As we wrote recently, there is going to be a massive, Europe-wide bank run on December 7th.

This is entirely a good thing, and it is precisely the sort of action that BLOGDIAL has advocated for years; we have been saying over and over that demonstrating in the streets is completely pointless, and we were and are completely right.

This call for a bank run has people in ‘authority’ very worried:

Valérie Ohannesian, of the French Banking Federation, said she thought that the appeal was “stupid in every sense” and a charter for thieves and money-launderers.

“My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic,” she told the Observer. “One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought.”

Grauniad article on the bankrun and Cantona

If that is all they can come up with, they must be shitting their knickers.

For a start, everyone now knows that ‘money laundering’ laws are not there to catch ‘criminals’ but are instead for the ordinary people who are trying to protect their money from the ravaging, rapacious state.

She goes on to very stupidly mock the idea with the fact that Cantona would need ‘several suitcases’ to withdraw his money. Of course, he would not need suitcases to withdraw his wealth if the money in his account was worth anything in the first place.

The hollow sound of desperation in print.

As we posted before, this bankrun is an entirely good thing, but what has to happen is a complete exposure and defining of the problem, before it can be fixed.

It seems that the people behind this bankrun are highly intelligent, media savvy people; lets go through this statement from the Bankrun 2010 site.

Dear media,

For a short time, the international press reported the call for a bankrun that we launched on Facebook to invite all those who wish to follow us to withdraw their money from their accounts on the 7th of December, 2010.

Since the publication of our call, people around the world mobilized to translate the text into their language to recreate the event in their country, to promote our initiative by all possible means and invite their contacts to do the same. Our call has met with a success that we did not dare to hope for. We are very happy about it and thanks to the personal investment of all those who, like us, want to enjoy a healthy banking system, equitable, affordable and accountable, we hope that over the weeks we can convince enough people in the world to finally be heard by our respective Governments.

Good. There is only one problem however; a healthy banking system cannot be equitable; a bank exists to hold your money for you and to facilitate transfers for you and to do other services that you require of it, in return for fees. What those fees are is a matter of negotiation, since you are entering into a private contract with a company or an individual.

This is why it is not smart to ask for an ‘equitable’ or an ‘affordable’ banking system; market forces produce the best possible banks, and therefore, banking should be left completely up to those forces, in the same way that the operation of self storage units are left to the market.

The problem with banking is not deregulation, it is regulation and interference from the state.

For clarification purposes, we do not speak on behalf of any political party or from any labour union or religion. Our action is a civic involvement that keeps its distance from any form of hate or conspiracy theories that could be made on behalf of our movement, by others during their interventions on any areas of discussion, which is beyond our control. We only speak for ourselves and for no other organisations. We do not seek to harm anyone in particular. It’s towards a corrupt, criminal and deadly system that we decided to oppose, as far as our ability our determination and respect for the law are concerned.

Very good.

Why have we launched this action?
First of all, we wanted to raise public awareness on the functioning of the monetary system.
The overwhelming majority of holders of a bank accounts, savings accounts or even a pension plan, are unaware the way money is created or what the banks are doing with the money that ‘they are given. They know nothing about the principle of money as debt. They do not know the reality behind words like “asset bubbles”, “Treasury bills”, “Hedge Funds” or “securitization”. Hence the media in general make little effort to inform in an objective, transparent and accessible way to all. The only thing the public really understands is that most major financial crimes and insider trading remain mostly unpunished, but they are the first to pay the consequences.

True. People are almost completely ignorant of what money is, how banks work and what the current role of the state and central banks is. They cannot define inflation, do not understand that it is deliberately caused, do not understand that the money in their accounts (so much as it even belongs to them) is worthless and that this is all by design.

Not only do we deplore how many questions posed by ordinary citizens on the economic situation remain without clear answers in your columns,

There are highly intelligent commenters who regularly destroy the nonsense some ‘journalists’ peddle about all of this. We are past the tipping point; its GAME OVER for this immoral system.

We do not need journalists anymore; what we do need is a free internet, millions of awakened people and one or two very famous people to stand up and push the snowball down the hill.

It has finally happened.

but we also regret your lack of zeal in denouncing the measures that have allowed the global economic situation get to the point where it is today: a situation that has bought our heads of states and Governments to their knees before the rating agencies, trembling with fear at the idea that our currencies are deteriorating.

Our politicians can’t meet both the interests of financial markets and those of its citizens. So, it is time to remind them who they were elected to serve.

Strikes and demonstrations are no longer useful because whatever we do, we are not heard. And whatever they do, we are not consulted. So we decided to hit the system at its core – THE BANKING SYSTEM

MY EMPHASIS!!!!……

At long last, they are beginning to understand!

For YEARS we have been saying this; demonstrations DO NOT WORK, and you are an ignorant PART OF THE PROBLEM if you call for them, or a GATEKEEPER in service of the STATE and THE WAR MACHINE.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

This is true about everything, including demonstrating to stop war or to make government do what you want it to do. You cannot keep calling for demonstrations and expecting the bad things to stop, when it fails to work; doing so is irrational and stupid. Demonstrations and violence are failure tactics, and the idiotic students who smashed Tory HQ are completely wrong in every way you can be wrong.

Think about it; 50,000 students, all of one mind are an army and huge potential financial force that could make a huge change; on the most basic level, that many people could buy a full page advertisement in a national newspaper once a month for ONE POUND EACH.

That would be far more effective in getting a message across, rather than marching in the streets like animatronic showroom dummies.

But enough of that…

Are we aware of the economic consequences that would result from the success of our action?

We are especially aware of the consequences that the deregulated and uncontrollable global financial system will have on our jobs, our health, our education, our pensions, our industries, our environment, our future, our dignity, the dignity of the citizens of countries that the system has enslaved by debt that they will never be able to repay to better appropriate their resources. This is the fate that awaits people if we in the West do not take ourselves in hand.

We are aware of the role this system plays in the prosperity of industrial empires whose interests depend on armed conflicts, diseases, food shortages and poverty prevailing in the countries that provide labour and natural resources at minimal cost. We are aware that this system will never have anything to gain from a world of peace and prosperity and that continuing to entrust our hard and honestly earned money to this sick system, we make ourselves accomplices of its thefts, for its crimes, its wars and the misery war generates.

Beautiful; they can actually see!

The only problem here, is that they are talking about deregulation being a problem when it is not. If these people were able to form their own bank, and run it however they please, they would be an international force unparalleled in its size and transparency, as everyone moved all their money to it en masse.

The reason why they cannot have their bank is because the state regulates banking so that the war machine can be run. They stop anyone honest from running a bank, and they use legal tender laws to prevent honest money from emerging. Once again, the problem is not deregulation, but regulation by the state.

There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. What is wrong is the wealthy using the state to murder people with its war machine. This is called Crony Capitalism, which is very different from Capitalism.

What do we want?
We, the citizens of the 21st century, heirs of generations who have sacrificed so that we may live free and dignified, demand the creation of a CITIZENS BANK- serving citizens, a bank that would put our money away from speculative fever, free of all financial bubbles designed to burst one day, free of operations that transform our loans & assets and use our debt to buy other assets.

This is a very good idea. The only thing stopping you from creating this bank is the state. Remove the state’s ability to regulate banks and then you can have your ‘Citizens Bank’, and you will be able to run it in any way that you like.

We want banks that lend only the wealth they have. Banks that help small and medium enterprises to relocate jobs, & bank lending at zero rate. (*) Banks that support projects that benefit citizens rather than the “market”. Banks where we can deposit our money, which will then create a peaceful conscience within ourselves. Banks we will not have to be worry about. Banks whose success will sound the death knell of the merchants of death, disease and slavery. On the ruins of the old system, we want to build a banking system that will no longer sacrifice more human dignity on the altar of profit.

This is error.

You want ‘banks’ that only lend the money they have; NO, you must make your own bank that does that; you cannot force people to run their businesses to serve you. Your only recourse, as it should be, is to remove your money from banks that are evil and to put them into an honest bank. You cannot on the one hand, say that you want a world free of violence, and then at the same time, call for the state to do your bidding via violence on others. Start your own bank, and if the state tries to stop you, confront them. You can be sure that the existing banks will be pushing for the violent suppression of you and this bank run right now; that is all they have left to fight with; the apparatus of the police state.

You will be able to set your own interest rates, lending requirements and ultimate purpose. There is a desperate need for such a bank, and you have a captive population of over one hundred million to start with.

I’m afraid that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. You are in the trouble you are in now because you trusted the existing banks and the state to take care of you, and like the predators they are, they fed on you. You will never be able to not worry about banking.

As for the ‘altar of profit’ this is just total nonsense; there is nothing wrong with profit, and you are conflating profit with Crony Capitalism and its evil practitioners. Profit, price signalling and all the other elements of real economics are essential to bringing into existence the prosperity, freedom, peace and the kind of bank that you want to be able to use. You cannot deny the laws of nature, and economics is governed by rules that are as firmly set as the laws that cover physics. Learn these rules, and you will make a bank that is more likely to be a long term benefit.

Finally, the old system must be swept away completely. There is absolutely no reason why a new, clean, moral bank should be set up on the ‘ruins of the old system’. If your plan is that you are going to start with a bad foundation, you might as well not even begin.

Dutch lawmakers have already considered laws to outlaw calls for bank runs. The state and its Crony Capitalist masters are going to use everything they can to destroy you so that they can continue with their insanity.

It is only through peaceful voluntarism that you will ever get a lasting solution to this problem. Forcing banks to obey you by using the state makes the state more powerful, and it is the state that is the true enemy.

We, the people have finally been awakened by poverty and despair afflicting the most vulnerable among us – pensioners, welfare recipients or working poor – and is now threatening what remains of the middle class & entrepreneurs. Even these are exploited as milking cows, and we now simply want the cancellation of the public debts generated by the sick system that we no longer want.

Once again, this is true; this debt belongs only to the people who authorised it; you cannot be made liable to a debt incurred by a third party, without your written consent, and NO, voting in an election does not constitute consent to be made a debtor.

We do not want our taxes, our efforts, our resources to continue to feed this bottomless pit.

Oops, its not ‘your money’ once you have payed it to the state; this is a common error that people make; they believe that the state, “works for them”, and that, “its our money”. It is not. You have no claim whatsoever over that money once you pay it. Its gone, toast, spent.

If you want your money to be used for good purposes only, you have to stop paying it to the state. Period. And I and others predict that that is the next psychological breakthrough that these people are going to make, very soon!

We want to regain the power to coin money and free ourselves from the guidelines imposed on us by the European Union, which was built against the consent of the majority of people consulted by referendum, not to mention those whose country of origin have no organized popular consultation.

This is absolutely key to the entire problem; without the power to decide what money is best for you, you are nothing more than a slave to the European Central Bank, the Private Federal Reserve and all other central banks, who steal money via the inflation tax.

Everyone who understands money knows that the best money is gold and silver coins, held and used directly by the people who transact with money.

Gold and silver money cannot be inflated, controlled or used against you by a central bank, and of course, central banks themselves should be abolished, and would be if this Citizens Bank took off; there would be no need for central banks if every country had its own Citizens Bank, working in cooperation with other similar banks around the world, only for the benefit and convenience of the depositors.

This is why its crucial to:

• remove the power to make money from the state
• remove the power to regulate banking from the state

Without these two in place, it will be impossible to get to the place that the stopbankque organisers want.

(*) What the Islamic banks to successfully achieve by refusing usury for religious reasons, we can do for civic reasons.

Oops, ‘Islam was right’?! Don’t tell Geert Wilders!

To conclude
We draw your attention to the fact that even if we manage to relocate jobs, advanced technologies and machines have replaced human labour in a growing number of areas. They can produce more, faster, cheaper, and for these reasons, they create fear to those who wonder how they will earn their living tomorrow. This is unfortunate because since the invention of the wheel, technology is meant to improve the living conditions of mankind. If progress was meant to serve citizens rather than serve the market, we could make a quantum leap in technology development today paralyzed by special interest groups that are the primary beneficiaries of this system.

This is completely wrong; technology does not put people out of jobs, this is The Luddite Fallacy.

Progress serves citizens though their freedom to choose one service over another. Sadly, Europeans are still steeped in the sticky, hallucinogenic treacle of socialist thinking. They want the state to continue its tyranny unabated, only with them at the helm. Sorry guys NO $A£€!

