Fight against terror 'spells end of privacy'

I guess that's that then.

"Privacy rights of innocent people will have to be sacrificed to give the security services access to a sweeping range of personal data, one of the architects of the government's national security strategy has warned.

Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, sets out a blueprint for the way the state will mine data - including travel information, phone records and emails - held by public and private bodies and admits: "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.

His paper provides the most candid assessment yet of the scale of Whitehall's ambitions for a state database to track terrrorist groups. It argues that while the measures are essential, public trust will be maintained only if such intrusive surveillance is carried out within a strong framework of morality and human rights" (Guardian)

As we said before, it's like a child. In this case a child that wants to do something but is embarrassed or shy to do it, it keeps getting closer to what it wants to do, then runs away again and if asked by an adult the child would say 'no I don't want to do that thing' when it's transparently obvious to any adults in the room that is what the child is trying to do.

And this has been the way of the Labour regime in trying to create a new social order, a new police state and to send the world backwards in time.

Now, like the small child as it's closer to its goal of a truly a truly radical pleb grid it's getting so emboldened it can just declare what it wants to do off the back of its previous efforts and the mess itself it has pooped out all over the place even though it said at every stage it wasn't trying to do it.

And we've seen this across the board with all of this menu of state terror that Labour have sought to deploy from ID cards, to the traffic spying grid, to this mass communications database it now desires and on and on and on.

I should say this is not strictly the Guardian's take on this. The Guardian's view is that David Omand, who they describe as a 'key architect of the national security strategy as it is now" is demonstrating 'great honesty' in telling us what Whitehall want to do.

The only problem with that is the police and security services have always had provisions to snoop and gather information where necessary in cases of serious crimes.

In the end of course it's not a question of the endlessly-repeated mantra about "maintaining security". If a civil servant like Omand were actually interested in that then he would have done well to take the advice of his colleagues in their own now infamous and rather obvious (yet feebly obvious warnings) about the invasion of Iraq.

Furthermore there is progressively becoming very little at all to 'secure' in the UK, it now represents such a damaged waste land. I think the real question is what is Britain, what are you protecting ?

Omand says, "This is a hard choice, and goes against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society - but it is greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of law, or derogating from fundamental human rights."

But that's not quite correct is it. Firstly it's not a 'choice' between liberty and security that's a false choice, secondly these spying and surveillance grids are the total undermining of the rule of the law by their very nature and presence, that's the whole point.

But what's even worse and actually breathtaking in its egregiousness is this notion, shared by the likes of Omand and elected politicians in the Labour government itself, of 'inevitable progression' and that this is something people will eventually 'understand as necessary' and just 'need to get used to', and then 'everything will be alright'. All of which accompanies the notion that it's simply a matter of the technology existing that decides if it should be deployed.

I don't think you could construct a more ridiculous, insane and dangerous error if you wanted to.

And if that's the case terrorism remains firmly a necessary tool of deception and staggering self-deception.

Sir David Omand, who according to the Evening Standard, was "among those to decide that [Dr Kelly] should be pursued for talking to the media about the Government's dossier on Iraq's alleged WMD" should be truly ashamed.

He has no business writing reports like this. He should instead be grovelling on his knees, begging for forgiveness for being the supine ridiculous wretch he is and that he has been a factor in taking things as far as they have already.

Omand needs to explain his macabre interest in creating a police state under a radical regime, and stop wasting everybody's time in trying to rationalise it. Instead the fact that Omand and those supporting him have produced this document shows how dangerously out of step with reality they are.

Perhaps the best way of summing this up though is in the editorial that goes along with this in today's Guardian, which is jokingly self-conscious about this itself and starts with the now all too familiar sentence we've all seen many many times:

"Britain is not a police state, but.."

Surely that says it all.

Bishop Williamson returns to UK

Isn't it amazing ? I didn't follow up on this at the time and perhaps I should have, breathtaking really.

You can get someone kicked out of a country because they don't believe in the Holocaust.

Guardian: "A Roman Catholic bishop who questioned the truth of the Holocaust arrived in Britain today after being asked to leave Argentina.

