NETHERLANDS: VAN GOGH'S SON ASSAULTED

NETHERLANDS: VAN GOGH'S SON ASSAULTED:

"Brussels, 28 July (AKI) - The 14-year-old son of controversial film director Theo van Gogh, slain by an Islamic extremist last November, is said to have been threatened and assaulted by Moroccan teenagers in Amsterdam and insulted by his classmates. The allegations were made during an interview the boy's grandparents gave to the Dutch television channel Nova. Amsterdam police have not confirmed any threats or aggression against Lieuwe van Gogh."

EU has destroyed the Italian economy

read more on EU Referendum, and read the comments.

Microsoft back to it's old ways

Microsoft uses former exec as lawsuit springboard 'to stop' Google according to The Register

In a sign of just how anxious Microsoft is about the threat posed by Google in internet, corporate and desktop search, Bill Gates reportedly told Lee that chief executive Steve Ballmer has been looking for a reason to go after to Google. Lee's defection, to head-up Google's Chinese R&D facility, was clearly it.

"Steve is definitely going to sue you and Google over this," Gates said according to court filings reported in the The Seattle Times. "He has been looking for something just like this, someone at a VP level to go to Google. We need to do this to stop Google."

And it's not like this will be the first time that Microsoft will have used dirty tricks to stop a rival with better technology. Luckily this time the platform is not the desktop but the web, so Microsoft will find it harder to exploit their monopoly to stiffle competition. This doesn't mean that they aren't going to try, using their web browser monopoly rather than desktop operating system monopoly:

Users with search toolbars from Yahoo! and arch-rival Google have discovered that these vanish. Other third-party toolbars designed to block pop-ups or aid with form filling appear to be working normally, according to reports from Reg readers.

Tim Worstall: Travelling on the Dark Side.

Tim Worstall thought he’d go over and see what is being said by and about the environmental movement, and found a jem.

The poor are not those who have been ‘left behind’; they are the ones who have been robbed. The riches accumulated by Europe are based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without Africa’s slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have led to new riches for Europe or the US. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

So I guess that before the industrial revolution everybody in the world must have had exactly the same level of wealth. This being before us nasty Westerners stole it all it should have been equal to the average world GDP today (since obviously no wealth can be created, it must be taken from somebody else).

The current world GDP is $55.5 trillion (2004 est.). In 1750, the earliest date I could find for population estimates, the world had 1566 million people in it. So their logic each must have had an income of $35440.61 a rather good middle class salary. I wonder why all the archeolgists seem to find are small scale craftsmen and subsistance farming peasants? It must be the evil captialistic conspiracy going around the archelogical digs and replacing all the finds.

New Labour challenged

Tim Worstal and the BBC are covering the case of Brian Haw who has lead a continous protest against the Iraq War since June 2001. New Labour, in keeping with it's project of the destruction of all civil liberties, decided that the best way of dealing with a minor peaceful protest was to ban all expressions of political disenchantment in one mile of parliment. Unfortunantly they forgot to make the legislation retrospective, so Mr Haw's protest, having started in 2001, is should be outside of it's scope. This is what lawyers for Mr Haw will say argue anway.

This is classic New Labour. Mix an image problem with a threat to the nation, destroy civil liberties, massive over-reaction, and utter incompetence.

Peaktalk - VAN GOGH KILLER SENTENCED

Theo Van Gogh's killer is sentenced to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment with no option of parole. Bouyeri's obliged to pick up Van Gogh's funeral/cremation costs as well as paying damages (not a lot, a few thousand Euros only) to some bystanders who witnessed the killing and who were hit by bullets.

55000 Islamist fifth columnists

Guardian two-thirds of Muslims consider leaving UK:

The poll finds a huge rejection of violence by Muslims with nine in 10 believing it has no place in a political struggle. Nearly nine out of 10 said they should help the police tackle extremists in the Islamic communities in Britain.

Which is good and what was expected. However

5% said that more attacks would be justified.

which with the over 18 Muslim population (the people polled) of roughly 1.1 million that gives a fifth column of roughly 55000 that thought the London bombings where a good thing and more should be done. That is the same as a large town.

"One in five polled said Muslim communities had integrated with society too much already, while 40% said more was needed and a third said the level was about right."

Well that 20% of the Muslim population can go back to shitheapistan, or whatever Sharia infested dirt bowl takes their fancy, if they think that they would have a better life there. Nobody is stopping them.

The Times Online guest contributors Opinion

Via Tim Worstall I was directed to this piece by Jamie Whyte writing for The Times about the State micromanaging our lives, and the effects as more and more control is givern over to the Government:

"Redistributive policies naturally incline governments towards totalitarianism. When families provide the safety net, they also impose the discipline. When the State provides the safety net, families lose their incentive to discipline. Who, then, will do it? The State is the only candidate."

Which has led to our current state of affairs. The most authoritarian government to rule this country in hundreds of years:

"the policy trend is clear: an increasing micromanagement of the population in general and of children in particular. And, as its petty interventions fail, so the pressure for more drastic measures will build. On Wednesday Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, proposed a curfew on expelled pupils and a legal obligation for their parents to stay at home with them — in other words, house arrest."

Without trial. And the parents have had any power over their children destroyed, by state intervention, so when they are under house arrest they won't even be able to do anything to control the kids then.

EU tax to add to price of air tickets

EU tax could add to price of air tickets as the EU tries to become self financing so as not to have to ask the member states governments about giving it more money for its budget, which it has not been able to get signed off by it's auditors for a decade now. The excuse they use is climate change, despite the fact that aviation only accounts for 2-3 per cent of EU emissions. I've covered the EU's proposed taxes before,but like everything from the EU it just keeps on creeping away slowly heading towards the goal of a single nation state of Euroland.

New Labour ask for yet more tough new powers

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Police ask for tough new powers:

"They also want to make it a criminal offence for suspects to refuse to cooperate in giving the police full access to computer files by refusing to disclose their encryption keys."

They have already got this power in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which reversed the burden of proof so that if you couldn't hand over the keys then it was up to you to prove this. I guess with all of the draconian laws that New Labour spews out they may have forgotten about this one from back in 1999.

Whitehall officials confirmed that, as reported in yesterday's Guardian, the security and intelligence agencies want a new system of plea bargaining. Convicted terrorists would be given lighter sentences if they supplied information before their trials.

Again this already exists. A criminal can choose to give evidence, and judges will then use there judgement to reduce the sentence appropreately. Having fixed reductions known before hand is a bad idea as it could lead to the naming of innocent people simply so they can get up to their quota of names for a reduction. Also the US experience of plea bargining should be taken into account where it is considered the normal practice so anyone that has the gall to fight, because they are for example innocent, will find their sentence disproportionately high.

The most controversial of the police proposals is the demand to be able to hold without charge a terrorist suspect for three months instead of 14 days. An Acpo spokesman said the complexity and scale of counter-terrorist operations means the 14-day maximum is often insufficient.

Well we all know New Labour's attitude to Hadeas Corpus and the other ancient freedoms of British Culture.

Terror suspects to give compulsory answers to questions similar to obligations on company directors in fraud trials

And how will extract the answers should the suspect not be forthcoming? How will they know they are the correct answers, or will they just keep on going until they have finally extracted the answer they already decided was correct?

New Labour, tough on Liberty. Tough on the courses of Liberty.

EU still chugging along

Not diverted by the death of the Consititution EU is still chugging along, in the wrong direction. The Lisbon Agenda initiative to make the EU the fastest growing IT based economy in the world by 2010 is way is steadily disappearing to stern, and what do our EU masters do to recify this navigational error 'full steam ahead' of course.

MEMRI: what we are up against

During an interview aired July 11, 2005 by Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV, retired Lebanese general and public relations expert Dr. Hisham Jaber discussed "global Zionism" and its purported hand in 9/11 and the recent London bombings.

"I Believe the Events of 9/11 Were Not Planned, Prepared, Or Perpetrated by Al-Qaeda Alone"

even though they admitted it and even celebrated it.

"I have some doubts about the September [2001] events – and some articles and books share my opinion. I believe the events of 9/11 were not planned, prepared, or perpetrated by Al-Qaeda alone. Absolutely not. A force greater than Al-Qaeda was behind these events. Whenever an ordinary crime takes place, the question is 'who benefits?' – let alone when the crime is of such huge proportions. What happened in Britain, and why Britain, of all places?

well having a large number of Islamofacsits running around probably had something to do with it.

"The perpetrator [of these acts] believes that he carried out an operation in retaliation for the oppression afflicted upon the world's wretched people by Western policies, and especially by the U.S. and Britain. This is what he believes. In addition, I say that the actual perpetrator – the person who actually commits a suicide operation – is not a mercenary, but may have been tricked into it.

tricked into it by being brain washed in a Pakistani Madrassa, which 3 out of 4 are known to have attended perhaps? But I guess that the madrassas must be a 'zionist' front organisations as well.