We already have the knowledge to free humanity of its needs in fossil and nuclear fuels and to produce and deliver drinking water throughout the planet at a lower cost, to produce fruits and vegetables, from ice fields to the desert. Poverty only exists on our planet because of the lack of political will of industrialized countries, subject to market forces. Pollution and waste of resources are the sad consequences of this obsolete system which we must put an end to.

Sigh…You cant have it all it seems… Market forces are the only way to eradicate poverty. The state, and ‘political will’ will NEVER do it, and if they try, it will mean giving up the very rights that the stopbankque people are calling for.

As for pollution, we know about that don’t we?

We, the inheritors of chaos, we have a world to rebuild. A world where work is no longer seen as slavery, and lack of work as a tragedy because we have been able to rethink how mankind of tomorrow will ensure its survival, education, well-being and old age.

In order for work not to be slavery, you need to be able to keep the fruits of your labour, that you voluntarily contract for. If the state takes even a penny of it by force, you are reduced to the level of a slave. Everything they do with your money after that, is insult added to injury.

We invite all those who want to follow us on this path – including you, dear journalists – to overcome their fears of the unknown and to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the system that will replace the current one, which with or without us, will eventually collapse when it has taken everything from us. We prefer not to wait until it arrives, or even worse, if in order to save the economy a new war would be declared.

We thank the footballer Eric Cantona for having instilled the idea that we have taken literally. The die is cast. Time will tell whether we were right. (07/11/2010)

http://www.bankrun2010.com/

Don’t hold your breath for the journalists to come on board; they are in the pay of the newspapers that are owned by the same people or colleagues of the people who own the war machine; why do you think these evil scribblers are for war with Iran? They are for war because they are being told to write pro war pieces. They cannot be relied upon or trusted – thankfully we do not need them. We have the internet, we have myriad ways of spreading information that does not include their channels. These new channels are being put to good use, finally, now all that remains is to formulate a plan and then execute it.

This means:

1. setting up a bank that is outside the control of the state
2. buying gold en masse with all the worthless paper money that has been withdrawn from the system
3. depositing that gold in the new bank

The honest money that you require already exists; GOLD.
The forms of banking you require already exist 100% RESERVE BANKING

Like we told you, someone is already doing it.

First things first; DESTROY the system through peaceful disobedience, starting with the money!

Someone that we follow on twitter is a classic violent socialist, that also believes in depopulation, ‘global warming’ and all of the other fear based eco fascist nonsense that is out there that the delusional live to cling to.

Recently, this person tweeted that:

UK regulator Ofcom lobbies Brussels against net neutrality – http://bit.ly/bRdVwJ #Ofcom betrays the British public #netneutrality

Knowing that this person tweets a mix of violent socialist garbage and important tech news related to copyright, it spurred me to finally take a close look at ‘Net Neutrality’, and lo and behold, it is Orwellian doublespeak and violent socialism.

Throwing “Net Neutrality Socialism” into the googles, we get this:

James G. Lakely: ‘Net Neutrality’ Is Socialism, Not Freedom

AHAA!

Advocates of imposing “network neutrality” say it’s necessary to ensure a “free” and “open” Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that “control” technology.

Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language — and that’s saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.

True.

‘Net Neutrality’ is a name that is highly deceptive and a form of subtle emotional and intellectual blackmail.

When you are asked wether or not you are for or against ‘Net Neutrality’ the conjunction of these two words, both of which are beneficial in meaning separately, immediately pressure you to believe that you are for it, since everyone wants to be (and appear to be) a reasonable person.

The word ‘Net’ is short for the greatest invention since the Gutenberg press. What reasonable person could be against that?

‘Neutrality’, the opposite of being biased, is a word that conveys goodness in almost every sense; a state which journalists strive for, closely related to that new brainwashing word ‘fair’.

What they do not tell you is that ‘Net Neutrality’ is actually a sinister code word for violent socialism.

The modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce. New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently doesn’t like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks — in response to millions of individual consumer choices — is not sufficiently “fair,” “open” or “free.”

And there you have it. The unconstitutional FCC, openly uses the new socialist programming word ‘fair’ in its push to wreck the internet, which has grown perfectly well without the help of the state, despite its origins in DARPA.

The chairman’s remedy is to claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation. This is exactly what the radical founders of the net neutrality movement had in mind.

This is of course, complete madness. Whatever the state touches, it ruins. The internet works by private people agreeing to route traffic through each other’s private networks. None of this has anything to do with the state.

If some large providers want to shape traffic, that is entirely their business. Its their bandwidth, their hardware and the contracts they have with their customers are private. If traffic shaping ruins the experience of the users of these knobbled internet access points, then the customers will leave in droves, to find un shaped access points.

The free market in internet access will determine which companies survive and which do not, which style of ISP is best and which should fail.

Once again, none of this is the business of government.

The concept can be traced to an iconoclastic figure, Richard Stallman, a self-described software freedom activist who introduced the term “copyleft” in the mid-1980s. In his 2002 essay “Free Software, Free Society,” Stallman fiercely attacks the idea that intellectual property rights are one of the keystones of individual liberty, so important that patents and copyrights are affirmatively protected in the body of the Constitution.

Copyrights and Patents are in fact evil. They are not founded upon any rational basis, are a legacy idea from the age of absolute monarchy, and are a disaster for humanity on every level. This is not a matter of ideology or belief, but is a truth grounded in evidence based fact.

According to Stallman, “we are not required to agree with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. [At one time, they both condoned slavery.]” Like slavery, he says, copyright law is “a radical right-wing assumption rather than a traditionally recognized one.” Rebuking those who might find a Marxist flavor in his call for a “digital commons,” Stallman turns the tables, writing: “If we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists.” […]http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/_Net-Neutrality_-Is-Socialism_-Not-Freedom-8410175.html

What Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement people are actually advocating are property rights in software, which all Libertarians and correctly thinking people would agree with on examination.

When you buy a copy of a proprietary piece of software, you do not actually own it; you own a limited license to use that software, that restricts your ability to decompile it, share it by copying it, modify it, re sell it, or use it in a context and on hardware other than what the writer and owner of the software allows you to. On top of all that, the manufacturer disclaims any liability of any kind for anything that happens to you or your hardware as a result of you using their software.

When you download Free software on the other hand, it belongs to you. You have the right to modify it, to share it, to run it anywhere and to make money off of doing all those things.

The authors and licenses that cover Free Software respect your property rights in ways that the makers of proprietary, ‘closed’ softwares under restrictive licenses do not. You cannot be for property rights of ISPs and simultaneoously against Free Software and its advocates, and be logical at the same time.

Richard Stallman is actually for property rights, not against them in the matter of computer software. He is doing something about it not by advocating violence against the makers of proprietary software, but by creating his own software and releasing it for free, under a license that respects your rights. This is a pure free market response to a problem, that uses voluntarism and liberty as its tools, and it has worked so spectacularly, and to such an extent, that it has become a commercial threat to the makers of closed proprietary software, causing them to lie, bribe, steal and use the violent state (much in the same way that the Net Neutrality advocates are trying to do) to destroy Free Software.

Net Neutrality is about state control of ISP’s hardware and the expense of bandwidth (physical property and cost). Intellectual Property is a separate matter.

Intellectual Property is a state granted limited monopoly on ideas, and who can profit from them. People who are against collectivism and the state must concede that Intellectual Property is a bad thing if they are to remain honest; especially after having read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’, which proves that Intellectual Property is damaging to the very thing that they claim it produces and protects; prosperity and the promotion of the creation of new ideas.

Now, lets take a look at what Net Neutrality actually means in practice.

You run an ISP, and have entered into private contracts with one million people. The state, at the behest of violent and ignorant socialists, passes a law saying that you may not shape your traffic on your own machines that deliver bandwidth to your customers.

Should you refuse to do what they say, a representative of the violent socialists will launch a ‘Class Action Suit‘ against you and you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you will have violent thugs arriving at your office to arrest you and haul you off to gaol.

This is the reality of what the Net Neutrality advocates are asking for; they want people who do not believe what they believe and who will not work for them to be put into gaol and to have their property confiscated by the state.

This is a despicable, evil and dastardly personal philosophy.

We tweeted to the person what we follow that if he wants ISPs not to shape traffic, he should set up a brand and standard that ISPs can conform to, ask them to join it and let people voluntarily work together for an internet where all traffic is treated the same, pointing out that Net Neutrality is government violence… Yes, all of that was compressed into 140 characters.

The response?

I’m advocating intelligent government, not violence…

It all sounds nice and cozy doesn’t it? “I’m a nice guy, I’m not violent, I want ‘Intelligent Government’ and ‘Net Neutrality'”… its all complete lies, designed to cover the inherent violence of the state and its clients.

These people are disgusting, not because they want a better world, indeed, their motivations are pure, and in person, they are nice people – they are disgusting because they are violent, and point blank refuse to face the facts and consequences of what it is they are advocating, and in the case of ‘Net Neutrality’ they are advocating theft, coercion and violence.

We know for sure that we do not need the state to keep us safe or to make the net ‘fair’ Underwriters Laboratories is a perfect example of how voluntary cooperation works better than the state. Indeed, the internet itself is proof of that.

We do not need the state to mandate more efficient light bulbs; private industry is more than capable of doing that in ways that environmentalists and politicians are not capable of imagining.

Think about it; Bitorrent is responsible for one third of all internet traffic. If ISPs start to shape traffic, there will be a mass exodus to ISPs who do not, causing one of three things to happen:

1/ the ISPs that shape traffic relenting to stem the loss of customers

They are only interested in making money. If they lose customers, they die. Its as simple as that.

2/ the ISPs that shape traffic entering into contracts with content providers, replacing lost customer revenue with fees from the media giants

This means that everyone who wants Bittorrent and unrestricted access to any service on the net will leave those ISPs that shape traffic, leaving those who want to watch corporate content.
The people who want full access will get what they want, the ISPs will get what they want, new business models will emerge, new ISPs – everything will work perfectly.

3/ something unexpected

The violent Net Neutrality advocates say that new services will not be able to become successful if ISPs shape traffic; this is simply not the case. No service starts at a size that requires mass bandwidth; all startups begin by using a trickle of bandwidth, they grow slowly and organically and only when they are hugely popular begin to hit a wall bandwidth wise. In other words, as these businesses grow they have a chance to find their place in the market under the constraints of it.

Here is an example of how it would work in real life. A new service starts to become popular. This service requires bandwidth (like Soundcloud). People want to use this service, but find that their ISP is shaping traffic to and from it. The ISP has two choices; un shape traffic to the new service, or risk losing their customers.

The new service, as it grows, will suddenly find that it could have millions of voices all rooting for it with their ISPs. This kind of commercial pressure is enough to ensure that any new service that starts to become popular will have enough bandwidth to grow and potentially dominate.

Think about this also; if many smaller services get together to put pressure on ISPs, their voices could be bigger than any single growing startup.

You can sit around and come up with an infinite number of scenarios that will solve the shaping problem; the point is that interference from the state is the worst possible solution of all solutions.

Not only is state interference not the best solution, it is also inherently immoral and violent.

If people insist on pushing for Net Neutrality, they need to acknowledge that they are indeed violent socialists.

That sort of plain speaking honesty is very important when framing any discussion about this subject. From the looks of it however, it seems that honesty about their violent tendencies is not going to be forthcoming.

UPDATE

Tim Berners Lee has an article at Scientific American, where he says:

The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.

So, the first instance of the WWW went live on a private desktop in Geneva.

Then we get this:

In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

[…]

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend.

This leaves out some very important detail, and makes a statement that is factually incorrect.

The web evolved into what it is today because people decided to freely and voluntarily cooperate with each other, for their own ends as well as the common good that served those ends.

The web as we know it is NOT being threatened by Facebook and the other huge social-networking sites, or by traffic shaping; it is being threatened by violent socialists who think that it is ethical to steal property and capital from others so that their idea of what the web should be can be maintained.

Before I cary on, I agree that Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike, are a threat to people’s rights. Where we differ is in the understanding of what rights are, and where they come from. Rights do not come from the government, and no one has the right to steal, wether they are Tim Berners Lee or the state.

The net is not ‘yours’. The nicest way that I can put it is to say that this is a completely wrong construction. The part of the internet that belongs to you is your machine, bandwidth and your storage wherever it is. Your ability to contribute to it depends on the size of your bandwidth, storage and the processing power of your machine, all of which are your property, that no one has the right to steal from you.

