It Didn’t Take Them Long to Hit the Panic Button

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22478310
10 May 2013 Last updated at 10:18

Note: Do these people really and truly think that an order, even backed by threats of force, can uninvent what is already in the public domain? Does anyone remember the similar fuss, in the early 1990s, over PGP encryption? An American friend of mine carried the software to London on a floppy disk in his breast pocket. Getting these designs here will take even less effort. SL

US government orders removal of Defcad 3D-gun designs

 

The BBC’s Rebecca Morelle saw the 3D-printed gun’s first test in Austin, Texas

The US government has demanded designs for a 3D-printed gun be taken offline.

101 Years Ago – G.K. Chesterton on Great Powers

Christopher Houseman

By 1909, Chesterton was contemplating the prospect of the decline of the United States, especially in light of its war against Spain over the Philippines. The decline of the British Empire after the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 was a given.

It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself.
Chesterton, G. K. (2010). Heretics (265). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

Says it all really, doesn’t it?

Yer-avv-ta-luff

But what’s a homophobic nude teabagger, for f***’s sake?

Jesus this is hillarious…

Peter Davis

THIS is how you knock down a door…

And if this is what we are up against, I shouldn’t worry…

Perhaps there is hope in The Last Best Hope

David Davis

I was encouraged by this here.

But I’m not holding my breath: traditionally, Good People do not make the first move against bad. This is sad and regrettable.

But this time, just for once, could it be different? Could we eat the GFNs, before they bankrupt, starve and freeze us?

So the USA has fake-charities now too?

Michael Winning.

Just spotted this from an incoming link. Strange, as it seems libertarians are in favour of letting people make their own decisions about when and how to get pissed, and how pissed to get. Perhaps it’s a fake charity?

US Obamabarmy Education.

Fred Bloggs.

Now in America school children are being taught to sing the praises of Obama, literally.
Heres the lyrics:

Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand [?]
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be clear today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Yes
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all [do? doth??] say “hooray!”
Hooray Mr. President! You’re number one!
The first Black American to lead this great na-TION!
Hooray, Mr. President something-something-some
A-something-something-something-some economy is number one again!
Hooray Mr. President, we’re really proud of you!
And the same for all Americans [in?] the great Red White and Blue!
So something Mr. President we all just something-some,
So here’s a hearty hip-hooray a-something-something-some!
Hip, hip hooray! (3x)

Please don’t give Gordon ideas, we would be singing “The Ode of the one eyed Scotsman”

I told you so

It is not suitable, for people whose lives depend upon it not happening, to allow socialist mountebanks to grandstand to the world mob cheering a murderer, while wearing the stolen clothes of liberal charity. No good will come of this for libertarians, or even for ordinary people in Britain, Scotland, Libya and the USA.

David Davis

There is no reason why the USA should always be our friend

We should think sometimes.

See update below, and the MSM heat is, slowly but inevitably, building:-

David Davis

It is an independent federation of States which chooses (and does choose) to behave as an independent nation. We ought not to take its benignity in any form of alliance for granted. Remember who gave them the Statue of Liberty, and for what historical deed and attributes. The USA has never needed critically to be our friend, or indeed anyone’s friend!

(There are in fact interesting arguments in favour of its having been better for it to continue in utter isolation, as “A City upon a Hill”. Especially to defend against institutionally-European diseases and mortal risks such as GramscoFabiaNazism, in all its various vile guises. If the USA goes down to GFNs, and it does seem now to have its fair share, we are all in trouble. But this is the subject of another post later.)

Conveniently for us here, the USA chose to aid us in most of the 20th Century, in our manichaean struggles with sundry tyrannies, at critical times. In 1917 for example – even up to February, and even up to the Zimmermann Telegram -  it was an entirely neutral and almost uncoloured decision, for the USA, to side with one or other batch of belligerents. Or even not at all.

Whatever valuable points Sean Gabb makes or implies about the First World War, it was (1) probably unavoidable in the end, and (2) our underlying motives were just and noble. The sheer scale of waste and slaughter is another matter, as is the generality of libertarian opposition in principle to war.

