It is becoming par for the course that the Police in this country cannot be believed. Ever. They are even willing to lie to Parliament.

Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon…

“When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, ‘There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,’” Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.

Broadhurst told the subsequent home affairs select committee that “no plain clothes officers [were] deployed at all” during the demonstrations in the City of London. This didn’t tally with video shot at the protests, including footage of two plain clothes officers wielding batons and walking among a line of riot police (also pictured above). Broadhurst lied to the select committee and said:  “The officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who [wear] full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were not plain clothes officers deployed by me or anybody on the operation.”

But, as with the murder of Ian Tomlinson, the video didn’t lie. He has now had to fess up and has said that there were at least 25 undercover officers deployed during the protests. His excuse for lying?

The deployment of undercover officers was “unknown to him”. The Gold Commander. The top dog. The pinnacle turd of the shitpile that terrorised London during G20. The same man who gave stark warnings of violence before the protests, which many now feel was used purely to stoke up confrontation.

It’s worth remembering why Ronald Kidd founded Liberty in the first place.

No police state? Pull the other one.

It is becoming par for the course that the Police in this country cannot be believed. They are even willing to lie to Parliament.

Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon…

“When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, ‘There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,’” Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.

Broadhurst told the subsequent home affairs select committee that “no plain clothes officers [were] deployed at all” during the demonstrations in the City of London. This didn’t tally with video shot at the protests, including footage of two plain clothes officers wielding batons and walking among a line of riot police (also pictured above). Broadhurst lied to the select committee and said:  “The officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who [wear] full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were not plain clothes officers deployed by me or anybody on the operation.”

But, as with the murder of Ian Tomlinson, the video didn’t lie. He has now had to fess up and has said that there were at least 25 undercover officers deployed during the protests. His excuse for lying?

The deployment of undercover officers was “unknown to him”. The Gold Commander. The top dog. The pinnacle turd of the shitpile that terrorised London during G20. The same man who gave stark warnings of violence before the protests, which many now feel was used purely to stoke up confrontation.

It’s worth remembering why Ronald Kidd founded Liberty in the first place.

No police state? Pull the other one.

Disclaimer 1:
il titolo si riferisce al Big Brother originale, quello di Orwell, tanto per intenderci
Discalimer 2:
non è necessario seguire i link, se non avete tempo (l’antifona si capisce lo stesso)

Va bene, lo dico subito: è colpa mia. Ho voluto verificare la consistenza di una mia affermazione, cioè che con alcuni personaggi è impossibile avere un contatto intellettuale pur discorrendo di un orto bonsai, e ne accetto le conseguenze.
Parlo di quella sagoma, di quel buontempone del sig. Aguedo (alias Alex Drastico in Incognito), che ho già avuto modo di presentare.

Caratteristica peculiare del nostro, nella gestione del proprio blog, è la prassi di cancellare la quasi totalità dei commenti (non sotto moderazione): sia quelli positivi (però, io non ne ricordo dove lui dice di averne ricevuti), per i quali ringrazia; sia quelli negativi, ai cui risponde con modalità tutte sue.
Infatti, succede che egli elimina il commento negativo e poi risponde – con una integrazione al post o creandone uno ad hoc – prendendo frasi qua e là, che tolte dal loro contesto spesso si prestano a interpretazioni a dir poco fantasiose, con la chiara intenzione di portare acqua al proprio mulino laddove la siccità è totale.
Quindi, preoccupato per i danni nefasti che certi comportamenti possono procurare all’umanità tutta (dovreste vedere che cosa non è accaduto ai commenti del sig. Censore!), vi porto la mia paradigmatica esperienza.

In un suo articolo, il Sig. Aguedo redige una lista di personaggi credenti che hanno contribuito al progresso e all’esperienza umani, con l’idea di rispondere all’analoga lista atea che, secondo l’estensore del post, viene sbandierata da alcuni blogger come una “collezione di figurine”.
Allorché, intervenendo per precisare che quell’elenco “significa soltanto che credere in Dio non è indispensabile per raggiungere risultati rimarchevoli”, scrivo:

«non so quali blog fanno “collezione di figurine” ma prendo la cosa per buona,
visto che l’essere atei non esclude a priori la fessaggine.»

E lui che fa? Oltre a cancellare tutto il commento, prende una parte del passaggio, questa

“Non so quali blog fanno “collezione di figurine” ma prendo la cosa per buona”

e commenta:

«Cioè vuole sostenere che si fida di me senza che io abbia portato una dimostrazione scientifica? Ma gli atei mica non compiono atti di fede? Allora siete creduloni irrazionali anche voi eh?!»

Ditemi voi se questo Aguedo non è un fenomeno.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

AVVERTENZE:
- Non lasciare questo post alla portata dei bambini
- Dopo la lettura di questo post, areare bene il locale
- Nel caso di reazioni allergiche, sono disponibili i testi integri dei commenti e dei post indicati (e poi c’è la cache di Google)

Prossimamente, su questo blog, si farà ironia su cose serie.
Stay tuned!

]]> http://stasination.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/tasers-you-will-obey/ Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:25:26 +0000 kiddr http://stasination.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/tasers-you-will-obey/

When tasers were first distributed to the Police in the UK, the Home Secretary told us it was a necessary weapon to protect the police and the public in the face of a growing threat of armed violence. The argument was that it was better to use a taser than to have to use a firearm to take down the perps. We were led to understand that the police would be able to deploy armed response teams equipped with M26 and X26 tasers and firearms, that only firearms-trained officers would use the non-lethal alternative of stun guns, and only in situations where use of deadly force had already been authorised. (Interestingly, the Home Office doesn’t refer to tasers as non-lethal in their internal documents – it calls them less lethal. The non-lethal description is only used when they are talking to us proles.) But we were being shafted.

A potted history: The M26 tasers were trialled in the UK in between April 2003-April 2004. They were only carried by Authorised Firearms Officers (AFOs) “as a less lethal option alongside conventional firearms at incidents” where firearms authority had already been granted. At the end of the trial, Blunkett authorised deployment of the M26 Taser for all police forces for operations involving the deployment of AFOs with the authority to use deadly force.

So far so good, eh? In a situation where a suspect is waving a gun around, the police now had the option to take him or her down with a 50,000 Volt shock instead of, for argument’s sake, seven dumdum bullets to the head.

And then along came a public limited company, the most sinister, Stalinist plc operating in the UK today: the Association of Chief Police Officers.  As Henry Porter explains, “Few understand that ACPO is a private company, which happens to be funded by a Home Office grant and money from 44 police authorities. But despite its important role in drafting and implementing policies that affect the fundamental freedoms of this country, ACPO is protected from freedom of information requests and its proceedings remain largely hidden from public view. In reality ACPO is no more troubled by public scrutiny than the freemasons. [The ACPO] acts with increasing autonomy in drafting these authoritarian new policies. If you wonder how it came to be that police officers are being equipped with 10,000 stun guns, despite the reports of hundreds of deaths in the United States, or how the automatic number plate recognition camera network was set up to record and store data from most road journeys, look no further than ACPO.”

Give ‘em an inch and the fuckers demand a mile: ACPO now concluded that tasers would be appropriate for other “conflict management situations” where the criteria to authorise the issue of firearms were not met, and asked the Home Office to rubber stamp that into legislation. Jackboot Jacqui took the reins of the Stasi on 28 June 2007. On  20th July 2007, she duly obliged with a one year trial by ten police forces of the use of M26 and X26 Tasers at incidents where firearms authority had not been granted. The trial, which commenced on 1st September 2007, also authorised the use of tasers against children. By the time that the trial ended, on 31st August 2008, a total of 1313 people had been tasered in situations where firearms use was not authorised, and 617 people in situations where deadly force had been authorised. Twenty-four children were tasered, 13 by probes only, 7 by drive stun only, and 4 subjected to both.

At the start of the trial Amnesty International’s Arms Programme Director Oliver Sprague warned: “The UK police force has always prided itself on policing by consent and not by force. This move to arm more police officers with Tasers is moving the UK force further and further away from this culture.” This is the nub of the matter: tasers are not being used by the Police to incapacitate dangerous, violent criminals: they are being used to force suspects to obey police commands. They represent the final shift from an admirable tradition of policing by consent to the new regime of policing by compliance. And to rub salt in the wound, it appears that tasers, far from reducing violent confrontation, instead lower the threshold at which the police resort to violence, with independent studies concluding that tasers are mostly used in situations where the  use of batons, CS spray, or physical locks/restraints/controls would never be justified. Police often subject targets to multiple taser shocks, even while in restraints and often use them against people posing no physical threat, such as against non-violent protesters or simply anyone they perceive to not be heeding a verbal command.

On 24 November 2008, Jackboots announced that a further 10,000 tasers had been purchased, and their use extended to all Police officers in England and Wales. The same old bullshit smokescreen was trotted out as justification – “I am proud that we have one of the few police services around the world that do not regularly carry firearms and I want to keep it that way” – despite the fact that they were no longer being used as an alternative to deadly force, but as a weapon of pain compliance. This is in violation of their own guidelines, which state that tasers can only be used where officers would be facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they would need to use force.

