should make Home Educators in the UK feel warm inside; you are free to Home Educate as you choose, in a country that (for the moment) is not bothering you in anything like the repressive, unjustifiable, nasty, fascist ways the other ‘Democratic’, ‘fair’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘just’ countries do. Your children are not being subjected to the horrors that are described so eloquently above.
After HRH Elizabeth the second officially killed the ID Cards bill (for the indigenous people of the UK only) we now read this story from the Manchester Evening News about what was actually going on at the time of the Manchester ID Card trials.
We can infer much from this, and also extrapolate to what is happening today:
Revealed: The full shambles of the ID card trial in Greater Manchester
Civil servants were urged to sign up their own families for ID cards as the controversial scheme flopped, it can be revealed today.
Confidential reports into trials of the controversial £30 cards, obtained by the M.E.N., expose for the first time the chaos that surrounded their introduction.
The £1bn scheme was launched in Greater Manchester in November last year but proved a hugely expensive failure, with only 13,200 people signing up.
It was scrapped by the coalition government days after it came to power.
Today the M.E.N. can reveal how:
Senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives encouraging them to buy cards because of fears about the level of demand
UK and overseas border guards refused to recognise the cards – with one traveller chased through an Italian airport after trying to use one as ID
The Home Office discovered the cards could stop some credit cards from working properly
The cards – which contained fingerprint and other biometric details – were championed by the previous Labour government as a way of preventing terrorism and identity theft.
The documents highlight particular concern about low take-up by staff at Manchester Airport –
By April this year, only 15 per cent of airside workers had enrolled for a card.
Reports reveal how the airport took the unusual step of appointing a full-time ‘National Identity Card Administrator’ to drive up demand and considered a competition to promote the scheme.
The report also said: “One participant complained that the identity card interfered with other cards kept in the same wallet.”
The ID scheme – which cost £292m before it was axed – was initially championed by Labour minister as an anti-terror measure that would allow them to keep track of people in the UK.
But public pressure eventually forced them to concede that the cards should not be compulsory. Manchester was chosen to pilot the scheme but all 13,200 cards issued have now been cancelled.
Participants who forked out £30 for the documents have been told they will not get refunds.
The Home Office refused to comment on any of the problems cited in the reports
Damian Green, the home office minister, said: “The Identity Card Scheme was intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive.”
But Leigh Labour MP Andy Burnham, who previously oversaw the biometric cards while a Home Office minister, said: “The Tory-Lib Dem government are trying to make the cards a totem of what our government stood for– but I think they were a good idea and many people are still be in favour of them.”
only 13,200 certifiably insane signed up for the ID Card; we knew that the uptake was very small, but what we did not know was that senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives to encourage them to buy the cards because demand was so small.
We did not know that UK border guards did not recognize the cards. That is just completely ABSURD.
The staff at Manchester Airport, bless them, held fast and refused to knuckle under, with only 15% of them taking the card. This is highly significant, since the jobs of these people might have been on the line if they refused.
We did not know that they appointed an NIR Administrator to drive up demand.
The question here is (and you know the answer) why did we not know all of this at the time it was happening?
BBQ was there ‘reporting’ what was happening in Manchester, with its vox pops and biased articles; surely they must have known about the low uptake, the NIR Administrator and the ridiculous scene of a man not having his ID Card at the borders of ‘his own country’.
Its a 1000% guaranteed fact that the BBC was aware of all of this and did not report it. We at BLOGDIAL know for a fact that they were involved in setting up NO2ID for their vile propaganda pieces; its a very safe bet that they withheld these sensational and game changing stories because they knew that if they reported them, the ID Card fiasco’s collapse would be accelerated.
Readers of BLOGDIAL know what we think of Andy Burnham. That he is still saying in public that ‘ID Cards are a good idea’ at this stage, when the Queen has just destroyed his ‘good idea’, with the entire nation galvanized against them, is simply staggering.
That man is an unrepentant, unctuous, evil little socialist. Period.
Now for the comments on this article…
Comrade Burnham would think they were a good idea wouldn’t he…moron.
Anthony Cutt (30/12/2010 at 12:42)
I like it!
£292 million later & Andy Burnham still thinks they’re a good idea?
Let me tell you something Andy: I shall probably vote Labour come the next election but not if idiots like yourself are still around.
Ivor Rash, Oldham (30/12/2010 at 12:43)
Oldham, up North, where they vote Labour, hates Burnham.
“The Tory-Lib Dem government are trying to make the cards a totem of what our government stood for”
They were. Money p****d against the wall on unnecessary, unwanted & unworkable ideas by an incompetent & inefficient government.
Anthony Cutt (30/12/2010 at 12:50)
The image has cracked; these scumbags cannot lie anymore, thanks to the internets. People have a vocabulary to defend themselves with, thanks to the internet; its a vocabulary that you will not be able to collect from any Broadsheep newspaper, the BBC, Sky or any MSM news source.
I signed up for an ID card but it got stolen.
It’s hard to type when you’ve had to saw off your fingerprints & difficult to see when you’ve had to have a cornea transplant!
NoSignOfHealthToBeWellAdjustedToASickSociety, Tameside (30/12/2010 at 13:00)
I lol’d!
Yes a lot of people are in favour of them, Sun readers and other sub normal cretins mainly.
PeteB, Hyde (30/12/2010 at 13:35)
I can feel your anger! It makes you stronger, gives you focus!
Stretch out with your hate BOY!
I’d be willing to bet that far more Guardian readers are in favour of ID cards. Personally, I wouldn’t have got one even if it had been made compulsory. I already have a passport, a driving licence and my Army ID. If they’re not enough to prove my identity, tough.
John Evans (30/12/2010 at 13:04)
When the army goes against the State, then the State is in big trouble. I have no doubt that there are more secret documents that detail revolt from the Police and the Military. We already know that BALPA came out against them unanimously. They killed this because it was offensive to everyone once the truth of how it actually works was spread virally.
But still there a number of morons in Greater Manchester who would SERIOUSLY consider voting for Andy Burnham come the next election, even in light of his absolutely obserd remarks!
Says it all…… To think the likes of him and many others in the LIE BOUR camp who still support the I.D card system beggars belief!
Red Army (30/12/2010 at 13:09)
They are truly human garbage, the whole lot of them.
You may read the rest of the comments at your leisure.
BLOGDIAL is offering £10 cash bounty for UK ID Cards; if you have one, we want to buy it from you. I am going to set them in a frame as a trophy to our victory in bringing this disgusting, immoral and vile scheme down. Email us!