Richard Williamson, who left Buenos Aires wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses yesterday, arrived at Heathrow airport dressed all in black and wearing a dog collar. Several police officers escorted him through a media scrum, and a photographer was manhandled by police during the jostling. The British-born bishop did not comment and was whisked away in a silver Land Rover.

Williamson had been at the St Pius X seminary in Buenos Aires for five years, but last week the Argentinian government gave him 10 days to leave the country."

"Argentinian government gave him 10 days to leave the country".

Whatever next.

David Cameron

Our prayers go out to David Cameron's family today at the loss of his young son.

Amnesty calls on US to suspend arms sales to Israel

"Detailed evidence has emerged of Israel's extensive use of US-made weaponry during its war in Gaza last month, including white phosphorus artillery shells, 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles.

In a report released today, Amnesty International listed the weapons used and called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups. It called on the US president, Barack Obama, to suspend military aid to Israel" Guardian

Labour planning 'class' laws

Another item from the Daily Mail:

So basically here, you have some internal war of Labour witches fighting for the magic cauldron that can easiest deploy misery on everyone else. It's quite a funny read, but I didn't realise this until I read the article:

"Last month, she [Harman] unveiled plans for a so-called ‘class law’ in which public bodies would have a legal duty to take account of people’s social class in the same way they have to consider race and gender"

I had to go back and read about this. This is just extraordinary. In fact I made a joke about this somehwhere once, and everyone understood it as a joke, and they are actually trying to make it a policy.

There comes a time when the government just stops being a government and starts going very very wrong. It started going serisouly wrong in the UK on May 1st 1997 and has been getting more and more and more extreme as time has gone on.

I hate to play the conspiracy card, from some of the things we saw last year with Blair attacking Brown, with Lord Levy attacking Brown, with Mandelson being parachuted back into the mechanics of government who Brown notoriously hated as Mandelson supported Blair over Brown for leadership early on, I seriously doubt Gordon Brown is operating in any kind of real capacity of leader at all.

And again, over the last year and currently portrayed in this article in the Mail, we've been all too aware of this jostling for power behind Brown; at least according to the press, although I accept they could be misleading us.

Certainly one gets the impression that policy is being formed somewhere else.

In the end you're getting serious dollops of radical Bolshevism masquerading as modern 'caring' 'responsible' government and seeing how far that can be pushed.

Ask yourself what is there to fear so much from a country being itself ? And where does this non-stop impetus for extreme social policy mixed with the machinery of the police state come from ?

And I don't think the answer to that is with a ridiculous crank like Harriet Harman.

Labour government trying to make CCTV mandatory

Apologies for the lapse here. I'm just gonna pick a few things from the Mail yesterday.

And we'll start with this.

"Big Brother CCTV cameras are to be fitted inside shops and supermarkets on the orders of the state to keep track on anybody buying alcohol. A law is being quietly pushed through Parliament giving councils the power to order licensed premises to fit the surveillance cameras. Pubs will also be covered.

The footage of people innocently buying a bottle of wine in a shop or a pint of beer in a bar must be stored for at least 60 days, and be handed over to the police on demand"

I haven't covered the police state machinery stuff for a while, and there will be nuances in it I'm not currently up on, but it's well.. it's really bizarre, it's like it just still can't stop itself.

In spite of whatever critique is offered, no matter from whom, from the public itself or even when the media has started (and it has for some time now) to actually get concerned about this, or the government's own data tzars and even the European Court of Human Rights and so on, it doesn't seem to make to a lot of difference.

No matter who is ostensibly in charge the Labour regime remains like a child in an insane tantrum, it's totally unreasonable, and thinks every conceivable moment of existence is just another opportunity to inflict the machinery of the police state, no matter what else is going on around it.

We talked about this a lot a couple of years ago, in end you're just not in the territory of normal, appropriate, adult rational behavior, but behavior that's transparently about looking for ways to deploy this kind of thing no matter what, because it wants to change society into something very different.

And what's been demonstrated here very clearly is the extremely real danger of compliance. In the end the government will claim a mandatory status for the very culture of snooping, spying and fear they themselves have created and encouraged amongst the public and I think the writing was on the wall for this a long time ago.