Let’s say that again: Tasers can only be used where officers would be facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they would need to use force. You don’t need to be Sherlock Fucking Holmes to see how the Police above totally disregarded their own rules for use of the taser.  At the end of the video clip you’ll hear one righteously indignant witness telling the Stasi that he thinks they’re “wankers”. And the response? “You’re nicked.” Arrogant bastards. How about the case of 45 year-old Daniel Sylvester, who was driving home one night when he was stopped by police because of “firearms related intelligence”. He got out of his car and was surrounded by officers, at least two of whom were carrying automatic weapons. Without warning, one officer fired a Taser into the back of his head which made him drop to his knees. A second shock caused him to fall on his face, breaking his teeth. A further six shocks made him wet himself and left him lying in the road in pain while the officers and sniffer dogs searched the car and found nothing. The police then saw he was not the person they were looking for, said he was free to go, and drove off. Eight shocks, incidentally, but the police later revealed how they massage the figures when they stated: “Our information is the Taser was deployed once.”

How about Nicholas Gaubert, who was travelling to see friends in Leeds when he suffered a hypoglycaemic fit that left him slumped on his seat on a bus. Armed police were called and when he failed to respond to their challenges he was shot with a taser. He finally came round in a police van and only then officers realised it was medical emergency, despite him wearing a neck tag to warn of his diabetic condition. He was taken to hospital but even then the police refused to remove his handcuffs while he was being treated. He was told the police believed he looked “Egyptian”.

Write to your MP. Demand that the use of Tasers be restricted to deployment by AFO’s and only in those situations where firearms have been authorised.

Next time you scoff when somebody says we’re living in a police state, ask yourself how else you could describe a country where the police use electroshock torture to force you to comply…

Other sources:

1. DSTL/BSC/27/01/07 dated 30 May 2007 DSAC Subcommittee on the Medical Implications of Less-lethal Weapons.

2. DSTL/BSC/27/01/07 dated 7th November 2008 DSAC Sub-committee on the Medical Implications of Less-lethal Weapons.

3. CFP\7\100516253011- PT TASER report 22mth 12/11/9 (7901) Home Office Scientific Development Branch

“Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach,” the New York Times reports.

But that, and the vast majority of the Mainstream “Ministry of Truth” Media, is about all they want to report. They don’t want to talk about it.

Because, it’s a heresy against their faith.

Their Religion- Global Warming.

Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.,”It is incontrovertible” that the world is warming as a result of human actions, Trenberth said. “The question to me is what to do.”

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and prominent man-made global warming advocate, wrote in an e-mail: “The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Ah, the Faithful and a “scientist” to boot….He is one of the people in the emails contained in “Climategate” by the way.

Climategate being the leaking onto the internet of data and emails that shows that Man-Made Global Warming is a farce.

I have said in past blogs what a crock I think Global Warming is and have provided evidence. But as the British author and satirist Douglas Adams once said, “Proof denies faith” and the two last things the Global Warming faithful want is to be wrong, and to have to defend their faith against the proof that they are wrong.

If you try looking for the story of the files and emails that show a major cover-up of information from the faithful to preserve their faith at all costs you’ll not see much of anything on the Mainstream Media. Because, like Van Jones, ACORN,  and other stories that the Liberal Elite don’t want to to talk about they want to just crush it and hope it goes away.

That “Journalism” today. It’s all Politics. All agenda all the time.

Washington Post:

While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate — nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal — public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.

In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” Mann writes.

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor,” Jones replies.

Your typical liberal response to any disagreeing with them, intimidate them, then if that doesn’t work, censor them.

WSJ:

This is downright Orwellian. What the Post describes is not a vigorous debate but an attempt to suppress debate–to politicize the process of scientific inquiry so that it yields a predetermined result. This does not, in itself, prove the global warmists wrong. But it raises a glaring question: If they have the facts on their side, why do they need to resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation?

It is hard to see how this is anything less than a definitive refutation of the popular press’s contention that global warmism is settled science–a contention that both the <LONDON>Times and the Post repeat in their articles on the revelations: “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument,” the Times claims. The Post leads its story by observing that “few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate,” and that “nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal.”

But don’t expect much more from the faithful than there usual scorn, contempt and disrespect.

This should be considered not merely a scientific scandal but an enormous journalistic scandal. The elite press treats skepticism about global warming as a mental defect. It uses a form of the No True Scotsman fallacy to delegitimize people who dissent from the (manufactured) “consensus.” Dissent is scientifically unserious, therefore dissenting scientist A is unserious. There’s no way to break in. The moment someone disagrees with the “consensus” they disqualify themselves from criticizing the consensus. That’s not how science is supposed to work. Skeptics who’ve received a tote bag from some oil company (me: or insurance company in the Health Care debate) are branded as shills, but scientists who live off of climate-change-obsessed foundations or congressional fiefdoms are objective, call-it-like-they-see-it truth seekers. Question these folks and you get a Bill Murrayesque, “Back off, man. We’re scientists.” (NRO)

Well said.

An even larger reason this is a journalistic scandal is that governments want to spend — literally — trillions of dollars on climate change.

Cap & Trade anyone? anyone?

Industries want to make billions off it.

And so will some of it’s biggest Prophets (Profits, that’s a funny ) , Like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi.

James Taranto of Best of the Web Today reminds us of Al Gore’s statement in an interview with Grist, “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” In plain English, the former Vice President and Presidential candidate supports lying in favor of the causes he believes in and supports.

Taranto even manages to turn up a Stanford University professor, Stephen H. Schneider, who explained to Discover that in order to make the world a better place scientists sometimes have to “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

Interject FOXNews: Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and Professor Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Professor Jones talks to Professor Mann about the “trick of adding in the real temps to each series…to hide the decline [in temperature].”

The poor will be hurt. Economies wrenched apart. And journalistic skepticism is almost nowhere to be found. If you know people in the “skeptic community” (for want of a better term) or even just normal, honest scientists, the observation that federal and foundation funding and groupthink is driving, or at least distorting, the climate debate is commonplace. But it’s given almost no oxygen in the elite press, because they are in on it. (NRO)

So, yeah,  ABC,NBC,CBS, etc are really going to cover this story in detail and depth.

Hey, is that pig Flying!!!!

A few More nuggets:

And there is a lot more. In another exchange, Professor Jones tells Professor Mann: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and “We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.” Professor Jones further urges Professor Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s controversial assessment report: “Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re: [the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report]?” In another e-mail, Professor Jones told Professor Mann and Professor Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona and Raymond S. “Ray” Bradley at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: “I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”

Professor Jones complains to another academic: “I did get an e-mail from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting e-mails” and “IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on.” We only have e-mails from Professor Jones’ institution, and, with his obvious approach to delete files; we have no idea what damaging information has been lost.

London Telegraph:

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters.

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, told The Wall Street Journal: “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn’t questionable practice, this is unethical.”

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming myth), with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

The New York Times argues: “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.” – This from the same news organization that regularly publishes classified government documents!

As long as they were related to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld that is. I used to call the New York Times, Al-Jazerra East because they were so gung-ho for the propaganda victories and damn the consequences.

US President Barack Obama said Tuesday the world has moved “one step closer” to a “strong operational agreement” on climate change at next month’s Copenhagen summit after his talks with Indian and Chinese leaders.

And the Mainstream Media is going to do everything Orwellianly possible to not talk about it. EVER.

You, the public, just can’t handle the Truth.

Doug Hoffman, who narrowly lost the congressional race in NY District 23 to Bill Owens, has declared that the election is over and there will be no recount. This comes after numerous errors were committed election night, Nancy Pelosi certifying Bill Owens the winner, before he was certified by the state of New York, in time to vote for the Health Care Bill, and known software bugs or tampering with of the controversial Sequoia voting machines.

Doug Hoffman, on one level this was your decision to make. However, we are in different times. This is not the country your parents knew.

We have entered a new world, a post Nazi takeover, Orwellian world where being polite or naively playing the gentleman card as Nevile Chamberlain did with the Germans, will result in catastrophe. On a higher level, Mr. Hoffman, this is the decision of New York residents and ultimately the American people. Regardless of your actions or your next move, this serious breach of the public trust, must be investigated. As I and others have stated, Barack Obama, the Obama camp and Obama thugs, including, but not limited to ACORN and SEIU, stole the Democratic primaries and caucuses through election fraud and intimidation. With warnings issued early in 2008 about voting machines and possible control of them by Chavez’s Venezuela or muslim countries, and now the evidence from the NY District 23 election, God only knows the extent that voting machines altered vote counts in 2008. We must protect our elections going forward.

We must have an investigation. 