Now for the extrapolation.
As you know ID Cards have been abolished only for the British; they still exist for the ‘wogs’.
What do you think the BBC is not reporting about the uptake of these Apartheid style cards by the dirty foreign invaders?
I guarantee you that the uptake of these cards amongst foreigners is even less than the uptake in the Manchester trial, and once the news of the racist nature of these cards spreads virally to all the victims of this abominable crime, you can be sure that there will be a blanket refusal to interface with the system.
ID Cards for foreigners will collapse just like the ID Cards for Brits collapsed, because if no one carries them, even the UK ‘authorities’ will not recognize them; they will be literally useless.
These racist cards will never reach critical mass, and of course, there are all the problems of an Apartheid state where millions of ‘honorary whites’ are also living unsegregated who, by law, are not required to carry an ID Card or show it upon demand.
Its a recipe for disaster of course, but it seems like the painful and expensive process has to be gone through before ID Cards can be completely eradicated for good.
A commenter gets the gist of this:
So what’s happened to the “full-time ‘National Identity Card Administrator’” now that the scheme has been scrapped and he has nothing to administrate.
I doubt he has been sacked. More likely he’s been given a new job title, a pay rise and an assistant.
ebble, manchester (30/12/2010 at 13:37)
This is what it is all about; fleecing human beings as if they were cattle, creating an ID Card ecosystem where there are guaranteed jobs for decades administrating, examining, reporting, issuing, replacing, repairing, distributing and interfacing with these diabolical cards.
Its very difficult to persuade people that they are supporters of violence by being in favour of Democracy. The brainwashing that they have been subjected to for the entirety of their lives presents an almost impenetrable barrier of disbelief and pavlovian disdain that even the sharpest scalpel cannot cut.
As soon as you tell these poor deluded fools (and calling people ‘poor deluded fools’ does not, of course, help), that they are violent people, they recoil like slugs that have been sprinkled with salt; no one wants to think of themselves as a violent type, and yet, that is exactly what people who are for Democracy are; violent human beings.
Decent people with intact moral centres and sound ethics are not violent and are against initiating violence. They would never dream of using violence to get what they want from other people, or to make them behave in a certain way, or to refrain from behaviours; the very idea is repugnant to them. This is how it should be.
Sadly, there is a huge sea of people who have been brainwashed into thinking that the state is not only necessary, but that it is an inherently good thing, it is not violent and that the democratic process justifies anything that the state cooks up, no matter what it is.
The idea that the State is inevitable is false, and every day, people are waking up to this fact.
Seemingly out of the blue, comes this clip:
as you can see, it beautifully, and gently demonstrates to anyone with a single brain cell how the state is violent and immoral, and how it doesn’t matter how many people vote for it, it is still violent and immoral.
A critical mass of understanding is on the way, and this video is evidence of it When we reach the tipping point, there will be a majority of people who do not accept the States’ alleged, self proclaimed ‘right’ to steal money and murder.
The coming economic collapse, the discrediting of the state through Wikileaks and every other thing that is just around the corner will push people towards Libertarianism and the true idea that people do not need a state to live in peace and prosperity.
Already in the UK, there is open talk of the illegitimacy of the State, and clips like this and the ones that will surely follow will help guide and solidify people’s thinking.
Any attempt to shut down the free internet will only make things worse for the State. Their best option now, if they want to survive in any shape or form, is to adapt. Already in the UK, some councils are thinking about going semi voluntary; slashing their ‘council tax bills‘, reducing the number of ‘services’ they have a monopoly on providing, leaving the rest to private companies. This would be a good move; garbage collection should not be done by the state at all for example.
If they fail to switch to pure voluntarism, essentially becoming charities without any pretence that they have the right to demand money from anyone, they will be swept away entirely, and the people who work in these places, their pensions and jobs also swept away.
It would be far better for them; they have the infrastructure already in place, local knowledge and an immediate ability to act in everyone’s interests immediately. The only thing that would change would be they would lose the power to steal money. Most people would go along with a town council that worked only to clean the roads, keep them salted in winter and the hedges trimmed.
These new councils would be very responsive to what people actually want, because everyone would have the option of paying someone else to do the work, and of course, any talk of planning permission and the other big brother, rights destroying nonsense would be instantly dead in the water.
How everything would work precisely (or not work) is irrelevant; its important to remember that the foundation of the State is pure evil. There is no option to say, “well, if statelessness doesn’t work out, we can always go back to violence”. No, you cannot go back to immorality chaps; immorality is not a choice on the table for moral men. The violence of the state must be stopped. Period. It is unacceptable to all decent people that a society based on violence is simply tolerated as, “things just as they are”.
The State is a house built on immorality. It is a loathsome, noxious and bad smelling weed that has grown from a bad seed. This is the root problem that has to be fixed, and without it being fixed things are only going to get worse. Its time to pour the RoundUp® on this parasitic plant to kill it right down to the roots.
Finally, here is another video for you, that explains what is about to happen with the forthcoming collapse that we have been talking about:
it is these events that will be the turning point.
Lets hope that when this happens it spells at the very least, the end of the State. As everyone walks out of the wreckage, we can but hope that the shock wakes them up out of their hypnotic trance as the fatal blow to the Stat, its apparatus and apologists shuts the hypnotic transmitter that has kept everyone asleep.
There are enough Libertarians in circulation in the USA to save it from a return to a murderous imperial government. Perhaps with their example the rest of the civilised world will follow along. Certainly, if the USA turns to Libertarianism, they will drain the brains out of every other country with a population.
Police may ban future marches to prevent disorder Police may ban anti-Government marches through central London to prevent further disorder and strain on officer numbers.
By Martin Beckford, Heidi Blake and Steven Swinford 7:00AM GMT 15 Dec 2010
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said that outlawing the demonstations was an option for the authorities but conceded it could anger protestors further.
He admitted he was “very worried” about the effect on law and order in town centres and suburbs caused by large numbers of officers being sent to the centre of the capital.
Despite widespread criticism over the policing of the protests, and warnings that the Met’s tactics risk leading to the death of an innocent bystander, Sir Paul said he was proud of the professionalism of the 3,000 officers on duty last week.
I’ve said it before; the police are in an impossible position. On one side, they have the socialist PC nanny state, making them enforce all sorts of insane and draconian laws that have nothing to do with protecting people and property, causing them to misallocate time and resources. On the other, they have the people who spit on them and hate them for doing what they are told. Then we have the protestors who are pushing on another side, with their irrational, violent and destructive behaviour, and for their troubles, they are paid next to nothing for the amount of personal danger they face.