"So who is the planner? The planner who is behind him is the one who benefits from what happens. We all know that after 9/11 the persecution of Muslims began in the U.S. and Europe, but later subsided, to a certain extent. For three or four years, we have been concerned – in the wake of these painful events – about the possibility of some sort of annihilation, or perhaps an unbalanced civil war

civil wars happen within states, so unless he considers the whole world to be a Islamic state (or perhaps just believes it should) it cannot be a civil war.

in Europe and the U.S. between Muslims and non-Muslims, or let's say, the Westerners.

But as for someone wanting to start a war between the west and th erest well he has actually got a point on that one. 9/11 was supposed to be an attack in a war between Islam and everyone. A war declared by Bin Laden.

"Zionism Has Forged The New Testament; 60 Million In The U.S. Alone Have Left Christianity To Become Believers In The Torah"

So the religion that has done most to persicute jews over the centuries is actually people duped by a Jewish conspiracy.

"It is global Zionism that stands to gain the most from this."

"Regardless of the logic of conspiracy, I would like to say something. We read history, and we know that since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,"

Oh come on. The Protocols where a nineteenth century forgery by Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian operative of Tsar Nicholas II. That they where a forgery has been known since the 1930's. Does he think people are that stupid?

"Zionism has forged the New Testament – and by now, 60 million in the U.S. alone have left Christianity to become believers in the Torah."

perhaps he should tell that to the evangelical Christians. Maybe the 'zionists' he was thinking about where a sect of heritical Jews around 60AD who where followers of the teachings of a dead holy many by the name of Jesus. Perhaps he is talking about that in Islam Jesus was a Prophet, did not die on the cross, and did not resurect. Which happens to be the core of Christianisty, but the Koran says differently so the Christians must be wrong about the meaning of their own faith.

"Global Zionism has tried to forge the Holy Koran, and has printed many copies of this forgery. It has been discovered that many extremist movements were backed by [global Zionism]."

Extremist groups like Hamas perhaps? Logic cannot get through to these people if they are not even willing to acknowlege reality and prefer to see everthing as a giant Jewish conspiracy. Morons.

Invation of the body snatchers

Some strange an powerful force, possibly called 'reality', appears to have taken over the body of Poly Toynbee as Polly Pot has started talking sense:

"apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion."

Not about poverty, deprivation, Islamophobia, or Britain simply not bowing down to the colonists every whim and impossing Sharia. This is not the Polly Pot that we all know, something has kidnapped her and replaced her with an almost identical clone.

Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason. Extreme superstition breeds extreme action. Those who believe they alone know the only way, truth and life will always feel justified in doing anything in its name. You would, wouldn't you, if you alone had the magic answer to everything? If religions teach that life after death is better then it is hardly surprising that some crazed followers will actually believe it.

Moderates of these faiths may be as gentle as the carefully homogenised Thought for the Day preachers. But other equally authentic voices of religion, the likes of Ian Paisley or Omar Bakri Muhammad, represent a virulent intolerance that is airbrushed out by an official intellectual conspiracy to pretend that religion is always or mainly beneficent. History suggests otherwise. So do events on the streets of London. Meanwhile the far left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around. (Never mind their new friends' views on women, gays and democracy.)

This is rather unsettling, I completely agree with every word. The problem of religious extremism is religion, the problem with Islamic extremism is extreme Islam. Our tolerant and broadly secular society is much better at many things than the various Sharia based societies of the world. That is why people come here. If they think they can lead a better life under Sharia then there are plenty of places to move to, we are stopping them. Polly might not got along with my previous statement but I certainly go along with her next one:

A third of all state schools are religious. The National Secular Society, a lone voice in monitoring their onward march, reports that Labour has let 40 more nonreligious state secondaries be taken over by the Church of England in the last four years, with another 54 about to go. The Office for the Schools Adjudicator said in a recent report that the only reason faith schools often achieve better results is because of "their practice of selection from churchgoing families". That attracts the pretend churchgoers, but selection, not religion, is the magic.

Yes, selection works. Parents will go to great lengths to get a chance at sending their children to a selective school, such as faking faith. Instead of demanding more faked faith why not give people what they really want, selective schools open to everybody that can pass the entrance exam. Rather than selective schools that are only open to the children of parents taht are religious, or can fake it. By opening the schools to everybody, and making them good (through selection) people from across community boundries will all want their kids in the same school. This will help to break down the barriers between communities and foster shared values, it might even start to erode the frontiers of the hermitically sealed Muslim colonies as the more sucsessful start to use schools that are not part of their colony simply because they are good. More religious schools will have the oppersite effect reinforcing the barriers that stop people from mixing at a very young age.

Islam kills

And before The guardian start preacing how 'Islam is a religion of peace' and all of these bombings are all the fault of non-muslims anyway. Presumably because we do not do things like this. I wonder if Dilpazier Aslam the Guardian's resident Islamofacist will be doing a peice on how we must all submit.

Tube cleared after minor blasts

Islamofacists hit again. No deaths, not even the rather shocked Islamofacist who's rucksack blew up. It caused a temporary 40 point fall in the FTSE.

Curfew zones ruled illegal by High Court

A story that I am really happy to hear has cropped up in the Times, one of the Tyrant Blairs liberty destorying schemes has been thrown out. This one is his idea that banning all children (the term collective punishment springs to mind) from being out after 9pm was a good idea. Thanks to the peaceful actions of a teenager challenging them in court the high court has disagreed.

In a statement after the ruling, "W" said: "Of course I have no problem with being stopped by the police if I’ve done something wrong. But they shouldn’t be allowed to treat me like a criminal just because I’m under 16."

Exactly, treat criminals like criminals and let the law abiding get on with their business unmolested. Perhaps if they spent a little more time on the criminals, rather than targeting the law abiding because they are easy targets, then they could get these problems under control without resorting to collective punishment of the law abiding.

UPDATE

The BBC is also running this story and says that because of the orders

Robbery was cut by 60%, actual bodily harm by 66% and theft from motor vehicles by 70%.

Which are oddly similar numbers to that decreased by

projects which involve young people in positive activities had led to a 65% cut in arrest rates

, in other words let kids do something positive and they won't be out making a nausence.

But here is a really radical proposal. Get policemen patroling the streets (perhaps we could call this a 'beat'?), we could let them more on people that they think are acting anti-socially (to use the buz word de jour) whilst acting as a visible reminder that the police is out there and will protect the law abiding (actually letting them protect the law abiding would also help). Yes I know that it involves the heritical ideas of letting professionals use their own judgement rather than acting like robots programmed in whitehall, and not erroding liberty. But it just might work. Like it did since the dawn of modern policing before the manderins got there hands on it.

But then again New Labour can't allow liberty to get away unchallenged can they. Tough on liberty, tough on the causes of liberty.

The fundamentals of law in this country...

Thanks to the Whinging pomme I have been directed to this telegraph article which attempts to set out the the fundamentals of values in Britain:

"First, we believe in the rule of law, meaning the successive judgments of the common law and the statutory declarations of Parliament. Those who wish to establish Sharia law in Britain are irreconcilables.

Second, we believe in the sovereignty of the Queen in Parliament. Political legitimacy flows upwards, from the will of the people and the traditions of the constitution, not downwards, from the interpretation of the will of God. Moreover, the state has a monopoly of coercion. The use of violence by other individuals or groups, in whatever cause, is illegitimate; those who espouse insurrection or jihad are irreconcilables.

Third, we believe that the nation is the ultimate object of political loyalty. Just as we resent the pretensions of the European Union to supersede the nation state, so we resist the idea that British citizens owe a greater allegiance to the global ambitions of a religious sect; those who say so are irreconcilables.

Fourth, we believe in a secular state, which allows the free expression of a plurality of religious beliefs. One of the most difficult aspects of this debate is the fact that many Muslims do not acknowledge the difference, or accept a separation, between the secular and the spiritual spheres. Mohammed, after all, was both a religious and a temporal leader, a prophet and a politician. This is a considerable stumbling block to the assimilation of Muslims in the West. Yet many devout Muslims manage it; those who wish Britain to be an Islamic theocracy are irreconcilables."

Even as a frothing-at-the-mouth liberal strangely I can agree with pretty well all of it. I have a slight issue with point one, I personally consider the laws of parliment to be codified social taboo, which is pretty well what they say when they state in point two "from the will of the people and the traditions of the constitution".

The problem with point one in my view is that laws, as static written expressions of social taboo, can become out of date as the social taboos change over time. This means that some, the ones that society at large has progressed from, are less binding than others so an absolute ridgid compliance with the letter of the law is not always obligitory, so long as you follow the spirit that the law was ment to codeify.