The content you produce and upload to a third party site is subject to private contracts you enter into with the owners of sites you use. For example, Flickr has a contract that you have to agree with when you sign up with it. If you do not like it, you can decline their generous offer and go somewhere else or start up your own photo sharing site.

What Tim Berners Lee and the Net Neutrality people are advocating, is that your bandwidth and your computer, by virtue of being connected to the internet, somehow cease to be your property, and instantly become a part of some communist collective where you do not have any property rights, and where other people have rights to your property.

Think about it; under Net Neutrality, you will be compelled to keep your computer on and never to turn it off, unless the government gives you permission to.

There is no difference between that, and being told that you cannot shape traffic that your clients get from you as an ISP, except in scale.

As a Skype user, you agree to route traffic through your computer as part of the Skype TOS. This voluntary sharing of your machine and bandwidth helps other Skype users make calls. What Net Neutrality is demanding, is that you may not shut down Skype, because the telephone network is a ‘public utility’ of which your computer becomes a part as soon as you download and run Skype.

Its completely absurd.

Clearly the question remains; do ISPs and individuals have property rights, or do they not? If they do, how and by what right can Tim Berners Lee and the Net Neutrality advocates call for those property rights to be suspended by the state?

Just who do these people think they are?

Moving along, does anyone remember AOL? It was a hideous walled garden pseudo internet garbage filled CDROM spewing lamer-fest. Where is AOL now? Its decline has been spectacular, because as people woke up to what AOL really was, dumbed down filtered junk, they abandoned it for the real internet of an ISP, a browser and the real internet.

This happened because the real internet grew exponentially, making AOL look like what it really was; a gaol. Word of mouse spread, and balance was restored to the force. AOL is dead and dying, their business model utterly destroyed.

The same thing is going to happen to Facebook; everyone thinks that its great now but once social networking becomes a protocol Facebook will die.

Rather than complaining about Facebook, software developers and standards people like Tim Berners Lee should be working on ‘protocolizing’ social networking to make the viability of ‘the cancer that is Facebook’ a losing proposition in the long run.

All of these large companies can be superseded by other companies in an open, unregulated web; MySpace is dying as I type this, not because some socialists have determined that MySpace is too big for its boots and must be forced to ‘play nice’ but because it has been superseded by something superior. The free market is killing MySpace.

The free market in ideas and services will always improve the web; the last thing we need is socialists with their ultimate weapon, the state, raining down theft and destruction.

Its obvious to everyone that cooperating voluntarily makes the web work brilliantly; why should this be abandoned now? Why, all of a sudden, is it now necessary to get the state involved in forcing private companies and people to do what it is not in their interest to do?

We create the Web, by designing computer protocols and software; this process is completely under our control.

That is true, but Net Neutrality is not about voluntarily agreed upon protocols; its about controlling what other people do on the web by force and violence.

Openness also means you can build your own Web site or company without anyone’s approval. When the Web began, I did not have to obtain permission or pay royalties to use the Internet’s own open standards, such as the well-known transmission control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP).

This is a good thing. Once again, why now should companies have to get permission from the state to design their ISP policy? Why didn’t you run to the state when you ran the first web server and demand that government legislation control your new invention? No one would have listened to you then, but now that you have the ear of politicians because you are the man that invented the web, you are eager to abuse that position to hurt ‘our’ internets. SHAME.

In contrast, not using open standards creates closed worlds. Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of “http:” the addresses begin with “itunes:,” which is proprietary. You can access an “itunes:” link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program. You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band.

And that is why people create services that are open, like Rate Your Music LastFM and all the other services out there that play nice. We do not need the state to make iTunes use “http:” instead of “itunes:”. There will come a point where iTunes dies because someone somewhere, another Bram Cohen, comes up with a protocol that shatters the way things get done now, and all of a sudden, everything changes. This WILL HAPPEN, even in a shaped internet, as I describe above. The market is a force so powerful that it can make what seems like magic happen. It can kill giants and turn midgets into giants.

And lets not forget; no one forces people to use Apple software. Apple makes very good products and software, and they offer them to you for money. In the case of iTunes, you can get it for free. If you want to destroy the walled garden created by Apple, you do not need government intervention and the violence that comes with it; you simply need to protocolize music files on the internet, or make your own iTunes alternative that is not a walled garden. People are doing this and eventually, they will be triumphant, because they are not proprietary in the protocols they use. Once again, we do not need socialism or the state to make this magic happen; people are writing the software without being told they need to do it, just like you did to create the web, without being told what to do, or asking permission from anyone.

An analogy is that the Web is like a household appliance that runs on the electricity network. A refrigerator or printer can function as long as it uses a few standard protocols—in the U.S., things like operating at 120 volts and 60 hertz. Similarly, any application—among them the Web, e-mail or instant messaging—can run on the Internet as long as it uses a few standard Internet protocols, such as TCP and IP.

Manufacturers can improve refrigerators and printers without altering how electricity functions, and utility companies can improve the electrical network without altering how appliances function. The two layers of technology work together but can advance independently. The same is true for the Web and the Internet. The separation of layers is crucial for innovation.

This isn’t a good analogy at all, but it serves to prove that governments should not be involved in selecting one technology over another.

Tesla and Edison were both vying for the state license to supply electricity to homes in the USA. Edison won the blessing of the state and Tesla lost. I do not know which was the better pick, but what is sure is that the people who gave Edison the nod didn’t know anything about how electricity generation and distribution works or would change america.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=tesla+vs+edison

The situation now is that AC electricity is a near ubiquitous utility that is licensed by the state. You cannot generate it and distribute it to millions of people because there is a well entrenched, state monopoly on generation. This has caused terrible and wasteful stagnation in the evolution of transmission technology. Electricity is very expensive and becoming more expensive, the fuels used to generate it limited in type. All of this is a result of the state interfering in energy distribution through the ‘Department of Energy’ and similar bureaucratic bodies world-wide.

Imagine if electricity generation and distribution were left entirely to the free market. Electricity would now be as cheap as tap water. Imagine what mobile phones would be like if the government was in charge of delivering the ‘right to a mobile phone’ to every citizen. We would still be using huge briefcase style phones; like the Lada of the old USSR.

This is exactly what will happen to the internet if Net Neutrality is made law. There will be a massive consolidation of ISPs until there are maybe twelve for the entire USA. Under these twelve ISPs all content will be served, and to which all people and devices will be connected.

This will bring about the nighmare totalitarian web that Tim Berners Lee fears so much. The state will have its tentacles in every ISP, by law, and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it, and no alternative or choice. There will be massive barriers to entry if you want to become an ISP, which will involve traffic monitoring equipment (that you will have to pay for) and heaven knows what, keeping out the renegades and the innovative.

All of this is the complete opposite of people freely choosing one ISP over another, and people freely volunteering to provide services and software to each other.

Which world is it that these Net Neutrality people want to create? The totalitarian one, or the free one?

Net neutrality maintains that if I have paid for an Internet connection at a certain quality, say, 300 Mbps, and you have paid for that quality, then our communications should take place at that quality. Protecting this concept would prevent a big ISP from sending you video from a media company it may own at 300 Mbps but sending video from a competing media company at a slower rate. That amounts to commercial discrimination.

No, there is no such thing as ‘commercial discrimination’.

If that were all Net Neutrality was about, then there would be no problem and no need for new legislation; what Tim Berners Lee just described is not ‘commercial discrimination’ but failure to fulfil a contract.

If I contract for bandwidth of a certain quality, and do not get it because my ISP is slyly traffic shaping, that is plain fraud. There are more than enough laws covering fraud on the statute books, and in fact, people who hold that there should be a small state accept that prosecuting fraud it is one of the few legitimate functions of a state.

Once again, the market can solve this problem, as I describe above. You do not like the policy your ISP is offering to you? Change ISPs. Your ISP is defrauding you? Change ISPs or sue them. No new legislation is needed for any of this.

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science.

Heavens above NO.

Just like I said… SOCIALISM! The internet is not ‘fair‘ and that socialist programming word makes me and every decent person SICK TO THEIR STOMACHS.

And don’t even start me on ‘democracy‘.

As for science, science is a way of making sense of the world; it is not a religion, a political philosophy, a consensus driven methodology, majority rule group think or fair.

Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

And this is the greatest fail, perhaps of all time.

The inventor of the most important technology the world has ever seen, a destroyer of tyranny, a literal liberator of man in every sense, breaking down barriers between people, facilitating cooperation, communication, commerce, copulation and greatly magnifying all the things that man does and thinks…. wants his invention to be crippled.

Government legislation is NOT needed to make people behave like good human beings. The basic values of the internet; sharing, openness, cooperation, cannot be legislated; you cannot force people to be good, and certainly threatening them with violence and state invasion is not a way to make people work together for the common good.

The growth and importance of the web is more proof that people can build great things together without the government being involved in any way, in case more proof was needed, and it seems that it is, even for the man who created the web.

Berners Lee goes on in the article to complain about ‘snooping’. Like I say above, the state having its nose in every ISPs business will facilitate surveillance, on the pretext that they are ensuring ‘fairness’ (Violently enforced theft of property aka Net Neutrality).

Pity the poor old ISPs.

On the one hand, they have the totalitarian police state forcing them to pay for the infrastructure collect and store the private communications of their users, violating them, ‘for the common good’, and on the other hand, they have the violent Net Neutrality socialists pushing them to deliver bandwidth to their standards ‘for the common good’.

They are caught between a rock and a hard place, and both have the same thing in common.

The State.

On either side a Griffin Sable gorged with a Collar and pendant therefrom a Portcullis Or.

If you watch any documentary this year, it absolutely must be ‘Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story’ http://bit.ly/9ICXTi.

Where the problem of Britain’s money is laid out so simply and effectively that even a child could understand it.

If you still believe in:

• ‘Benefits’
• ‘Grants’
• ‘Funding’ the arts
• Councils to do everything
• State funded education
• Government ‘subsidies’ of anything
• Government ‘investment’ in anything

Then you need to watch this programme. After having watched it, if you STILL think that these things are not immoral, unethical and insane then you really are lost.

Every once in a while, someone writes something that is so clear and efficient at dispelling commonly held beliefs and myths that it changes everything. This television programme is one of those things. The first twenty three minutes alone are enough to expunge all of your false ideas about the true nature of government spending.

What is for sure is that democracy will inevitably lead to absolute socialism, and this documentary proves it. The clients of the giant state, who all have a vested interest in keeping the monster alive, will always be disinclined to vote for liberty and a smaller state, as they will be cutting off the teat that is feeding them. As the programme says, there are places in the UK where 70% of the economy is made up of state feeders; none of those people are going to vote for a smaller state. Ever.

Taking all of this into account, its clear to see that there will not be many more chances for Britain to escape the nightmare of total socialism; if this lot do not unleash the forces of capitalism immediately, subsequent elections will turn this country back towards socialist totalitarianism; there will simply not be enough people left to vote for anything else.

The only way this can be prevented is if the economy is returned to sanity in a very short amount of time, so that the people who used to rely on the state, will be able to find places in the real economy. They will then be disinclined to vote for socialists who will destroy their prosperity. If this is not done quickly, and people are languishing for too long, a reversal will be much more difficult.

Whoever is in charge, if they understand economics at all (fat chance) should be thinking about secondly reducing the size of the state, and firstly, removing all obstacles to capitalism, like the minimum wage, all regulations on hiring people (and everything else), abolishing VAT etc etc.

If this is not done immediately, then there is going to be… trouble.

A failure to unleash capitalism (to ‘go Hong Kong’) will mean that either the system will have to be brought down by some other means, or it will turn to socialism. Which is the most likely outcome? Who knows? The choices are clear however, and there is still alot of educational work to be done, what with all the totally delusional Keynesians, Socialists, Statists and Global Warmistas debating wether or not gravity holds you down: http://j.mp/9Ttwpi whilst it does precisely that. If otherwise intelligent people persist in their wishful thinking, wilful economic illiteracy and statism, then it is going to take nothing less than a wholesale withdrawal of support from the productive to engineer the change to reality based living that is so desperately needed.

Once again, its Libertarianism that is the key to real prosperity of the sort that made Britain great; property rights are the ultimate right that not only protects you personally, it also protects your family, your money, your future, your security and allows you to fulfil your maximum potential.

UPDATE!

An intelligent person at Home Ed Forums said:

barrybloye

Channel 4: Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story

It’s surprisingly digestible, but reveals some shocking facts about the UK’s debt and the burden that heavy taxes and bureaucracy have on the country.

Can you believe that the UK Government controls 53% of the British economy (compared to 28% in China)!?