All of that aside, we have already written about demonstrations, how they are entirely useless and how they are nothing more than a way to keep people inside an illusion that they are free.
Now this police ban on protesting is going to do exactly what we say demonstrations do, only it will be explicit and not implicit; banning demonstrations will cause all those unenlightened people who think that demonstrations are effective to spend their time fighting for the ‘right to demonstrate’ instead of working to solve real problems with strategies that achieve discreet and real goals.
Alex Jones says that Britain is de-facto going into martial law. This is very probably true, but the fact remains that there is nothing any state can do to stop people from spreading ideas and then acting on them, especially when those acts are essentially private. This is why it was impossible to completely eliminate alcohol sales during prohibition, for example.
Demonstrating in the streets does not solve problems, so what needs to be done to reverse the rot?
For a start, you have to understand that the state does not have enough staff to control everyone. Widespread control of the population can only be achieved with the consent and help of business.
For example, VAT is going to rise to 20% in January. The people who are going to collect this Tax are the businesses of the UK. The individual shoppers are not the ones who are forced to collect and hand in this money; if every business refused to collect VAT, then the system would be abolished by default. It could happen in a single week.
Just as we wrote in the ‘Zero TRust Society‘ essay and proposal, the key to stopping any predation of the state is to convince the businesses that do the work of the State to stop doing that work en masse.
ID Cards would have become useless if every business refused to interface with the NIR and the cards; business is the crucial interface that allows police states to function. The smoking ban could not have been implemented without the every publican acting as a locum policeman; indeed, in Germany, the smoking ban has failed precisely because the publicans are ignoring the ban:
Many methods of getting around the ban have been utilised; mobile smoking bars now drive around towns catering for smoking customers, one restaurant cut holes into the walls so that diners could pull open a curtain and lean outside to smoke and with Germany bordering a wealth of more democratic countries many people now pop across the borders into tolerant countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia to enjoy an evening out. In many parts of Germany the anti smoking laws are simply ignored completely.
Instead of demonstrating, people who want real change and an end to the police state have to convince every business owner not to cooperate with the apparatus on any level, they have to make it so that the businesses who choose the side of freedom rather than the side of the State, profit from doing so and are protected.
In the end, this act of banning demonstrations is going to push the population towards the conclusion that we have laid out here.
Already the French have woken up and understood that demonstrations do not work; this was the key insight that led the instigators of Bankrun 2010 to do what they did… and did you notice that there was nothing about it in the news? Have you also noticed that the incredible violence and disruption in Greece is also not being reported?
But I digress.
People are slowly waking up to the fact that they are not making any headway on any front, and the tools they are using are simply not working. Things are getting worse through no fault of their own, and everything that they have been trying is not making things better.
At long last, they are beginning to sense the truth.
Make sure that you have no coffee next to your keyboard, or in your mouth, because if you do, you WILL splutter or spill over your keyboard it as you watch this unprecedented, foul, loathsome and appalling display of inhuman nastiness:
All of you who still believe that the BBC is a ‘fair’, necessary, unbiased, professional and beneficial organisation, take note; what you have just watched is a manifestation of the true nature of the BBC and the people who control it.
This is what they are really like, right to the bone. At all other times, they are merely pretending to be human beings, with soft voices, seemingly reasonable opinions and lack of bias.
You are paying for this. Literally and figuratively. You pay this man’s salary. You pay for the whole sick and twisted organisation. You paid for this presenter and his attempt to humiliate and vilify a man who cannot even push his own wheelchair.
And they have the GALL to ask for the ‘License fee’ to be INCREASED.
It should be ABOLISHED Period, the BBC should encrypt its signal and anyone who wants to pay for this sort of trash can do so if they like seeing human beings treated like this. Anyone who does not concede that the BBC has GOT TO GO is FOR what we have just seen.
He is absolutely correct that the way Cloud Computing works right now is insane, and that anyone who trusts Google or any other Cloud Computing service with their data is ‘a sucker’.
The main problems that should concern anyone who is thinking about using these services are these; the sysadmins (the owners of the Cloud Computing service) can see all the data on the cloud that they manage, if they decide to cut you off for any reason, Wikileaks style, your data is lost. All it takes is a single phone call from the State, no warrant, no legal process. Lastly, the police can serve a warrant on the host company and not you personally to look at your data.
All of these are legitimate concerns, but what is not being seen here is why Cloud Computing could be attractive to millions of consumers.
Like many men who are confronted by difficult subjects, processes, realities and facts that they find inconvenient, consumers simply do not want to think about how their computers work; they just want to ‘do their email’.
The vast majority of people who use computers today do only two things on them; surfing the web and email. The Google Cloud Computing platform will do both of these wonderfully; it turns on instantly, has a very long battery life, and you can access your gmail (or any other webmail service) in an interface that you are already familiar with.
That is all most people need, and Cloud Computing does it identically to a local storage machine running a browser…. and there are still people out there, believe it or not, who ask ‘what is a browser’. This is the point that Richard Stallman does not understand, and it is the reason why Cloud Computing could take off in a big way. There are people, from the highly intelligent to the most stupid amongst us who are uninterested in ethics or the consequences of their actions, or how the world and technology really works.
There is another aspect to this that we have already touched upon on BLOGDIAL, and for the record, software is perhaps the only speech for which this statement always returns ‘true’ the answer to attacks on free speech is more speech.
As we wrote before, the problem of your data being visible to the sysadmins of Cloud Computing services can be solved by encrypting all the data on the users platform before it is stored in the Cloud so that Google cannot see it even if they wanted to. This would mean that the State serving a warrant on Google would be pointless, since all Google would be able to present to the police is unreadable ciphertext.
You solve the problem of privacy on Cloud Computing services not by complaining about them, or asking the State to outlaw what you do not like, but by writing software libraries and interfaces.
Then there is the problem of the State cutting you off from your files by forcing or intimidating the Cloud Computing service provider to do so.
This can also be solved by writing software; a simple adaptation of the Open Source tool rsync (a powerful mirroring tool) could do it; all the data that you generate on your Cloud Computing tablet or laptop is seamlessly sent to a mirror on your home or office computer, over SSL so that no one can see it in transit. It is stored in plaintext, in an identical folder structure so you can retrieve it at any time without downtime.
And there you have it.
There is no reason whatsoever why Cloud Computing cannot give you all the convenience of its particular innovations, with the security that your data cannot be seen or seized; all it takes is a little (in fact, very little) thought.