Dear Friends,
Today, Tuesday, November 24, 2009, it is with a heavy heart that we declare this election over.  We will formally end this election and not ask for a recount.  This was a difficult choice to make because so many people have put their faith, hope and aspirations into our campaign.
 Yes, there seem to have been many vote counting problems, missed vote counts and, as was recently reported by the Gouvernour Times, software problems in the computerized voting machines. Despite these incidents, I do not believe the voters of NY-23, or New Yorkers in general, would be well-served by a disruptive and costly recount that would most likely not change the election outcome.
 I know many are disappointed and even angry. To those I say now is not the time to look back, but to focus on the future and ensure that next year we win back this district decidedly. Know this decision was not an easy one. I did not want to let down those who worked so hard, donated so much and shared their enthusiasm for retaking our country with common-sense conservative values.
And rest assured, our energies are now directed toward 2010. This election, in which a third party candidate narrowly lost, showed that principles do matter.  Special interests do have an Achilles’ heel, the American people. Main-street conservatism’s voice is now echoing through the government chambers and boardrooms that shape America. By most measures, this campaign was a success and I have you all to thank for this. And all of us have to thank the Conservative Party of New York State for nominating a candidacy like ours.
We take away lessons from this year’s campaign that will make us stronger and more competitive in the future. Next time we will be better prepared. Many people forget that our campaign only began in earnest three months ago. Most campaigns of this stature take at least a year to prepare. In three months, we almost toppled an entrenched political system and successfully defied the conventional thinking of the elite political punditry. Citizen government is making a comeback in America.
I thank everyone who participated in this campaign and urge each one of you to stand with me in the future. We have a calling that we must answer. My opponent in this race quickly abandoned the promises he made to his voters. Within the first hour of being sworn in by Nancy Pelosi, Bill Owens broke 4 campaign promises — so much for change in Washington. We must resoundingly defeat him next year and, with your help, I promise to help restore our nation’s faith in elected officials when we win.
But there is more to do than just win back NY-23 in 2010. We must work to help other like-minded citizen candidates win across the country.  We need to make time to help other candidates who are working for the principles we hold dear — other fiscal, common-sense conservatives.  Together we can successfully take back our great nation, one legislator and one member at a time. We need more than one common-sense conservative voice in the echo chamber of liberal, spend thrift cacophony if we are to redirect our great country.
I would also like to commend those election commission officials who worked tirelessly and may have taken offense to an unfortunate and poorly worded fundraising email that was sent out toward the end of our campaign.  As we tried to make sense of the false vote counts and stories of software viruses in the voting machines, we never intended to imply the election commissioners had somehow acted improperly. This was never our intention and, on the contrary, the election commissioners went above and beyond to uphold their duty to ensure a fair election took place. I owe them a debt of gratitude for all they have done.
So where to now? Full speed ahead to 2010. This gives us time to carefully articulate and communicate thoughtful positions on issues that impact the great people of our district and ensure that our campaign promises are NOT broken.  Best of all, it allows me to work hand-in-hand with the many supporters who shared their ideas, their concerns and their dreams with me.
We need to continue to stand united because we cannot spend our way out of recession or tax our way to prosperity. We must continue to fight to protect our liberties and protect those who are yet to be born.  We must protect our country against terrorists and protect the sanctity of marriage. We must fix our corrupt tax code, our immigration policy and our educational system.  Most of all, we must defend the free enterprise system that made America the greatest and most prosperous country in the world.  Although I’m conceding an election today, I do it with the certainty that we will win back this seat a year from now.  I am certain of this because our mission is too big, the country’s problems too dire and the American people are too smart.
Thank you for all you have done and will continue to do. “We the people” are retaking America.

Doug Hoffman, this is bigger than you or the election in NY. We are at a crucial point in the history of this country. The actions we take now will determine the security and pursuit of life, liberty and happiness that our descendants and ultimately the entire world will enjoy.

Mr. Hoffman, you have chosen to end the election. I urge you to not end the cause.

Wells

The Register has a 4-page exclusive detailing the arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of the first Briton jailed under the draconian powers that Ministers said were “vital to battle terrorism and serious crime”. Who was this mass-murdering terrorist scumbag? Sorry to disappoint, but actually he is a 33 year old “schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.”

He was originally detained under the Terrorism Act on 15 September 2008 by officers from the Metropolitan Police’s SO15 counter-terrorism unit, and held at the top security Paddington Green police station. Throughout he maintained his right to silence. Sniffer dogs had first become spooked by the presence of components for an Estes rocket kit and a full forensic examination found nine nanograms (the mass of a typical human cell is 1 nanogram) of the high explosive RDX (see Update below) on his left hand. To cut a long story short, it was soon realised that this was  a very eccentric, amateur scientist, that there were no suspicious motives and that he was not a threat to national security.

What SO15 was really interested in were the encrypted contents of several hard drives and USB thumb drives belonging to the man.

Police… warned him they would seek a section 49 notice under RIPA Part III, which gives a suspect a time limit to supply encryption keys or make target data intelligible. Failure to comply is an offence under section 53 of the same Part of the Act and carries a sentence of up to two years imprisonment, and up to five years imprisonment in an investigation concerning national security.

Following the warning he was bailed again, to reappear on 4 February.

[The suspect] did not attend the bail date. Instead he moved to Southampton, living in a series of temporary homes. He says he felt harassed by authority and helpless against police he believed were determined to pin a crime on him.

His disappearance led to a raid on 7 March this year. Officers bearing sub-machine guns broke down the door of [his] flat. He rang local police before realising [SO15] had come for him. At the local Fareham police station he was served with the section 49 notice. Signed by [SO15]’s Superintendent Bell, it said: “I hereby require you to disclose a key or any supporting evidence to make the information intelligible.”

The drives were examined by the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), part of GCHQ, who were unsuccessful in their attempts to crack the encrypted files. One file encrypted using Steganos software was cracked, but investigators found only another PGP container.

[He] maintained his silence throughout the one hour time limit imposed by the notice. He was charged with ten offences under section 53 of RIPA Part III, reflecting the multiple passphrases needed to decrypt his various implementations of PGP Whole Disk Encryption and PGP containers

And yes, they really do now presume guilt unless you can prove your innocence.

In his final police interview, [SO15] officers suggested [his] refusal to decrypt the files or give them his keys would lead to suspicion he was a terrorist or paedophile.

“There could be child pornography, there could be bomb-making recipes,” said one detective.

“Unless you tell us we’re never gonna know… What is anybody gonna think?”

[The suspect] says he maintained his silence because of “the principle – as simple as that“.

He was remanded in custody for three months until his trial on 2 June 2009, where he pleaded guilty to all charges, and was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment.

Before finishing what would have been a six-and-a-half-month prison term during September, [he] was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He now does not know when he will be released from hospital.

Even before his trial, it was known that he was not a threat to national security and not involved in either the planning or execution of terrorism. The judge who heard the case admitted:

“You… wished to involve yourself in a world which was largely based upon the access to the internet and using computers and not really interacting with other people in the ordinary outside world to any great extent. It is said on your behalf that you lead an existence rather akin to that of a monk, and that there is nothing sinister in any of this but it is essentially private matters and you do not see why you should have to disclose anything to the authorities.”

Essentially this man with a mental illness “associated with paranoia and a fear of authorities” was jailed for the offence of not talking in a police interview. A grim verdict on life in 21st century Great Britain indeed.

It will also be news to at least the part of government that administers the justice system. On 3 November, Claire Ward, a junior Minister in the Ministry of Justice told Parliament: “Up to the end of 2007 (latest available) there have been no persons reported to the Ministry of Justice as being cautioned, prosecuted or convicted under section 53 of the Act in England and Wales. The government are satisfied that offences set in RIPA are appropriate and that the legislation is being used effectively”

Read the full article at The Register here. I have presented a very hacked down synopsis here for the sake of space and also because, well, it is their exclusive. Full marks to them for getting this story out into the light.

UPDATE: Could stray explosives incriminate the innocent?
The suspect was unable to account for the presence of RDX, however New Scientist carried this article by Mike Hamer on 18 January 1997:

More than twenty times the amount of RDX, a constituent of Semtex, needed to link a terrorist suspect with explosives was found in a police car at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1995. The car had apparently carried explosives used to train sniffer dogs… The police car, a Vauxhall Astra, had 111 nanograms of RDX on the inside of its rear doors and windows. Just 5 nanograms is enough to link someone with Semtex. The car [also] had 109 nanograms of PETN.

This made me chuckle.

IBD:

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are No. 1 and No. 2. Whatever is No. 3 is far behind.

Many of the things the government does that may seem stupid are not stupid at all, from the standpoint of the elected officials or bureaucrats who do these things.

The current economic downturn that has cost millions of people their jobs began with successive administrations of both parties pushing banks and other lenders to make mortgage loans to people whose incomes, credit history and inability or unwillingness to make a substantial down payment on a house made them bad risks.

Was that stupid? Not at all. The money that was being put at risk was not the politicians’ money, and in most cases was not even the government’s money.

And it made the liberal, especially, “feel good” that all these people who couldn’t afford it were given houses they couldn’t afford so that when the whole scheme collapsed it was the evil capitalists fault. The same capitalists they used and lauded over to create the mess in the first place.

And these people would vote for them.

They could use that. And they can use the “crisis” also.

Then they got their power dream. Control of the US Government.

So what if they cause the worst crash in generations, they got the power and there main goal now is to hold on to it. Everything else doesn’t really matter.

So how do they fix the problem of Bush running up the deficit?

Why, they SPEND EVEN MORE, but they do it “compassionately”

Moreover, the jobs that are being lost by the millions are not the politicians’ jobs — and jobs in the government’s bureaucracies are increasing.

And there are 111 new bureaucracies and counting in the Health Care bill. That’s a lot of bureaucrats.

And when the government has control of 1/6 of our entire economy and you and the decision of whether you live or die. It will be a bonanza for them.

Vote for me or die.

But first you have to pay massive tax increases for 4 years so that we can cook the books to make it look like we’re fiscally responsible when we’re just trying to get more money for re-election by funneling money to phony congressional districts.

But it looks good.

So what if we only have 38% support. We’re going to do it anyways.

It’s all about THEM, not US. You silly little taxpayer.

What every politicians wants, a pliable electorate to abuse.

So who really cares about jobs. Sure, Obama and Co. are going to be “job focused” as one Democratic strategist said once they cram Socialized Medicine down your our throats. But that’s because 2010 is a Congressional Re-election year.

Nothing more.

And I have maintained that if you thought 2007-2008 was the nastiest, most partisan fight ever. Just wait until 2010 and 2012.