What happened over Lockerbie, which accidentally happens to be in Scotland, affects the USA more if anything than the UK. What would, for example, have been the prosecution’s position against Megrahi et al , in either of these two cases? Firstly,  if the device had exploded, say, over Ribblehead or Slaidburn (if earlier it might have done – I am the Director of Northern Affairs: I know these places!) or secondly instead over international waters of the North Atlantic?

Here, I must add that it does not even matter a monkeys, whether it was the Gaddaffi-Megrahi mob wot dunn it, or another mob, most likely Syrian/Iranian, as the estimable Devil (pbuh) suggests here. If the Devil is right, then it’s the renaging on deals, of whatever sort (ask Stalin, he renaged on lots) that endanger them. And the initial results, always, are bad for liberty.

If public opinion in the USA leans towards refusing to buy our stuff (and they are I still think our major trading partner – the EU is nowhere by contrast) then that’s one more to chalk up to Gordon MaCavity, who seems to bugger off and go to ground when things get embarrassing. It’s becoming clearer by the hour that his pawprints (and most likely Mandelson’s, his puppet-master) are all over Megrahi and his release. But none of these three will be on the DNA database, you can bet the usual 17p.

Libertarians should hope that the sound good sense of the American People (it did however fail last November, for a critical minute) will prevail, and that little lasting damage will be done and this sleazy-dealy-oily-scumbag-under-the-carpet-while-nobody’s-looking event will sidle gently into oblivion. Libertarians in the UK and Europe will need all the help they can get in the next few decades – not just from US bloggers and think-tanks and philosophers, able to narrowcast to us and to each other – but from a broad front of general friendship and fellow-feeling for liberty – from an entire Nation.

And now this stuff is getting about:-

not useful to us, and embarrassing

Look, guys: it’s all very well to strike postures – like about how Megrahi is not the right man, althoug he probably is. The Syrian and Iranian fascist guvmints were much much too clever, even in the late 1980s, to be seen with own their fingers in the blood if they could get somebody else to be the fall-guys. Also it’s just as heinous of Westminster to pretend to agree, by inference, and (worse) by silence, that it was a “Scottish Government decision”.

Libertarians are worried, because there are still a few hundred over this side of the Pond, and they want there to be somewhere they can disappear to more easily than Mexicans can, and in which there is enough space not to be found for decades, if not ever. Libertarians with British versions of EU passports are therefore endangered as regards their human rights to become refugees, by decisions like this one.

But I doubt it will.

Some people may like this site…

…others may not. I’ve put in on the bog-roll anyway, as although they may not smell nice to some Libertarians, they may do things which make them into our friends for a time (like how Churchill thought that “…if Hitler was to invade Hell, then Imight at least make a favourable reference to The Devil”.)

David Davis

Take your choice. Their take on the saddo GramscoFabian Gordon Brown***, and his posturing over Afghanistan, is instructive.

***I don’t think he genuinely thinks he’s a Nazi, the poor fellow, so I won’t call him a GramscoFabiaNazi by name [in public] in case we get sued.

***But he __is__ a Gramscian, which is true by observation and therefore not actionable by him, and he __is__ a Fabian, evinced by the way he has gone about things for the whole of his political life.

Perhaps we are!

Free, I meant. Do read the whole thing.

David Davis

This guy ought to be the President….or on second thoughts, perhaps we ought not to have those.

Piracy: it is not clear to me why the owners of these ships or their cargoes don’t just eviscerate the buggers.

David Davis

Am I paranoid, or is “piracy” by a load of towelhead scumbags with pop-guns and lilos, being allowed for some reason? It does seem rather odd that in the 21st century (I still piss myself at the very idea of one!) huge metal ships bursting at the seams with crewmen (I assume they are men?) get held up, presumably in the full sight of toher ships, hijacked and emptied of people by a couple of thug-muggers on a rubber ring, with what amounts to an airgun.

Are these buggers friendly with fake charities? Are their Khalashnikovs paid for by “Chrisdaia Nit”, for example, or “people not profit”? Or even Gordon Brown? I do not know. I think we ought to be told.

Has nobody heard of the British East India Company? Of course, it was really a fascist monopolistic “public-private-prtnership”, fully in bed with the State in most aspects of its operation, but it did manage to mostly protect its ships and employees from attack, most of the time. I wonder what the employers are doing about this modern matter, and what their insurers say?