I think it has massively redefined my idea of Britain’s place in the World, almost as much as the Balls–Badman affair.

Clips:
UK public sector is crippling UK economy
Lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue

Hat-tip to Blogdial.

Indeed.

We have been talking about this for several years now. Anyone who takes what we say seriously (and there are many that do, resulting in profound changes to their entire personal philosophies) will have already read ‘For a New Liberty’.

You need to read that book. I am not just saying that to be saying it; I REALLY MEAN IT. Surf to mises.org and BUY IT. NOW. It is one of the most important books you will ever read. After reading it, you will be left with the choice of being an irrational, imbecillic, violent moron, or an ethical, rational real human being, with a deep, morally based concern for the welfare of your fellow man.

I’m not making that up. I’m not saying it for effect.

If you think that this documentary is digestible, revealing, shocking and redefines your ideas about Britain’s place in the world, you are in for a BIGGER SHOCK. ‘For a New Liberty’ is 1000 times more profoundly life changing than this documentary, because it deals with every part of your life, and not just money alone.

Its great to have a small part to play in spreading these ideas. Its through their spread that we are finally going to be rid of the state, so at the very least our children can live like real human beings instead of cattle.

Here we go again.

Ian Duncan Smith and his Tories are set to reintroduce ID Cards.

How do we know this? They are attempting to scrap the byzantine system of ‘benefits’ in favour of a single ‘Universal Credit’ that will be able to take into account what your circumstances are on a month to month basis.

Has an alarm bell rung in your head yet?

The Workers Revolutionary Party website (of all the people) reveals the crucial details:

Defend benefits! down with ‘universal credit’!
THE announcement yesterday that the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, had won his battle with the treasury over bringing in a single ‘universal credit’ has rightly been described as the ‘bonfire of the benefits’.

Under his scheme, every single benefit available to the unemployed, elderly, low paid or incapacitated – about 50 benefits in all – will be scrapped overnight and replaced with a single universal credit.

Due for the chop are housing benefit, incapacity benefit, the tax credit system for low-paid workers and single mothers as well as the job seekers allowance.

According to Smith, bringing all these benefits together is now possible due to computer technology that would even enable benefits to be varied from month to month depending on changes to a claimant’s circumstances.

This means that there will need to be an ID Card, tied into a system that Ian Liddle-Grainger MP hinted at, ‘real time taxation’, which translates to ‘total realtime financial surveillance’.

[…]
Nobody in their right mind will believe the nonsense being put about by Smith that these huge amounts can be obtained through efficiencies being made by collapsing the 50-odd benefits into one single universal credit, that can be varied according to changed circumstances.

Efficiency savings have never been made on this vast a scale by any government.

This is true. The system that IDS and Liddle-Graiinger are describing would be bigger, more complex and intrusive than the doomed UK ID Card system, and of course would be even more immoral and unethical, quite apart from being undoable as all UK government IT systems have proven to be.

On every level none of this should be considered seriously. And remember, this job will be contracted out to Lockheed Martin, Capita or some other company, that will have access to all private and company bank accounts in the country.

The very idea is beyond absurd.

In truth, these savings can only be achieved through savage cuts in benefits, by repeated means testing, and by a constant state policing of the former benefit holders, with punishment for those who do not report changed circumstances.

The means testing will be built in comrades; they would have real-time access to your bank account, cash would be outlawed, and they would adjust your ‘benefits’ by a series of programmed break points that are automatically triggered by the amount of money flowing into your account. Theoretically.

[…]
These proposals are not about efficiency, cutting out so-called ‘benefit fraud’ or targeting the really needy, they are simply about smashing all benefits, in order to prop up the bankrupt capitalist system and its bankrupt bosses and bankers.

I just cut out all the nauseating socialist Santa Claus Money Thinking. This section is factually correct however; this is about slashing ‘benefits’, that is true, but it is also about setting up a system whereby not a single penny of money that you earn or spend is outside the scrutiny of the state.

This is about propping up the system of crony capitalism (NOT capitalism, perfect examples of crony capitalists being Lockheed Martin and Capita) and the people who benefit from it; and I use the word ‘benefit’ deliberately in this context, because crony capitalists receive benefits from the state in the same way that the so called scroungers do. They are no different from each other save in the scale of their theft.

[…]
And what is the significance of the title ‘universal credit’ in place of ‘benefit’. A benefit, of course, is something that a person is entitled to by right. A ‘credit’ is basically a loan for which one has to beg, and which must be repaid at some time in the future.

No doubt we will be clarified shortly concerning the issue of repayment.

The TUC must not allow current benefit holders to be turned into beggars. The coalition must be told that any attempt to abolish benefits in favour of a credit will be met with a general strike to bring them down.

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/5696

Very perceptive comrade. Of course, the state cannot create rights any more than it can create jobs. I would say also, that the word ‘universal’ is used in the literal sense; everyone in Britain will be ‘entitled’ to this credit; you will receive an amount ranging from a negative number (taxation, which is theft) to a positive one (‘benefit’, which is redistribution of the stolen money). Of course, you will not be able to opt out of this system, the taxation part being the real-time taxation system hinted at by Ian Liddle-Grainger.

Clearly the only way that such a system can be implemented is with a compulsory ID Card for every economically active person, without which it will be illegal to operate a bank account.

Each ID Card will be linked to your account number, and the state will be able to check a list of your transactions remotely through realtime backdoor access.

It will be forbidden for you to make any cash transaction over an arbitrary limit, to stop the emergence of an underground economy of the size and scope that Russia Greece Spain Italy have for example.

Of course, the ID Card will have all the other side effects and secondary uses that we have been writing about since 2001.

There are no two ways about this. Either they introduce an ID Card for all economically active UK persons (and that means everybody if cash is severely constrained) or they drop the idea of real-time taxation and Universal Benefit in its nascent incarnation.

Finally, Labour are for the idea of a Universal Credit. That should tell you all you need to know about these ideas.

They know it means the introduction of the ID Card and the creation of a system of invasive police state socialism, where once they become the government again, they will have complete control of all the people and everything they do. It will mean the completion of the New Labour project that came to a halt because they ran out of other people’s money and patience with the nanny state.

If you think that life was bad under New Labour, wait till they take the reigns again once this system of complete control is in place. The thirteen years of Blair and Brown will seem like a picnic in the sun.

Obviously, none of this is a done deal, and there are infinitely better ways to secure the social safety net that do not rely on crony capitalists, immorality, faulty economic models and violence.

Hopefully, if the United States turns 180° and returns to its roots, this will cause a huge brain drain from the UK and Europe, causing them to think again.

Already, some of ‘Britain’s’ biggest companies are getting out of dodge for fairer climes. You can expect this trend to continue, especially in the internet business, where moving a company is as simple as running rsync, changing your DNS settings and buying hosting in another jurisdiction.

Britain boasts an internet economy of £100 billion per year. This will shrivel up should the tories introduce this invasive police state system. No one will host here, no one will develop here, no one will use transaction services based here; they will all flee to a restored USA, and other jurisdictions where Libertarianism flourishes.

Mark my words.

UPDATE

We have had some mail…

This is what you need to consider; if all benefits are going to be replaced by a single Universal Credit, in a monolithic system, that takes into account your circumstances automagically, they are going to need to following at a minimum:

• A database with every British person in it, each citizen having a unique ID (National Identity Register)
• Each child that is born would need to be in this database, with their relation to their parent or guardian, to calculate the Child Benefit component of the new Universal Credit (ContactPoint)
• A connection to the medical database so that the disability benefit component of the new Universal Credit can be calculated (NHS Spine)
  A new Universal Credit system (database and business logic) that is integrated into all bank accounts and which, PayPal style, can pay and withdraw monies from your bank account.

That is what is required at a minimum, to pull off what IDS is proposing, and of course, none of it can possibly be optional. It is not possible to do what they are thinking about without tying everything together into a single system that has the citizens unique identifier as the key.

As we say above, this is much worse than the original ID Card, and of course, when we say ID Card, we really mean NIR. This proposal brings together all the worst elements of the database state, and unifies them into a system of total control and surveillance.

The lovely, razor sharp, eagle eyed, Collie concentrated Staffordshire alerts us to a simply incredible, though not very surprising, story that the Metropolitan Police have been issued with a set of guidelines listing Home Educators as a group who are ‘at risk’.

Give me a flipping break.

Here is the background. There is, apparently, something called a CRAM (Child Risk Assessment Matrix) that the police use to do who knows what, since they routinely fail to do the right thing when it comes to any of this.

Someone wrote to the MET (Metropolitan Police) with a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) asking just how the HELL (Has Everyone Lost Logic) they came up with the entries in this ‘matrix’. Wait for it, you will not BELIEVE their rationale:

Metropolitan Police Service (MPS)

1 November 2010

Dear Mr White

Freedom of Information Request Reference No: 2010090003147

I respond in connection with your request for information which was received by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) on 19/09/2010. I note you seek access to the following information:

This request for information under the Freedom of Information Act refers to an article on the Community Care website, and in particular to the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM). See: http://www.communitycare.co.uk/static-pa….

My questions are as follows:

1. Was an Equality Impact Assessment undertaken in respect of the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)?

[…]

(a) Which definition of ***disability*** was used to determine its inclusion as an alleged risk factor in the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)?

(b) What evidence base was used to determine the inclusion of ***disability*** as an alleged risk factor in the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)?

Please supply copies of all evidence used by the MPS to justify its inclusion as an alleged risk factor. 3. “Home educated”

(a) Which definition of ***home educated*** was used to determine its inclusion as an alleged risk factor in the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)?

(b) What evidence base was used to determine the inclusion of ***home educated*** as an alleged risk factor in the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)?

Please supply copies of all evidence used by the MPS to justify its inclusion as an alleged risk factor.

[…]

DECISION

I have today decided to disclose the located information to you in full.

[…]

At question 3 you asked: “Home educated”

(a) Which definition of “home educated” was used to determine its inclusion as an alleged risk factor in the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)?

The MPS response is: No specific definition of home educated has been used. The concept/designation in its widest generic understanding is used.

(b) What evidence base was used to determine the inclusion of “home educated” as an alleged risk factor in the Child Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM)? Please supply copies of all evidence used by the MPS to justify its inclusion as an alleged risk factor.

The MPS response is: A number of children throughout England and Wales have suffered from neglect in circumstances where they are home educated. These cases have attracted both local and national comment and some have been the subject to serious case reviews. The absence of a child from a conventional school environment where staff are routinely trained in safeguarding responsibilities can in some circumstances lead to that child being in a more vulnerable situation and at a higher risk of neglect or abuse. No specific individual case evidence has been relied upon for the inclusion of this category.

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/child_risk_assessment_matrix#incoming-123936

My emphasis.

“We read something about this in the newspapers, and so we threw it in for good measure.”

Of course, anyone who has been paying attention (and why on earth should the police be paying attention to this? they have enough of their own problems without having to do very nasty, immoral social work) knows that in fact, Home Educated children are SAFER than children at nurseries and state schools.

Now to get to the title of this post.

In a Libertarian space, the job of protecting people and their property, which is the ONLY purpose of the police in a free society, would be done entirely by private police forces, that are directly and completely accountable to the people who pay subscription fees to them:

Another common objection to the workability of free-market defense wonders: May not one or more of the defense agencies turn its coercive power to criminal uses? In short, may not a private police agency use its force to aggress against others, or may not a private court collude to make fraudulent decisions and thus aggress against its subscribers and victims? It is very generally assumed that those who postulate a stateless society are also naïve enough to believe that, in such a society, all men would be “good,” and no one would wish to aggress against his neighbor. There is no need to assume any such magical or miraculous change in human nature.

Of course, some of the private defense agencies will become criminal, just as some people become criminal now. But the point is that in a stateless society there would be no regular, legalized channel for crime and aggression, no government apparatus the control of which provides a secure monopoly for invasion of person and property. When a State exists, there does exist such a built-in channel, namely, the coercive taxation power, and the compulsory monopoly of forcible protection. In the purely free-market society, a would-be criminal police or judiciary would find it very difficult to take power, since there would be no organized State apparatus to seize and use as the instrumentality of command. To create such an instrumentality de novo is very difficult, and, indeed, almost impossible; historically, it took State rulers centuries to establish a functioning State apparatus.