Other than that, fairly minor thing, this appears a very good expression of the core values of Britain.

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

here is a list of what the religous right of america thinks are the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Voted for by a (all male) pannel of 15 judges. Some I can agree with, The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and Quotations from Chairman Mao all inspired alot of death.

However at their number four spot just below these three is The Kinsey Report. a very dry but very accurate portrait of human sexuality. Apparantly he felt that the reports where written entirely to "give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy." rather than simply showing up the massive stupidity and hypocracy on the part of the makers of the sexuality laws whereby 95% of men would have commited some kind of offence under the 1940's laws. Number of deaths inspired 0, number of lives saved by it? Unknown, but probably very high.

At number 10 is the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes. Again a scientific tome this time about economics rather than biology. Apparently because this book contains theory about when it is sensible to run a deficit it is entirely to blame for the massive US deficit, rather than say Evangelical Republican president George Bush under whom the US deficit has ballooned like never before.

In between are a group of feninists, humanists and philosophers. Strangely not including Darwin. But just in case anybody thought they might have evolved a clue he is in the Honorable Mentions, twice, along with John Stuart Mill (for On Liberty), Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, and strangely Ralph Nader for a book about seat belts.

Why I Am Not A Christian

Bertrand Russell lecture Why I Am Not A Christian, a very good read including the following great quote:

"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. "

Julie Burchill of the times

Julie Burchill of the times has a good article about Islam and multiculturalism asking.Why should we tolerate these Islamofascists who hate us all? And why is it always the native Britians that take the blame for the inadiquacies of the Islamic immigrant populations. We bend over backwards to try and help them, but most of the time they do not recipricate.

This sort of Islamofascist hates multiculturalism. Just you try building a church in Saudi Arabia! They won’t even let our troops out there celebrate St Valentine’s Day. And as for any idea of the races being equal . . . it is the Muslim world that keeps slavery alive, and Muslim governments, as in Sudan, that see nothing whatsoever wrong with ethnic cleansing. Recently a Muslim columnist wrote sorrowfully of how in her culture a Muslim girl marrying a black man was the greatest shame that could fall upon a family. So much for equality under Islam.

"We, the host community, have accepted multiculturalism; the issue now is whether hardline — and I stress hardline — Muslims can do the same.

To my eyes at least, “live and let live” seems to be a concept they have a problem with; until they can grasp it, as the Sikhs and Hindus have (who have at least as strong and rich a culture, but feel no need to burn books, form parliaments, set up separatist schools and kill their fellow Britons to demonstrate this), the jury is still out on whether hardline Muslims can truly live happily in non-Muslim countries. And, after all, they have 56 — count ’em! — of their own to go to if they don’t like it. They are spoilt for choice."

Exactly, if they feel they are oppressed here then they can always leave. If they decide to live here then obviously there is something that is better about this country than the ones ruled by Sharia. And it isn't the weather.

NO2ID's Pledge success!

Thank you all - what a success!

When I started this pledge, I hoped we could show the government the
depth and strength of feeling against their draconian ID system, and
begin to build a fund to fight a series of legal battles against it.
YOU have now done this - and more quickly than I ever dared hope.

Some of you have already asked exactly how the pledge is going to work,
and now that we have reached the 10,000 mark I hope you'll bear with me
while I explain in a little more detail what we (NO2ID) intend to do:

1) We shan't be asking you for your £10 until or unless the government
manages to pass the Identity Cards Bill. It is by no means certain that
they will be able to do this - and you can help us NOW to stop them*.
Once you send your money in, it would be administratively prohibitive
for us to refund it so we only want to ask for it once we are
absolutely sure that we are going to need it.

2) All funds that you send will be held in trust, in a seperate bank
account administered by an independent third party (a couple of law
firms have already offered their services). NO2ID will not mix your
pledges with campaign funds, i.e. every penny you give will go towards
fighting the Act in the courts, and supporting those who are fighting
the necessary legal battles.

3) It is just possible that even if the government do pass this Bill,
they may drop the current ID scheme - leaving the legislation on the
statute books. In this case, we shall still need to get the Act
repealed (it contains some very dangerous powers, even if they remain
dormant for a time) and so the fund will be used to pursue that end.

4) Once we have won utterly (no Bill, no ID scheme, no law sitting on
the statute books) then any monies remaining in the fund will be
dispersed - depending on how much is left - by either donating it to an
appropriate charity (we'll hold a vote on which one, should this ever
become necessary) or drafting a Bill, the aim of which is to inhibit
any future government from imposing compulsory registration and ID
cards on the people of the UK.

HOWEVER, this pledge does not end just because we have reached 10,000.
We know that many tens of thousands more will refuse to register, and
we still want to reach them and have them sign up before the closing
date of October 9th, the day before Parliament sits again in the
Autumn. The more of us that there are by then, the harder we make it
for them to proceed.

We shall also shortly be launching another pledge - one that you may be
highly motivated to promote.

Raising £100,000 in a little over a month from people who will refuse
to register for an ID card is astounding, but now we want to raise
£1,000,000 from people who - for whatever reason - feel they CAN'T
refuse to register, but who will wholeheartedly support those of us who
do. I know from the comments and direct mails [*please* don't write
expecting an answer, I simply can't handle the volume of mail] that
there are many people like this out there already.

I'll be notifying you of the URL for the new pledge shortly - DON'T
SIGN IT YOURSELF, but see if your friends, family and colleagues will
now back YOU up in your fight for our freedom and privacy.

*Finally, I said that there is something that you can do to help us
now. Don't forget that we are fighting hard to defeat the Bill so that
your pledge may not even be called in. Many of you have said that you'd
happily give more than £10, some have already seperately donated and
joined NO2ID. If you haven't done so already, please:

1) Sign our petition at http://www.no2id-petition.net and get others
to, too.

2) Donate to NO2ID - via Paypal from the front page of our website
http://www.no2id.net or by post (cheques payable to 'NO2ID') sent to
NO2ID, Box 412, 78 Marylebone High St, London W1U 5AP.

3) If you're able to give £15 or more or set up a regular payment,
please do become a member - we hope it will be the shortest
subscription that you ever make! Forms and bank details are available
online at http://www.no2id.net/getInvolved/join.php or by post from the
above address. If you send an SAE it will save campaign funds for our
ongoing essential work in Parliament, the media and across the country.

Thank you for your patience with this long e-mail, and my heartfelt
thanks for your commitment to fight this thing. Together, I am sure we
shall win.

In solidarity,

Phil Booth
National Coordinator, NO2ID

The European Central Bank Haughty indifference, or masterly inactivity?

I am not an economist, but there is an interesting article in The Economist aboutThe European Central Bank. Apparently the very poor performance of the Eurozone is not because of the rates being to high, as :

A widely used test of the tightness of monetary policy is the Taylor rule, which calculates the “correct” interest rate according to the amount of spare capacity in the economy and the deviation of inflation from its desired target. What does it say about interest rates in the euro area? Calculations by David Mackie, of J.P. Morgan, show that virtually throughout the past six years, interest rates in the euro area have been lower than a Taylor rule would have prescribed

while they may have been wrong for the individual member states they where not overal too high, and they have been historically very low with

Real interest rates in the euro area have been negative or near zero for most of the past two years, their lowest for more than 25 years.

So the problem is not the interest rates. Nor is it the torrent of (over)regulation coming out of Brussels as the UK is also subject to that and has faired better despite implementing and enforcing more of them. So the only candidate left is the precious European Social Model.

Control, Control, Control we must have control

Politicalog is bloggin about Charles Clarkes attempts to finger print everybody in Europe, going to remind people that New Labour did not start destroying civil liberties as a reaction to 9/11, they have always been at it since they where elected. He points out the disgusting Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, New Labour's first attempt at reversing the burden of proof to make you guilty until proven innocent.

Politicalog also has the best animation I have seen in a while sitting in his side bar.

A post about ID and Charles Clarkes obsession with repression is rather fitting as this comes on the day that the No2ID pledge at Pledge Bank reaches completion. I just received this email

The pledge, created by Phil Booth, reads: 'I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10000 other people will also make this same pledge.' The 10001st person has signed the pledge, just moments ago.

Not that that should stop anyone else signing up now, as we will need all the help that we can get to over come the authoritarians of New Labour. I wait with cheque book out to send off my money to the defence fund. However I would rather have be able to pay cash.

Sonofusion

more reasons to be sceptical

sonofusion is back

Sonofusion, despite some high profile negative results before, Purdue findings support earlier nuclear fusion experiments.

Now the idea is that you get a beaker of liquid acetone where the hydrogen has been replaced by heavy hydrogen, then by playing a sound through it bubbles are created. As these bubbles collapse the gas inside gets very hot and dense, hot enough for the deuterium to fuse. This technique has the advantage that, like in a Fusor, all of the fusion fuel is moving towards the same point and will end up hitting in primarily head on collisions.