I note that The LandedUnderclass wondered about this same problem a little while ago.

Pirates: Join the Navy, travel to faraway places, meet bad and uninteresting people in rubber boats with guns, and kill them

David Davis

This story shows that there is no point in The West trying to pretend that “pirates” need to be “negotiated with”. A US boat turned up, and it was all over.

The place for pirates is the ocean bottom, while still alive, just (for a little time) with a lead weight tied to their feet, and no oxygen cylinder.

Enemies of What State? « Little Alex in Wonderland

 

Enemies of What State?

Posted by Kevin Carson on 29 March 2009

Kevin Carson

On the economic fascism of  crony capitalism and irrational American common sense.

19 Mar 09 | C4SS

There are all too many people in American politics whose real concern, concealed behind all the “free market” rhetoric, is not so much “statism” per se as statism that benefits the wrong class of people. A good example: it was quite amusing to hear some Republicans, during yesterday’s Congressional hearings on the AIG bonuses, wringing their hands over the prospect of “interfering with the management of private business” and “altering the terms of contracts.” Last night Rachel Maddow ran clips of some of the very same people, last December, crowing about how they were forcing the UAW to renegotiate it’s contract and accept lower wages in return for bailout loans to the auto industry.

Another example: I don’t advocate Social Credit or greenbackism, but I don’t understand the reasoning of those who object to either as an increase in statism over the present system.

By way of background, Social Credit is a proposal to remedy corporate capitalism’s chronic tendency toward overinvestment and overproduction by periodically depositing a sum of interest-free new money, equivalent in aggregate to the demand shortfall, in the citizenry’s bank accounts. Greenbackism is a proposal that countercyclical deficit spending, rather than being financed by interest-bearing debt in the form of government bonds, should simply take the form of directly spending money into existence by the Treasury.

It seems to me the sticking point, if there is one, should be at the idea of government as regulator of the money supply by creating fiat money, or of deficit spending to meet demand shortfalls, in the first place. But these things are overwhelmingly accepted in principle by the mainstream public. So the sticking point about Social Credit and greenbackism can only be the sacred principle that the fiat money must be specifically lent into existence at interest, and that deficit spending must be financed by government bonds.

The problem is not the function itself, but only carrying it out in a way that doesn’t enable a class of coupon-clippers to skim the cream off the top.

It also seems to me, on the other hand, that if these basic functions are accepted in principle, it makes it more statist–not less–to compound the injury by doing it through private accomplices, and empowering them to charge interest for the function, rather than simply doing so directly.

It’s just another instance of a broader phenomenon, what the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb calls “economic fascism.” Economic fascism is his term for the phony regime of “privatization” advocated by such organizations as the Adam Smith Institute. It doesn’t get government out of the business of performing particular functions. It just delegates the function to nominally “private” corporations that perform the function with public money, with government protection from free market competition, and with a guaranteed profit for performing the function (on the regulated utility’s “cost-plus” model).

Under this vulgar libertarian model of “free market reform,” the only thing that matters is the comparative percentages of functions which are carried out by nominally “private” and nominally “public” organizations–not the substance of things. But it seems to me that if a corporation receives its revenue from the government, is protected from competition by the government, and is guaranteed a profit by the government, it IS the government. The only significance of the entity’s profit is to increase the overall cost of performing the function, and thus increase the total injury to the taxpayer.

And while we’re at it, let’s be honest about something. Given the existence of a corporate economy on the present model, countercyclical government spending is absolutely essential to prevent its collapse. Those who advocate a return to the Reaganism and Thatcherism of the ’80s, or the cowboy capitalism of the ’90s, absent high government spending, are either delusional or disingenuous. Reagan was the biggest Keynesian of them all.

There are only two alternatives: to eliminate the existing–statist– structural causes of overinvestment and underconsumption, or to continue adding new layers of statism to counter the chronic crisis tendencies. Either more and more statism, or forward to anarchy.