Defective By Design ran a campaign to try and get everyone to ‘not buy an iPhone’, the best ever mobile phone at the time.
When they were making this boycott call, Jailbreaking had already become wildly popular, with over 25% of all iPhones in circulation have been jailbroken / liberated.
Instead of helping that software effort, and using Jailbreaking as a means to educate people about all the important issues surrounding the Apple ecosystem, Defective by Design got precisely nothing and nowhere. It would have been far more useful to them if they had joined forces with Saurik so that he could improve the usability of the jailbreaking process and non Apple ecosystem software.
The lesson here is clear; in this information war, writing software is the key to winning anything real. Protesting, calling for boycotts of philosophically malodorous products and all other tactics like that simply do not work. The iPhone is bigger than ever, and so is Jailbreaking, which has now been determined to be legal; the FSF lost a big opportunity by not supporting it.
Android is gaining ground on iPhone sales; this is because the software is better philosophically. Apple is going to lose this one, in the same way that it lost the ‘PC war’, and the same way that Microsoft is going to be superseded by GNU/Linux. These behemoths may seem to be in an unassailable position, especially in the case of iTunes but in the end, they will fall, because the systems are not open, and they control the users like serfs. In particular, once everyone can do an A/B comparison to Android’s upcoming music service, or some other future service, iTunes will be dumped en masse.
With the Google Cloud Computing platform, there is an unprecedented opportunity to change the way it works by taking the Chrome OS source and altering it to make it privacy centred. Why would you, as a consumer, not take something that is private over something that is not, and which gives you local backups for free, without any change in the interface and no effort on your part? Even a sucker would go for it, and furthermore, the development of this is something that I would pay for and financially contribute to the building of.
One thing is for sure, all the complaining in the world will not make Chrome OS sane. The only sensible, moral and ethical way to fix it is to take it and modify it in a way that makes it trivial for anyone to have ‘Cloudy Chrome’ on their machine, with a simple patch or by any other simple means. People are willing to patch and modify their property in their millions, as we have seen with the iPhone jailbreaking phenomenon. Privacy and freedom are popular; what needs to be done is to make it easy for people to be free on Chrome OS.
Finally, what you cannot ever justify is calling on the State to force Google to respect the privacy of its users. There are some out there who have no problem with the idea of calling on the State to violate millions of people as a means of spreading their personal philosophies. They would, in a second, lobby for new law to force Google and all Cloud Computing service providers to add privacy and local backup facilities to their products. Calling on the state in this way is fundamentally unethical and unacceptable to all decent people. The way to change people’s minds about anything is to show them why doing it ‘my way’ is better. This means writing software that they can use, that costs them nothing to switch to (either in money or learning curve terms) that is clearly better for them.
(Wikileaks gives us) “a snapshot of the world as it is, rather than the edited account agreed upon by diverse elites, whose only common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance”.
Give me a break.
The 250,000 cables handed to Wikileaks are all being trawled through by The New York Times, El Pais and the Guardian, and other newspapers all of whom use their biased editorial filters to decide what shall and shall not be published. It is only AFTER this process takes place that Wikileaks posts what they have extracted and redacted.
The newspapers that are publishing these cables are precisely a group of diverse elites whose common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance.
The players of the old, ‘dinosaur’ media have a common interest in maintaining their power as the gatekeepers of information and how it is disseminated. What they have done with these cables is pure pre-internet newspaper thinking; “we know best what you need to know”, “take what we give, do not think”. By doing this, instead of releasing all of the information into a system that can be crowdsourced, they deliberately maintain the ignorance of the public. At the current rate of release, it will take years for all the cables to see the light of day, if they ever do at all.
“Tell us what to search for and we will let you know if we find anything interesting”. I’m sorry, but this is just so ridiculous you couldn’t make it up if you tried…. unless you worked at the Grauniad.
Bear in mind this is the same newspaper that built a brilliant crowdsourcing tool to facilitate the pouring over of MPs expenses. Its not that they do not know how to write or deploy software in innovative ways; in the case of Cablegate, they do not want you to know what is in there. There is no reason whatsoever why they cannot repurpose use the tools they have already built for the Cablegate data; in fact, it would work even better because we are not dealing with scanned receipts but with plain text
This blog has had issues with Henry Porter’s writing in the past and it seems that nothing has changed; he thinks he can type out “black is white” and everyone will simply believe it, because he printed it.
The facts are these, and this goes for all the newspapers gatekeeping the Cablegate files:
The Guardian is for the warmongering state.
The Guardian is a protector of the warfare state.
The Guardian is a gatekeeper whose job it is to keep you ignorant.
The Guardian is there to conceal the truth from you.
The Guardian is there to head off your ability to come to conclusions based on the facts.
The Guardian is there to aid the state in destroying your rights.
If none of these are true, then that newspaper should release the Cablegate files immediately, without equivocation or redaction or delay.
OR
At the very least, desist from printing the untruth that they are in any way separate from the ‘elites’ that seek to control the perception of the world.
I wonder if someone in the Gruaniad has the balls to MYSQLDUMP the cables and ‘do a Wikieaks’ on the gatekeepers…
Now THAT would be amazing!!
UPDATE!
As we told you, The Guardian is nothing more than a tool of the state, to the bone.
The Editors of the Guardian have allowed James Richardson, ‘journalist’, to publish a hit piece on Wikileaks attempting to shift the blame for a cable that they inspected and released which will now have real world consequences that they would rather they did not.
The Guardian has been one of the virulent rabid anti Mugabi newspapers calling for the ouster of that man for years. When they received the 200,000 plus cables, they naturally threw his name into the search box to dig up whatever dirt they could on him to further the agenda of destabilising that country and replacing Mugabe with a puppet.
Since Wikileaks does not actually leak these cables themselves, but instead, only publishes what their ‘media partners’ sanitise and publish they cannot be blamed for what is about to take place in Zimbabwe.
James Richardson however, wants to blame Wikileaks for this cable release, when it was his newspaper that did it. This is a deliberate, total and shameful misrepresentation of the facts.
The Guardian is clearly trying to separate itself from any harm that is to come out of this particular cable, placing all the blame for their vindictive actions on Wikileaks.
This is just what you would expect from a gang of traitors, liars and collaborators, whose sole aim is to bolster and reinforce the power of the state.
Unfortunately for them, the internet is here, and they cannot get away with an article like this; we all know the Wikileaks process, we all know who the criminals and their facilitators are, and no amount of lying and spinning can change that.