The weird thing is that they claim that this reaction is Deuterium-Deuterium, and yet needs to have lots of high energy neutrons pumped through it to make it work. Small problem, in no other type of reactor does Deuterium-Deuterium need lots of high energy neutrons, this is a unique requirement of this set up. Then when you realise that they claim that they are getting fusion because they are detecting neutrons being emitted things start to look dodgy. I'm sceptical.

perfect.co.uk is very angry

Thanks to Tim Worstall's Brit Blog Roundup I was able to descover a vast fount of anger in the form of perfect.co.uk on the disgusting treatment of an al-Qaeda mole who's cover was blown purely for political advantage to try and gain Bush a few extra points in his bid for reelection. An emotion echoed by Manic of Bloggerheads.

By leaking this story the mole's cover was blown and arrests had to be made before the police where ready, so some of the Terrorists got away. And then blew up suicide bombs in London killing 50 people. For a few minutes of good TV people died. I can see why he is angry.

the insane bravery Jonathan Calder

In an act of almost insane bravery Jonathan Calder of Liberal England takes on the national overreaction about paedophilia. Yes it is a very bad thing, but it is also a very rare thing. Is sealing all children in plastic cocoons to stop any possible interaction with adults for fear that they may encounter the exceptionally rare individual that finds them attractive sensible? And when we deny any organised things for them to do is it any surprise when they end up as teenagers very bored and unable to interact with the rest of society, the society that cut itself off from them in order to protect them from a phantom threat.

Democracy? Whats that? The EU continues as normal

From the dead tree edition of the Telegraph. An article By Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England, contains many interesting tip bits such as this list of things that where in the rejected EU Constitution but have been implemented anyway. I would advise you to read the whole thing but I have no link to the online version to give.

"

• The European Space Programme.
• The EU Criminal code.
• The European Defence Agency [which the EU Referendum blog dose a very good job of keeping tabs on].
• The common asylum policy.
• The mutual defence clause, which replicates NATO's Article Five [but in no way undermines NATO, at least according to B lair]
• The External Border Agency.
• The Fundamental Rights Agency (neé Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia [I guess they already have letters crawling through the eurocracy to this blog]).
• Autonomous politico-military command structures, the beginning of the EU's army.
• The European External Action Service (that is the EU diplomatic corps).
• The EU prosecuting magistracy.
• The Union Foreign Minister - that silky socialist Javier Solana.
• The Charter of Fundamental Rights.

"

As to the reasons why they think that they can get away with this the reasons that he states are telling

The more honest of them go on to explain that this is how the EU has always operated: first it extends its jurisdiction into a new area and then, often years later, it authorises its power-grab in a retrospective treaty

And the reason that they do this, the reason that they are willing to completely put aside democratic accountability?

The ruling ideology - peace in Europe through political integration - is thought to be too important to be left to the ballot box. If a plebiscite elicits the wrong response from the plebs, they must be suffering from what Marxists used to call 'false consciousness'. They misunderstand their true interests. They need better information, better education. And in the meantime, the project goes on.

So basically they believe their own myth. They have been caught up in their own propaganda repeating the same lies over and over until they cannot tell them from the truth.

What the Islamist really think

Just as the Muslim Council of Britain releases it's very pleasing statement condemning suicide bombings and telling Muslims to go to the police with any information they have it appears that the people that they are talking to aren't going to listen. In an interview aired on Al-Jazeera TV on July 8, 2005 the head of the Al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies, Hani Al-Siba'i. The whole thing is a bit of a culture shock, with blatant anti-semitism and views that would be considered extreme if they where uttered in mainstream british culture no matter who said them just breezily allowed to stand.

But it really warms up towards the end said the that not only Muslims shouldn't listen to them but that bombing civilians was justified:

Al-Siba'i: The term "civilians" does not exist in Islamic religious law. Dr. Karmi is sitting here, and I am sitting here, and I'm familiar with religious law. There is no such term as "civilians" in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not.

These institutes, like the Islamic Association (of Britain), represent white-collar people, the effendis, people with "prestige." They only represent their own interests and do not mix in society. They don't know... Ask other Muslims... People see them only on their TV screens. They don't participate in the demonstrations for the poor. they are not interested in people's problems. We invite them, and they don't show up.

the statement "They only represent their own interests and do not mix in society" is a bit rich coming from an Al-Qaeda apologist. Perhaps it is just a factor of the way that Islamic society in Britain has sealed itself within it's colonies that anyone that operates within native culture cannot be seen as operating within the society they recognise.

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns attacks

The Muslim Council of Britain has put out a statement about the London bombings. It condemns them in the strongest possible terms and tells all Muslims that they should cooperate with the police.

"We are firmly of the view that these killings had absolutely no sanction in Islam, nor is there any justification whatsoever in our noble religion for such evil actions. It is our understanding that those who carried out the bombings in London should in no sense be regarded as martyrs."
A good clear condemnation of the bombings that I applaud. You can't get clearer than that or ask for much more. I just wonder if they will remember this when the next suicide/homicide bomber blows himself up in Iraq or Israel.

"It is incumbent upon all of us, Muslims and non-Muslims – to help the authorities with any information that may lead to the planners of last week’s atrocity being brought to justice. The pursuit of justice for the victims of last week’s attacks is an obligation under the faith of Islam."
Nice to see this as well, the only way that the people that aided and abetted the bombers will ever be found is if the police can crack open the hermitically sealed colonies that the bombers came from. This statement is should be an invitation in from the colonists themselves.

Liberty and anti-Islamofascism

I am a believer in the virtue of freedom. I believe that the only way that people can be truly happy is if they are able to go out and do the things that make them happy, which means they must be able to make there own decisions, and maybe mistakes, without interference.

I also condemn Islamists. This may seem like a contradiction, and in a way it is, but the way that I reconcile theses views is simple. I understand that actions have consequences.

Where the Islamists ever to fully implement there policy it would destroy many freedoms for everyone, for ever.

The Sharia that they want to impose may have been quite liberal in the sixth century but in the context of modern life it is extremely constraining and destroys many freedoms that we now take for granted. In their view Sharia is law given by 'god', it over rules all human made laws and can never be revised as no human has the right to over rule 'god'. The freedoms that it destroys can never be restored should Sharia be implemented, nor any of the current freedom destroying rules that we live under, that Sharia agrees, be rescinded.

So by opposing the Islamists, and other freedom hating political creeds, I may not be maximising freedom at this instant but I am trying to maximise it across the whole of the future.

STOP PRESS, guardian writer speaks sense.

Stop the press, a Guardian editorial writer says that Islamist terrorism is not the fault of the west. He goes further:

Britain has done much to help integrate Muslims. Now they must rise above their grievance culture.

A truely the most shocking statement to be found in the Guardians comment pages, not only that the west is not the source of all evil, but Britian has bent over backwards to help the people that want to come here form part of our shared british culture.

According to an ICM poll in the Guardian last year, 13% of British Muslims thought the 9/11 attacks were justified, and according to other polls as many as 25% do not identify with Britain in any way.

So he even that some of the blame for rejecting integration must be leveled at the Muslims themselves! Surely this man is a monster and must be locked up!

First, the relatively poor socioeconomic position of most British Muslims has little to do with Islamophobia or racism and a great deal to do with the fact that nearly two-thirds of British Muslims come from Pakistan and Bangladesh, often from these countries' poor, rural areas. (Indian and Arab Muslims do better.) The starting point in terms of education, skills and traditional cultural attitudes is worse for most Muslims than it is for, say, the Hindu or Chinese minorities, both of which outperform white Britons.

Blasphemy! Surely he must know the Guardian line that all Muslim problems are caused by Islamophobia? That they are pure and innocent and good and peace loving and must never be challenged or they will put a sentence of death over you?

the crude "war against Islam" rhetoric of many British Muslims is just a feelgood rallying cry. How often do Muslim leaders point out that Tony Blair favoured ground-troop intervention on behalf of European Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo? And as the Muslim peer Kishwer Falkner points out: "When Muslims are pressed to say what should have been done with a Taliban-run, al-Qaida-embracing Afghanistan, one is met with silence."

Well they never point out that we protected the Kosovar Muslims, or that it was NATO that went in to protect the Bosnian Muslims from genocide when the UN failed. But this is only because everything the UN does is good and everything that NATO does is bad, therefore the protection of the Kosovars and Bosniacs did not happen and is just a vast conspiracy spun by News Corporation and Halliburton and what is the point of praising something that cannot possibly have happened?

the terrorist threat that Britain faces comes overwhelmingly from British or foreign Muslims; it does not come from Welsh hill farmers or US investment bankers. So it follows that most terror-related investigations will focus on Muslim communities. This isn't picking on Muslims; it is simply a fact of life.