Unholy, unethical, total annihilation partisanship is coming to a TV and Newspaper near you in 2010.

And Obama and The Democrats will have their “journalist” in the Mainstream “Ministry of Truth” Media to back them up and lie like Pinocchio never conceived of.

Just like the Housing Crisis, even today.

After the cascade of economic disasters that began in the housing markets in 2006 and spread into the financial markets in Wall Street and even overseas, people in the private sector pulled back. Banks stopped making so many risky loans. Home buyers began buying homes they could afford, instead of going out on a limb with “creative” — and risky — financing schemes to buy homes that were beyond their means.

But politicians went directly in the opposite direction. In the name of “rescuing” the housing market, Congress passed laws enabling the Federal Housing Administration to insure more and bigger risky loans — loans where there is less than a 4% down payment.

A recent news story told of three young men who chipped in a total of $33,000 to buy a home in San Francisco that cost nearly a million dollars. Why would a bank lend that kind of money to them on such a small down payment? Because the loan was insured by the Federal Housing Administration.

The bank wasn’t taking any risk. If the three guys defaulted, the bank could always collect the money from the Federal Housing Administration. The only risk was to the taxpayers.

And they’re suckers.

Just look at the Great Political Prostitute of 2009, Sen. Mary Landreiu. She says she against the Health Care bill. Obama and Reid roll up to her and ask her what it will cost to get her vote. They put down 100 Million. She says $300 Million.

Done.

It’s not their money. They don’t need to care. Because it gets them what they want.

And now she and probably many other Prostitutes are going to pork the Health Care Bill to unimaginable heights.

But don’t worry, it’s all for a good cause in the end.

Health Care for the Uninsured and the Poor?

Hell no, the Government, specifically, the Democrats, win. They get the ultimate Gravy Train of Money.

Money to use to get Re-Elected.

And that’s far more important than silly little ole’ Health Care. Or Global Warming. Or Amnesty.

Anything they do, we pay for it.

But it’s for our own good. Don’t you know.

But not to worry. There will always be taxpayers, not to mention future generations, to pay off the national debt.

And those future taxpayers, your kids and their kids, can’t vote against THEM and and the future is someone else’s electoral nightmare. That is after they spend 60 years in office raking in the millions and the power, that is.

Very few people are likely to connect the dots back to those members of Congress who voted for bigger mortgage guarantees and bailouts by the FHA. So the lawmakers’ and the bureaucrats’ jobs are safe, even if millions of other people’s jobs are not.

Rep. Barney Frank is not about to cut back on risky mortgage loan guarantees by the FHA. He recently announced that he plans to introduce legislation to raise the limit on FHA loan guarantees even more.

Rep. Frank will make himself popular with people who get those loans and with banks that make these high-risk loans where they can pocket the profits and pass the risk on to the FHA.

So long as the taxpayers don’t understand that all this political generosity and compassion are at their expense, Barney Frank is an odds-on favorite to get re-elected. The man is not stupid. What is stupid is believing that politicians are trying to solve our problems, instead of theirs.

As for the FHA running low on money, that is not about to stop the gravy train, certainly not with an election coming up in 2010.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is also running low on money. But that is not going to stop it from insuring bank accounts up to a quarter of a million dollars. It would be stupid for them to stop with an election coming up in 2010.

Sound Familiar??

The comedian Gallagher was right when he said :

There’s a reason “Congress” begins with the word “con”. Because “con” is the opposite of “pro”, so “Congress” must be the opposite of “progress”. 

I wrote recently about GCHQ and the Intercept Modernisation Programme. Part of this will require by law all telecoms companies and internet service providers to keep a record of every customer’s phone call, text message, email and website visit showing who they have contacted, when and where. When I have this conversation with friends, I’m sure most of them think I’m just being paranoid. I’m sure most of them, despite receiving itemised telephone bills, or bank statements saying which ATM they used, don’t think that it is technically possible to monitor every individuals communications in this way. It is possible. It is happening. The telecoms operators already have the first stage in place, being required by law since October 2007 to keep records of all phone calls and text messages for 12 months.  A Conservative win in 2010 isn’t going to cast a magical spell which will instantly undo all of the sinister new practices instituted under the neo-Stalinists. We will still need to fight these erosions of our rights and liberties.

This isn’t about targeting a suspect and then monitoring their activity: this is the vacuum cleaner approach,  assembling the activities of all UK internet users into massive databases, which can be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords (including “Shami Chakrabarti” no doubt). Everyone becomes a suspect; we’re all labelled as guilty of crime-think and future-crime, and after trawling through the database they will then select their targets. Dylan Sharpe over at Big Brother Watch has also had some interesting things to say about IMP (they obviously gave some thought to that one) which are worth repeating here:

Snooper’s charter breathes again

11/19/2009
Two stories today on the dreadful ‘Intercept Modernisation Programme’ otherwise known as the Home Office plan to monitor all of our emails, phone calls and other forms of private communications. The first, courtesy of Kable, is that Phil Woolas MP has said that the £2bn Programme is due for completion in 2016; despite the bill being dropped from the Queen’s Speech earlier this week.

As they report:

the information from Woolas shows the Home Office does not anticipate that this will delay the IMP, with 2016 as both the original and the current planned date for completion.

To make matters worse Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions – a role that ought to be entirely separate from politics – has come out today and said that monitoring all of our calls and emails is ‘vital’ in the fight against crime.

As reported by the Daily Telegraph:

Keir Starmer said the controversial plan, which would see the communications activity of every citizen stored for a year, was essential for establishing links with suspects.

His support is in contrast to his predecessor, Sir Ken Macdonald, who last year warned against the expansion of technology by the state into everyday life which could create a world future generations “can’t bear”.

Sir Ken is right and it simply isn’t the government’s job to monitor our private communications. We hear of too many cases of private and personal data being lost, sold or misused by the state to trust that our phone calls and emails won’t end up in the wrong hands.

In addition, the DPP should not be going around doing the government’s dirty work – plugging a policy that the majority of British people find deeply worrying. And remember, Keir Starmer has previous in this field.

You could argue that blanket surveillance such as this will lead to more law enforcement success, and so must be a good thing. But as the All Party Parliamentary Group on Privacy reminds us in their Briefing on the Interception Modernisation Programme “such demands are really analogous to saying that were the police released from their constraints on entering private property, or to arrest and detain people, the levels of convictions would be much higher.” There would be no point at which the essential “necessity” and “proportionality” tests would be applied, nor any form of plausible oversight. That truly would be a Police State.

This is a level of domestic surveillance that Erich Honecker would have given his left nut for. As Henry Porter has often reminded us, we cannot ignore Churchill’s warning any longer: “If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only precarious chance for survival.”

Every year the President pardons the White House Turkey.

This year, we are the turkey and all we have to look forward to is a noose.

Buffalo News Opinion: Right now, the legislation is driven by empty promises, the residue of Obama’s 2008 campaign, congressional Democrats’ need to “do something” before they’re hobbled in next year’s elections and by special interests and ideologues who want to build a pathway to single-payer coverage.

If the they want to do real reform (and I have said this before):

1. Tort Reform.

Even uber-Liberal Chris Matthews said, in a discussion with Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), said “you have found the Democrats achilles heel. Tort Reform would bring cost down but there is none in this bill because of the Trial Lawyers”

I thought his intestines were going to jump up and strangle him before he finished, or at least his Socialist masters at MSNBC would have a mysterious power outage before he finished.

Because he is correct.

The Trial Lawyers are amongst one the biggest contributors to the Democrats. So we can’t do any reform there.

Pelosi-Care Version:

Section 2531, entitled Medical Liability Alternatives, establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But] a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys fees or imposes caps on damages.

Pelosi-Care, we are there for you, the consumer.

2. Portability

You can’t buy coverage across state lines.

So with “Choice & Competition” you’d think we’d get this one.

No.

We get a bankrupt government that is going to tax you for 4 years BEFORE any benefits and when the whole thing goes pear-shaped and balloons out of control guess who is going to be hit with the tab.

And let there be no doubt that it will happen.

And since a for-profit Free Enterprise industry will be hamstrung by regulations and a “competitor” that has the power to tax and print as much money as it feels like  will be driven to extinction.

So you’ll have nothing but good old, reliable, “compassionate”, Uncle Sam.

And he has a great track record:

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775 – you’ve had 234 years to get it right; it’s broke.

Social Security was established in 1935 – you’ve had 74 years to get it right; it’s broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938 – you’ve had 71 years to get it right; it’s broke.

The “War on Poverty” started in 1964 – you’ve had 45 years to get it right. $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to “the poor”; it hasn’t worked and our entire country is broke.

The Alternative Minimum Tax — 41 years go- passed to “soak the rich” is now considered by Democrats to be an onerous tax on the middle class.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965 – you’ve had 44 years to get it right; they’re both broke.

Freddie Mac was established in 1970 – you’ve had 39 years to get it right; it’s broke.

Trillions of dollars were spent in the massive political payoffs called TARP, the “Stimulus,” the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009…. none show any signs of working, although ACORN appears to have found a new source: the American taxpayer.

And finally, to set a new record: “Cash for Clunkers” was established in 2009 and went broke in 2009! It took cars (that were the best some people could afford) and replaced them with high-priced and less-affordable cars, mostly Japanese. A good percentage of the profits went out of the country. And the American taxpayers take the hit for Congress’s generosity in burning three billion more of our dollars on failed experiments.