The Guardian and its Editors are responsible for the release of this cable, and no one else.
As for the whole idea of ‘media partners’, clearly The Guardian and its editors are the sort of people who cannot be trusted with an empty bottle of milk, let alone sensitive information of any kind, or a gentlemen’s agreement. Its extraordinarily naive and simple minded to put your faith in The Guardian, and anyone who has been paying attention to them over the last 13 years will know this. The Guardian will stab you in the back once it has what it wants. They will sell you out in an instant, without hesitation or remorse. They will lie about you, spin the truth and hang you out to dry. That is the lesson.
Expect Wikileaks to be hung out to dry by the Editors at The Guardian, and as their embarrassment over this ‘facilitating Mugabe’ affair becomes ever more painful, expect their denial, lying and spin to become more shrill, in the way they are so expert. Expect more salacious ‘revelations’ about Assange and ‘full coverage’ of his trumped up charges and kangaroo court trial.
In the end, Wikileaks is going to have to release all of the cables, either to protect itself from lying Newspaper Editors, or because its ‘leader’ has been renditioned. One thing is for sure; now that they have handed over all the cables to the Guardian, they cannot cease being ‘media partners’ with them without a full escalation from the Editors; Wikileaks has no cards left in this hand, the Guardian has them all.
Wikileaks should have released everything at once in the first place, but I suspect that they were seduced by the silver tongued ‘journalists’ at the world’s biggest newspapers, whose main objective is circulation and serving their master, the State.
Full disclosure is the only way to manage this sort of information. If you accept that State secrecy is legitimate in any way, then this sort of information should not be released at all. If you do not believe that the State is acting correctly or does not have the right to murder, steal and corrupt, then the only course of action is to give a warning and then release the information.
I’m sure that whatever happens in the future, no one with a brain cell who has been paying attention is going to trust the Editors and ‘journalists’ of The Guardian, who have once again, shown their true colours.
If you have been paying attention at all, you will have read about the mass manifestation, the acephalous Anonymous and their successful attacks on MasterCard, Visa and PayPal:
What is interesting about all this is not that the sites of these large organisations have been bumped offline, but the slick consumer grade tools that are being used to do it.
LOIC is an acronym for ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’. It is a piece of software that runs on Windows Mac and Linux, and every instance of it presents the user with this simple interface:
It is easy to install and run, and when you run it, the twenty five people who direct the Botnet created by thousands of installations of LOIC can pour traffic onto any website they desire.
What is interesting about this is that LOIC, which does a sophisticated job in an interface that a child can use, is now spreading everywhere because one man, Joe Lieberman, made a public statement attacking Wikileaks, where he claimed that anyone who helped the site could be committing a crime.
Glen Greenwald dispels this lie very efficiently here:
With his single act, Lieberman’s words have had the unintended consequence of spreading the knowledge of how all of this works and LOIC itself into the machines of many tens of thousands of irate, dedicated internet users and the knowledge into the minds of millions of people who previously didn’t know anything about the workings of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Indeed, I didn’t know what LOIC was until this event took place. So many people are talking about it, Google has a realtime results box on the main results page for the search term.
The perfect storm of this consumer grade DDOS tool, social media, Wikileaks, Joe Lieberman and the cowardice of the online payment systems has spawned a game change in how the internet is going to work in the future.
These tools and the ones that will surely follow, can never be stopped. In a perfect world, where companies like MasterCard, VISA and PayPal work only in the interests of their customers, these tools would not not be used to pop them off of the internet, if they existed at all.
But that is not what is really interesting.
Its clear that there is a problem with the way payment systems on the internet are structured; they are top down in shape, with a single point of failure, forcing two parties that want to transact to use the services of a third party.
This point of failure is a problem if you are like Wikileaks and have your account frozen and your ability to receive and send money stopped. It is a problem if you want to donate to a cause the state would rather see die. Its also a problem if copycat groups styling themselves on Anonymous decides that you are evil and that you should be ‘punished’.
With a single point of failure, both the customers and the companies that run the payment services are at risk of having their business disrupted.
The same is true for DNS; the state is arbitrarily, without warrants, charges or any legal process at all, seizing domain names to shut down access to websites. Clearly DNS and the way it works is a huge problem, especially when we are talking about Wikileaks and the sites like it that will surely follow. There are already plans afoot to create a distributed DNS system; hopefully it will be robust enough to protect everyone and their domains.
As for the question of money, a system like Bitcoin is a possible solution to the problem of companies like MasterCard, PayPal and VISA who do not have the best interests of the customer uppermost in their minds:
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency. ”Peer-to-peer” (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or to keep track of the transactions. Instead, those tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. ”Anonymity” means that the real world identity of the parties of a transaction can be kept hidden from the public or even from the parties themselves.
This sounds good. In the Bitcoin system, there are a limited number of ‘coins’ the number of which cannot be increased; when the system is twelve years old there will be 21,000,000 coins in circulation:
New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain calculational problem (i.e. creates a new block), for which an average solution time can be calculated. The difficulty of the problem is adjusted so that in the first 4 years of the Bitcoin network, 10,500,000 coins will be created. The amount is halved each 4 years, so it will be 5,250,000 in years 4-8, 2,625,000 in years 8-12 and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21,000,000 over time.
This is very interesting indeed. It means that there is now a greenback style currency that the state can have no control over, cannot monitor and which people can use to exchange goods. It seems to take the best parts of Chaumian e-Cash, whilst removing the bad parts, i.e. centrally controlled mint in a centrally controlled location, owned by a single corporate entity, constituted under the laws of a state. It does have some serious flaws however, one being that everyone can see your transaction history if they have your address… yikes!
The source for Bitcoin is available, so if you are minded to do it, you can set up your own identical network. Its all very intelligent, and it costs you nothing to try it out. You could even fix its flaws and release an improved version.
This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be done to solve the problems sketched out above.
Using LOIC to knock websites off the internet doesn’t pass the BLOGDIAL demonstration test; once the act is over, just as in a demonstration, all the problems are still there:
Wikileaks can’t receive donations.
Wikileaks is still having its websites attacked by the state.
The online payment systems still cut anyone off with only a phone call from the state as a reason.
All of this is predictable from the beginning, and so, using LOIC ‘to make a point’ doesn’t make sense in the long run.
It is however, and hopefully, an iteration. Once the futility of DDOSing sites dawns on Anonymous, they might turn to writing pieces of software like Bitcoin, or simply running the Bitcoin client to help the creation and spread of the currency. Or as has just been announced something else.