Furthermore, the purely free-market, stateless society would contain within itself a system of built-in “checks and balances” that would make it almost impossible for such organized crime to succeed. There has been much talk about “checks and balances” in the American system, but these can scarcely be considered checks at all, since every one of these institutions is an agency of the central government and eventually of the ruling party of that government. The checks and balances in the stateless society consist precisely in the free market, i.e., the existence of freely competitive police and judicial agencies that could quickly be mobilized to put down any outlaw agency.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard146.html

In a Libertarian space, there would be no police working on CRAMs, victimless crimes like smoking in pubs, ‘underage drinking’, speeding, dance parties or any other harmless activity that had nothing to do with the protection of people and property.

Education, childrearing, fostering and everything to do with you and your lawfully created or acquired private property would not be the business of the police, unless someone tries to steal your property from you or invade your property or you are foolish enough to try and steal from someone else, i.e. kidnapping.

Once again, Libertarianism provides a clean solution to a bad problem; you can have security AND Liberty in it, where the police are freed to do only what they are meant to do, and you can live without fear of discrimination, vilification, slander or persecution simply because you, as a responsible, loving, diligent, intelligent, above average and willing to sacrifice parent, want your children to be educated to the highest possible standard.

Note once again, the way things are now, you have no way to stop the Metropolitan Police from wrongly and arbitrarily classifying you in their CRAM as a potential abuser. You have no way to stop them from using this information to target you, discriminate against you and to harass you. If you are harassed by them, you have no avenue of redress unless you are wealthy (and of course, they would not even approach you if you have a good postcode, say in Belgravia).

In a Libertarian police system of competing forces all vying for your business, paid for by voluntary contributions, no police force would engage in this sort of blatantly discriminatory and absurd behaviour because there is no money in it.

What would it look like I hear you think… Imagine the National Trust, only instead of looking after historic buildings and land, they police. It would cost as much as belonging to the National Trust, would be as nice as them…

Whats not to like?

I don’t care what anyone says….

The Swiss COMPLETELY ROCK.

but…

Is their style of government good for people other than them?

Some people who lean towards Libertarianism seem to think that a Swiss style government would be a good replacement for Parliamentary Democracy, but there is a fundamental problem with democracy that rules it out as an ideal way for people to live together.

In a democracy, even the Swiss democracy, other people get to tell you what you can and cannot do with your property, based only on a vote. This is unacceptable to anyone who wants to live in a free country, and its unacceptable to all true Libertarians.

The fact of the matter is that the violent mob, should they be steered to destroy you can be made to do so by the ballot box. It means that your legitimately acquired property, even in Switzerland, can be controlled by this violent mob, and their will trumps your rights.

Of course, democracy not just a simple matter of the collective all linking telepathically and deciding on who does and who does not have rights; all democracies involve the steering of the population by a small minority. This makes democracies effective dictatorships wherever they are implemented.

You have got to remember, no matter what you might think about the rightness or wrongness of any particular vote eventually the violent mob are going to come after you and your rights. That is why only a system where the power to vote means nothing and has no effect on your fundamental rights (property) can be ethical.

In the Swiss model, Cantons can split off from their parent Cantons Jura has did this in 1979, of course, by a popular vote. That means that everyone who did not want to split, had themselves and their property (same thing) dragged off into this separate Canton, against their wishes.

Now there will be the inevitable retorts of, “well you can just move to another Canton”. What? Why should someone be made to move from their own home because there was a popular vote? And what if your property (house) was on the edge of the disputed Cantons, and you wanted to remain a part of Bern whilst your house fell under the jurisdiction of Jura? Why should someone have the power to draw a line on a map and determine what laws your property are governed by?

For a true Libertarian, none of it makes any sense, or is justifiable.

Obviously, extrapolating from the last example, the ideal situation is a place where all individuals are a Canton. You live by your own rules on your own property, you contract with other Cantons, trade with them, recognise their sovereignty and they recognise yours. No one can take away your property or have a say over what you can or cannot do on your own land or with yourself and your property by dint of a vote.

This is the only way all injustice and coercion can be eliminated. As for the ‘problems’ of policing, courts and everything else, go and read how that works in a stateless society.

The Swiss live in a beautiful country. They do not bother anyone. They have had, up till now, the best banking system in the world, with unparalleled privacy protections for individuals. They do not go to war. They all own guns and ammo. What happens in Switzerland, stays in Switzerland. They have, as you can see above, some mindblowingly beautiful music and traditions.

They also have compulsory ID Cards, and greatly curtailed property rights, and a system that can mean property owners cannot build the sort of buildings they would like if the population get stirred up enough.

No country on Earth is perfect; if you want to design, hypothetically, the ideal place to live, where your rights are guaranteed and where they cannot be taken away by anyone for any reason, any idea that involves the popular vote has to be off the table from the outset, since it is so clearly against your best interests, logic, ethics and constitutes an ever present threat to your Liberty.

This video ‘Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America’:

Describes on many levels, why the collectivists, the socialists and all the brainwashed people who believe in ‘democracy’ are nothing more than human cattle.

On the first level, there is a story in this video about how three women living in the same town save and borrow money.

Ms Fitts describes how, with a simple piece of software, it is possible to cut out the bank that is massively charging one of the women a high interest rate, by connecting these three people locally.

This is the sort of thing that entrepreneurs do, and which the socialists cannot even begin to imagine.

The socialist will blame the bank for the ‘problem’ of high interest rates, and then call on the violent state to force the bank to charge less.

The entrepreneur is smarter, and more importantly, ethical.

She understands the true nature of the problem and solves it in a way that not only is better for the consumer, but which has the side effect of completely destroying the business model of the bank. All without any coercion or violence of any kind, all done on the back of the power of human imagination, and voluntary exchange.

As you may have heard, there is a call for a bank run throughout the EU on the 7th of December:

French stop banque Facebook page

German stop banque Facebook page

Italian stop banque Facebook page

Greek stop banque Facebook page

English stop banque Facebook page

Dutch stop banque Facebook page

[…]

http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/starve-the-beast/

This is a good idea, but what is going to happen after the run is over?

The socialist wants to destroy, but he cannot create. He wants to hurt the system, but he wants to leave it all intact so that he can sit in the seat of power and run everything to his own bitter taste.

This is the difference; the freedom loving entrepreneurs who create and benefit everyone, versus the socialist control freaks who are inherently evil and destructive of capital and human life.

Had all the people now going berserk in France taken the opportunity to form their own banks that run on rules they fix for themselves, on a purely voluntary basis, none of them would have the need for what they are doing right now.

One thing is for sure; with all of those people withdrawing their money from the banks, this is an great opportunity to start just the sort of bank that the organisers of this bank run would want to see and use… do they have the brains to do it?

Thanks to the wise Preuss, we have a nifty little pair of articles that demonstrate once again why the people who think that democracy is a good way to organise the affairs of groups of people are spectacularly naïve.

The unethical long winded men who believe that, “the only legitimate way to have a process is if everyone has their say” would do well to consider the implications of these articles, but then, if they had the capacity to understand what the implications of this are, they could not hold the unethical views that they do:

The ‘politics of the brain’ is a threat to choice, freedom and democracy – which is why spiked is declaring war against it.

Quote:
In earlier eras, the revelation that there was a Behavioural Insight Team at the heart of government, dedicated to finding ways to reshape the public’s thoughts, choices and actions, would have caused outrage. It would have brought to mind some of the darker antics of the Soviet Union, which treated certain beliefs as mental illnesses to be fixed, or maybe O’Brien, the torturer in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who boasts that the human mind is ‘infinitely malleable’.

Yet the news that David Cameron has a Behavioural Insight Team inside Downing Street, and what’s more that it is increasingly influential within the Lib-Con coalition, has been treated as if were a perfectly normal, even admirable thing. Have we lost our minds?

The Guardian article refered to gives us another prime example of how it doesn’t matter how you vote the government still get in.

Quote:
A “nudge unit” set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.

The unit, formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, is being run by David Halpern, a former adviser in Tony Blair’s strategy unit, and is taking advice from Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor generally recognised as popularising “nudge” theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society.

Thaler was in London for three days this week advising ministers, and in a speech urged the government to adopt longer term horizons. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he believed the unit could change the way citizens think.

And so, there you have it.

There are people in the employ of government whose work is to manipulate the thinking of the population. These people have the power to coercively use economics to alter the behaviour of the population, and of course, they also abuse the English language to do it.

Why do you think that the word ‘fair’ and all its derivatives are now on the lips of every Tom Dick and Harry? Do you think that it is merely by accident that everyone is measuring policy, laws and everything that comes out of government and which is related to ‘society’ is measured against this idea of ‘fairness’?

It is absolutely deliberate, and a direct result of this Behaviour Modification group at the heart of government.

Anyone who believes that democracy is beneficial or ethical is completely insane.

Anyone who believes that “having your say”, or “getting your points heard” legitimises government processes or democracy itself is also completely delusional, insane, Naïve and very very stupid.

It is clear that the frames of reference within which all the problems and non problems (like Home Education and its practitioner’s relationship to government) you face are nothing more than elaborate traps, created by this and other social engineering groups.

The Behavioural Insight Team and its predecessors, by creating the boxes within which you are allowed to address a problem have complete control over you from the outset, and because you are retarded, you cannot see that everyone having their say really does not legitimise anything.

This is why the only response to anything that is unethical should be point blank refusal. As soon as you enter into a discussion on their terms, you are thinking inside their frame of reference and all is lost.

This is why it is not irrational, confrontational or counterproductive to take the Libertarian stance when you are confronted by these persistent pests, but the complete opposite; a rational, ethical and productive thinker does not concede for a moment that the state usurping the role of the parent is legitimate. For example.

Its also why it is so important to use English words correctly:

While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is [p. 25] Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

All true, and if you have not yet read that book, go and do so immediately.

These are the facts:

‘Taxation’ is actually theft.
‘Conscription’ and ‘National Service’ are in fact a form of slavery.
Government ‘Grants’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
Government ‘Subsidies’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
‘Subsidising the arts’ is in fact redistributing stolen money to cultural gatekeepers.
Central Bank ‘Quantitative Easing’ is in fact Money Printing.
Government ‘investment in industry’ is in fact economy destroying redistribution of stolen loot and crony capitalism.

All of the above have one root thing in common; violent coercion. If you disobey the state, violence is used against you to force you to comply. This is even true in the case of Quantitative Easing, where if you attempt to escape from the criminal and inflationary central bank, you will be arrested and gaoled and your goods confiscated.

It is in no way ‘fair’ to tax people based on the level of wealth they have accumulated; taxation itself is immoral theft. It is in no way ‘fair’ that graduates should pay a tax so that others can receive a university education, or that money is stolen from you for any purpose whatsoever, no matter what the need is or what the money is to be used for.

If you use the language of the state as your frame of reference, you instantly become their prisoner, and this can have consequences that will touch every aspect of your life, quite apart from making you sound like a complete zombie.

While we are at it, what is an example of something that actually is fair?

If there is a piece of cake in a household, and two family members both want a slice, the two can agree that one can cut and the other gets to choose the first piece.

That is fair, since both of the parties have voluntarily agreed on how the cake that belongs to them both should be divided.

Dictionary says:

fair – 9 dictionary results

adjective, -er, -est, adverb, -er, -est, noun, verb

–adjective

1. free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge.
2. legitimately sought, pursued, done, given, etc.; proper under the rules: a fair fight.
3. moderately large; ample: a fair income.
4. neither excellent nor poor; moderately or tolerably good: fair health.
5. marked by favoring conditions; likely; promising: in a fair way to succeed.
6. Meteorology .
1. (of the sky) bright; sunny; cloudless to half-cloudy.
2. (of the weather) fine; with no prospect of rain, snow, or hail; not stormy.
7. Nautical . (of a wind or tide) tending to aid the progress of a vessel.
8. unobstructed; not blocked up: The way was fair for our advance.
9. without irregularity or unevenness: a fair surface.
10. free from blemish, imperfection, or anything that impairs the appearance, quality, or character: Her fair reputation was ruined by gossip.
11. easy to read; clear: fair handwriting.
12. of a light hue; not dark: fair skin.
13. pleasing in appearance; attractive: a fair young maiden.
14. seemingly good or sincere but not really so: The suitor beguiled his mistress with fair speeches.
15. courteous; civil: fair words.
16. Medicine/Medical . (of a patient’s condition) having stable and normal vital signs and other favorable indicators, as appetite and mobility, but being in some discomfort and having the possibility of a worsening state.
17. Dialect . scarcely; barely: It was just fair daylight when we started working.

