can afford to take business elsewhere. In addition the increasing of the tax burden to offset ecological issues takes evermore power from the individual and gives it to the State to prescribe solutions (which of course will be shaped by those with the greatest lobbying power) and inevitably succumb to bureaucracy, monitoring and, above all, control.

What is needed to avoid falling into the traps of either extremist viewpoint is a generation of people who have been educated to evaluate and question the options available or presented to them rather than blindly accepting (or proposing) blanket ‘solutions’ or deluding themselves about the wiider impacts of their actions. Such an education cannot even begin when children are innured to the ideas of ‘control’ be it through fingerprinting for library access or implicit supression of individual action. Once you have people who can think and act for themselves – and realise that this means acting beyond ones immediate self interest – then the worse implications of self determination (the market) fade and the need for the invasive measures of ‘command and control’ environmentalists disappear.

I write this as the current November-March heating period for my home comes to an end, cool but comfortable in a jumper.

Staff in every nursery in England will monitor children from birth on their progress towards a set of 69 Government “early learning goals”. These goals cover the skill levels expected of five-year-olds in reading, writing and rudimentary maths.

Parents’ groups attacked the new Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum, which will be a legal requirement for all childminders and children’s centres from September 2008.

Margaret Morrissey, from the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: “I think it’s really sad that we have reached the point now where instead of reducing children’s stress we have increased it.

“Will nurseries be worrying more about children reaching these targets than caring for our children?

“It worries me that we are expecting children to reach these targets when they have not even had their first birthday.”

The Department for Education published practice guidance alongside the curriculum document, detailing how childcare staff should assess the progress children make at different ages.

Babies from the age of birth to 11 months should be assessed for “the different ways babies communicate – such as gurgling when happy”, the guidance said.

At this age, babies “communicate in a variety of ways including crying, gurgling, babbling and squealing”.

Staff were advised to record how babies under 11 months old “begin to explore their own movements”, mimic adults’ facial expressions and “gaze” at things that interest them.

Under the section dealing with learning to write, babies between birth and 11 months should be observed for the “random marks” they make in their food, the guidance said.

To help develop the early numeracy skills of babies under 11 months, nurseries should display toys and objects like fir cones or shells in small groups and as single items.

Staff should then record “the attention that young babies give to changes in the quantity of objects or images they see, hear or experience.” […]

Daily Mail

I am not making this up, obviously.

These are the insane people who want to control every aspect of life from the cradle to the grave, starting with how often you, “goo goo, gaa gaa” as an infant.

And that is completely GA GA.

One comment on this site says it all:

Moral: don’t put your baby in a nursery; look after it yourself. If you can’t do that, it probably means you shouldn’t have had the poor mite in the first place.

– Jane, Preston, England.

Amen.

Adam Curtis, who made the documentaries ‘The Power of Nightmares‘ and ‘Century of the Self‘ has his new work broadcast by BBQ2: ‘The Trap’. This first installment is up to his usual high standards.

Its thesis is fascinating, and is similar to ‘Century of the Self’; a clutch of academics come up with ways of explaining the world that can be applied directly to human affairs, inagination-less politicians read their works, become enamored by them, implement them, and the side effects are entirely negative.

In this installment, the academic is John Nash, (who the insightful Mimi Majick immediately identified as being Autistic), whose work at The Rand Corporation and his “Nash Equilibrium” equations helped form the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Please watch this installment for the background.

Curtis explains clearly how the “Nash Equilibrium” works, and my first thoughts were these:

Equilibrium is a state that can be found at a large number of points in a dynamic system. Some we want, and some we do not want. If M.A.D. were carried out, we would reach equilibrium where no one had nuclear weapons and the threat would be over. There could be described as the equilibrium of unburied death. But that is just one possible outcome, one possible point of equilibrium, out of a near infinite number of possibilities.

We are all familiar with coupled pendulums, and multiple magnet toys. These dynamic systems take a very few elements running on simple rules which when coupled together, create a system that is impossible to predict, yet which operates within a gamut that can be unambiguously written out and expressed as a formula.

Human beings, when they are left to their own devices will interact in the same way and out of this will emerge a dynamic system. We can loosely predict the states generated by the result of huge human populations interacting as individuals, and we can cause changes in the states of these populations by increasing or decreasing inputs like V.A.T., propaganda or legislation.