They might get the millions of people who are following them to contribute financially to the effort to create a distributed DNS. They might even reproduce the work of Operation Clambake where the ‘Sacred Documents’ of Scientology were so extensively mirrored on the internet that if you search for OT3 Operating Thetan you can read it all – which is exactly what the Scientologists do not want.
MasterCard, VISA and PayPal have made a massive long term business error. In their knee jerk response to appease Joe Lieberman, they have awakened millions of people to the fact that their money and access to goods on the internet is not guaranteed if you use their services. They have awakened a software developer somewhere who is going to write the equivalent of ‘Bittorrent for Money’ that will completely eliminate their dominance of the online payments market; remember; credit cards are a 1970’s idea that has been superimposed onto the internet. It is inevitable that this system of cumbersome numbers married to plastic cards is going to be superseded. Bitcoin might be this system, it might not be. It might be one of several replacements. Either way, these new systems are coming now, guaranteed, and there will be nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
Think about this; imagine that Bitcoin is huge, with millions of users. It is running not only on laptops and desktops, but on mobile phones. It is integrated into tens of thousands of websites through its API. Some of those users run exchange services; they sit in Cafes or in dorms or offices, and they will trade ‘street money’ for bitcoins. Social networking brings these parties together to transact. Now there is an interface between the real world and the Bitcoin ecosystem that will be impossible to shut down or even monitor. You might be able to pick off one or two of the people who provide this service, but for all intents and purposes, it will be as impossible to stop this Bitcoin economy as it has been for the state to stop the illicit drug economy in its ridiculous ‘war on drugs’.
Had MasterCard and its like taken a stronger stance against the state, they would not face this inevitable circumstance in the near term, and might have been able to transition to the new styles of online payment; now it is too late – no one trusts them.
Finally on to the subject of boycotting Amazon for kicking Wikileaks off of its hosting service.
Amazon, being the rightful owner of its servers has the absolute right to refuse to serve anyone. The consumer has the absolute right to refrain from using Amazon services for whatever reason.
Think about this; imagine if Amazon was knowingly selling sex slaves or ‘murder to order’ through its service, ‘because it could’. This reprehensible and unambiguously immoral trade would be enough to cause you to boycott them. On the other extreme, because Amazon sells pornographic novels, there are some who would not use them by virtue of that taint.
Somewhere between those two poles is the Wikileaks case.
Wikileaks, by exposing the lies of the mass murdering, thieving and destroying state is a benefit to you directly. Amazon, in the act of kicking them off of their service, without being forced to do so, i.e. voluntarily, is wilfully aiding and abetting the state in its aim of covering up its deception, mass murder and theft. That means that Amazon is working directly against your interests as a human being.
Amazon is not a victim of the state, and I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few days; they are a willing participant in covering up the evil of mass murderers. They acted without a court order, national security letter or any other direct attack from the state. Had they received such an attack, they would be victims of an attack, but since no such attack came to them, they are and were not under direct threat.
In this instance, a boycott is justified in my view; these people are directly attacking me and everyone else by arbitrarily deleting the Wikileaks site; and it must be pointed out that they did not delete the site during the previous Wikileaks expose ‘Collateral Murder’.
Once again, if they want to delete Wikileaks, they have the right to do so; its their property. What you cannot claim is that Amazon is a victim, because that simply is not true.
Its been a very interesting week. Whatever the truth is behind Wikileaks, there have been unintended consequences that will change the internet in ways that the state has not factored in to its responses or plans, depending on what you think about the origin of Wikileaks and the people who run it.
The state is not all powerful. They cannot predict what people will do with software, and that is the truly profound game changing factor. LOIC is just the latest in a long line of pieces of software that change the way people think; Napster, Gnutella, Bitorrent, are all predecessors of this trend, Bitcoin is a new one and there are others in the pipeline. One thing is certain; the state cannot keep up with all of the developments, because there are too many people out there developing the tools and using them once they are deployed.
When the next perfect storm of software and a cause comes around the effects will be even more intense and more unstoppable; this is the trend that the state cannot resist. As they clamp down harder, the internet pushes back with an exponentially greater force.
Every once in a while, you come across something that is so infuriating that you are compelled to try and set it right.
The other day, I came across a man’s plea to a government to tax all its people so that the ‘creative’ among their population can be ‘fairly remunerated’ with the collected monies.
Obviously, to a Libertarian, this is anathema.
It is a call for theft through violence on behalf of a special interest group. It is entirely illegitimate, unethical and immoral. I sent an email to try to start the process of showing this man that stealing is immoral.
Part of this man’s plea for theft included the claim that the state has the ‘right’ to tax one group to redistribute money to another. I pointed out in the email that states do not have rights, only man has rights. This error of attributing rights to states was fobbed off in his reply as ‘a figure of speech’, and that he, “would say that ‘persons have rights'”.
Finally his reply ended by saying that he thinks taxes are legitimate, and that the money can be spent in good ways or bad ways.
He then ended by saying, “I don’t have time to think about this”.
What?
This is like a ship owner, upon being told that his boat is being used to smuggle human beings without his knowledge, saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.
It is like a man committed to non violence who unwittingly is supplying tools and supplies to torturers saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.
This sort of attitude is completely unacceptable to decent people.
By all means, if you agree with paying taxes, you can do so voluntarily; but to call for a nation to forcibly steal money from its entire population, simply because you believe it would be a good idea is beyond passive support for the regime – it is initiating a new form of theft on a massive scale, and famous people (like this man is) have the power to make these bad laws come into force by virtue of their reputations. These people are actually dangerous.
If you are informed that what you are proposing is in fact immoral, you are duty bound as a human being to think about it and to be absolutely sure that you are not doing evil. You cannot blithely say that you ‘do not have time’ to consider the ethics of what you are doing, when two hundred million people could be violated.
The attitude displayed by this man is quite frankly, disgusting.
It seems that there is alot of work still to be done to educate people about the true nature of the state; there are still people out there who are fast asleep, or at the least, so focused on what they are doing that if the whole world ended as a result of their passive action or inaction they would shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t have time to think about this”.
The fact of the matter is, you must find time to think about this, now more than ever, because the world is actually changing at a rapid pace, towards a worst possible case dystopia scenario.
Having said all of this, its important to bear in mind that only five percent of the population was actively involved in the American Revolution. The rest of the people just went along with what was going on, probably because they ‘didn’t have time to think about tyranny’. We do not have to wake up everyone in order to be successful.
Today, many millions of people are awake, world-wide, and are actively repelling the advances of the criminal, mass murdering thieving state.