Target the people that carried out the bombings! Racist! Racist! How can he suggest such a thing! No the only way of protecting us from Islamist terror is by targeting non-islamic Anglo-Saxons, the source of all evil.

OK on a slightly less sarcastic note we finally have some sense poking it's head into the pages of everybodies favourite lefty comic. It won't last, in fact it didn't last. Not even for one edition as to give some Guardian style 'balance' they also have Salma Yaqoob of Respect to trot out the guardian approved slogans of how it is all the fault of Iraq. But even he has had to admit that there has been no popular backlash against Muslims, and so had to go to the fall back position of saying that the backlash will come from the politician. Despite the fact that all public figures have been trying to appear nice to the Islamists

Moreover, as British Muslims we must brace ourselves for a backlash - coming not from ordinary people, but from the need of politicians to deflect attention from their own role in this tragedy.

At least going from the lie of there being widespread oppression of Muslims by British natives to the new lie that there is going to be widespread appression of Muslims by the political establishment is progress in narrowing the scope of this Islamic grievance culture.

Byers lied to Parliment

Tim Worstall has a link to an article in the telegraph where Byers admits tht he lied to Parliment over Railtrack:

"Looking uncomfortable, Mr Byers replied: 'It's true to say there was work going on. So, yes, that was untrue.'"

This is just about the worst thing that a politician can do, if he had any honour at all then he would resign. Of course he does not, this is New Labour, and so will not.

CAP Reform

Apprarently CAP is not going to be reformed, nor was it this governments intention of reforming it. It was merely a bargening chip to, temporarily, maintain the British rebate.

"What particularly upset these MEPs were Beckett's evasions – something to which British MPs are inured. Although repeatedly challenged to give some detail, her responses were 'insubstantial or misleading', whence at least five MEPs walked out. This apparently left a flustered Beckett, pleading for MEPs to remain in their seats.

What did emerge, of substance, however, was confirmation of that which we all knew – that Blair's rhetoric on reforming the CAP was completely empty. According to Bloomberg, Beckett revealed that: 'All people are talking about is the next financial perspective beginning in 2014.' In other words, nothing is going to happen until after the 2006-2013 budgetary period, and the current CAP settlement is locked into place until then."

EU Referendum then goes on to point out that tourism is a bigger part of the economy than farming, but relient on the landscapes that farming produces with the logical conclusion that we should if anything subsidise the production of attractive landscapes rather than subsidising rich land owners simply for existing.

Needless to say Chirac jumped on this like a hyenna onto a newly dead carcas

No sooner has Beckett admitted that there will be no changes to the CAP until 2014 then, right on cue, in weighs Jacques Chirac declaring that he is not willing to make any concessions on EU agricultural policy as part of discussions on the EU budget.

On this, he could not have been more unequivocal. Speaking yesterday in a television interview on the occasion of the Bastille Day national holiday, L'Escroc said: "I am not prepared to make the smallest concession" on CAP, adding that the EU had two problems to resolve: To fix the next budget and to emerge from the crisis brought about by the "no" votes in the EU referendums. He said he was defending the CAP "not only to defend the interests of French farmers."

Not a month ago, Blair was making his song and dance about reforming the CAP and then talking about abolishing it. Now, it is all over – the CAP will remain unchanged for the next nine years and probably for many more years thereafter.

The British rebate is however still in the debate and as we now have no amunition left to defend it is an almost certain to be scrapped meaning that our relationship with the EU becomes even more unfair.

Tony played a political blinder bringing the link between CAP and the impoverishment of the third world to the worlds attention on the back of Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaigne. Now this vegitable Beckett has undone all of that and probbaly considned us to putting £5 billion a year into the corruption filled pit that is the EU.

Tim Worstall: Blogcritics UK.

Tim Worstall is setting up Blogcritics UK. A blog site for people to review books mainly. I won't make any profits itself, trying to generate enough ad's and amazon sales to break even.

There is a, small, possibility of reviews getting bought by the mainstream press, but the main purpose reason for joining would be to write about books you like and get them for free. He is looking for reviewers, my writing isn't good enough for this but since I apparently get people viewing this site perhaps you would be interested.

A visit from our Lords and Masters

Just looking through the logs of the freebee hit counter at the bottom of this page and found one very interesting, it came from eu.int it appears that my humble ramblings have attracted some more attention than I thought possible.

Quite frankly I'm surprised that anybody read this, there are better writers out there.

So what else do I know about this visitor from our Lords and Masters? Well they use Windows 2000 and IE 6, have a 1024 x 768 monitor set to millions of colours,this person was originally 'looking for hsbc,paper entitled "european meltdown?"', so this post here, and actually stayed around, probably so appalled by my poor writing style, to view 4 pages almost a quarter of an hour.

Forces chiefs warn on prosecutions

The number of prosecutions and the fear of prosecution is harming the moral of the troops fighting in Iraq according to former leaders of the armed forces. This is exactly what the US feared would happen and the reason that it did not sign up to the International Criminal Court, we of course did because High Moral Tony could not resist a bit of grandstanding with the armed forces, so it is the troops on the ground who have to not only be looking out for suicide bombers but also looking over their shoulders for knives to the back from the attorney general or 'public interest' lawyers such as

Phil Shiner - who leads a group called Public Interest lawyers and has been acting in relation to the conduct of British troops in post-war Iraq - said the armed forces could not be trusted to administer their own system of justice.

"Everything that we know - and that the attorney general knows - shows us that the military are completely incapable of investigating and prosecuting themselves," he said.

.

Russia approves new space plans

Russia approves new space plans, including a mission to mars. I don't think that this will actually happen, like President Bush's plan to get NASA to go to mars this is just a PR exercise of a president doing the vision thing. Why do I think this, simple the cost $10.5 billion. The cheapest mission plan from NASA, the Mars Direct plan, requires at least $20 Billion. The Russians are good at space having inherited much from the Soviets, who comprehensively beat the USA in just about every category of human space exploration except getting to the Moon, but not even they will be able to haft the cost of this mission.

We can also tell a lot about the type of mission that they are planning by the amount of time that they say the people will be in space for, 500 days. Now unless the Russians have been developing some kind of new propulsion system for manned flights this means that they are going to have a particular type of flight where they leave when mars is as close to earth as it can get, travel for 180 days to reach Mars, stay on Mars for just 30 days, then travel back going deep into the inner solar system to get a boast from Venus before reaching earth after about 430 days. This doesn't leave much time for science on the surface, but if this is a PR mission then that doesn't matter as the point is to get some really expensive photos then head back.

EU economy

An article about the EU economy by EU Observer.

The paper argues that economic growth in the area will be half of its current level in two decades if the countries' governments fail to implement necessary reforms.

The such as the reforms set out in the, now dead, Lisbon agenda. But the kind of reforms that are needed would lead to more of the Anglo-Saxon economic model, fear of which was one of the reasons for the rejection by the French in the EU Constitution.

The EU's finance ministers approved a disciplinary action against Italy and Portugal at their meeting on Tuesday, and warned Germany and France that they will breach the 3 percent deficit limit set this year, with Germany heading for 3.7 percent in 2005 and 3.4 percent in 2006.

Insisting that the Growth and Stability pact was still in existance, when it is dead. Or at least it is dead for the major economies such as France and Germany that can break the rules with impunity, but not for smaller economies such as Portugal which apparently have to obey the rules even if the country that created this set of rules, Germany, doesn't.

The chancellor pointed out that the EU's economies have been failing to bring the unemployed back to work, as about half of the block's 20 million jobless have been redundant for more than a year.

He therefore suggested that both national and European spending should be focused on improving education, research, innovation and life-long training in order to make citizens better prepared to change jobs in case of restructuring in various spheres.

"Only if we invest in education, infrastructure and science will we be able to compete with other emerging global players other than on lower pay", he said.

Which is all true, but will the EU listen. Maybe if there is some juicy pork to be handed around.

The Rise of Open Source languages

Tim O'Reilly talks about trends in computer language book sales, which corespond well to the popularity of said languages, in cluding a graph.

Back to the graph, you can see that sales of books on C# have leveled off, while books on C/C++ have seen something of a resurgence along with Java. PHP book sales have also leveled off, while Python has continued to gain ground against Perl, and we're perhaps seeing the beginning of an uptick in Javascript book sales, driven no doubt by interest in AJAX.

the C# and .NET hype is beginning to wear off and poeple are seeing it for what it is, a minor improvement on Java without it's cross platform abilities. So C# levels off in interest to only Microsoft lovers, and .NET as a whole starts to sink. Perl also has started to sink, heading towards growing Python, but it has a long time to go yet. I don't mind Perl sinking in popularity the idea of More Than One Way To Do It strikes me as very inelegant and likely to lead to very ideocentric code that cannot be understood by anyone else.