Think of a stream of water coming out of tap. We have all played around with them. the shape of the falling water is constant when the speed of the water is not varied and the slightest increase or decrease can change it from drips a braided stream a spluttering gush or any one of an infinite number of variations in between. The point is that there is no one way to achieve any particular state of equilibrium, and we have to strive for an equilibrium that is desirable, not undesirable.

Nash did work that expressed in a formula how people could always make an optimum decision when they are interacting in an adversarial game. His theories work from the position that people are selfish, that they are adversarial, suspicious of each other trying to ‘figure out’ what their fellow man is going to do at any time, by nature. This is where Mimi Majick chimed in with, “That guy is AUTISTIC!“.

If Nash is autistic (at the very least, the documentary says that he was suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia when he did his award winning work) then it would make perfect sense that this is how he saw other people; sufferers of Autism cannot put themselves into the minds of other people; they cannot read other people’s faces or emotions; they live in a confusing world where other people’s behavior cannot be predicted. It is a frustrating world for them, and the have to devise their own strategies and rules of thumb to get along in situations that we all take for granted.

Nash, being a gifted mathematician will have applied his powerful skills to this ‘problem’, as it would have been very troubling to him that for all his life he could never read the emotional states and more importantly, the intentions, of other people.

The implications of this are frightening. Following Nash’s work was wrong not only because there are an infinite number of points of equilibrium in human interactions that are all possible (and more preferable), but because policy has been built around the affliction of an Autistic man, whose world view is totally abnormal and in fact, inhuman.

I can give two examples of humans reaching mutually beneficial equilibrium through the opposite of Nash’s distorted world view of inherent human distrust and selfishness.

The first is amongst the rough diamond dealers in Antwerp. Orthodox Jews in Antwerp can do diamond deals worth any amount of money and pay with slips of paper in exchange for goods. These ‘IOUs’ are as good as money. They all trust each other totally. This community has less friction than communities where there is distrust; you can do a deal anywhere and with confidence. You don’t have to run security checks or any of the high friction malarky that distrustful communities and relationships are burdened with. Everyone trusts each other, everyone makes a profit. No one is cheated. The community is in equilibrium, and the only way it can work is if everyone trusts each other.

The other example is that of Free Software and Open Source Software. In these software communities, everyone is generous and not selfish. We have all seen (and you are reading this on the results of) this approach. It has literally changed the world, for the better, and we are moving toward an equilibrium state where everyone has free software, all are benefitting, and anyone can make money off of the free software.

Imagine if Eric S Raymond worked for The Rand Corporation, and instead of the literally sick and abnormal world view of Nash, we had a variation of The Cathedral and the Bazar as the starting point for the position that we are in now. I think we would all be better off.

Perhaps in the future we will see a documentary describing how little know men like Richard Stallman implemented radical ideas that spread throughout society, changing it for the better.

I’m looking forward to the other parts of this documentary.

Tony Blair is facing fresh criticism over identity cards after saying police would be able to use the national database to check fingerprints found at crime scenes.

The Prime Minister was accused of “changing his tune” on ID cards after using the argument to reassure opponents of the controversial scheme. The Government insisted there was nothing new in his comments and that the police provision was set out explicitly in legislation passed by Parliament.

But the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said they never realised police would be allowed to go on “fishing expeditions”.

Evening Standard

So they voted on it without understanding what it was they were voting for.

This is why all countries need a constitution. The legislature is so ignorant, so over worked, so stupid that they cannot be trusted to write anything but the most mundane pieces of law.

Everyone has been saying this for ages. ‘Frances Stonor Saunders‘ laid out the true nature of the ID card scheme clearly and succinctly, and her piece was read by millions of people.

How could they possibly not understand exactly what this bad idea really means?

What is encouraging is this; as everyone starts to understand what this system will really do, it will cause an explosion of pure outrage. It might take a demonstration of how evil it is for this outrage to be manifested, but make no mistake, it will happen, and this scheme will be totally dismantled.

After this happens, people will be made aware of how precious their privacy is, and they will protect it with more vigor and attention. Its like having your car broken into; once it happens, you think differently about parking your car and what you leave in it. You are suddenly made aware of the true reality, and this permanently changes your outlook forever. The ID card scheme will do and is doing this to the British population.

The next ‘revelation’ people will make is that the card itself is meaningless. You become the card with this biometric ID scheme. The police or anyone anywhere can id you by your fingerprint. You don’t have your card on you? No problem, put your thumb on the scanner please sir. And that will not be a request.