-adverb

1. in a fair manner: He doesn’t play fair.
2. straight; directly, as in aiming or hitting: He threw the ball fair to the goal.
3. favorably; auspiciously.
4. British, Australian . entirely; completely; quite: It happened so quickly that it fair took my breath away.

–noun

1. Archaic . something that is fair.
2. Archaic .
1. a woman.
2. a beloved woman.

–verb (used with object)

1. to make the connection or junction of (surfaces) smooth and even.
2. Shipbuilding .
1. to draw and adjust (the lines of a hull being designed) to produce regular surfaces of the correct form.
2. to adjust the form of (a frame or templet) in accordance with a design, or cause it to conform to the general form of a hull.
3. to restore (a bent plate or structural member) to its original form.
4. to align (the frames of a vessel under construction) in proper position.
3. to bring (rivet holes in connecting structural members) into perfect alignment.
4. Obsolete . to make fair.

—Verb phrase

1. .fair off / up, South Midland and Southern U.S. (of the weather) to clear: It’s supposed to fair off toward evening.

—Idioms

1. bid fair, to seem likely: This entry bids fair to win first prize.
2. fair and square,
1. honestly; justly; straightforwardly: He won the race fair and square.
2. honest; just; straightforward: He was admired for being fair and square in all his dealings.
3. fair to middling, Informal . only tolerably good; so-so.

Origin: bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fair

That pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of ‘fair’ in the Nick Clegg Orwellian sense; taxation is dishonest and unjust. It is illegitimately sought, given and pursued money. And so on.

The same can be said for ‘paying your fair share’ or ‘greed‘, ‘capitalism‘, ‘rights‘ and many other crucially important words that are routinely and deliberately misused to steer you into the squeeze chutes. You need to get a grip on these words, restore their true meanings in your mind, so that when someone tries to steer you and frame your thoughts for you it will be easy to deflect their nonsense. In particular, when some disgusting, unctuous and deeply sinister bureaucrat tries to justify why he should have access to your children, you will not even begin to discuss the subject, because you know that it is illegitimate.

Rather than do this by making a list of words and then re-defining them one by one, you would be well advised to read this book by Murray Rothbard. It will train you to think in such a way that words you have been misusing will automatically find their correct meaning, by virtue of your newly found ethical basis of thought. Once you finish that book, no matter what word they try and hijack as the new rallying cry for collectivism, the principle itself, having been disempowered in your mind, will be unacceptable, and the word in its new usage will cause you to bristle and your hackles to rise.

This is the place that your thinking needs to be in; a place where you are immune to the nefarious work of the ‘Nudge Group’ and the ‘Behavioural Insight Team’. Where no matter what they do, you will NEVER give up your dignity or your rights no matter what they or anyone else says.

Finally, ‘choice, freedom and democracy’; choice and freedom are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from democracy!

I agree 100% with everything in this interview, between Doug Casey and Louis James.

…….

Doug Casey on Voting
Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator

Louis: Doug, last week we spoke about presidents.  We have an election coming up in the U.S., one many people believe is very important even though it isn’t a presidential election – an election that could have significant consequences on our investments. But given the views you’ve already expressed on the Tea Party movement and anarchy, I’m sure you have different ideas. What do you make of the impending circus, and what should a rational man do?

Doug: Well, a rational man, which is to say, an ethical man, would almost certainly not vote in this election, or in any other – at least above a local level, where you personally know most of both your neighbors and the candidates.

Louis: Why? Might not an ethical person want to vote the bums out?

Doug: No. I’ve thought about this a lot, so let me give you five reasons why no one should vote.

The first reason is that voting is an unethical act, in and of itself. That’s because the state is pure, institutionalized coercion. If you believe that coercion is an improper way for people to relate to one another, then you shouldn’t engage in a process that formalizes and guarantees the use of coercion.

Louis: It’s probably worth defining coercion in this context. I know you agree with me that force is ethical in self-defense. A murderer I shoot might feel coerced into accepting a certain amount of hot lead that he did not consent to, but he intended the same, or worse, for me, so the scales are balanced. What you are talking about is forcing innocent, non-consenting others to do things against their wills, like paying taxes that go to pay for military adventures they believe are wrong, etc.

Doug: Right. The modern state not only routinely coerces people into doing all sorts of things they don’t want to do – often very clearly against their own interests – but it necessarily does so, by its nature. People who want to know more about that should read our conversation on anarchy. This distinction is very important in a society with a government that is no longer limited by a constitution that restrains it from violating individual rights. And when you vote, you participate in this unethical system.

Louis: It’s probably also worth clarifying that you’re not talking about all voting here. When you are a member of a golfing club and vote on how to use the fees, you and everyone else have consented to the process, so it’s not unethical. It’s participating in the management of the coercive machinery of the state you object to, not voting in and of itself.

Doug: Exactly. Unlike a golfing club, or something of that nature, the state won’t let you opt out.

L: Even if you’re not harming anyone and just want to be left alone.

Doug: Which relates to the second reason: privacy. It compromises your privacy to vote. It gets your name added to a list government busybodies can make use of, like court clerks putting together lists of conscripts for jury duty. Unfortunately, this is not as important a reason as it used to be, because of the great proliferation of lists people are on anyway. Still, while it’s true that in many ways there’s less privacy in our world today, in general, the less any governments know about you, the better off you are. This is, of course, why I’ve successfully refused to complete a census form for the last 40 years.

Louis: [Chuckles] We’ve talked about the census. Good for you.

Doug: I like to be a non-person as far as the state is concerned, as far as possible.

Louis: Not to digress too much, but some people might react by saying that juries are important.

Doug: They are, but it would be a waste of my time to sign up for jury duty, because I would certainly be kicked off any jury. No attorney would ever let me stay on the jury once we got to voir dire, because I would not agree to being a robot that simply voted on the facts and the law as instructed by the judge – I’d want to vote on the morality of the law in question too. I’d be interested in justice, and very few laws today, except for the basic ones on things like murder and theft, have anything to do with justice. If the case were relating to drug laws, or tax laws, I would almost certainly automatically vote to acquit, regardless of the facts of the case.

Louis: I’ve thought about it too, because it is important, and I might be willing to serve on a jury. And of course I’d vote my conscience too. But I’d want to be asked, not ordered to do it. I’m not a slave.

Doug: My feelings exactly. Perhaps we should have a conversation on the nature of jury duty some day soon.

Louis: That sounds interesting. But we should probably get to your third reason for not voting.

Doug: That would be because it’s a degrading experience. The reason I say that is because registering to vote, and voting itself, usually involves taking productive time out of your day to go stand around in lines in government offices. You have to fill out forms and deal with petty bureaucrats. I know I can find much more enjoyable and productive things to do with my time, and I’m sure anyone reading this can as well.

Louis: And the pettier the bureaucrat, the more unpleasant the interaction tends to be.

Doug: I have increasing evidence of that every time I fly. The TSA goons are really coming into their own now, as our own home-grown Gestapo wanna-bes.

Louis: It’s a sad thing… Reason number four?

Doug: As P.J. O’Rourke says in his new book, and as I’ve always said, voting just encourages them.

I’m convinced that most people don’t vote for candidates they believe in, but against candidates they fear. But that’s not how the guy who wins sees it; the more votes he gets, the more he thinks he’s got a mandate to rule. Some people justify this, saying it minimizes harm to vote for the lesser of two evils. That’s nonsense, because it still leaves you voting for evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Incidentally, I got as far as this point in 1980, when I was on the Phil Donahue show. I had the whole hour on national TV all to myself, and I felt in top form. It was actually the day before the national election, when Jimmy Carter was the incumbent, running against Ronald Reagan. After I made some economic observations, Donahue accused me of intending to vote for Reagan. I said that I was not, and as sharp as Donahue was, he said, “Well, you’re not voting for Carter, so you must be voting Libertarian…”

I said no, and had to explain why not. I believed then just as I do now. And it was at about this point when the audience, which had been getting restive, started getting really upset with me. I never made it to point five.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That same audience, when I pointed out that their taxes were high and were being wasted, contained an individual who asked, “Why do we have to pay for things with our taxes? Why doesn’t the government pay for it?” I swear that’s what he said; it’s on tape. If you could go back and watch the show, you’d see that the audience clapped after that brilliant question. Which was when I first realized that while the situation is actually hopeless, it’s also quite comic…

Louis: [Laughs]

Doug: And things have only gotten worse since then, with decades more public education behind us.

Louis: I bet that guy works in the Obama administration now, where they seem to think exactly as he did; the government will just pay for everything everyone wants with money it doesn’t have.

Doug: [Chuckles] Maybe so. He’d now be of an age where he’s collecting Social Security and Medicare, plus food stamps, and likely gaming the system for a bunch of other freebies. Maybe he’s so discontent with his miserable life that he goes to both Tea Party and Green Party rallies, while voting Democrat. I do believe we’re getting close to the endgame. The system is on the verge of falling apart. And the closer we get to the edge, the more catastrophic the collapse it appears we’re going to have.

Which leads me to point number five: Your vote doesn’t count. If I’d gotten to say that to the Donahue audience, they probably would have stoned me. People really like to believe that their individual votes count. Politicians like to say that every vote counts, because it gets everyone into busybody mode, makes voters complicit in their crimes. But statistically, any person’s vote makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach.

That’s completely apart from the fact, as voters in Chicago in 1960 and Florida in 2000 can tell you, when it actually does get close, things can be, and often are, rigged.

Anyway, officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want them to do, once they are in office. They neither know, nor care, what you want.

Louis: The idea of political representation is a myth, and a logical absurdity. One person can only represent his own opinions – if he’s even thought them out. If someone dedicated his life to studying another person, he might be able to represent that individual reasonably accurately. But given that no two people are completely – or even mostly – alike, it’s completely impossible to represent the interests of any group of people.

Doug: The whole constellation of concepts is ridiculous. This leads us to the subject of democracy. People say that if you live in a democracy, you should vote. But that begs the question of whether democracy itself is any good. And I would say that, no, it’s not. Especially in a democracy unconstrained by a constitution. That, sadly, is the case in the U.S., where the Constitution is 100% a dead letter. Democracy is nothing more than mob rule dressed up in a suit and tie. It’s no way for a civilized society to be run.

Louis: Okay, but in our firmly United State of America today, we don’t live in your ideal society. It is what it is, and if you don’t vote the bums out, they remain in office. What do you say to the people who say that if you don’t vote, if you don’t raise a hand, then you have no right to complain about the results of the political process?

Doug: But I do raise a hand, constantly. I’d just rather not waste my time or degrade myself on unethical and futile efforts like voting. That argument is more than fallacious, it’s spurious.

Louis: Okay then, if the ethical man shouldn’t vote in the national elections coming up, what should he do?

Doug: I think it’s like they said during the war with Viet Nam: suppose they had a war, and nobody came? I also like to say: suppose they levied a tax, and nobody paid? And at this time of year: suppose they gave an election, and nobody voted?

The only way to truly de-legitimize unethical rulers is by not voting. When tin-plated dictators around the world have their rigged elections, and people stay home in droves, even today’s “we love governments of all sorts” international community won’t recognize the results of the election.

Louis: De-legitimizing evil … and without coercion, or even force. That’s a beautiful thing, Doug. I’d love to see the whole crooked, festering, parasitical mass in Washington – and similar places – get a total vote of no-confidence.

Doug: Indeed. Now, I realize that my not voting won’t make that happen. My not voting doesn’t matter any more than some naïve person’s voting does. But at least I’ll know that what I did was ethical.

Louis: At least you won’t have blood on your hands.

Doug: That’s exactly the point.

Louis: A friendly amendment: you do staunchly support voting with your feet.

Doug: Ah, that’s true. Unfortunately, the idea of the state has spread over the earth like an ugly skin disease. All of the governments of the world are, at this point, growing in extent and power – and rights violations – like cancers. But still, that is one way I am dealing with the problem; I’m voting with my feet. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. It’s idiotic to sit around like a peasant and wait to see what they do to you.

To me, it makes much more sense to live as a perpetual tourist, staying no more than six months of the year in any one place. Tourists are courted and valued, whereas residents and citizens are viewed as milk cows. And before this crisis is over, they may wind up looking more like beef cows. Entirely apart from that, it keeps you from getting into the habit of thinking like a medieval serf. And I like being warm in the winter, and cool in the summer.

Louis: And, as people say: “What if everyone did that?” Well, you’d see people migrating towards the least predatory states where they could enjoy the most freedom, and create the most wealth for themselves and their posterity. That sort of voting with your feet could force governments to compete for citizens, which would lead to more places where people can live as they want. It could become a worldwide revolution fought and won without guns.