It the net loss was $24,000 per vehicle! And auto sales slumped right back to where they were afterwards. It had no effect.

But it made the liberals feel good.

So, with a perfect 100% failure rate and a record that proves that “services” you shove down our throats are failing faster and deeper, you want Americans to believe you can be trusted with a government-run health care system-  20% of our entire economy???

With all due respect,  Are you crazy? Or do you think the American people are? (ATR)

Worse, they think they are superior and you’re just too stupid to realize it so they have to do for your own good.

And they want to stuff this Turkey.

And this is no Treducken (a real dish by the way-A Treducken is a dish consisting of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken), this one is just going to be stuffed with pork and the rotting fruits of our labors.

So who wants a slice?

At the end of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis turns to Donald Pleasence and says, “It was the boogeyman.” Pleasence, realising that the monster has survived and escaped yet again, responds: “As a matter of fact, it was…”

You see, there’s something about Mandelson, The High Lord Too-Many-Titles, that just isn’t right. Normally, the public loves an underdog, admires the tenacity of the guy who gets knocked down but dusts himself off and tries, tries, and tries again. But the plucky, come-back kid, Mandelson aint. He’s more like Michael Myers: everytime you think he’s finally – bang! this time – dead, he shuffles to his feet and zombie lurches right back at you. Mandelson has been an unstoppable force in British politics for the last twelve years, without a doubt. But not in a good way. Perhaps most terrifying of all, each time he returns to Government, he does so even more powerful than before.

So is he really as bad as some would have us think? Is he, in fact, the digital boogeyman?

Glyn Moody over at Computerworld UK says yes. He’s pretty adamant  that Mandelson’s Bill and his request for changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act “for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement” represents “the most far-reaching and dangerous changes to not just copyright law, but any UK law, giving a government minister unprecedented and unbridled powers to act as he or she (and their chums in the “creative industries”) might choose.” And the outcome? “If this proposal is enacted, it will turn the British online world into a wasteland, with business and end-users paying the price not just financially, but in terms of the loss of the ability to innovate and of fundamental freedoms.”

Rupert Goodwins, the Editor of ZDNet UK, might as well be Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis to Mandelson’s Myers. He’s got the case notes, he’s done the study, and he’s here in Haddonfield UK warning that the monster is on the loose:

Without debate, without public consultation, without any form of mandate, Lord Mandelson – an unelected politician – is preparing to place the rights of powerful industrial concerns above those of Parliament and above ours.

The powers that he wants to create – by means of a statutory instrument, which bypasses Parliamentary debate and decision – will criminalise downloading of content without permission. They will give him or anyone he chooses the power to enforce by law any action he or his successor thinks fit, in the service of protecting copyright.

And they will give industry bodies, such as the BPI, FAST and so on, powers of investigation tantamount to those of the police force. The risk of copyright infringment would be enough to force any company to patrol its actions and offerings, closing down anything that might land them in the dock. The freedom of the Internet would be gone. It is placing the future of the Net, with the force of law, in the hands of those who depend on artificial scarcity. It is antithetical to everything that matters in the digital world…

Should these moves succeed, the Internet in the UK will be thrust back thirty years, when a state monopoly with commercial interests was the gatekeeper to all online information – and where that information was only held by other large organisations.

But Internet users would be thrown into another dimension, one where every action must be monitored, every access cleared, every file transfer a potential criminal act. A dimension policed and enforced, moreover, by those with a direct financial interest in preventing new models of distribution, of enforcing the idea that they and they alone can set the rules for information-driven commerce.

Nothing would be untouched. Everything on the Internet is a transfer of information, and all information may be copyright. Thus, every action on the Internet would be a potential criminal act, and everyone connected would have a duty to make sure it wasn’t. Be sure that that duty will be imposed with eagerness.

It would be easy to use the metaphors of the police state, of corporate monopoly, of any society where the state turns on its own citizens. Easy, but wrong: what is being proposed is new, one where the very machinery that runs our lives is handed over to a special interest group with a history of saying and doing the maximum it can get away with for its own survival and prosperity…

Despite many pointing to a Conservative win at the 2010 general election, I can’t shake the feeling that the morning after the polls close, Mandelson is still going to be there, zombie-like, indestructable. Or at the very least, his legislative legacy will be.

As Nick Ross would say, “Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well…”

“Writing is like prostitution.  First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money.”  —Moliere

I’ve been struggling with this idea of writing for money.  Moliere suggests writers are prostituting themselves if they write for money, so  when I read this quote, I felt a twinge, as if I might be damaging myself in some way, exploiting myself, or misusing a talent.  Unfortunately, the writing that satisfies me the most isn’t lucrative—poetry, fiction.  In these areas, if money is the main motivation then I’m not going to write as I need to; I’ll be writing for an audience primarily, not for what is bubbling up in my unconscious and seeking imaginative expression.  I don’t feel that way when I write articles and essays, genres that can pay.

The word prostitution seems key here.  Most of us think of a prostitute as someone who sells her/his body for money—who uses something intimate and vulnerable in order to live.  What relationship does the body have, though, to writing, to words?  Beckett may have the answer.  He says, “Words are all we have.”   In a way, our bodies are all we have, though I’m not sure we even have them, and words are as connected to us as our skin is to our frames.  Words not only are all we have but, as Orwell understood so well, language forms us—informs us.

Does prostitution need to have a negative connotation?  Couldn’t one have sex for money not just to exploit the body but to share it, to get close to another’s body, to have something vital to give, sex being the only way to give it?  (I’m thinking of Moll Flanders, that wonderful 18th Century character, a prostitute if you like, but what a prostitute!)

Or maybe what Moliere means is that like a prostitute, a writer has something to give that is intimately related to his/her self.  The problem might arise in our attitude to our body or ourselves and our customers.   If we are doing it, sex or writing, only to exploit, only for money, then the behavior could be damaging.  But if we approach this process consciously, we might not only do our best work, we also may stay more true to ourselves.   It needn’t be an either/or proposition, as Moliere makes it sound, but both/and—not love or money, but love and money.