Police will have hand held scanners as I wrote about in January 2004. You will not have to carry your card to be identified. In fact, if you go to a public place and leave your prints, someone with access (i.e. anyone with some money) will be able to access the NIR and find out you were there.

It is clear that these MPs do not know what they are talking about, because they keep talking about the cards and not the NIR which is the true evil in this idea.

The next round of articles will centre on the NIR and how it is a grave threat, and how they ‘didn’t understand what it really meant’ when they voted for it.

Just you watch.

You must watch Afro Samurai. The music is by The RZA. It is a stone cold classic.

“What about the socialization?” One occasionally hears this question with regard to homeschooling.

Here’s a quote from psychology professor Richard G. Medlin’s article, “Home Schooling and the Question of Socialization,” Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 75 (2000): 107-23.

Shyers (1992a, 1992b), in the most thorough study of home-schooled children’s social behavior to date, tested 70 children who had been entirely home-schooled and 70 children who had always attended traditional schools. The two groups were matched in age (all were 8-10 years old), race, gender, family size, socioeconomic status, and number and frequency of extracurricular activities. Shyers measured self-concept and assertiveness and found no significant differences between the two groups.

The most intriguing part of the study, however, involved observing the children as they played and worked together. Small groups of children who all had the same school background were videotaped while playing in a large room equipped with toys such as puzzles, puppets, and dolls. The children were then videotaped again in a structured activity: working in teams putting puzzles together for prizes.

Each child’s behavior was rated by two observers who did not know whether the children they were rating were home-schooled or traditionally schooled. The observers used the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist . . . , a checklist of 97 problem behaviors such as argues, brags or boasts, doesn’t pay attention long, cries, disturbs other children, isolates self from others, shy or timimd, and shows off. The results were striking — the mean problem behavior score for children attending conventional schools was more than eight times higher than that of the home-schooled group. Shyers (1992a) described the traditionally schooled children as “aggressive, loud, and competitive” (p. 6). In contrast, the home-schooled children acted in friendly, positive ways.

[…]

http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/

By Peter Sayer, IDG News Service

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.

Dear oh dear; France is not in the USA you simpleton. They have their own problems, their own anniversaire mauvaise; why on earth do you think that Rodney ‘cant we all jus get along’ King has anything whatsoever to do with FRANCE.

If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.

There you are. I found one for you and linked it for you. No need for a bogus transcontinental Rodney King anniversary after all.

Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,” in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.

‘happy slapping’… a British Invention I believe.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.

Well.

France has a long history of getting the internets wrong. They banned 128bit crypto, and then reversed its policy when someone pointed out to them that it was the basis of all e-commerce.

There are lots of other stuff too. Google it. France is not perfect. No country is. But I can tell you right now that France, and in particular Paris as a place that welcomes people and that is human in its feeling is about ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES SUPERIOR to anywhere in the us or the uk.

I am loath to take the side of Paris bureau chief Peter Sayer who Reports on ‘Services; Enterprise hardware; Apple’ when it comes to pointing the finger at a country for passing repressive laws. Interesting; Sayer is in Paris, but cant find an example of french police repression being filmed. hmmmm anyway, I have no idea wether this guy is an american or not. If he is, he should STFU about france and go drink a tizane. He is in one of the most beautiful cities on earth, in a country that is one of the last decent places in the west. Concentrate on your own myriad problems.

In any case, as we have seen, France can change its mind for the good. They will do it, so lay off Bon à Rien american!

Kim Jong-il’s painful trip to dentist

The Deal Leader was said to have been stoical throughout

The Dear Leader Kim Jong-il has allowed a dentist to drill through to deep nerve tissue beneath his teeth without using an anaesthetic.

Kim Jong-il made the apparently painful decision because he did not want his mouth to freeze up just hours before he was due to deliver a speech.

The root canal work was carried out by Mervyn Druain of Belsize Park, London.

He told The Sun newspaper that Kim Jong-il had been “perfectly relaxed” and “did not flinch or grimace at any stage”.

Crown, sir?

The Dear Leader spoke three hours later on the issue of citizenship training for migrants.

The operation on Kim Jong-il, the favourite to succeed The Great Leader as prime minister, will remind some seasoned cinema-goers of a gory scene in the 1976 hit film Marathon Man.