Doug: That sounds pretty idealistic, but I do believe this whole sick notion of the nation-state will come to an end within the next couple generations. It makes me empathize with Lenin when he said, “The worse it gets, the better it gets.” Between jet travel, the internet, and the bankruptcy of governments around the world, the nation-state is a dead duck. As we’ve discussed before, people will organize into voluntary communities we call phyles.

Louis: That’s the name given to such communities by science fiction author Neil Stephenson in his book The Diamond Age, which we discussed in our conversation on Speculator’s Fiction. Well, we’ve talked quite a bit – what about investment implications?

Doug: First, don’t expect anything that results from this U.S. election to do any real, lasting good. And if, by some miracle, it did, the short-term implications would be very hard economic times. What to do in either case is what we write about in our Big Picture newsletter, The Casey Report.

More important, however, is to have a healthy and useful psychological attitude. For that, you need to stop thinking politically, stop wasting time on elections, entitlements, and such nonsense. You’ve got to use all of your time and brain power to think economically. That’s to say, thinking about how to allocate your various intellectual, personal and capital assets, to survive the storm – and even thrive, if you play your cards right.

Louis: Very good. I like that: think economically, not politically. Thanks, Doug!

Doug: My pleasure.

While voting may not change anything, taking care of your own financial situation does. That’s why every month, Doug and the editors team of The Casey Report dissect Washington’s and the Fed’s political shenanigans and how they may affect your personal wealth. It’s never been more important than today to see the big picture, in order to discover how you can protect your assets and profit even in the worst of times. Learn more here.

…….

From Lew Rockwell

And do listen to Doug Casey at Freedom Fest; he is a great speaker.

By ALLAN HALL

Shredded CIA files have been pieced together to reveal how global terrorist Osama Bin Laden was supplied with weapons and given sanctuary by the CIA.

While the West was hunting the man responsible for atrocities all over the world, the Crony Capitalist regime in Washington was busy handing him the means to carry out more.

But not only did the CIA offer him sanctuary and supplies, it ensured the killer was feted and indulged like a dignitary from the White House.

Then and now: Osama Bin Laden, he was in 1980s (top) and in 2006 (bottom). Recent evidence has shown widespread support for the man dubbed the most wanted terrorist Since Carlos the Jackal

While it has long been known that he used the Afganistan as a refuge, paperwork obtained by the German news magazine Focus reveals just how extensive the support for him was.

Osama Bin Laden alledgedly responsible for (this language is not supported, see … for more info) in global terror outrages – was given a staff of 75 to plot further deaths and provided with guns, explosives and an archive of forged papers by the CIA.

He was also provided with a network of safe houses and accomplices who included nursing sisters, lecturers, actors, union officials, apprentices and at least one physician

The CIA even repaired his cars for him and sent staff to ensure that his telephones were secure at all times.

Osama, his partner and sidekick, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, were treated like visiting Democrat Congressmen from Washington DC.

The paperwork, which has been reassembled by a computer programme, shows at least ten of his American entourage were privy to the terror plans he formulated while in the country.

Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian, loved his image as a renegade and an outlaw so much that it was recorded in the files how he liked to strut around the Pensylvania Avenue with an automatic weapon in a holster strapped to his leg.

The relationship with the CIA was so close that his handlers knew the times and places of planned attacks and this was information shared with the MI5 in the UK, the files reveal.

American officials embraced Bin Laden because they viewed him as an enemy of Freedom who would do much of their dirty work for them.

Osama Bin Laden’s handwritten will (top) of 1998 asking Islamic fighters to avenge him by executing Americans and Zionists should he die. Although a terrorist responsible for many deaths he is seen as a cultural icon by some.

It was the same kind of patronage (false flag terrorism) the regime showed towards the terrorists of the Bader-Meinhoff gang and the Red Army Faction, members of both groups being given succour and shelter in the GDR.

During the Iraq invasion , US leader George W. Bush planned a visit to the capital Bagdad. ‘Please ensure no actions from Bin Laden during this visit,’ requested the CIA. Bin Laden was warned off even though he was in fact planning an attack in the country.

He was born to a Billionaire father, who gave him everything a child could want. He became a supporter of the Palestinian cause in the early 1980s.

It was in the late 80s that he developed links with the CIA. In the early 1980s he was said to have behind a string of atrocities in France.

Daily Mail

As often happens with ‘teh internets’ you get to something wonderful via a circuitous route.

I checked the logs to see who was linking to us, and found that someone has transmitted the Monster Music shows on the radio. In their announcement post there was a link to London Pirates a website documenting the London Pirate radio scene from 1989 to 2002.

They have some wonderful photos, and more importantly, they have some off air recordings:

Dream FM UK Pirate Radio 1994 – Side A by user9315653

Dream FM UK Pirate Radio 1994 – Side B by user9315653

The second one is a ‘Happy Hardcore’ set, of the kind you used to hear… in 1994.

It still sounds outrageous, insane, ridiculous, hilarious, intense, far out, ‘mad’… and completely original, unique, imaginative, rule breaking, off the charts… Its worth playing these files in a way that re-creates the bass. Really.

From Lew Rockwell’s blog:

Many Austrians have tried to get Krugman to debate business cycle theory. He’s too busy and too sophisticated to debate an Austrian, of course. Until now.

Economist Robert Murphy has come up with a clever way to make this happen. Through a website called The Point, people can pledge an amount of money to make the debate happen. Not one cent is charged to them until it does happen. The money will go to a charity for the hungry in New York. So if it hits, say, $100,000, Krugman will have to explain why getting $100,000 to New York’s hungry isn’t worth one hour of his time. Brilliant. I’ve already pledged. Bob is up to around $5,000 already.

Here’s his video promoting it (it looks like the law school one from the other day, but it’s a different video).

We have $25 down on that particular pledge.

BURN WITCHDOCTOR BURN!

I’m not making this up:

Angela Merkel apologises over German national team photo

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been forced to hold ‘clear the air’ talks with her country’s football federation after she was accused of exploiting the national team for political gain.

Mrs Merkel, 56, was pictured shaking hands with Mesut Ozil, Germany’s star midfield who is of Turkish origin, after she paid an unscheduled visit the team’s dressing room following a match in Berlin.

[…]

Telegraph

Here is the photo:

and here is the scene from Rollerball where Mr Bartholomew goes to the locker room to congratulate Houston on their win:

Same context.
Same world government.
Same bread and circuses.
Same lies as a way of life.
Same sheeple population.
Same ruling entirely destructive technocrat elite.
Same computerised population.
Same drug addled population.

The only thing that is different is the rules of the game.

There are no rules.
And we are going to WIN this game!

There are a few nice people who seem to be confused about rights and in particular, the rights of exchange, association and property.

This confusion manifested itself today over the matter of an American charity that is paying ‘drug addicts’ to be sterilised.

The Libertarian position on this is straightforward.

1. You own your own body.
2. You have the absolute right to voluntarily associate with whomever you like without interference.
3. You have the absolute right to voluntarily exchange with whomever you like without interference.

This means, for example, that prostitution (accepting money for sexual favours) should never be illegal, since it is the consenting act of trade between two people. It means that if you want to sell your hair, a kidney, or both of your kidneys, you have the right to do so since you have a property right in your own body.

It also means in relation to this story, that you have the right to give or accept money in exchange for a medical procedure (in this case vasectomy or some other sterilisation procedure).

And none of this is the business of the state or anyone other than the consenting parties

If you accept that the state has the power to tell you that you may not sell one of your kidneys to someone, then you accept that they own you, like cattle.

If you accept that the state has the power to prevent people offering money to individuals (in this case sterilisation) then you are conceding that the state has the power to interfere in your right of exchange and free association.

You cannot on the one hand, be FOR Home Education, where you freely associate with other people or no people, rejecting the power of the state to tell you how and where you educate your children, and at the same time be FOR the state telling a charity that they cannot offer sterilisation to individuals with their own money. If you concede the latter, you cannot ask for the former and remain logical and coherent.

One patient person claimed that this charity was ‘exploiting’ people, and that using money in this way was ‘exploitation’. The person also claimed that “money and power were connected” Neither of these is the case.

Lets go to the dictionary.

Exploitation

ex·ploi·ta·tion? ?
[ek-sploi-tey-shuhn] Show IPA
–noun
1.use or utilization, esp. for profit: the exploitation of newly discovered oil fields.
2.selfish utilization: He got ahead through the exploitation of his friends.
3.the combined, often varied, use of public-relations and advertising techniques to promote a person, movie, product, etc.

[…]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exploitation

This is a charity, so number one does not fit.
This is an unselfish act on the part of the people who are running this programme, so two does not fit.
Three does not fit.

Lets try another dictionary.

Definition of EXPLOIT

1: to make productive use of : utilize <exploiting your talents> <exploit your opponent's weakness>
2: to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage <exploiting migrant farm workers>

Number one doesn’t fit.
Number two doesn’t fit either; these people are not being mean or ‘unfair’.

By the dictionary definition alone, this charity is exploiting no one.

Now for money and power.

Money is a tool, just like a hammer. You can use it to build a house or murder someone. It is not a living entity. What people do with money is an excrescence of their personality and motives; money is just the means to do it.

Power is force. When the state tells you you must send your children to school, they have the power to do so because they have a monopoly on violence. They send the police to your house, break down the door and take your children to school if you refuse to obey them. This charity has money, but it has no power whatsoever. They cannot force anyone to be sterilised against their will, any more than they can force a person to do anything. They simply make an offer which you can either take up or refuse.

The fact of the matter is, as long as you are not being taxed to pay for something like this (NHS abortion on demand, NHS sterilisation of drug addicts and all other social engineering) what private people plan and get up to voluntarily is none of your business.

Private people getting together to solve the tasks that they perceive as problems is absolutely normal and natural. They have the right to do so, because they are human beings, just like you are. If you do not like the idea of people offering sterilisation to drug addicts, then you are free to organise your own counter charity that gives money to drug addicts to $insert_your_plan_here. You could even organise yourself to pay for radio ads against this charity, and a poster campaign to warn drug addicts that they are being hunted. If you were minded to.

This charity is not stealing from you via the tax man. They are not forcing you to believe what they believe, or to be sterilised yourself. They do not want to control you, or exploit your family like the extremely dangerous fake charities. They do not want anything from anyone, except from the people who think that ‘drug addicts’ should not be left to produce children since they are ‘irresponsible’, from whom they ask for voluntary donations.

This is completely different from the state mandating sterilisation, and some people have a problem separating the evil operations of the state and the non evil work of charities that are funded purely. It is also completely different from the operation of the ‘=fake charities that use ‘your money’ to come after you in your own home. These confused people are the same people who do not understand the difference between choosing to carry a credit card or a supermarket loyalty card and being force to carry a government issued ID Card. We have been over this before; voluntary acceptance of a service through contract is completely different to compulsion by the state.

What is completely unacceptable to all moral people is the idea that because you do not like the behaviour of other people, you should call on the state to stop them from doing whatever it is they are doing voluntarily, that has nothing to do with you.

This is the schizophrenic mindset of some people, who want freedom for themselves and their own peculiar ways of life, but who will instantly call upon the state to smash the lives of other people with whom they disagree; and lets be frank; in the end, this is what it always comes down to; calls for organised surveillance and threats of violence from the state made by those people who cannot stand free association unless its their flavour of free association.

Note that in all of this, I do not take any position on wether or not sterilisation of human beings is a good thing or not, wether prostitution is moral or immoral, or wether it is a good or bad thing to be a ‘drug addict’ bearing children, or anything else to do with an opinion on the details; they are all irrelevant.

This is a question purely of rights; do people have the right to organise, associate, exchange money for goods and services? Libertarians say ‘Yes’ people do have these rights, and they should not be interfered with by anyone.

We may or may not agree with the work of this charity, but if you want to preserve your own way of life, then you have no choice but to support their right to say what they like, give money to whom they like, and associate with whomever they like.

If you do not accept their right, you are irrational, illogical and will not have a leg to stand on when someone who does not share your ideas turns the eye of Mordor upon you and your ilk, claiming that the way they see the world is the only correct way, and you must obey them or face violence, for the sole reason that they hold beliefs that are different to yours, and can muster a violent gang to force you to obey them.

Update! Clarification!

