60 Years after Orwell published Nineteen Eighty Four

Frail, cowardly Winston saved us by Robert Harris, Times Online

Clearly much of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire on Stalinism, from the physical description of Big Brother’s face (“black-haired, black-mous-tachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm”) to the split in the party led by the Trotsky figure, Emmanuel Goldstein. And if that were the limit of Orwell’s ambition – to describe England as a Stalinist state – the novel would be regarded today as a brilliant period piece about the horrors of communism, comparable perhaps to his friend Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon: an important work, still read but confined to a limited audience.

However, what sets Nineteen Eighty-Four apart – the difference in ambition which means that millions of people who have never read a word of Orwell nevertheless know what “Orwellian” means – is that it parodies the totalitarian impulse in general. The original ideology behind this impulse may be communist or fascist, or nationalist or corporate or institutional, but the methods by which it proceeds are in each case the same: the stamping out of the capacity for individual thought and freedom, not merely by physical force but by a complete denial of privacy and by the control of all information, even to the extent of policing the language in which thoughts are expressed.

(BOLD emphasis mine)

Yes, I think at least to date, Winston did in a way save us, but whether Winston’s testament will continue to do so for another generation remains to be seen. Although, I see wonderful stirrings among the younger generations in the areas of privacy, liberty, freedom and individuality. It gives me hope to see this as we mark the 60 year milestone since the book 1984 (Nineteen Eighty Four) by George Orwell was published. Orwell’s last and greatest work — that took the last of everything out of him to bring to fruition. Thank you George Orwell.

Footnote: To Robert Harris: Maybe George Orwell didn’t get it wrong. Maybe, by publishing this book, and so many people taking the possibilities to heart is what in part helped to prevent this type of horrific society in 1984 from actually coming to pass? Just a thought…

NO CLEAN FEED – Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

NO CLEAN FEED – Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

Help spread the word about the campaign by blogging about the filter, linking to nocleanfeed.com website, or including one of their buttons on your own site or blog.

If nothing else learn about what is going on in Australia … because Australia may just be the proving ground for a terrible worldwide or at least countrywide filtering system that may be coming to USA or wherever you live!

The Martial Law Mind-Set

The Martial Law Mind-Set by William Norman Grigg (LewRockwell.com)

While Archimedes is rightly revered for his many imperishable contributions to science, he could also be considered the first recorded victim of lethal police brutality.

A native of Syracuse, Archimedes did his considerable best in the doomed but worthy effort to repel Roman invaders. Following the conquest, Roman soldiers were dispatched to “pacify” the restive streets of the newly conquered city.

One afternoon, so the story goes, Archimedes was sitting inoffensively at the side of a street drawing geometric equations in the sand when some mouth-breather in Roman military garb trod heedlessly on the improvised tablet, ruining the elderly scientist’s calculations.

By this time, the venerable physicist was in his ninth decade, and he saw no point in enduring this act of thoughtless vandalism by an armored imbecile to pass without protest.

“Please don’t disturb my circles,” Archimedes insisted in what was probably a direct but polite tone of voice.

Like law enforcement officers who would follow in his footsteps – albeit in jackboots rather than sandals – the Roman soldier took offense that a mere civilian, and an elderly one at that, would demand deference from someone wearing the uniform and insignia of authority.

If the technology had been available, the Roman quite likely would have given Archimedes a “ride on the Taser.” Instead, the thug withdrew his sword and summarily killed him.

Much more in the must read article.

I have talked about my experiences with the Security at the Ferry system here in Virginia on this blog previously. I am sure some might have thought I was being silly for my concerns about this, until they read this article that is. Thanks Will Grigg for sharing in a great article the same real concerns I have had about all of this and couldn’t put it into words properly. You sure did!

But Then It Was Too Late

They Thought They Were Free

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

Much more in the article and on the site.

Sound familiar? Must read.

Freedom and Liberty are fragile … handle with care.

Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms

Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms – Phillip Pullman (TimesOnline)

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness – the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

Phillip Pullman, the childrens’ author, continues in the article to talk about reality that are echos of the Orwellian 1984.

I would suggest that you read first Phillip Pullman’s article and then read my 1984 posting from 2005. There is a sad and striking similarity.

And what of us (here in the USA)? And what of us?

Must read.

More great discussion at: http://www.modernliberty.net/

New plan may tax U.S. drivers for every mile traveled, says Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood

New plan may tax U.S. drivers for every mile traveled, says Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood (NYDailyNews)

What the…!?!

I can not believe this! How dare they! Do they know how many small businesses depend on driving to meet/have appointments with their clients? Small businesses that are struggling badly already!!

