Blogging Takes Effort

This post was going to be "Labour's Plastic Poll Tax", but this new work caper kind of reduces the time available even for a little blog like mine. Anyway your are all probably bored with ID cards and the subject is bad for my my stress levels too. So I'm going to read a crap Star Wars novel in the bath. Bert out.

D'oh, Looks Like Another Beagle 2 Moment

A few hours ago a probe was launched from a sub in the Barrents Sea. The probe was the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1. This was to be the first test of a controlable solar sail space craft. Unfortunately no telemetry has been received from the craft and at this time the craft seems to be lost. So spare a thought for some very depressed scientists and engineers as you go about your business today.

Bert's Illustrated 101 Uses For An ID Card Part 1

Take one National ID Card.


Apply a liberal coating of KY.


Find a smirking cunt or...


...a bearded smirking cunt.


Insert


It's all very well making jokes about the constant erosion of civil liberties in Britain today but the fact is the subject simply makes me furious. I normally read the first editions of the papers online before I go to bed, but the if there is an article about civil liberties I try to put of reading it to the next day. The reason is simple, after reading about two paragraphs I'll get a knot in my stomach due to pure anger and frustration. So if I go to bed I won't sleep because I'm thinking somebody should go do a Guy Fawkes on all the cunts in parliament(note to ECHELON operators up yours you nosy cunts). Reading articles like this really get right on my wick, it's worth reading the whole thing but a couple of good quotes are:

My aged mother was still alive in 2002. Approaching 80, after a robust and healthy life, she was suddenly needing to "access" district nurses and care assistants on a regular basis. I airily told her that Mr Blunkett might be wanting a biometric photograph of her left iris any time soon for his entitlement-card scheme, and she was thunderstruck. "Whatever for?" Um, so you can prove you're entitled to use NHS services. "Tell him I bloody paid for them," she shouted, "when I got bombed out of Coventry!"

That's right stop Bin Laden in his tracks get your granny down to a "citizen enrollment booth" and get her bioscanned lest anyone mistakes her for a suicide raghead. The real problem of course is that while some people think the ID scheme is "sinister" or "Germanic" as Maggie memorably put it. It is only tech heads who really understand the true implications of what lies beneath the ID cards and that is the National Identity Register. Another quote:

You can say, "If you've got nothing to hide, you'd got nothing to fear." But there is a bunch of people who fear the National Identity Register Database mightily, and for good reason. They're bloggers. Bloggers understand what databases are, they understand information technology and if they're not tech-head geeks themselves, they know people who are. British bloggers are going crazy about the database.

The question we should be asking ourselves is how do we stop the slide towards ever greater state power? Will votes, demonstrations, civil disobedience and boycotts be enough? At what point do Libertarians of Left and Right say enough is enough and turn to violence?

Database State

Tell Toni to stick his ID card up his ass, here.

Melanie, Polly And The Thought Police

One way of knowing when the government is making another one of its monumental blunders is when a Guardian columnist makes the same arguments as a Daily mail columnist. You sure don't see Polly Toynbee and Melanie Philips making virtually identical arguments in their respective columns very often. The government's incitement to religious hatred bill is of course a cynical ploy to by back Muslim votes, as I said before. There are already plenty of laws stopping people inciting violence against others on the statute book, we don't need a new law. Why is a crime worse if it is racist or sectarian? If I was to say "go and stab that rag head Muslim" as opposed to "go and stab that person" and assuming that my oratory was sufficiently good in either case as to have caused someone to be assaulted. I would have committed a more serious crime because it was "religiously aggravated". The person would still be stabbed in either case, the difference is apparently the added insult. Even though Parliament has already rejected this nonsense by the government twice they are now threatening to use the battering ram of the Parliament act to force the issue through. Can't the government see that the only people who want this law are in fact the real bigots? People whose beliefs are so cherished that only the strong arm of the law is sufficient to protect said beliefs.

They say the law will only result in a few convictions a year as any use will require the Attorney-General's consent. Never mind the question of separation of powers, why waste all this parliamentary time when people can already be convicted of inciting violence? It is worth noting that very similar laws already exist here in N. Ireland, to my knowledge they have hardly ever been used. It's is not hard to see why. These laws will probably be counter productive in terms of religious harmony with groups of fundamentalists vetting every word said by other groups as happened in Australia. The government however blunders on regardless.

Vegetabletarins Are Pompous Twats

And I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Perfect For Larry The Lamb

Click Pic To Enlarge

This add from 1959 recommends Thorazine for the more irritating members of the family.

Big Head Attack

It seems uber blogger Andrew Sullivan agrees with me about comparing the Gulag to Guantamo. Quote

The moral idiocy of Amnesty International comparing the serious issues in Guantanamo with Stalin's monstrous crimes didn't come out of thin air. To the best of my knowledge, the first use of this metaphor was by ... Sid Blumenthal. Here's the piece. The whole thing is infuriating because it allows the Bushies and their boosters to avoid the real subject. The truth is: you can have a real grasp of Stalin's Gulag and still be appalled by what this administration has been doing in its secret jails and torture chambers. Exhibit A in this moral universe is Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer-prize author of "Gulag," who has not mercifully given in to moral complacency.

Has he been reading Squire's humble blog?

Time For Revolution

Shoot Mugabe.

Getting Some Perspective

Something very scary is happening in the West at the momnet especially in Europe. People especially on the left have failed to see the threat to liberal democracies posed to them by Islamic fundamentalism. You see protesters on the streets with posters of Guantanamo or Belmarsh prisoners and burning effigies of Bush dressed as Hitler. I have no problem with protesters campaigning for human rights in any country but why no posters of Ken Bigly, Margaret Hasan or some of the thousands of political prisoners held in the theocracies of the Middle East? Why don't a load of the protesters fly to Iran or Saudi and protest for women's rights or something? Some of the protesters would claim that they have more chance of making a difference by protesting in a democracy like the UK or US. Fair enough, basically they're up for freedom except when it might cost them. Since they brought Hitler into the argument we may as well use a Hitler analogy. The analogy would be people campaigning against Mosley in Britain while leaving Hitler to overrun Europe. Dare I say it but Orwell must be rolling in his grave at most of the Left's reaction to Islamo-fascism. We must of course remain vigilant to the erosion of our own liberties by statists like Blair and Bush, but we aren't in Saudi Arabia. Recently we have seen Belmarsh jail called "Britain's Gulag" or the treatment of the Palestinians compared to the Holocaust. This is hugely insulting to the millions of people who died in the Gulag or the Holocaust. Some people now see this as the West turning in on its self in a sort of moral sickness that cannot tell the difference between the bad, as in Belmarsh and the absolutely fucking horrendous as in the Holocaust or the Gulag.

Recently I finished reading Gulag A History by Anne Applebaum, the book won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. I'm not going to do a book review here but words like moving, terrifying, heartrending, painful and devastating would be a good place to start. People who make equivalences between Hitler and Bush or the Gulag and Guantanamo should read a few books on 20th century history.