[...] En 1993 IG Farben devint le principal pourvoyeur de fonds en vue de la montée en puissance des Nazis. Au cours des années qui ont suivi, ce cartel chimico-pharmaceutique allemand devint complice et prêta main forte aux préparatifs de la conquête militaire de l’Europe.
Les rapports du Tribunal de Nuremberg sur les crimes de guerre parlent d’un don de plus de 80 millions de Reichmark offert aux Nazis et aux organisations affiliées à Bayer, BASF et Hoechst. En retour de cet «investissement» IG Farben obtint le contrôle et la gestion de toutes les industries chimiques, pétrochimiques et pharmaceutiques des pays occupés pendant la 2nde Guerre mondiale avec comme objectif final la création d’un vaste marché allant de Lisbonne à Sofia.
Selon les rapports du Tribunal de Nuremberg sur les crimes de guerre, Knieriem, directeur de l’IG Farben adressait le 20 Juillet 1940 une lettre au gouvernement Nazi – quelques temps après la victoire sur la France – dans laquelle il soulignait les instruments qu’IG Farben entendait utiliser afin d’asseoir son emprise en Europe. La lettre d’IG Farben évoquait l’existence d’une monnaie commune européenne, des lois communes et même un système juridique commun et tout cela sous le contrôle et la supervision de la coalition Nazi/IG Farben.
A Auschwitz, IG Farben y érigea le plus grand complexe industriel européen destiné à la production des produits chimiques et explosifs destines à être utilisés sur le front Est au cours de la 2nde Guerre Mondiale. Ce complexe industriel de 24 km² de superficie – y compris son énorme camp de concentration, réservoir d’esclaves travailleurs – fut financé par les crédits d’environ 1 milliard de Reichsmark fourni par la Deutsche Bank.
Les milliers de prisonniers de ce camp furent utilisés par la section pharmaceutique de Bayer à de pseudo expériences médicales en testant les produits brevetés comme la «chimiothérapie».
Au cours des procès du Tribunal de Nuremberg sur les crimes de guerre 24 dirigeants de IG Farben ont été traduits en justice et beaucoup furent condamnés.
Voici comment le procureur américain Telford Taylor résuma le rôle joué par le cartel chimique au cours du procès du Nuremberg: «la seconde guerre mondiale n’aurait jamais été possible sans IG Farben».
Pendant plus de 6 décennies les rapports des procès du Tribunal de Nuremberg contre les dirigeants du cartel de IG Farben ont été tenu secrets au sein des archives de Nuremberg. En juillet de cette année (2007) notre fondation eut accès à ces archives et publia plus de 40.000 rapports sur Internet. Aujourd’hui tout le monde, les enfants aussi bien que les adultes peuvent avoir accès à ces archives quelque soit l’endroit où ils se trouvent au monde.
Avec le début de la Guerre Froide, quelques uns des dirigeants de IG Farben ayant été traduits en justice furent reconduits dans des postes de responsabilité dans l’industrie allemande.
Karl Wurster, président de Degesch – le fabricant du produit Cyclone B ayant servi dans les chambres à gaz d’Auschwitz – redevint le Directeur général de BASF.
Fritz ter Meer, le directeur de IG Farben et de Bayer coupable de génocide et de crimes d’esclavage commis ici à Auschwitz fut libéré de prison après seulement 4 mois. Dix ans après avoir été jugé coupable comme criminel de guerre à Nuremberg il devint à nouveau président du conseil de surveillance de Bayer.
Hans Globke fut coauteur de lois racistes de Nuremberg et fut également auteur des nouvelles lois sur la Grande Europe, le «Reich» dans les pays occupés par les Nazis pendant la seconde guerre mondiale.
Après la 2nde Guerre Mondiale Globke devint ministre chancelier au sein du cabinet du Chancelier allemand Adenauer. En tant «qu’éminence grise» et en dehors de tout contrôle parlementaire, il eut la haute main essentiellement sur tous les aspects politiques de la période d’après guerre en Allemagne de l’Ouest, allant des services secrets jusqu à la poursuite des plans du cartel pharmaceutique et pétrolier en vue de la conquête de l’Europe et de la toute nouvelle Union Européenne fraîchement construite.
Walter Hallstein, un éminent professeur de droit à l’époque des Nazis disait en 1939: «l’une des principales lois dans (dans les pays conquis et occupés) sera la ‘loi de protection de l’honneur et du sang allemands’…».
En 1957 l’avocat de «l’honneur et du sang allemands» devint le personnage clé et l’architecte de la mouture de la future Union Européenne et le premier responsable de «la commission européenne», ce fut le premier responsable exécutif de l’Union Européenne désigné dès le début en dehors de tout contrôle démocratique.
En résumé, les Nazi et IG Farben nommèrent la commission Européenne comme «Politburo» du cartel pharmaceutique de l’après guerre pour diriger l’Europe.
Résultat de l’influence de ces intérêts, les décisions du parlement européen n’ont que peu de cas si aucune influence n’est exercée sur les lois, sur ce que l’on nomme «directives de l’union européenne» imposées par la «commission européenne» sur la vie de plus de 400 millions d’individus en Europe.
Au même moment les élections en vue de mettre en place le Parlement européen ne sont qu’une vaste mascarade, décevante et destinée à montrer l’Union Européenne comme une structure démocratique.
La base de toute démocratie est le pouvoir appartenant au peuple. Dès le moment ou le pouvoir exécutif n’est plus contrôlé par la volonté du peuple la démocratie n’est plus rien de plus qu’une dictature.
Aujourd’hui des silhouettes d’IG Farben subsistent toujours en Europe. Les objectifs des successeurs d’IG Farben sont rejoints par les multinationales pharmaceutiques et pétrolières européennes. Leurs objectifs ressemblent étrangement à ceux d’IG Farben pendant la seconde guerre mondiale :créer et mettre sous son contrôle un marché de produits pharmaceutiques brevetés et autres produits brevetés de haute technologie, un marché allant de «Lisbonne à Sofia».
L’énorme espace géographique que ces intérêts corporatistes veulent contrôler concerne tout le monde et tout habitant de ce continent. Ces intérêts concernent également les brevets sur les gênes – visant à exercer tout contrôle sur la vie et le système génétique des individus – les brevets sur les organismes génétiquement modifiés avec comme objectif de mettre sous contrôle quotidien notre système nutritionnel.
Le plus connu des ces industries cherchant à exercer un contrôle sur notre vie est «le commerce des maladies fait par le secteur pharmaceutique». Comme je l’ai précédemment mentionné, l’industrie pharmaceutique promet la santé mais toute son existence n’est basée que sur la promotion des maladies constituant ainsi une source de revenus. Nous savons aujourd’hui que les maladies cardiovasculaires, le cancer, les maladies immunodéficientes et d’autres maladies peuvent être évitées. La perpétuation délibérée des maladies par les intérêts corporatistes de l’industrie pharmaceutique est un crime.
Résultat de cette pratique industrielle pour le moins éthique :le nombre de victimes de ce commerce frauduleux a dépassé un milliard de personnes et déjà dépasse le nombre de victimes des guerres que l’humanité ait connu jusques là.
Sous le prétexte de lutte contre le terrorisme, la même Commission Européenne au sein de l’Union Européenne a émis une directive qui risque de transformer l’Europe en un «continent Orwelien»¹.Selon cette directive de l’UE désormais tous les appels téléphoniques que vous ferez, toutes les adresses emails que vous cherchez à contacter sont susceptibles d’être brouillés. Pas seulement pour vous mais également pour les 400 millions d’européens. Ce n’est pas difficile de comprendre ce que ces instruments veulent signifier une fois aux mains de ces intérêts corporatistes qui ont si souvent abusés de leur pouvoir par le passé. Notre rencontre a lieu à un moment historique, le monde est à croisée des chemins. Les responsables politiques des principaux pays leaders en matière de production et d’exportation des produits pharmaceutiques et pétrochimiques comme les Etats-Unis, le Royaume Uni, l’Allemagne ainsi que la France ont déjà publiquement parlé de la Troisième Guerre Mondiale et de leur volonté de faire usage de l’arme nucléaire.
A la suite d’un holocauste nucléaire et la proclamation d’une loi martiale à large échelle ces intérêts corporatistes qui soutenaient la seconde guerre mondiale pourraient abuser de leur puissance encore une fois.
Ces plans innommables ne peuvent être mis en pratique que s’ils restent secrets ou si nous n’en parlons pas et restons indifférents.”[...]

lisez cet article en intégralité, c’est énorme !!

J’hallucine complètement quand je lise cela : ” en résumé, les Nazi et IG Farben nommèrent la commission Européenne comme «Politburo» du cartel pharmaceutique de l’après guerre pour diriger l’Europe.”
En effet le dailymail a dit exactement la même chose il y a de cela 5 mois : ” The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany’s post-war recovery, prepare for the Nazis’ return to power and work for a ’strong German empire’. In other words: the Fourth Reich. ”

Ce texte confirme des tas de choses que j’ai lu ces derniers mois, c’est vraiment excellent !!

Voila comment elle définit l’industrie pharmaceutique : ” le résultat de cette pratique industrielle pour le moins éthique :le nombre de victimes de ce commerce frauduleux a dépassé un milliard de personnes et déjà dépasse le nombre de victimes des guerres que l’humanité ait connu jusques là. ” Comme ça c’est claire !!!!

Elle n’oublie rien, la preuve : ” Sous le prétexte de lutte contre le terrorisme, la même Commission Européenne au sein de l’Union Européenne a émis une directive qui risque de transformer l’Europe en un «continent Orwelien»¹.Selon cette directive de l’UE désormais tous les appels téléphoniques que vous ferez, toutes les adresses emails que vous cherchez à contacter sont susceptibles d’être brouillés. Pas seulement pour vous mais également pour les 400 millions d’européens.”

Lisez l’article en entier, il est vraiment bien, elle n’invente rien, les élites dégénérées nous ont pris en grippe (lol), après nous avoir exploité et manipulé, ils vont nous exterminer.

We are all unique!!!!

One of the most obvious answers to the title is this: the video makes you laugh and makes you think at the same time. You need to realize that a really good Prank video is something that can be a funny video as well as something that is not designed to simply scare the living daylights out of the person that the prank is being pulled on. Those that like making prank videos need to realize that you have to stick to a certain level of sensibility in order to make the video that you want to make, to scare your “victim” some and to make them as well as everyone else laugh.

who used all the milk?

 If you are determined that you are going to make any prank videos available on websites like vidbang and frickenfunny you need to remember that you will have to deal with what the other people that watch that video happen to think about it as well as what the website creator thinks of it. This holds true for all the videos that are posted to video sharing websites such as Vidbang or fricken. They all are trying the best they can to make sure that you are not going to be offended by any of the videos that are posted on their website. You can be sure that this mission is not the easiest in the world because there is no way to tell what will offend someone and what will just roll off of them like water off a duck’s back.

 Let’s say that you are trying to make a video that is a combination of a sexy video and a prank at the same time. The question here is where do you draw the line and how do you know what is actually going too far over the line of common sense and common decency. If you are trying to videotape a fashion show that is going pretty good and then has something (or many things) start going wrong, you might not realize that what you think is just good fun might be something that others really cannot make sense of. The other reaction that you might get is that the person watching the video is disgusted by what they are seeing because it makes no sense to them.

This is where you really need to be able to know what people will accept and what they simply will not accept because it goes against their own personal Code of Conduct, or morals, as it were. You might think that what is offensive can easily be spelled out in black and white or in terms that are easy to define to a good degree of certainty, but this simply is not the case any which way you look at it. Thinking like that is what tends to cause a bit of trouble because those that think like this really are not seeing the forest for the trees. Choosing not to see the truth that is right in front of you is something that is not that smart.

New Global Internet Treaty — as bad as everyone’s been saying, and worse. Much, much worse.

BoingBoing.com
November 20, 2009

There is, however, little detail in the bill on how the government will stimulate broadband infrastructure.

The Great Bribe of the 21st Century.

Washington Post: And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote — and to trumpet the financial “fix” she had arranged for Louisiana. “I am not going to be defensive,” she declared. “And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix.”

Got to admire her balls. Yes, I was Bribed. I wanted to be bribed! I’m proud of it! Aren’t I Magnificent!!

It was an awkward moment (not least because her figure is 20 times the original Louisiana Purchase price). But it was fairly representative of a Senate debate that seems to be scripted in the Southern Gothic style. The plot was gripping — the bill survived Saturday’s procedural test without a single vote to spare — and it brought out the rank partisanship, the self-absorption and all the other pathologies of modern politics. If that wasn’t enough of a Tennessee Williams story line, the debate even had, playing the lead role, a Southerner named Blanche with a flair for the dramatic.