How dare they even consider this. It was bad enough when it was gas prices out of sight. But this is unbelievable. More TAX! More TAX that will not only hurt the small businesses in this country but every other American when they go to buy ANYTHING that is delivered to the grocery store, retail outlets, gas stations, shipping for packages, etc. etc. etc. … the list goes on forever!

Not to mention the curbing of individual freedoms with excessive taxation. How many people will be able to travel after this goes into effect? How many children and grand children will see their grand parents and vice versa after all the toll of this goes into effect.

Do they not remember what happened when there were extremely high gas prices? Or are they so beyond the pay level of the average American family to even have a clue how the rest of the country survives?

This is President Obama’s answer? This is the ‘leaders’ of various States answer?

Go back to the drawing board. Start cutting salaries of elected officials. That would likely take care of it right there.

Between everything else that’s been going on and this I am thoroughly disgusted.

U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money

U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money – Something you could go your whole life without seeing … this is despicable.

When young people go before a Judge, you would expect that the Judge would have the young person’s best interest at heart. Some sort of sense of responsibility to try to do the best thing that could help the young person get past this, learn something positive to take forward in their lives and not be in jail any longer than absolutely necessary.

I still can’t believe this … the very Justice System that is to ensure JUSTICE is done abusing young people in this manner. The betrayal of these young people is beyond the pale.

I remember a line from a movie called Time Cop where Van Damme’s part asks his Director in the TEC about a greedy presidential candidate. The Director said, “Capable of eating his young.”

That is what this despicable situation reminds me of … and took blood money for it.

This is a national disaster.

And think about this … if they could do that to children?!

EVIL CONCEALED BY MONEY

Thanks to Kurt for bringing this article to my attention!

The following article by Walter E. Williams is very thought provoking and I hope it will speak to each person’s heart.

EVIL CONCEALED BY MONEY
We’ve become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders (Liberty-Watch.com)

Evil acts can be given an aura of moral legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic expressions such as spreading the wealth, income redistribution or caring for the less fortunate. Let’s think about socialism.

Imagine there’s an elderly widow down the street from you. She has neither the strength to mow her lawn nor enough money to hire someone to do it. Here’s my question to you that I’m almost afraid for the answer: Would you support a government mandate that forces one of your neighbors to mow the lady’s lawn each week? If he failed to follow the government orders, would you approve of some kind of punishment ranging from house arrest and fines to imprisonment? I’m hoping that the average American would condemn such a government mandate because it would be a form of slavery, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

Would there be the same condemnation if, instead of the government forcing your neighbor to physically mow the widow’s lawn, the government forced him to give the lady $40 of his weekly earnings? That way the widow could hire someone to mow her lawn. I’d say that there is little difference between the mandates. While the mandate’s mechanism differs, it is nonetheless the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

Probably most Americans would have a clearer conscience if all the neighbors were forced to put money in a government pot and a government agency would send the widow a weekly sum of $40 to hire someone to mow her lawn. This mechanism makes the particular victim invisible but it still boils down to one person being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another. Putting the money into a government pot makes palatable acts that would otherwise be deemed morally offensive.

This is why socialism is evil. It employs evil means, coercion or taking the property of one person, to accomplish good ends, helping one’s fellow man. Helping one’s fellow man in need, by reaching into one’s own pockets, is a laudable and praiseworthy goal. Doing the same through coercion and reaching into another’s pockets has no redeeming features and is worthy of condemnation.

Much more in the article.

It is equally evil if these same socialistic means are used to back corporate bad judgment instead of allowing natural outcomes of bad judgment to take their natural course. In that case, it not only becomes socialism, but a form of socialistic fascism or corporatism. That is what I see happening here and it worries me; not only are they trying to make us feel good about being forced to ‘do good’ at their bidding, but also to save companies that should not prosper while in the process making smaller, or at least properly and ethically managed businesses that (are apparently not too big to fail) to fail or languish instead. AND worst of all, making some Citizens feel it is somehow EVERYONE’s duty to pay to make this happen so they don’t lose what they have worked their careers to build. What a twist of fate and I truly feel for them being put in this position. But it does not make it the proper way forward. It is a way down a terrible path that even they won’t appreciate in the end…

And all this while causing the value of the dollar to fall further. NOTE: Just because the dollar is doing a little better on prospect at any given moment due to pushing these horrible ideas does not mean it will do well consistently. If anyone follows the history of the Great Depression, they will see that they had what looked to be a reprieve for awhile, it did not all fail in a day, week or even a year. It actually did better for a short while till things ultimately went terribly wrong. Check it out for yourself (PDF).

In addition, this type of thinking and behavior creates a situation where enforcement of these new dictates will make life untenable for any freedom loving people. We, as Citizens can not allow a surveillance state to take over, or allow thinking free to become a danger, like some sort of thought crime.