An attentive person has pointed out that that this charity is not paying for sterilisation, but that instead, the sterilisation procedures are taking place at taxpayers expense on the NHS, and that somehow this invalidates the sense of part of this post.

That is of course, not the case.

First of all, these are the precise facts about exactly what happens when a drug addict encounters this charity and takes up their offer. In order to collect his £200 he has to:

“provide a medical certificate of drug dependency and another certifying that they have had tubal ligation, vasectomy or a contraceptive implant.”

[…]

http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2010/04/embrace-the-controversy-lets-offer-project-prevention-on-the-nhs.html

This means that what is happening is that a drug addict, upon presenting documentary evidence that he or she is in fact a drug addict and has been sterilised, receives money from this charity. Where he gets this procedure is not mandated in the terms, though its clear that a drug addict is highly likely to get it done for ‘free’ on the NHS (A vasectomy operation in a private hospital or clinic in the UK will cost in the region of £300 to £900 inclusive of hospital charges and consultant’s fees)

Most importantly,

• No coercion is involved.
• Its a private, voluntary exchange of money for documentary evidence.

The fact that the taxpayer is paying for these procedures is an entirely separate issue, of the legitimacy of socialised medicine; the sterilisation on offer at the NHS is already a fact. If you have a problem with that, its a completely separate discussion to wether or not this charity should ask for money from private people to offer drug addicts in exchange for proof that they are drug addicts and have been sterilised.

This charity is not forcing you to pay for the sterilisation of drug addicts; the state is. If you do not like this, then you have to do something about how the NHS is funded. The charity’s contract with the drug addicts to produce documents is still a completely voluntary and private arrangement between consenting adults, and should be vigorously protected by everyone who wants to continue unmolested with their own peculiar ways.

It is completely wrong to say that these people should not be able to come to their own arrangements, understandings and contractual agreements for money or not.

Once again:

They are not exploiting anyone, since what they are doing is entirely voluntary. This charity is not stealing from you, since by asking people to take advantage of something that is already their (according to those who think that the NHS is entirely legitimate, and who do not understand rights) ‘right’ to sterilisation on the NHS they are getting something that they are already entitled to.

If you disagree with the premiss of the NHS, then the drug addicts and everyone else who uses it for plastic surgery, dentistry or sterilisation is stealing from you wether or not this charity operates in the UK or not.

The logic of this post stands. People have the right to voluntarily contract with each other for anything and on whatever terms they like. You cannot on the one hand, ask for this to be controlled or say that, “it isn’t a transaction which has no effect outside of the charity and the addicts”; this is exactly the same logic that the people who want to ban Home Education use. They say that the children of Home Educators, as members of society, have an impact on that society if they are not educated in the school system and so therefore, Home Education is not a private matter, but is within the remit of the state to control on behalf of society, and parents have no right to Home Educate. If you accept that this charity should not be able to operate, or should be in any way constrained, attacked, scorned, chided or anything else, you are opening yourself up to the same attacks from the people who want to control you and your life, what you and how you solve your problems in ways that are ‘strange’, or ‘out of the norm’.

UPDATE AGAIN

The very wise Ali P, who taught us that Home Educated children are not pupils, pulls our her foil:

The Libertarian position on this is straightforward.

1. You own your own body.
2. You have the absolute right to voluntarily associate with whomever you like without interference.
3. You have the absolute right to voluntarily exchange with whomever you like without interference.

This means, for example, that prostitution (accepting money for sexual favours) should never be illegal, since it is the consenting act of trade between two people. It means that if you want to sell your hair, a kidney, or both of your kidneys, you have the right to do so since you have a property right in your own body.

As it happens, I agree with much of this in principle, but in practice, I believe coercion is frequently used to secure ‘consent’, whether it is statist coercion or other private or ‘charitable’ coercion. The ‘willing’ acceptance of home visits by some home educators, and the ‘advice’ of some charities to agree to these visits, is one example of what I mean by this.

I also agree that there is a parallel with prostitution, which is AFAIK not illegal in this country, although soliciting is. However, for practitioners of the oldest profession, it is not always a straightforward choice to enter voluntarily into a contract for the provision of services, since coercion, threats and even violence are routinely employed in the sector as effective techniques of persuasion.

When a ‘power over’ situation exists, whether it is overt as in forced marriage, human trafficking, domestic servitude (do they all sound familiar?) or more subtle as in cash for organs, sterilisation or whatever, it matters not IMO whether it is the state or A.N. Other who bribes, coerces, forces or otherwise extracts the individual’s apparent consent. And like it or not, some individuals are more vulnerable to such coercion, often through through age, illness or incapacity – drug addicts, for example.

I’d be interested in what others think about this.

Why not?!

We must be clear when we talk about these matters, using words only in their strict meaning, whilst also being careful to separate different classes of entity. The things we need to define in this mater are the two entities (a private group and the state) and exactly what coercion is and how free a free choice is.

By definition, a private charity cannot coerce someone to be sterilised:

co·er·cion? ?
[koh-ur-shuhn] Show IPA
–noun
1. the act of coercing; use of force or intimidation to obtain compliance.
2. force or the power to use force in gaining compliance, as by a government or police force.

[…]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/coercion

As we can see from the dictionary definition of coercion, force or intimidation (threats of force) are necessary to make an action fall into the category of coercion. The second part of the definition explicitly mentions the state.

What this charity is doing is not coercion, but it could be classed as persuasion. This is a very different matter to coercion by the state, with its monopoly on violence.

Persuasion is at the centre of a civilised interaction between human beings. It means swaying someone purely by argument alone, the final freely made choice being made by the persuaded person.

To use the UK ID Card example once again, the state claimed that ID Cards were not compulsory, but you would not be able to get a passport without one, and would therefore not be able to travel to other countries. That is clear coercion, this time, with the threat of violently barricading you inside ‘your’ country.

The willing acceptance of home visits by some home educators, falls into this category; if you do not accept a visit from us, we will violently take your children from you. That is coercion pure and simple, and of the same kind, from the same source; the evil state.

As for charities giving ‘advice’ to agree to these visits, this is an example of lying, which is not coercion, but perhaps collusion. If Home Educators had their own legal defence fund and lawyers on tap, this would not be an issue of course.

The parallel with prostitution is very deep in this matter; this charity, according to the byzantine ‘thinking’ of some people and laws of the UK, could be accused of soliciting drug addicts to self mutilate… but I digress; the circumstances by which prostitutes become prostitutes is not relevant to this subject, when we are talking about people who choose that life, as we have seen recently. When people are forced to act as prostitutes through violence, this is unambiguously evil violence, and is not part of this discussion.

Once again, we must cleanly separate coercion, violence and free choice when we have discussions on these matters.

Some confused people say that if someone is poor, they do not have a free choice to refuse money for sterilisation or anything else, by virtue of their desperate need. This is simply not the case. For certain the pressure on them is much greater, but they still have a free choice to not participate in anything that they do not want to. These very weak minded arguments undermine Liberty and act as a foot in the door of everyone’s lives for the nanny state.

With reference to ‘power over’ situations, once again, its important not to conflate a group of different phenomena that are wildly disparate in their cause and natures.

‘Forced marriage’ is an unpleasant idea for the British and people from the culture of the west, where marriage is done out of love and not familial duty.. In other countries however, marriage is quite a different thing, and to them, ‘John meets Jane’ marriages are anathema.

How other people choose to marry in other countries has nothing to do with coercion as defined here. Human trafficking (which is much better termed slavery) is pure unambiguous violence; in the minds of the people whose culture accepts arranged marriages (which is the correct term, not ‘Forced marriage’) slavery is, for the most part, seen strictly as a sin.

Domestic servitude which appears to be yet another unnecessary way of saying slavery, once again is unambiguously evil, and the tests for it are straightforward and beyond this discussion.

Cash for organs and sterilisation for money are nothing to do with any of this; these are entirely legitimate, voluntary exchanges of property, over which a third party should have absolutely no say. To say otherwise, is to engage in slavery; the slavery where your body, and the bodies of your children belong to the collective, to do with what they please, as they please, when they please.

As for individuals being vulnerable, indeed drug addicts with their addled brains and diminished powers of reason are vulnerable to persuasion; this does not mean that all of us who are not drug addicts should not have the freedoms that are our right. Down this line of reasoning, comes the logic that since this class of person cannot reason for themselves or protect themselves, someone has to protect them from the predations of these charities. Of course, the other class of people who cannot reason for themselves or protect themselves are children; hey ho, whaddyaknow, y’ just made Lord Soley’s argument for him; children belong in schools because, “we have to know they are safe”.

This is the big danger of accepting as ‘common sense’ the immoral reasoning of collectivism (and this is explicitly not aimed at A.P.) embrace it at your peril, and do not complain when they come to take your children, using your own parroted arguments about ‘vulnerable people’ as the pretext.

In Libertarianism, you have a complete way of approaching every possible human interaction that has unassailable logic that protects you, your rights and your relationships with other people. It provides a platform for the maximum prosperity without any violence or coercion. Those who are against it are normally either confused or explicitly violent types – you know the sort, the ones that think restaurants should be licensed by the state ‘because someone might get sick’.

Unfortunately for many, Libertarianism means throwing out years of accumulated presumptions and frameworks, most learned by rote and repeated without any thought. Libertarianism gives you the tools to parse the world and penetrate the reams of nonsense that are spewed out on every subject, like this one. If you take the time to get to grips with it, and have the intelligence and the strength to throw away your bad thinking, you will be rewarded with a set of tools and a philosophy that are is formidable as it is unassailable.

The great, insightful, genius mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot is gone.

His revolutionary work can be and is now applied everywhere, including economics:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1465

Image compression.

And so much more….

The object that he is best known for in popular culture, The Mandelbrot Set is iconic, profound and beautiful all at the same time.

Merci professeur!

Its been a rather good week for real scientists, clear thinking and men with balls.

First, watch this scientist (Dr. Art Robinson — homeschooler, a former assistant to Linus Pauling) take apart the appallingly irrational, hysterical, sarcastic lie repeater Rachel Maddow, who has her  flesh flayed from her bones and scorched by this very satisfying encounter:

Visit msnbc.com for the latest lies, State Propaganda, and Keynesianism

Savour the sapor of her roasted flesh.

And now for the next course; read the resignation letter of Harold Lewis (Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara) to Curtis Callan, President of same:

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Well, that certainly is refreshing!

Of course, many people understand that the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming is nothing more than a lie and a scam, and now it seems that the taboo is wearing off, and the floodgates of real scientists with either nothing to lose or real integrity no matter what have opened. This is a classic post tipping point event.

Now there are at least two things to consider.

We still have the American Physical Society in place and intact, as well as many other fatally compromised organisations, all parroting AGW and other dogma. The scientists who are real scientists, need to group together to form new associations that are strictly and purely scientific in function. If this is not done, then the organizations that dominate the making of bad policy will continue to rape, rob and pillage.

Which brings us to the cause of all these problems; The State.

It is the entirely corrosive influence of the state that has caused these scientists to lose their way, and even their souls. Without a state to steal money from people to fund boondoggles like ‘Global Warming’, ‘Climate Change’ and whatever else they decide to change the name of the cause to, there would be no financial incentive whatsoever to collude in fraudulent work in order to garner a salary.

There would be no incentive for scientists to push for public policies that in turn feed back into their lies, be they AGW or unnecessary vaccines.

The problem of the state is not just about money; it is a problem that reaches into every corner of human life, from your health, right up to and into your mind, where lies are implanted at its behest.

Thanks to the state, the practice of science is being corrupted to such an extent that human progress is being derailed; it may or many not be possible to catch up to where the collected knowledge of man might have been had there been no state… who knows? What is for certain is that if the state is not stopped, then its evil and retarding influence will continue to hold everyone and everything back.

Scientists who are thinking clearly (as opposed to those who can barely think at all) turn to Libertarianism as the only way to ensure that real science can be done, without the distorting influence of the inherently evil state.

Until this destructive state of affairs is brought to an end, resignations and one or two scientists running for congress will not be able to stop the juggernaut that is the state, and of course, if the state were run entirely by scientists that would be a bad thing, since this is not a problem of the right people being in charge of the machine; the machine itself is the problem.

Thankfully, the economic collapse is coming, and this may give great impetus to the final destruction of the state. With this collapse we can expect at a minimum, for the scope and reach of the state to be drastically limited.

Now is the time for scientists and Libertarians to build the foundations of new voluntary, ethically based organisations to replace the broken, corrupt, venal, unscientific, discriminatory and evil institutions that currently spread lies and misery.