Thinking purely tactically, we only need to wake up the people who are capable of being woken up, the rest will simply follow along; and judging by their subhuman response to a direct threat, we could, if we were violent, even destroy them without them lifting a finger in response.
Luckily for them Libertarians are not violent, because we are going to win, and there is no doubt about this.
These deluded, misguided and violent people are surely to become the first great challenge of any newly emerged free society; how are we, the free people, to deal with the violent socialists and statists who want to restore a system of organised criminal theft and mob rule for themselves and their clients through violence?
It will mean putting to the test the very idea of having a free and purely voluntary society, where everyone voluntarily pays others (or does it themselves) to protect their property from the violent socialists.
It will almost certainly end in people being killed. This will be entirely the fault of the socialists and their brain dead followers who are hell bent on controlling other people, invading their property and stealing from them. They will not listen to reason, understand only force, and even those violent types who have the intellectual capacity to come to the correct conclusion, “don’t have time to think about it”.
Libertarians have the truth on their side, and the truth always triumphs over lies.
An army of non violent volunteers, backed by people with an economic interest in bolstering them will present an unstoppable defensive force for the preservation of Liberty in any future battle between the violent statists and free people.
As time wears on, and prosperity spreads like wildfire, the idea of statism and violence will become completely discredited, to the point that the people who try and rally troops for initiating violence will find that their prospective thieves and killers saying…
Absolutely amazing and disgusting in equal measure, the cash strapped state science bureau NASA is whipping everyone up into a frenzy over something that is newto them.
This ‘discovery’ which is actually more accurately termed an ‘uncovery’, is of something that pre-dates the emergence of man (if you accept the theory of evolution) and all the life that is walking, crawling and flying around today.
Everything that is possible that is naturally occurring, already exists; it does not need or seek permission of man to exist, it is there, waiting to be uncovered.
This uncovery does not ‘change everything’ and the utter nonsense about ‘goldilocks zones’ and all the other total garbage that ‘scientists’ rabbit on about is just that: utter nonsense.
What this ‘discovery’ is about, the secrecy and high drama surrounding the release of the information, is the salary addicts at NASA boosting their importance in the minds of the public so that they will not face the austerity chop.
If that were not the case, they would simply just release the information as if it was any other type of information, which it in fact is, and be done.
Lets take to pieces some of the drivel written in The Telegraph about this:
The discovery could prove the theory of “shadow” creatures which exist in tandem with our own and in hostile environments previously thought uninhabitable.
Rubbish. Which creature is the light and which is the shadow? Are the creatures based on the carbon cycle first or second? And thought uninhabitable by whom? Not by anyone with a working brain, that is for sure.
The “life as we don’t know it” could even survive on hostile planets and develop into intelligent creatures such as humans if and when conditions improve.
Intelligent creatures such as humans. Such as. We already know that there is life everywhere, and have known this for a very long time indeed. The only people who refuse to concede this fact are the members of the cult of science.
In a press conference scheduled for tomorrow evening, researchers will unveil the discovery of a microbe that can live in an environment previously thought too poisonous for any life-form to survive.
The bacteria has been found at the bottom of Mono Lake in California’s Yosemite National Park which is rich in arsenic – usually poisonous to life.
Obviously arsenic is not ‘usually poisonous to life’ and never has been. People with a proper understanding of the universe know that life is everywhere and very diverse in what it uses to get its job done. That people can write this at the beginning of the 21st century is really quite astonishing.
Somehow the creature uses the arsenic as a way of surviving and this ability raises the prospect that similar life could exist on other planets, which do not have our benevolent atmosphere.
The prospect of life on other planets, or more accurately, the probability, is 1. This is a fact and that fact has nothing to do with any homocentric scientist from NASA or the earth saying it is so. It simply is.
Dr Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the Centre for Planetary Sciences in London, said: “If these organisms use arsenic in their metabolism, it demonstrates that there are other forms of life to those we knew of.
“They’re aliens, but aliens that share the same home as us.”
This is just about the most ignorant thing I have ever read.
These life forms, if they pre-date ‘us’ (whatever that means; are carbon based life forms now to be considered some sort of race?!) then it is ‘US’ that is the interloper surely, and it is ‘US’ that shares this planet with THEM.
These are EARTH LIFE FORMS. The are not ALIEN in any way.
What utter CODSWALLOP!
The space agency will announce the full extent of the findings at a press conference titled “astrobiology finding which will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”.
There is no impact on extraterrestrial life, since this life is TERRESTRIAL.
If you want to infer that life can exist in space simply because you find it at the bottom of a lake, then you must extrapolate about life that is found on the surface in the same way. These people are inconsistent, illogical, terra-centric buffoons of the first order.
They believe the creature proves the existence of a second form of life that exists in tandem and before and after intelligent life blooms on planets across the universe.
Nonsense; there is no ‘second form of life’ or first form; there is only life – it is everywhere, has been before man (evolution accepted) and does not need ‘our’ permission to exist, and its existence here is not proof of anything other than there is life here; otherwise, all life here, no matter what it is based on must be given the same weight as these ‘extremophiles’, and should be used to extrapolate that life is everywhere.
It follows a growing belief that alien life far from being rare is actually abundant in the universe just in a form that is not recognisable as life.
Its only a growing belief by the members of the science cult; they do not accept the facts, for them science is a matter of faith and belief.
All the real scientists already accept that alien life must exist, and also that abundant intelligent life must come along with that fact. This is not news, it is pure hype.
At the heart of his theory is that life on earth may have come and gone many times during the planet’s existence.
These creatures are the remnants of the previous inhabitants.
OR they have always been here, along with the life based on carbon and the other life that is not yet uncovered by man.
Scientists have also estimated that life of some kind exists on hundred billion trillion Earth-like planets in space.
However it is usually just bacteria and intelligent life such as us is fleeting and only exists for a fraction of the time.
This is just fluff and gibberish.
There is no reason to believe that single instances of intelligent life cannot persist for one hundred million years or a billion years. And there is no reason to believe that most of the life in the universe is bacteria. This is all homocentric twaddle, peddled by imagination-less people who desperately need to keep man at the centre of creation.
Sorry boys, if you accept the theory of evolution, then you must accept that man is as close to nothing as you can get in the grand scheme of things. Deal with it.
A study last month said that the universe is teeming with planets capable of supporting alien life.
After studying stars similar to the Sun, astronomers found that almost one in four could have small, rocky planets just like the earth.