After Landrieu threw in her support (she asserted that the extra Medicaid funds were “not the reason” for her vote), the lone holdout in the 60-member Democratic caucus was Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Like other Democratic moderates who knew a single vote could kill the bill, she took a streetcar named Opportunism, transferred to one called Wavering and made off with concessions of her own. Indeed, the all-Saturday debate, which ended with an 8 p.m. vote, occurred only because Democratic leaders had yielded to her request for more time.

Even when she finally announced her support, at 2:30 in the afternoon, Lincoln made clear that she still planned to hold out for many more concessions in the debate that will consume the next month. “My decision to vote on the motion to proceed is not my last, nor only, chance to have an impact on health-care reform,” she announced.

Landrieu and Lincoln got the attention because they were the last to decide, but the Senate really has 100 Blanche DuBoises, a full house of characters inclined toward the narcissistic. The health-care debate was worse than most. With all 40 Republicans in lockstep opposition, all 60 members of the Democratic caucus had to vote yes — and that gave each one an opportunity to extract concessions from Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) won a promise from Reid to support his plan to expand eligibility for health insurance. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) got Reid to jettison a provision stripping health insurers of their antitrust exemption. Landrieu got the concessions for her money. And Lincoln won an extended, 72-hour period to study legislation.

“I have concluded that I believe it is more important that we begin this debate to improve our nation’s health care system for all Americans rather than just simply drop the issue and walk away. That is not what people sent us here to do,” Lincoln said. (ABC)

Actually, the will of the people was for you to vote “No”. But that didn’t fit in with your ego did it Senator?

And the big shakedown is yet to occur: That will happen when Reid comes back to his caucus in a few weeks to round up 60 votes for the final passage of the health bill.

Obama 1/20/2009: “We come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics,” he said.

So how’s that working out for you. The singularly 2 most partisan votes in recent memory (The House Bill and the Senate Bill).

All 58 Senate Democrats — along with independent Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — supported bringing the measure to the floor. All the Republicans voted against it. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, did not vote.

But don’t worry, it’s all the Republican’s Fault.

The Republicans “are frightening people,” said Sen. Tom Harkin

The Democrats are 100% not to blame for this and the massive and in your-face Bribery to get there.

No, not at all.

Sen. Landrieu,“I’m not thinking about my reelection” in 2010.”

Yes, Senator we believe you…

Sen. Landrieu clarified that her vote was not an endorsement of Reid’s bill and said she might ultimately vote against the legislation if it is not changed during the Senate floor debate

Sure, Mary, we believe you. You’re going to leave the $300 Million dollar Bribe and walk way, later…

Sure, whatever you say…

Sen. Lincoln (D-Ark) said: “I’m not thinking about my re-election, the legacy of a president or whether Democrats or Republicans are going to be able to claim victory in winning this debate. “My first loyalties are with the people of Arkansas,” she said. “Not insurance companies, the health care industry or my political party.”(MSNBC)

The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas’s Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea.

So, Yes  Senator, please continue to tell yourself that as you gather around the Turkey this week and then come back to Washington to stuff it down our throats.

Sen. Burr (R-NC) hoisted the bill as he spoke at the Republicans press conference.

“This 20 pounds is the size of most people’s turkey next week and that’s what most people in North Carolina think of it,” he said.

“This is the Harry Reid layaway plan for the holiday season,” Burr said. “Pay in for four years before you get anything out of it.”

This will put more than a food coma on the economy.

But at least The New Louisiana Purchase is safe!

“At what point is the government going to step in and say, ‘We are not paying for that and you are going to die earlier than you would if you had received that treatment,’” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

And This Indyfromaz signing off for the day from Obama’s Post-Partisan Utopia…

Barack Obama, the Obama camp and the Democrat Party continue to attack Sarah Palin. They are openly, flagrantly, requesting donations to continue their Orwellian attacks on Palin. Attacking Palin is attacking America, American values and us, the American people. If they want war with the American people, by God they will get it.

Yesterday, November 20, 2009, the Citizen Wells blog explained that the Attacks on Sarah Palin are not just attacks on her. The attacks are also aimed at what is good about this country. This is fundamentally a struggle between good and evil. Looking back on the attacks against Sarah Palin and her family during the 2008 election, one only has to remember the comments made about Palin’s mentally challenged son, why Palin did not abort him aand the many viscious statements made about the daughter who got pregnant, to realize that evil drives this agenda.
Attacks on Sarah Palin and America, Good Vs Evil

Organizing  for America, BarackObama.com, is requesting donations to fight Sarah Palin. They accuse her of  lying and deception. Talk about audacity. Obama and his thugs are the masters of lies and deception. Big brother of  “1984″ could have learned much from them. The Organizing for America website has Barack Obama in it’s .com name. Barack Obama and the Democrat Party must take ownership in it’s content.

Help us raise $500,000 in the next week to push back against Sarah Palin and her special interest allies.

Whatever lie Sarah Palin comes up with next will be widely covered by the media, then constantly echoed by right-wing attack groups and others who are trying to defeat reform.

And as we approach the final sprint on health reform, we can’t afford more deception and delay. We need to be ready for anything — and have the resources to respond with ads, events, and calls to Congress when the attacks come.

So we’re setting a big goal: $500,000 in the next week to help push back against Sarah Palin and her allies. Can you chip in to help reach our goal?

Barack Obama, the Obama camp and the Democrat party continue to use Chicago style intimidation to attempt to shut down all opposition to their radical socialist agenda. They used Nazi brownshirt and Orwellian threats in 2008 to steal the election. Now they are focusing their attention on a good American, Sarah Palin and her family. What they did not count on is that Palin resonates with the American public. When they attack Palin, they attack us and we are not going to take it.

North of the border, David Strang, the Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police, has come clean and said that the suitability of tasers in Scotland is still to be proved, arguing that CS spray and body armour were adequate enough defences for officers on the beat.  About 700 police officers in Scotland are trained to use tasers, but the weapons have been discharged only 12 times since their introduction in 2004, on 11 occasions by Strathclyde Police and once by Lothian and Borders Police.

Meanwhile, here in the south, Police have been given the go-ahead to use tasers against children… despite warnings that they could trigger a heart attack in youngsters.

When they were first introduced the liars in the Police and the Home Office assured us that the tasers – which emit a 50,000-volt electric shock – would be used only by specialist officers as a “non lethal” alternative to firearms. Now, they can be used against all “potentially violent” offenders even if they are unarmed, even kids. The Defence Scientific Advisory Council medical committee specifically told the Home Office that not enough was known about the health risks of using the weapons against children, and that what limited research was available suggested there was a risk children could suffer “a serious cardiac event”. And as for the unborn, the Home Office relies on “computer simulations” to analyse the effect on a pregnant female. The same computer which claims my street will be under 50 feet of water or in a desert next year, no doubt.

Amnesty International claims Tasers have been responsible for 220 deaths in America since 2001. Many cities and police forces there have banned their use against minors. Two years ago in Chicago a 14-year-old boy went into cardiac arrest after being shot with one. Medics had to use a defibrillator four times to resuscitate him.

The Association of Chief Police Officers, which issues guidance to forces on the use of weapons, said Tasers would be made “readily available” for “conflict management” at incidents of “violence and threats of violence of such severity that they will need force”.

While we can’t afford to pay for cancer treatment, Jackboot Jacqui stumped up an extra £8m this year to expand the use of tasers in England and Wales.

So where is this slippery slope leading?

Taser gun used on 10-year-old girl who ‘refused to take shower’

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles
19 Nov 2009

A police officer used a Taser stun gun to subdue a 10-year-old girl in her own home.

The officer had been called to the girl’s home in Ozark, Arkansas, by her mother because she was behaving in an unruly manner and refusing to take a shower. In a report on the incident the officer, Dustin Bradshaw, said the mother gave him permission to use the Taser.  When he arrived, the girl was curled up on the floor, screaming, and resisting as her mother tried to get her in the shower before bed.

“Her mother told me to tase her if I needed to,” the officer wrote. The child was “violently kicking and verbally combative” when he tried to take her into custody and she kicked him in the groin. He then delivered “a very brief drive stun to her back,” the report said.

The girl’s father, Anthony Medlock, who is divorced from her mother, said the girl showed signs of emotional problems but did not deserve to be “treated like an animal”. He said: “Ten years old and they shot electricity through her body, and I want to know how the heck in God’s green earth can they get away with this. If you can’t pick the kid up and take her to your car, handcuff her, then I don’t think you need to be an officer. She doesn’t deserve to be treated like a dog. She’s not a tiger.”

The local Police Chief Jim Noggle said no disciplinary action was taken against Bradshaw.

Meantime, down in New Mexico:

Consider this fair warning. If you won’t write to your MP about the use of tasers against children, don’t go crying to anybody else that nobody told you how it was all going to end up.

Oh, and just a parting thought – if they really are as harmless as the Police and Home Office want us to believe, why aren’t they available to all homeowners as a “safe” remedy against burglars? Or given to women as a defense against rapists?

Let’s face it, they’re glorified cattle prods. And we proles are the fucking cattle.