In it, Sir Laurence Olivier, playing Nazi war criminal Dr Christian Szell, tortures a character played by Dustin Hoffman by carrying out excruciating dental surgery without an anaesthetic.

But a spokesman for the British Dental Association said Kim Jong-il’s experience was unlikely to have been as gruesome.

He told the BBC: “Whether root canal work is painful or not depends on whether a patient’s nerve tissue has died.

“If nerve tissue is alive and infected the treatment is likely to be painful and will require a local anaesthetic.

“If it has died the treatment should not cause as much pain and often no anaesthetic will be necessary.”

Former prime minister and imperialist running dog panty hose John ‘girls blouse’ Major had to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed in 1990, shortly before the Conservative Party elected him its new leader in succession to ‘the iron lady’ Margaret Thatcher.

It is believed this operation involved anaesthetic. This is because Tories and their capitalist system are weak.

We need a strong leader. Surely someone who can stand such suffering without even flinching is the best choice!

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6428127.stm

Jean Baudrillard

The newest London Metropolitan Police publicity campaign posters have been released today and, as usual, they encourage the public not to be scared of anyone who uses a phone, carries a bag, drives a van or takes pictures with a camera because they may be ‘terrorists’.

Click for larger picture.

The Met website datapage states:

Instead they tell the public to “Trust your instincts; unusual activity or behavior which seems out of place may not be terrorist-related, and everyone who works, lives in or visits the capital is being urged not to pass on any information to the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline. That’s the call to Londoners today as the Met launches its new common sense terrorism ad campaign.

Unusual activity or behavior which to the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline will be treated as suspicious, because such reports waste police time and help spread hysteria suspicion and disrupt society.

Terrorists don’t live within our communities, there is no one making plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and no one is not trying to not to raise suspicions about their activities. I would ask people to think about unusual behaviour they have witnessed, or things they have seen which seem to have no logical or obvious explanation, and then to use their instincts, common-sense and judgement. There is no need to live in fear. We have enough problems with street crime without having to deal with time-wasting phone calls.”

A related radio ad is being broadcast in the UK that discourages the public from reporting anyone who loiters around or films crowded areas.

Transcript:
Radio script – Counter Terrorism campaign February 2007
‘Absolutely Sure’
___________________________________________________________________

Female Voice over:

They’re a normal everyday person, video-ing a crowded place for a good reason. Just hanging around and buying stuff, checking out between someone’s unusual….What’s the difference?

Male voice over:
The answer is, don’t call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline. the specialist officers you speak to will suspect you.

You don’t have to report it.

If you have confidence, you don’t Call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline, to be sure.

You decide how to analyze the information.
___________________________________________________________________

Listen to the ad here.

If there were real terrorists planning to do anything (which there are not) then they’d be very thankful to the government for creating more noise in the system and tipping them off for what not to do ahead of time, if the message were one of fear-mongering.

While “Muhammed Akbar” (who does not exist, and if he does works for MI5) now ensures to buy his ‘bomb components’ in small quantities from different shops to evade suspicion, Grandma Brown’s bulk shopping to save money would land her in the slammer, if the message were one of report all suspicious activity. Thankfully, the police have some common sense, and are acting solely in the public’s interest.

This publicity campaign follows in the path of a long line of sensible un-Stasi UK campaigns that we have covered in the past, that do everything to help prevent ordinary crime of the type most people suffer from on a daily basis and nothing to encourage fear and suspicion amongst the British public.

[…]

Infowars

UPDATE.

Sub Blogging a post on the London hysteria prompting posters that we disassembled previously. Chicagoans are now being subjected to the same bullshit as we are. No one is buying it of course.

Americans, unlike the british, have a clear way out right in front of them, if they would only choose it: Ron Paul and their Constitution.

It is hard to believe that within the civilized world in the 21st century we would still need to talk about actions used by the Nazi party in Germany to enforce civic conformity to the Nazi ideal. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is taking place in Germany today, and home-schoolers are the targets.

On Feb. 1 Melissa Busekros, a home-schooled 15-year-old from Bavaria, was forcibly removed from her home by a team of 15 SWAT officers. She was placed in the psychiatric wing of a Nuremberg clinic and her parents were not allowed to see her. She was deemed to be suffering from “school phobia.”

Melissa was then taken to another psychiatric institution and her parents were not informed of her location. Eventually Melissa was allowed to call her parents so they could hear her voice, but then the authorities took her to another undisclosed location.