And please spare me the, “but that is all science fiction, not science fact”. Extrapolation is all fiction. You either accept that you can extrapolate, or you reject it. Its like being a little bit pregnant; you cannot extrapolate just so much and no further. If life can exist based on arsenic, and you are extrapolating that it can exist on arsenic on another planet, then you must accept that other planets have everything that we have here, including space faring intelligent life. No exceptions; you cannot use evidence just to suit your religion, or to fit your purpose.
Many of these worlds may occupy the “Goldilocks” zone – the region where conditions are neither too hot, nor too cold, for liquid water and possibly life.
You see? Its just made up nonsense that is terra-centric, imagination-less and wrong.
If you accept that the universe is infinite, then there is enough space and time for life to evolve that uses every sort of condition imaginable and unimaginable. Therefore it is a question of not if this life exists, but where it exists and what use you can make of it. There is no basis whatsoever to limit life to the type that we know, that uses only the chemistry that we understand. This is not a surprise at all to real scientists.
Planets outside our own solar system are too far away and too small to see directly with telescopes.
With the telescope that we currently use you mean. A telescope in space with the correct design would be able to see other planets directly. The real question is who is going to pay for such devices to be constructed.
Instead, astronomers study distant stars for tell-tale ‘wobbles’ – caused when stars are pulled by a planet’s gravity.
In the last decade, nearly 500 planets have been discovered outside the solar system this way.
UNCOVERED, they have been there for ages.
In September astronomers announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet ever found – a rocky world three times the size of our own world, orbiting a star 20 light years away.
The planet appears to have an atmosphere, a gravity like our own and could have flowing water on its surface.
The discovery came three years after astronomers found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra.
The planet, named Gliese g, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away – so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the earth.
This is ‘wow talk’. Not very interesting, and none of it has anything to do with wether or not life and intelligent life is abundant.
The latest news induced feverish debate as to whether scientists were about to announce that they had discovered life on other worlds.
“Did they find ET?”, asked one headline in the U S., while another wrote, “Has Nasa found little green men?”
Speculation mounted around the world about the mystery information and buoyed people who already believe in aliens.
One said on U.S. news website MSNBC, “It’s still hard for me to understand why people can’t accept that aliens exist … ET is real”.
“Fact is, life is everywhere,” another wrote. ‘I don’t need some BS announcement to know it because I have common sense.’ […]
Exactly. Now use your common sense to understand that this is NASA looking for money. This is not about science or the truth, this is purely about the money.
“It is embarrassing how our country makes it all a secret and hides and controls what we know,” one American ranted, insisting aliens do exist and the U.S. knows it.
The Wikileaks output is being widely and heartily condemned by those with vested interests. Sarah Palin has called for Assange to be ‘hunted down’, ‘like al Quaeda’. So, he won’t be found for a decade at least then..
However, Bob Aisworth, previously UK Defence Secretary, noted in this interview (from 1min50sec) a very interesting point. I shall quote:
There are no secrets any more. […] Anything goes. Nobody is prepared to take authority that you should not disclose this or should not tell people this and things systematically leak, and one must assume, whether you’re a politician or a security planner that anything and everything, every scrap of advice that you do is going to wind up in the public domain, not in 30 years time, but tomorrow or even later on today, and you have to do your business in that way, effectively, it’s as simple as that.
Mr Aisworth goes on to suggest that this will be damaging for the way diplomacy is done (he remains part of the old structure, but has at least seen the near-future clearly in this case). However, one could argue that it will not just be damaging, it will be absolutely and completely destructive for the way diplomacy is currently done . This can only be a Good Thing.
We may imagine a system in which there is less and less interference in the business of other nations and peoples, in which backroom deals can no longer be done to decide who invades whom and for what share of the spoils, in which influence would be curtailed, nepotism and corruption laid bare. A system in which the state of paranoia is shifted from the populus to the existing elite, who will know that their every word is essentially broadcast to the world and there will no longer be any sub- to their -terfuge.
If all the political build-up to the Iraq invasion had been leaked at the time, it would never have happened. If all the internal motions of the gravy train that is the European Union and Council Of Europe were broadcast and available for dissection, the system would rapidly dissolve in its own digestive juices. At the very least, the populace may be reduced to pleading stupidity should they then allow these things to continue, but they would no longer be able to plead ignorance.
Business will, by necessity, be carried out on a small scale, with the requisite security controls in place. Business will no longer be allowed to exert self-serving interest over public servants – directing policies and law-making to their own benefit – and neither would government be able to interfere with business.
There is already an enormous propaganda war begun by those who stand to lose most from the “novyi glasnost”, from those who will be seen as naked emperors during the perestroika that will surely follow. We will be, and already are being, told that life cannot go on this way, that secretive dealings are the only way to maintain trust and international relationships, that secrets held by the few to wield power over the many are the only way to maintain a happy life. “Go back to bed, your government is in control. Watch [$retarded_reality_show_for_retards]” (to misquote Bill Hicks). These lies, that only through secretive government can one achieve happiness, are as much a fairy story as the ugly, evil troll lurking beneath the bridge. An horrific fear existing simply to scare you away from the lush meadow on the other side. All that is required to break the fear is one small billy-goat… and one big billy-goat can destroy it forever.
Additional: Should you require any evidence that They are extremely concerned with this situation, and the potential harm it may cause their future ability to do business in the way to which they have become accustomed (i.e. in secret, doing as they please), please note that there have been calls for Julian Assange to be assassinated, and he has already been branded a rapist (in a very poor quality smear) in order to alienate him from the public. The person responsible for bringing the comments of public servants into the public arena has been branded a traitor and may be executed for his actions. In addition, the Wikileaks servers are being attacked, both digitally and politically.
All this is being done not to punish Wikileaks for facilitating this release, but instead is only to persuade any future leakers that it may not be in their best interest to do so. Very reminiscent of the way North Korea, China, Iran et al. deal with dissent to prevent it spreading, isn’t it?
So students think that breaking stuff will change something, will win them back a ‘free’ ticket to university? Right there is the proof that these people are uneducated!
[T]hat’s another big problem, the people who can’t separate the authority and the people who have the authority vested in them. You see that a lot on the demonstrations, they have the concept that The Law and Law Enforcement are one. They’re demonstrating against the Police Department, actually against policemen. Lenny Bruce
Unfortunately, education is now considered a human right.
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit…. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among … racial or religious groups….”
Not only is education a right, but “Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.”
Thus is another false market created. How can education be ‘free’, unless teachers work for nothing, all materials are provided gratis… and so on. Someone is paying! Are you educated enough to work out who?