Kilroy faces leadership challenge

Kilroy faces leadership challenge Ha Ha Ha Ha!

Village Hampden: Police State Expansion Proposals

The Village Hampden has picked up Charles Clarkes proposals to retain all email and telephone records and correctly says that while this will do thing to stop terrorism it could stiffle free speach.

Such snooping is unlikely to pick up any terrorists, but it might pay for itself by inducing a degree of self censorship of politically incorrect thought, so that something that you dare not send at work for fear of the PC horde, you will soon not dare send privately either for fear of the Government. There will also be a few messages picked up for prosecution under the religious hatred laws, and maybe the odd builder offering a discount to his customers for cash. No one will be safe.

His solution. "Encrypt everything". Small problem, you cannot encrypt anything. If you have anything that is encrypted on yur hard disk then you must give up the keys to the government on demand because of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Should you loose the keys then it is up to you to prove this. One of the Tyrant Blair's first attempts to make us all guilty until proven inocent.

Muslims want Qu’ran exempted from Religious Hatred Law

It appears that Muslim leaders have found that the Koran, like the Bible and Torah, contains passages the promote hatred of other religions. So they want the Qu’ran exempted from the proposed Religious Hatred Law.

The deference between Muslims and other immigrants

Dr Richard North of EU Referendum talks about the differences between growing up in a Jewish ghetto compared with living in a white enclave of a Muslim colony. Yes I use these words, ghetto and colony, deliberately and carefully.

The Jewish community, according to Dr North, while they lived together interacted with the outside community, employing and being employed by, trading and doing business. They lived symbiotically with the host community to both of their mutual advantage.

The Muslim community isolates itself refusing to interact with the host community in as much as it is able.

the Asians not only live together in their own areas, to a greater extent than before, they trade only with each other and exclude the indigenous populations. In the Asian areas, the shops are exclusively and aggressively Asian. The signs are in Urdu script – the labels and advertisements are likewise. And the goods are geared mainly to the Asian community.

Moreover, whole streets are like that. The banks are Asian, the cinemas are likewise, and the areas make no concessions at all to the host country. There are, effectively, huge if invisible signs saying "whites keep out". And if you do not get the message, there are other, more dangerous ways of learning."

also:

"Not only are these areas culturally and economically segregated, the writ of British (and European) law does not run. And it is not only the "high level" offences that are ignored – like the "honour killings", under-age marriages and even female genital mutilation (which are all illegal in this country) but also the administrative laws applying to businesses.

He then goes on to suggest that it is the high burden of regulation that would face any business trying to expand outside of the colony that prevents them from doing so, and the high burden of regulation of the native businesses outside the colony means that businesses inside have such a competitive advantage that they cannot get native companies cannot get in. A plausible explanation, but not one that explains why other immigrant communities that arrived at the same time have managed to integrate despite the same pressures and why it is exclusively the Muslim communities that have formed colonies.

Helen Szamuely, Dr North's co-editor, says that it could be that with these other immigrant communities there was an expectation that they would integrate.

it is important that people should feel that they are expected to become part of the country and its culture. With respect again to some of the commenters, that does not mean adopting every single British custom (and, at least one articel in, I think, The Business, some weeks ago pointed out that many of the second and third generation immigrants do adopt all the worst habits) but being expected to achieve things rather than be handed them. That may be the secret why the more recent Vietnamese immigrants are doing very well and why the older Jewish communities also did well. Nobody was going to make exceptions for them. If they wanted to keep their language and teach their children literature then they had to do it themselves.

But again, why would the natives make an exception especially for the Muslims as to whether we thought they should integrate? The answer to that is we didn't, but it was that the Jewish and Vietnamese communities also felt obliged to form part of our now common culture. The Muslims obviously have not felt this need.

Perhaps this is because of the teachings of Islam that the Ummah, the shared community of Islam, is more important than whatever society they happen to be living in. Possible this is part of Muslim culture because as at the time of the writing of the Koran the Prophet was leading a very successful expansion of the Islamist empire. So if you weren't part of an Islamist country then, well, you soon would be and so it is the natives that would soon have to integrate with your culture. In dealing with this situation of non-Muslims living in a Muslim culture the Koran is extremely generous for the time that it was written, forbidding pressuring people to convert and requiring respect for their beliefs, especially if they where 'people of the book' such as Christians and Jews.

It does not have much in the way of provisions for non-muslims being the dominate force, with no chance of that changing in the near future. This option was simply not thought of as when your winning just about every fight, as the Islamists were, there is not need. And the Islamists did have many victories for a very long time. It was only on 11 September 1683 at the battle of Vienna that the tide of Islamist dominance turned by which time the Koran and Sunna had already been set in stone.

Stumbling and Mumbling on the causes of terrorism

Stumbling and Mumbling disects the commonly trotted out causes of terrorism, that is that it is all the fault of the west, and then pulls out a blinder that it might be possible to use economics to model terrorists with hatred replacing the role of money. A fasinating idea:

Such a market requires people who have an incentive to supply hatred – that is, politicians who see it as a way of winning support. It requires “hate stories” to be minimally plausible – that there be a demand for them. This requires people to believe that the object of hate is attacking them; for that object to be segregated from them (so they learn about it from politicians rather than personal experience); and for people to have little incentive or ability to learn the truth. It also helps if suppliers of hatred offer services to its potential customers. These could take the form of a “meaning of life”, some career, or protection services, as the IRA offered.

How plausible is this model? I don’t know. But it offers more insights than glib one-liners.

EU Fingerprints database of all EU subjects

The EU wants to make sure that everybody has an ID Card with biometrics of their fingerprints. They ignore that ID Cards would have no effect on terroism, as Charle Clarke admited, and Japanese cryptographer Tsutomu Matsumoto, along with his students at the Yokohama National University, showed that they can be reliably fooled with a little ingenuity and $10 worth of household supplies but they want them anyway. $10 would not be a problem for Islamists funded by multi millionare Bin Laden, but they wouldn't need them anyway the 9/11 terrorists for example used their own real passports to get on the aeroplanes they used. Could this be another case of Clarke using the EU to bypass our democratically elected parliment and pass new laws by decree? This has happened before rather recently on a measure much less controversial than ID Cards.

By invoking this mechanism[a council of ministers desision], Clarke can come back to the UK with his new "EU law" and ask for it to be ratified by Parliament on the basis of a single vote, with no scope for amendment, which he will get "on the nod" with the government's in-built majority. He can then implement it at will in the UK.

The central point, of course, is that if Clarke went through the normal legislative system, he would have to resort to an Act of Parliament, which would have to go through all the stages of Readings and Committees, in both Houses. Given its contentious nature, it would take a great deal of Parliamentary time, with no guarantee of success.

So they can get their database, that would have come from the UK ID Card, holding the biometrics and other data on all UK citizens (which was the scary bit of hteID Card system anyway), and they also get every other citizen of the EU as well! Nice free gift that for an authoritarian bastard like Clarke.

If you read nothing else today read Charles Moore

According to a New Statesman article by Jamie Campbell, highlighted via a comment on Samizdata, there is a reason that Islamist terrorists and terrorist recruiting sargents like Abu Hamza are tolerated in this country, it makes us less of a target. Apparently radical Islam understands that a good parasite does not kill its host, so as long as the host country does not interfere with it's attempts to subjugate the rest of the world under Sharia it itself will not be attacked. And the subjugation of the world in an Islamic state is the goal of the Islamists, Islam has always had an expantionary political dimension. The prophet was not just a religious leader but a political leader that forged an empire. This has been toned down in modern moderate Muslim thought, but it is the cornerstone of Islamist thinking and does crop up even in the more moderate elements as Charles Moore of the Telegraph shows

As I write, I have beside me an article that appeared during our recent election campaign in Muslim Weekly. By Sheikh Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi, it calls for the replacement of British parliamentary democracy with "a new civilisation based on the worship of Allah", attacks the Conservatives for being "in the hands of an illegal Jewish immigrant from Romania" and speaks of the "near-demented judaic banking elite".

These views are expressed by an educated Muslim in a Muslim publication. Are these Muslim views, non-Muslim views, anti-Muslim views?

Now that our special protection as a safe harbour has ended perhaps we can stop acting as a safe harbour. Islamists will not be satisfied until they control the world, they want to destroy our way of life. So perhaps instead of action against the almost nonexistant religous hatred perhaps it is time to stand up against the religous leaders that preach hatred and start deporting rabble rousing fifth columnists like Hamza back to a state that implements the Sharia law that they loves so much.

An Islamic Opus Dei?