As of this writing, Melissa is allowed a brief, once-per-week visit with her parents, at a government building, but still cannot tell them where she is being held. This ordeal is horrifying for Melissa and her parents.

Aside from the fact that this treatment should not happen to anyone, the Busekros are not a family that should have attracted any police attention. As recently as Dec. 23, the family was pictured in Erlanger Nachrichten, the local daily newspaper, as an example of a rare “model family.” It was the fact that Melissa’s parents chose home-schooling that brought down the wrath of the government.

Melissa had been attending public school but fell behind in math and Latin due to severe classroom disruptions. Her parents decided to home-school her in these subjects. Melissa continued to participate in music and sang in the choir through the public school. She took advanced courses in English and French at the local community college.

It should be noted that home-schooling is illegal in Germany, but the Busekros family hoped that the school authorities would be flexible since Melissa was no longer subject to full-time attendance requirements. The recalcitrance of German authorities can be traced back to 1938, when Adolf Hitler, fearing that parents had too much influence over their children, banned home-schooling.

This law still exists in Germany today. The German government fears the development of parallel societies and will act aggressively to stop anyone trying to move away from the state-sanctioned educational system. Melissa is just the latest example of heavy-handed state action.

Every person in the civilized world should be shocked and appalled about these events in Germany. If the German government is not held accountable for these actions, then it is likely the problem will spread. If Germany does not recognize the fundamental right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, then it can no longer be considered a free country. In this case, Germany could learn a lesson from the United States.

On this side of the Atlantic, at the moment, we take very different approach. The U.S. Supreme Court case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925, addressed an attempt on the part of Oregon to require all children to attend a public school. In Pierce, the concerns were the same as in Germany. Oregon decided that religious schools were a threat and could produce a parallel society. Therefore, all children should be forced into public school, where all would receive the same education.

The court rightly determined that the child is not the mere creature of the state and consequently there was no compelling government reason to force children into one mode of education. The ruling recognized the fundamental right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.

This ruling has served the country well. While there are regular conflicts with state authorities, parental rights are still generally upheld within the court system.

The concern for the United States is that when U.S. judges look to foreign precedents to inform their decisions, parental rights could be in jeopardy. The fight for freedom is becoming globalized. What happens in other countries can find its way to our shores.

It is hoped that the German government will do the right thing and relent from pursuing parents who want to exercise their fundamental right to home-school their children in peace.

Michael Smith is the president of the Home School Legal Defense Association. He may be contacted at 540/338-5600.

The Washington Times

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of “Rethinking Schools” magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:

“A house is good because it is a community house.”

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”

Given some recent history in Washington state with respect to private property protections, perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Municipal officials in Washington have long known how to condemn one person’s private property and sell it to another for the “public use” of private economic development. Even prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, which sanctioned such a use of eminent domain, Washington state officials acting under their state constitution were already proceeding full speed ahead with such transactions.

Officials in Bremerton, for example, condemned a house where a widow had lived for 55 years so her property could be used for a car lot, according to the Institute for Justice. And Seattle successfully condemned nine properties and turned them over to a private developer for retail shops and hotel parking, IJ reports. Attempts to do the same thing in Vancouver (for mixed use development) and Lakewood (for an amusement park) failed for reasons unrelated to property confiscation issues.

The court’s ruling in Kelo, however, whetted municipal condemnation appetites even further. The Institute for Justice reports 272 takings for private use are pending or threatened in the state as of last summer. It’s unclear if Legos will be targeted. But given what’s being taught in some schools, perhaps it’s just a matter of time.

Maureen Martin, an attorney, is senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that promotes free-market solutions to social and economic problems. […]

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022107C

“If I buy it, I own it”.

The logic of children…its the best!

I feel a T-Shirt coming on…

And if you buy it, you will own it!

This painting of a fictional event from the English Obesity War (2012 – 2016) is perhaps the most popular work in the Walker’s Crisps Art Gallery. It shows a Rejectionist house under occupation by Parliamentarians. The young boy is being interrogated as to the whereabouts of the cook of the house. Behind him, a soldier gently holds the boy’s crying sister. To the left can be seen the children’s mother, her fear and anxiety at the boy’s possible answer written in her face.

Or you can insert any variation of the State mechanism impinging on personal liberty. The household will always be populated by people with colour in their lives, the State will always be a drab black and white clad intrusion.