The recent attack on the Catholic Church

I meant to get this done last night. I wanted to comment a little on this recent thing with the Bishop and the Pope and the Vatican , which I think has been conspicuous as perhaps of one of the more wanton attempts to attack the Catholic Church I've seen the media come up with.

There are sensitive topics buried in this for sure, but frankly it's also the height of vulgarity for the media as a whole, for Jewish groups, commentators and non-Jewish sympathisers, along with the likes of Angela Merkel to try to grandstand by creating a campaign out of the views of one man, against the recent backdrop of the horrors in Gaza at the hands of Israel, and the overall situation there for some time.

I think it's very conspicuous.

From the BBC, to the New York Times to the Times of London, what we have witnessed is nothing short of just another concerted vicious campaign of egregious drivel dressed up in the usual secular probity to needlessly whip up controversy using some guy nobody had even heard of, almost certainly set up to have exactly this effect, to preemptively attack the Church to make sure it doesn't step too out of line, and in particular to provide another wonderful distraction to the recent gutting of Gaza.

Of course this is all the while propagandizing the usual message to the hapless proles that the Church is secretly wicked, backward, and so on, and must demonstrate its commitment to all things we the media tell it are 'worthy' including its own castration.

Well that's what psychotic drivel is. While we understand people wanting to do what may seem like the right thing, I think it's incorrect to frame these issues around some bottomless pit of endless interfaith 'placation', and I'm kind of lost as to how the role of the Church is supposed to be demonstrated first and foremost as whatever the media tells it it should be.

It should just be itself.

And this all too familiar picture of having to pay sufficient reverence to the crimes of the Holocaust, is one that's become way outside of just basic decency, sympathy, understanding and good will. And it's not just the Holocaust, the structure of this is used over and over again.

I'm sorry to say, at least in what I've seen plucked out and presented by the media which I have no doubt could well be flawed, I can't help but be somewhat inquisitive with some of the things said or at least how their are framed, such as the Pope apparently having to express his "indisputable solidarity with Jews".

I'm no theologian but surely the Church has a indisputable solidarity to all mankind.

And why seriously was German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the Pope what to do ? What serious explanation is there for this ? Enough of this crap already. This is silly. This is just not healthy.

Excuse my language, but Angela Merkel looks like a real f*cking joke. Even more of a f*cking joke and ridiculous puppet than she did, and that's truly saying something.

And really I find this use of the Holocaust to attack things that are inherently good, absolutely vile actually. It gets to a point of sickly awfulness.

You see there is a bottom rung of reality, and if we can't even meet that rung, what's the point ?

Now the Bishop has been sacked from his post, much to the delight of the global media establishment, despite him being almost irrelevant in this, just another ticked box on the list of things to quote Reuters of how the Pope has 'angered Jews'.

There's no polite way of saying this, but I suspect the Catholic Church should be 'angering Jews'. Not as a mission, but simply as part of its business of believing something different.

Look at the words 'ultra-traditionalist' in the BBC's version, as if that's something despicable.

Well you know what, I think that's a wonderful thing to be an' ultra-traditionalist'.

And that's after the Vatican demanded the Bishop recants, presumably after being told what to do by Angela Merkel.

So much for the Vatican secretly running the world.

And I'm going to say something else shocking now. Devastating though the crimes of WWII were, the world doesn't revolve around the Holocaust and being seen to pay it sufficient reverence in the form of tokens of appeasement and the whole thing played out like some ridiculous childish spectacle in the media.

This ghoulish fascination, this sickly surveillance to see who dares put a foot out of line, or can be coerced or provoked to put a foot out of line on the Holocaust and how that can be seized upon to attack institutions, has got to stop.

At some point it gets ridiculous and I think many good people out there who would normally be horrified and hungry for knowledge at many of the things that went on during World War II are now after being bombarded with this stream of nonsense, starting to say the Holocaust seems to be code for something else, and is that something else something I should care about ?

And the world is sick of these whining pages of drivel in the Times dedicated to demonstrating why some part of the Church is not sufficiently apologetic, acquiescent and philo-semitic enough.

The world is sick of hearing how 'good' 'Christians' worshiping at the fount of The War on Terror, Israel's sickening barbarism against Palestians and the moral, legislative and administritive deconstruction of their own societies and are 'real Christians', 'progressive Christians', 'moderate Christians'.