An interesting essay on Tech Central Station creating an alternative to the Wahabi sect and Muslim Brotherhood, to reduce the extremists recruitment and channel them into actions that might actually help the Muslim world. His tool, the Sufi and Shia sects of Islam and a healthy dose of capitalism:

While the vision of modernization through traditional Islam may seem counter-intuitive to many Westerners, transformation of the Muslim world by spiritual revitalization has already been a principle visible, if little understood, in the liberation of Iraq. In the 1950s, Shia theologians defined their interpretation of Islam explicitly as a struggle between "terrorist" usurpers and proponents of "religious democracy" represented by the Shia martyr Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. With the Bush-led handover to the sect of the Shia holy sites, Karbala and Najaf, a regime is emerging in Baghdad that seeks to harmonize religious devotion and governance without transgressing pluralism and popular sovereignty. To impel the new Iraq into artificially imposed and extreme secularism would vitiate the first achievement of the liberation strategy in the Muslim world.

One might argue that Islam already has its Opus Dei in the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, which is powerful in many Arab countries, especially Egypt. But the Muslim Brotherhood remains committed to conceptions that are radical, not conservative; these include violent hatred of the West and non-Muslims; takfir or excommunication from Islam of those who do not share the Brotherhood's ideology; and the goal of exclusive governance by religious law. Opus Dei propounds no such extreme notions: it accepts the need for peace and order in existing political systems, it does not preach against those outside its ranks, and it does not embrace theocratic politics. But above all, the dedication of Opus Dei to a healthy Catholic criterion in commercial affairs offers a new model for Muslims, absent in the Sufi tradition and enormously beneficial for the progress of the Islamic countries. For too long, the Muslim world seems to have forgotten that the Prophet Muhammad was a caravan merchant, and the traditional Islamic axiom, "Allah loves the merchant."

London bombers came from Leeds

According to the BBCthe Islamofascist terrorists that Bombed the London underground came from Leeds, next door to the Islamic colonies in Bradford. Not that you would realise this from the BBC's coverage. I understand that the reason that they are doing this is to try and stop people from realising that they where Islamofascists as it could provoke attacks on Muslims. An honourable goal, but completely unattainable.

Everybody already knows that the London bombings where committed by Islamofascists, and everybody also knows that the vast majority of Muslims are not Islamofascists and want nothing to do with them. If anything this blanket ban lumps Muslims and Islamofascists together as if they where somehow equivalent. By studiously avoiding any mention of the reasons behind the bombings all the BBC is doing is stiffling debate about what to do with this nasty Islamofascist minority, and so creating a space where the debate happens on the terms of filth like the BNP as they are the only ones that admit that it exists.

Andrew Sullivan

Andrew makes a point similar to David Aaronovich, you cannot negociate with fanatics.

What we're learning, especially from the home-grown bombings in London, is that our fundamental enemy is a medievalist theological fascism, buried in the recesses of a legitimate religious faith. It would be nice if we could talk these people out of it, or hand them concessions to buy them off, or hug them till they saw the joys of the New Age. Until then, we have to bring them to justice - on the battlefield or court-room.

David Aaronovitch

David Aaronovitch of The Times on why appeasement won't work. Islamists won't stop until we are all dead, they can't as they are on a mission from 'god'. Ignoring them won't make them go away.

"What does all this tell us? First, that if they aren’t blowing us up, then they’ll be blowing up someone else. And you don’t get to choose who. Secondly, who or what they blow up is largely a matter of what’s available. Jews anywhere, Americans after that, Shia next and Brits probably a distant fourth. Africans for fun."

Ditching euro 'could benefit Italy' HSBC

From EU-Serf Telegraph is running an article on HSBC's analysis of the Euro, in short they are in deep:

"In a new paper entitled 'European meltdown?', the world's second biggest bank said Italy, Germany, and Holland had all been damaged by the perverse effect of the one-size-fits-all interest rate policy, and might be tempted to leave.

It said the euro had pushed Germany to the brink of deflationary spiral, while causing a 'dramatic boom and bust' in Holland. At the same time, Italy was now trapped in slump with a 'truly appalling export performance' and exorbitant unit labour costs."

Before the introduction of the Euro all the Pro-EU people said that we had to join, that if we didn't our economy would be destroyed and we would be left behind as teh Eurozone roared ahead of us. Well it hasn't happened, what actually happened was exactly as the Eurosceptics said, a one-size-fits-all interest rate does not work and this will mess up teh economies of the countries that enter.

EU to try and Squash Internet TV, it will fail

EU wants to Squash Internet TV, it will fail. It has been said before and will be said again. TCP/IP tries to route around censorship, it sees it as damage. Now this is not to say that things like the Great Firewall of China, just hard, and almost inevitably bypassed with a some effort and money. Then when you consider how much money is being made on the net by things that are very much against 'taste and decency' the chances of this working are very slim.

Here is an example of how to get all of your indecent films from the net, using existing technologies. First the distribution method, trackerless BitTorrent, it requires no central server so there is nowhere for the police to raid once the initial segments are online. It also shares the server load between everybody downloading so can work without anyone, including the producers, needing a major supply of bandwidth.

Now payment. Again simple, encrypt it and charge for the decryption keys exactly as all current pay per view TV is done. Have short clips unencrypted, as tasters, and everything digitally signed so that you know the people putting out the tasters are the same as the people putting out the big versions. The market will deal with cheats as it does at the moment.

Liberty and discipline

Infinitives Unsplit has a nice post on the necesity of Liberty and self-discipline in society: People follow conventions of society, the written and unwritten rules we live by, because of 4 rules

"# Your own advantage;
# Consideration for others;
# Confidence in others:
# Fear of punishment"

So the problems of the oft stated break down in society over the last 50 years may be less to do with the great increase in Liberty, as most of the people that perceive there to have been a decay in society, but rather the lack of a coresponding growth in personal self discipline. Probably due to the nanny state absolving any need for self discipline by attempting to do everything for everybody.

Not in my name

I opposed the war in Iraq. Not because it didn't have permission from the irrelivant talking shop that is the UN. Certainly not because I thought that Saddam was couragous or indefatigable, or even remotly fit to rule Iraq. I simply felt the resources would be best spent in Afganistan getting Bin Laden. Saddam was a monster, but he was caged. He could not threaten anyone outside his borders, a situation that had held for 10 years. He needed to be removed, but he could wait. Bin Laden on the other hand could, and would, fund Islamist terrorism from anywhere on the planet that he could get a phone line to his various bank accounts.

But by not supporting the war does not mean that I in any way support the so called leaders of the anti-war movement, such as the odious George Galloway, in their rush to blame Islamist terrorism on the west. Islamist terrorism comes not from western actions but from the Wahabi sect of Islam, and began along time before Iraq or even 9/11. Muslims are not mere puppets driven in mindless reaction to the actions of the west. They have there own reasons for doing what they do, a point that has been taken up by the Guradian (but probably not for long):

"But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors.

Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC.

Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows."

He then goes on to dismantle the standard supporting bush is the reason for the attacks argument that was wheeled out to explain the London bombings by pointing to the reasons Bin Laden gave for the Bali bombings. The left said it was because of the Australian support of Bush, Bin Laden said it was because of the Australian support of the East Timorese to get rid of the, Islamic, Indonesian government that had been massacring them for decades. This did not fit with the standard 'the west is bad' world view so Bin Laden's words where forgotten.

EU Taxes return

EU Referendum has a post on the EU's proposals to tax financial transactions, this was one of the options explored by a working paper that I blogged a while ago.

According to the working paper a Tax on financial transactions did not forfill their criteria for Sufficiency or Stability. So by there calculations it will not provide enough money for what they want the EU to do. Wheither this is because it will cause a lot of financial activity to move to elsewhere is not specified.

Another thing that the working paper pointed out was that a Tax on financial transactions has a very low visibility to the general public. The working paper considered this to be a bad thing. But perhaps in the light of the recent referendum defeats this lack of visibility has changed into a good thing.

However one thing is certain, if they get this tax they will be after more, and preferably an EU personal income tax.

EU Referendum

Luxembourg backs the EU constitution, but not in a big way only getting 55% of the vote. In a country where 40% of the population is dependent of the EU for employment, has been subject to (the usual) barrage of pro-EU propaganda, and voting is compulsory this is not a ringing endorsement. Only 25% of the people that are not in the pay of the EU voted for it. They should have been able to get at least 70%. Not that this would have made a difference had the vote been 0%, the consititution will be implememented, then ratified post facto.