The American corporate economy has been statist to its core since its beginnings in the late 19th century. There wouldn’t even be a national market at all, or national corporations serving it, had it not been for the land grant railroads and other subsidies to long-distance shipping that made possible artificially large firms and market areas. There wouldn’t be stable oligopoly markets had it not been for the cartelizing effect of patents, or the stabilizing effects of the Clayton and FTC Acts’ restrictions on price warfare.

To repeat, the system was statist from its beginnings. There are all too many on the Right who like to refer to a mythical “free market” system that prevailed before 1932, and to pretend that the “statism” only began when government started intervening on behalf of workers and consumers. But in fact, all the “progressive” interventions of government under the New Deal were secondary, aimed at ameliorating the side-effects of the prior interventions that created corporate capitalism in the first place. Had it not been for the secondary, ameliorative interventions, corporate capitalism as we know it would have collapsed in the 1930s.

Returning to my earlier point: if we are to have statism at all, and we are reduced to quibbling between Democrats and Republicans over what kind of statism it is to be, I make no secret of the fact that I prefer the kind of statism that weighs less heavily on my own neck.

If phony “free market” Republicans accept NLRB certification of unions in principle, and only want to quibble over the Employee Free Choice Act because it makes it easier to certify unions without harassment, intimidation and punitive firing of organizers–well, why would I, a worker, prefer a system of certification that suits the bosses’ interest?

If we’re going to talk about a genuine free market labor regime, then let’s eliminate the Wagner Act–and with it Taft-Hartley’s prohibitions on sympathy and boycott strikes, and its mandatory arbitration and cooling off periods. Let’s eliminate the Railroad Labor Relation Act’s provisions that prevent transport workers turning local and regional disputes into general strikes. In short, let’s eliminate all the legal prohbitions on the tactics that unions were using to win before Wagner was ever passed.

But if we’re going to have government certification of unions, let’s have a form of certification that fulfills its stated purpose–determining the intention of workers–as accurately and automatically as possible.

Likewise, if we’re going to have a welfare state, let’s eliminate the costly and intrusive welfare bureaucracies and spend the same amount of money on a guaranteed income. If we’re going to have a regulatory state, let’s eliminate all the agencies and replace their functions with pigovian taxation of negative externalities.

My goal is the abolition of the state. I would welcome all these things tomorrow, if I thought they were genuine steps toward the abolition of the state altogether the day after tomorrow. They certainly wouldn’t be net increases in statism.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, both of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

Enemies of What State? « Little Alex in Wonderland

A mega-burger a day keeps the Docto-crats away

….of these.

David Davis

We should find out, each morning, by meticulous research, what the Obesity-Nazis, foodfascists, dieticians, doctors, dastardly politicians who want to ration food, anti-fattists and other scumbags, want to do to our consumption of nice things, and we should do _precisely_ the opposite of what they say.

Just the small one today.

Libertarians should be preparing for a victory over statism in 2012…

…in one of the countries that matters and is still “nominally” “free”.

David Davis

There are several blogs out there devoted to this enterprise. Here is one.  Written by a powerful and incisive libertarian analyst. Much is going on down, in the destruction of Barack Obama’s reputation for “being able to govern”, which will continue apace. More needs to be said by the substantive blogs available now and with long histories.

Not that we really, as libertarians, want people to govern other people. It’s like, just sort of expected right now, that someone will do so. Bummer. Ultimately, it would become un-necessary: the State could indeed wither away.

Very sad

http://thecautionaryrevelation.blogspot.com/2009/03/sad-fact-about-america.html

Better read this….

David Davis

Here at The Cautionary Revelation. I am beginning to like the way this guy thinks.

Interesting

David Davis

From Bodwyn Wook, via that inestimably tireless spotter of small candles of liberty in the wind, The Landed Underclass.

Quite right too, ‘coz we’re stuck with the bugger for four years (at least)

David Davis

Yup. He can be as rude as he likes to Brown, and we will laugh, ‘coz we despise him as well. It was quite funny, to watch our PM being met out of his car by a “director of protocol”, whatever that thing might be (I have no idea…)

But underneath, we hope that, in the sad and continuing absence (for now) of libertarian administrations in the USA and the UK, Obama understands who the people  _really_  are, who would really in their hearts like to be his Nation’s friends.