Frankly fuck off.

The problem for the media is (and I hate to be so sweeping but that's how it is) it's dug itself into a hole over this and tried to run with it in a million different sub-directions, tripping over itself to try to escalate the issue into some trend of not exactly 'pro Jewish' sentiment. Apparently the Vatican's has no other duties or concerns but to agree.

Personally I think the Vatican should be pro-Christian and pro-mankind, and the Pope should follow his own position, quoted in the Guardian back in August 2005 when :

"...Israel criticised Pope Benedict for not mentioning attacks on Israelis in a condemnation of terrorism. The Vatican responded with a terse statement asking Israel not to tell the Pope what to say"

But then again all of this whole sordid affair in the media shows how reasonable, and humble and gracious the Pope is, and frankly how unreasonable, vicious, hate-filled, nasty and childish and psychotic his enemies in the media and this particular campaign against him and the Catholic Church has been.

'Exposing financial corruption' !!!

We still haven't looked in depth at the financial crisis/recession/depression/crunch etc really yet, but actually there's a section of what's going on somewhat connected to all of it or actually even blamed for it as well to some degree, that's such a ridiculous cruel joke I guess we may as well talk about it. It's exemplified by an article in today's Times.

I should point out all the conservative press is guilty of this and probably most of the left press as well. So here's the story from the Times:

"THE financier who has been appointed to protect taxpayers’ money in Britain’s bailed-out banks is a former trustee of a secretive Liechtenstein bank accused of facilitating massive tax evasion.

Glen Moreno, who chairs the powerful body that oversees the government’s £37 billion shareholding in the banks, was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during a nine-year association with Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank based in the tax haven.

The disclosures are an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who last week criticised offshore tax havens and called for international action to stamp out tax evasion.

“Advising the rich to exploit tax loopholes is unpatriotic,” the prime minister has said in the past. The bank was strongly criticised by name by President Barack Obama when he was a senator"

You can read the rest of it if you want I wouldn't bother. But this idea, that somehow the press is 'exposing financial corruption' and this is presumably supposed to find a resonance with a lot of people struggling to make ends meet and so on is a very common one that is repeated constantly.

Just unfortunate then that's not what's happening at all when you see this stuff.

First off it's the height of irony that The Times, along with the Daily Mail and so on which essentially should be pro-business, pro-corporation, anti-tax, small government etc gives such a lot of space to what they purport are white collar financial intrigues (note tax loopholes are a not exactly an intrigue). But that's the clue.

Anyway in this specific example in the Times we get the usual general implicit message beamed out that taxation is an immutable destiny of the state, that tax is a perpetual duty of everybody and that there is something so utterly despicable about people who think otherwise.

The idea is that perpetually closing loop holes, and more and more draconian tax legislation is a wonderful thing and an ongoing noble quest of government and so on.

And yeah, all of the above is not aimed at any fat cats with really ridiculous money that's squarely aimed at you.

We also, in this case, get the implicit message that individuals avoiding taxes could somehow be to blame for the financial situation, along with the idea that some yet even more sinister 'reforms' of world banking are the only answer.

But enough of me writing on this.

Superb analysis of this kind of thing has been done by academic, writer and activist Noam Chomsky, and I can't recommend enough these 3 videos on YouTube where he is interviewed by Andrew Marr of the BBC on the subject of the media. (these clips are over 10 years old)

So as far as this article in The Times goes let's just quote Chomsky on this (YouTube 3:16+):

"Big business is not in favour of corruption. And if the press focuses on corruption Fortune Magazine will be quite happy with it...

They don't want the society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interests.

...Corruption interferes with that."

Chomsky goes on:

"So for example when I came back from India, the Bank of India released an estimate, economists there tell me it's low, that a third of the economy is black, meaning mostly rich businessmen not paying their taxes. Well that makes the press because in fact certainly transnationals don't like it.

They want the system to be run without corruption...just pouring money into their pockets. So yes that's a fine topic for the press"

And as well that brings up the whole point about big government, and big government spending and the mix of big government and big business that for the so-called 'conservative' press usually mysteriously vanishes when discussing some financial intrigue or another.