UPDATE: Officer Bradshaw, the courageous cop who tased the ten-year old, HAS now been suspended. But here’s the kicker – he wasn’t suspended for using the Taser but for not having a video camera attached when he used it. (Hat tip: Al Jahom)

right, today, have been a hard and emotional day for me on several occasions. which im not going to go in to on here, as it is private to myself, and i moan endlessly about others posting about there lives on the internet, some things, you have to keep private i guess.

anyway, apart from my rubbish day, that consisted of lessons of photography, which i usually enjoy. the fact that im listening to snow patrol is probably not helping my emotion. so il put something abit heavier on i guess.

first of all, i have set up a new twitter, which is: www.twitter.com/MasonMcEnery or @MasonMcEnery

which ever way you prefer it, please follow me on there.

i started reading in to orwells, 1984. which i was also watching ‘im a celeb’, whilst reading it. and honestly, they seemed to highly contrast there selves to each other, and i was drawn in to watching TV in the end. distraction is a down point of me.

i have no plans for the weekend, which doesn’t involve coursework or homework, as i said in an earlier post. so my weekend will be full of joy and excitement.

thats me off the internet for the night,guitar or xbox? its a tough choice, but as everyone else in my house is asleep, i am afraid i am drawn upon the latter. thanks for reading this, laters xxx

“What has been will be again,
       what has been done will be done again;
       there is nothing new under the sun.”…Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)

“I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure.
That which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was good;
that which made for less life, which hurt, dwarfed and distorted life, was bad.”…Jack London

“Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.”
“the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.”
“He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia.”
“There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies”
“In it’s second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices”… George Orwell “1984″

Lies

Leftists

Liberalism

 If you are offended by references to the Bible, good versus evil or anything that is not politically correct, you are in the wrong place.

Everyone is tap dancing around the attacks on Sarah Palin. People with the best of intentions speak of her as a conservative female threatening the philosophies and positions of those on the left. Let’s call this what it is. This is a classic struggle between good and evil, right versus wrong.

The modern day Democrat Party is controlled by far left socialists who are driven by a message of hate. Hate George Bush, Hate America and recently Hate Sarah Palin. The Beatles, in their song “Revolution”, had this to say:

“But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait”

“You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow”

It seems the leftist Democrats have covered all the bases. Hate, change the Constitution and carrying pictures of  Chairman Mao (Anita Dunn).

Sarah Palin is not a perfect person, her humanity prevents that. She is, however a good person who loves her family, her country and follows her moral compass, her concept of God, the creator of all. She is against many of the ideological positions that have slowly taken hold of this country.

Sarah Palin represents what is right about this country. She tries to live her life by doing the right thing. She apparently intimidates those who believe:

• Women should follow the dictates of the Democrat Party.
• Abortion is always ok and should not be reserved for the lesser of evils.
• There is no God.
• There is no right or wrong.
• The founding fathers and US Constitution are out of vogue and not relevant to modern issues.
• European countries should be emulated.
• A Government option will improve health care.
• Global warming is real and is mainly the fault of Americans.
• An endangered fish is more important than endangered humans.
• Drilling for oil is always wrong.
• Terrorists are regular criminals with constitutional rights.
• Patriotism, Religion and Guns are not fashionable.

I am next going to refer to Jesus of Nazareth. The life and tenets of Jesus are known by Christians, Jews and Muslims, so most of you should understand what I am about to write. While Sarah Palin cannot be compared to Jesus on one level, reactions to the good in Sarah Palin and other children of the light are paralleled in the reactions to Jesus, his teachings and actions.  The hypocrites and evil doers of Jesus’ time attacked him and demanded  his crucifixion.

The modern day hypocrites have put Sarah Palin under a microscope. They employ legions to fact check her statements and her new book and gave Barack Obama a free ride on his books and election campaign. As Jesus would state, they look for a speck in Palin’s eye and ignore the beam in theirs.
I wish to make an important point. It is ok to disgree with Sarah Palin. Since Palin embraces American values, she would be the first to agree. It is not ok to trash, lie about and attack Sarah Palin. This is wrong (remember, most of us believe in right and wrong.) When you attack Sarah Palin, you attack America and decent Americans and we are not going to take it anymore.

This is fair warning to those, and I do not care who you are, who viciously attack Sarah Palin. If you are a company like NewsWeek, that belittled Palin with the sexist magazine cover, we are going to boycott you. If you are a politician, we are going to run you out of office. If I personally hear someone attack Palin, I am going to quietly get in their face and ask why they hate America. I suggest you do the same.

Generally, I do believe we should pray for those who have lost their way. However, there is a concept called righteous indignation. A response, sadly lacking in many of those who profess to be Christians. And how ironic. Jesus, who was all about love for thy neighbor, entered the temple, saw the moneychanger’s wrongful acts, and overturned the tables in righteous indignation.

The lesson is simple. We must rise up in righteous indignation and say no more to attacks on Sarah Palin and others.

And be certain you are clear about this.

This is a struggle between good and evil.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”… Ephesians 6:12.

That slimey reptilian known as Mandelson has got his own way. Again. As usual. (Well, he does run this Demokratische Republik, so it isn’t that much of a surprise.) The new Digital Economy Bill will force ISPs to penalise those “persistently observed infringing copyright via peer-to-peer networks.” Ostensibly, their targets are “illegal filesharers”,  swapping movies and music.

The KiddR household uses P2P quite often, although not for movies or music. One of the sprogs plays games online, which are forever being updated and patched by P2P. I also like to download old and out of print books, which sometimes find their way on to filesharing sites.

But the between-the-lines of Mandy’s bill is the important part – they’re not really that interested in the content that is being shared as much as they are in being able to monitor the act of sharing. It is just another back door into your life through the internet. The Government and its enforcers might have no common sense at all, but we can’t pretend they’re stupid – they know as well as you and I that P2P can be anonymised and encrypted, making it impossible for the ISP’s to detect the file sharing, never mind the content being shared.

Back in October, Hannah Nicklin wrote an open letter to Mandelson, setting out exactly why his law was an ass:

You seem to be so eager for the Royal Mail to modernise, I wonder why you don’t see it equally as important for the music industry to do so? … Three Strikes [a proposed account-blocking Bill already enacted in France] will not work. Because we will not allow it to. No one will.

Aside from the impossibility of monitoring and prosecuting all (let’s call non-profiteering sharers ‘domestic’) p2p filesharers, we will stop you from penalising any of them. If you begin to cut off people’s internet access, then everyone who can afford to do so will set up alternative unsecured wireless networks across the country.

If you aim to track torrent usage, we will proliferate details on how to obscure or re-route your IP address. If you shut down those sites, we will use private chat to discuss what we want, and private cloud storage systems, drop boxes, to share content.

We will rename files, disguise track identites with a couple of bytes worth data, break meta-data, and come up with new ways of encrypting our actions. The industry will not only lose out on ‘sales’ but valuable usage figures too.

You are attempting to solve a digital problem using analogue solutions. We are open source, we are anonymous, and we are everywhere. Don’t fight us, don’t push, help dying industries reform, and remarket themselves in a sustainable way.

When the Bill was first touted, the Stasi spooks warned it would lead to a rise in encryption, scuppering their own efforts to monitor the internet. As The Register explains,

as well as obscuring traffic to current analytical techniques, widespread encryption would also damage the case for the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), an ongoing multibillion-pound, cross-government attempt to increase surveillance of the internet. “The spooks hate it. They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult,” a source involved in drafting Lord Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill told The Times. While the paper speculates the source is referring to MI5 and MI6, it’s more likely that GCHQ, the other intelligence agency, is at the centre of the fears. It is responsible for electronic spying, sits at the heart of the IMP, and has long battled public use of cryptography. The agency’s National Technical Assistance Centre acts as a central resource for cracking scrambled communications and stored data, used by police, MI5, MI6 and SOCA. Its limited resources are likely behind GCHQ’s battle to against widespread take-up of encryption, and so fears over anti-filesharing legislation.

If more internet users were to use encrypted connection, it would at least in part blind the IMP. The Programme aims to intercept and [record] details of who contacts whom, when, where and how in transit inside ISP networks… Encryption would render third party communications services such Facebook effectively invisible.

GCHQ lost the first round of the Crypto Wars, and the Government was prevented from taking powers to regulate companies selling encryption services, but did manage instead to get an amendment to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) passed into law. Intended primarily to deal with terrorists (yes, that old chestnut), it allows police to demand encryption keys or provide a clear text transcript of encrypted text… Between April 2008 and March 2009 15 people were served with the “section 49 notices.” Of the 15 individuals served, 11 did not comply with the notices. Of the 11, seven were charged and two convicted, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.

Call me a tin-foil hatter, but I have seen this far too often now to ignore the perverse  joined-up thinking that this Government is capable of. These laws in conjunction allow the state to intercept all of your internet traffic and demand your encryption keys. Just as anti-terrorist legislation is used to outlaw dissent on the streets, copyright laws will be used to seek out and outlaw dissent on the tubes.

To be honest, I’m surprised that they didn’t just dress it up as an attempt to prevent the apparent millions of domestic paedophiles from swapping c***d pron, and ban p2p all together.

See also BoingBoing: “BREAKING: Leaked UK government plan to create “Pirate Finder General” with power to appoint militias, create laws” for a run down of how this Bill effectively grants Mandelson the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it is done in the “name” of protecting copyright…

UPDATE: What price privacy? Details of the first successful Section 49 prosecution.

Katha, l'embarcadère

Après deux jours de bateau, accostage à Katha. Sur le quai, deux Guesthouses, mêmes cellules basiques, mêmes tarifs (3000k).

Sur les quais de Katha, pagode et poteries

Katha. Arrivée du train en provenance de Naba

Des wagons vraiment très rustique, un banc double en bois, c'est tout

Katha. La vie sur les quais de l'Ayeyarwady

Katha. Coucher de soleil

Katha. Le ferry pour Mandalay