UK biometric ID card morphs into 'passport lite'

UK biometric ID card morphs into 'passport lite', an internal passport perhaps:

"If the US is going to read UK ID cards, it's mainly going to want to read them at border control, right? The information on UK ID cards is going to be essentially the same as on UK biometric passports, with the initial variation that the first generation of biometric passports will not include fingerprint. Therefore, the ID card will be more likely to provide the US immigration authorities with the data it wants than the earlier biometric passports. So the US ought to prefer an ID card over a passport.This points us towards a logical conclusion. The US-G8-EU vision of the biometric future is of a world where machine-read biometrics ID everybody. This requires, obviously, that everybody's readers read everybody's cards, plus a level of compatibility between different countries' cards, and a level of data interchange between countries. Now, if in that world everybody has interoperable ID cards and everybody has readers that will read them, what's a passport for? It's only there because it's currently the only single international standard for travel (which could change in the longer term), and in the UK, in order to provide a fictional* justification for charging people shedloads of money.Fortunately the brave new biometric world will never go fully live, and stands a pretty good chance of crashing and burning before doing so as far as the EU and US are concerned. Nor does it seem absolutely certain that the UK ID Cards Bill will even make it onto the statute book, never mind actually work/ship. Nevertheless, the total demise of the UK scheme would not of itself turn the clock back. Take the ID scheme out of the equation and we still have the US, the EU and the G8 committed to widespread use of biometric ID. In the EU we will still have a biometric visa system (with accompanying database and data exchange), biometric ID cards for resident non-EU nationals, and the intent to produce an EU standard for biometric ID cards. Tony Blair regards biometric ID as inevitable, and he should know, given that he's one of the ones who'll make it so, if they're not stopped. �"

Body Scanners for the London Underground

Perv-O-Vision comes to the Underground. So next time somebody looks at with lustily they will not be undressing you with their eyes, but a million pound millimeter radar machine. Well it is slightly less invasive, considerably less troublesome, and much more useful than an ID Card.

Clarke admits ID cards 'wouldn't stop attacks'

Charles Clarke admits that ID cards 'wouldn't stop attacks', but he is going to force them on us anyway. Ignoring the large number of extra police that could be employed with that money, and would make a difference to stopping terrorism, he just doesn't get it.

Al Qaeda fears our way of life and all it's freedoms. They fear how attractive it is to people living under the heel of Sharia. This is what it wants to destroy, the beacon of enlightenment so attractive to the people forced to live medieval life that Al Qaeda somehow considers to be the only properly Islamic way of living. They want us to give up our freedom and snuff out the light showing that a better life is possible.

If we give up our freedoms they win. If we do not, if we pick ourselves up and continue as before, we win. Which side are you on Mr Clarke?

So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?

Showing that the EU is not the only organisation that is rather lax when it comes to auditing the whereabouts of other peoples money that it is using the coalition provisional authority cannot account for $8.8 billion, oops.

Galloway praises mass murderers ... again

I knew it wouldn't take long for someone to start blaming Britain for the murdering Islamist thugs outrage in London. Nor is the person much of a surprise when I heard it on PM as I drove home from work, George Galloway. Well Galloway has plenty of experience standing up for the oppressive.

UPDATE

George Galloway, champion for the oppressive everywhere, has these words on the bombings

"We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.
We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East."

The Socialist Workers Party, the fascist organisation that Galloway's Respect Party acts as a front for, have this statement on the bombings

"The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best way to ensure that there are no more such terrible attacks is for British troops to be withdrawn from there immediately."

Another disgusting appeaser is Gilad Atzmon, who says that the message of the bombing is that we must bow down and cower before the moral superiority of the terrorists

Whether we like it or not, we must admit that Terror is a message and we better learn to listen to it attentively

, wanker.

The best rebuttal that I have found to the terrorists and the type of invertebrates that preach appeasement is from The London News Review:

we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.
So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

The Corner on National Review Online

In a massive display of turning his blog into an even greater taste free zone than my own humble offering The Corner on National Review Online is asking if the G8 protestors will have a protest against Islamic terror as well. Of course they won't, and will probably be lining up to say how this is all our own fault for not doing everything that the Islamists want. But he could have at least waited until the bodies cooled down a bit rather than almost as soon as the bombs went off.

Europhobia: London tube explosions

One of Europhobia's comments contain the text of Al Qaeda claiming responcibility: "Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of Qaeda't al-Jihad in Europe

In the name of God the most merciful...

Rejoice the nation of Islam, rejoice nation of Arabs, the time of revenge has come for the crusaders' Zionist British government.

As retaliation for the massacres which the British commit in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mujahideen have successfully done it this time in London.

And this is Britain now burning from fear and panic from the north to the south, from the east to the west.

We have warned the brutish governments and British nation many times.

And here we are, we have done what we have promised. We have done a military operation after heavy work and planning, which the mujahideen have done, and it has taken a long time to ensure the success of this operation.

And we still warn the government of Denmark and Italy, all the crusader governments, that they will have the same punishment if they do not pull their forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So beware.

Thursday 7/7/2005
Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of al Qaeda't al-Jihad in Europe."

London tube explosions

most blogs are covering Islamofascism's attack on London Europhobia and Tim Worstall are live blogging.

Several injured in London blasts

IT's finally happened Several injured in London blasts, multiple co-ordianted attacks designed to generate the maximum media attention. This was Al Qaida.

UPDATE

I don't think that this can be the work of any other than the Islamists. It has to be a network as a lone nutter cannot set off multiple co-ordinated attacks.

It is unlikely to be the IRA, they go for size rather than spread. The IRA is also getting alot of what it wants at the moment through the balot box having just become the main Nationalist party in Northern Ireland, they are not going to give that up when they are unlikely to gain anything from it.

It is unlikely to be anti-capitalists, they have no track record at all of using bombing as a tactic prefering to use people power instead. The targets where around the City of London area, but none where the kind of financial centers that you would expect should a splinter of anti-capitalists decide to up the ante to bombing.

It is unlikely to be Animal Rights activists, and while they have no problem what so ever with hurting people again the targets are wrong. These where all transport targets which have nothing to do with animal experimentation, or even finanical targets that might fund animal experimentation.

The last actual terrorist attack in the UK was against Gays, but it unlikely that this is the work of rabid homophobe terrorists, the targets are simply not gay enough.

There is only one active group that likes to kill simply for the fear that it induces rather than to make a political point, that is the Islamists.
It is unlikely to

I like the Olympics

Some people arn't happy that London got the 2012 Olympic Games. Well I am, and not just because I don't, and have no intention of ever, live in London. Yes you could do a lot of better things for the £3 billion that it will probably cost, but in the world of expensive boongoggles it is not exactly the worst at the moment. Compared to ID Cards it is possitively cheap. Based on the LSE's medium estimate of about £14billion you could buy 4 Olympic Games (say London, Glasgow, Cardif, and Exeter?) and still have change left over. At least with the Olympics there will be some good things left over from it, not something that you can say about ID Cards.

The EU Army

The Eu Referendum blog has found documents on the coming Single European Army, as the EU continues its slow crawl towards the ultimate goal of becoming a nation state. It already has peace keeping forces and police training:

1. The EU force deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina within the framework of the ALTHEA military operation.
2. During the first half of 2005, the EU Police Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM).
3. The EUPOL PROXIMA operation in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia.
4. The EUJUST THEMIS mission in Georgia.
5. The EUPOL Kinshasa – the first civilian crisis management mission in Africa, officially launched on 12 April 2005.
6. The EU mission to provide advice and assistance for security sector reform in the DR Congo, known as EUSEC, contributing to integration of the army in the DRC.
7. The Integrated Rule of Law mission for Iraq, EUJUST LEX.
8. Support for the African Union mission in Sudan (AMIS).
9. An EU support office for the Palestinian Police (EU COPPS).
10. EU support for the Georgian authorities in the follow-up to the OSCE border monitoring mission, with an EUSR office in Tbilisi.
11. Support for the Crisis Management Initiative in relation to the peace process in Aceh.
12. Preparations for responding to the African Union request for a putative African Union mission in Somalia.

in the document

Much is then made of the European Defence Agency (EDA), which has started work on four flagship projects in its four areas of operation: C3 (command, control and communications) in the area of capabilities; combat armoured vehicles in the armaments area; the European defence equipment market, in liaison with the European Commission, for the area of industry and the market; and drones for the research and technology area.

The legislation authorising all of this was in the, now dead, constitution. But when has the EU let legality get in the way of integration? It will simply be done and presented when finished to a population that says "But we justed wanted a free trade area, but it's there now so might as well keep it." This is not a peace keeping force, it is for war fighting (I thought war was one of the things that teh EU was supposed to have put an end to)

Together with a forward action plan for the UK presidency, and much more, this whole report forms a template for a comprehensive "war fighting" capability. This is no mere peacekeeping force – the Euro-Army cometh.

But who are they to fight war against. Since the EU defines itself in a similar way to the French TV standard SECAM, System Essentially Contrary to the AMericans, that is a scary thought. However considering the current lack of sucess in exercising their 'soft power' I can see why the Eurocrats would want to get their hands on some real power.