Charity is a personal thing, and should remain so. If you want to give to a charity, or to a family, it is something that should be done on a personal level and out of the goodness of one’s heart; otherwise it is meaningless and becomes another form of entitlement to drag down our country. It can not be forced on the people as a tax (double tax because it is borrowed money) or it is less than meaningless.

I hope our leaders will open their eyes to the truth before it’s too late … if it’s not already.

EDIT: Added Professor Walter E. Williams homepage to this posting, and a link from his website: Great Myths of the Great Depression (PDF).

Dog bleeds to death from ID chipping

Dog bleeds to death from ID chipping
‘This technology is supposedly so great until it’s your animal that dies’

A couple in California, required by law to have their dog implanted with a microchip in order to take him camping, swallowed their objections … and watched their Chihuahua named Charlie Brown bleed to death from the procedure.

The law REQUIRES LA residents to have their pets chipped! REQUIRES! Not only do they require your pets be chipped; but if you are found to have a pet that has not been chipped, the first offense is $250 fine, if you are caught again without a chipped pet, you could spend 6 MONTHS in JAIL AND up to $1000 fine!

And little Charlie Brown isn’t the first pet to die at the hands of this crap!

A few years back, Léon was another victim of these microchips being pushed on pets.

In April 2004, Léon was diagnosed with a fibrosarcoma (cancer) at the site of his microchip implant. This location (dorsal neck/interscapular area) is also commonly used to vaccinate dogs, cats and other animals.

As a result of Léon’s vaccine and/or microchip-induced fibrosarcoma, I started asking a few questions. Those questions led to more questions. And those questions led to many frightening and disheartening answers which revealed that Léon’s health problems were man-made. The answers also revealed that the pharmaceutical companies, medical community and those who are meant to protect us are fully aware of these problems, yet blindly and recklessly steer us down the same misguided and ill-fated path.

There are some great quotes that Jean put on the Léon’s website and these are just two:

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

James Madison

“Léon’s story is not just about Léon. Léon’s story is about all of us and what we must learn from his story so that future tragedies are prevented.”

Jeanne
Website writer

These are not the only issues with these microchips. Here you can find some other info on issues with them.

If you think that this is just a simply a way for pet owners to keep an eye on their pets or get them back if lost, think again.

Katherine Albrecht, the author of Spychips, and founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) shares with the world the dangers of these spychips.

Albrecht, Katherine.”Supermarket Cards: The Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg.” Denver University Law Review, Summer 2002, Volume 79, Issue 4, pp. 534-539 and 558-565.

As if that wasn’t bad enough,

Consider the following statements by John Stermer, Senior Vice President of eBusiness Market Development at ACNielsen:

“[After bar codes] [t]he next ‘big thing’ [was] [f]requent shopper cards. While these did a better job of linking consumers and their purchases, loyalty cards were severely limited…consider the usage, consumer demographic, psychographic and economic blind spots of tracking data…. [S]omething more integrated and holistic was needed to provide a ubiquitous understanding of on- and off-line consumer purchase behavior, attitudes and product usage. The answer: RFID (radio frequency identification) technology…. In an industry first, RFID enables the linking of all this product information with a specific consumer identified by key demographic and psychographic markers….Where once we collected purchase information, now we can correlate multiple points of consumer product purchase with consumption specifics such as the how, when and who of product use.” 32

Thank you Katherine for what you do!

Find out more about Charlie Brown and what happened to him in Katherine Albrecht’s February 3, 2009 interview Charlie Brown’s Lori Ginsberg on the Katherine Albrecht Radio Show Archives at her website and find out more info and see some additional pictures of Charlie Brown here under the Press section of Katherine’s site.

Here’s a direct link to the February 3, 2009 show:

Download Hour 1
Download Hour 2

Listen as streaming MP3

More great shows by Katherine Albrecht here.

This is much bigger than a few devastated pet owners (which is horrible in itself if you have ever lost a pet) … they are careful to only show the positive on these microchips to pet owners, and eventually maybe even your children, or other family members. There have already been jobs in security that require chipping.

Even Wikipedia acknowledges that RFID (Radio-frequency identification) microchipping is being used in humans. And here’s a company that does such implantation and on their site:

“My wife had triple bypass surgery. If she’s brought to the hospital, I want to make sure they have the information they need to take care of her. The RFID MicroChip is that technology. We both feel comfort knowing her medical information is always with her.” – Craig W.

What about Alzheimer’s patients being chipped, and people placed in Nursing Homes. What’s next, microchipping children for their own safety (from 2007 – remember this one)?:

Last month’s ‘appeal’ to identify technologies that could prevent child abduction has moved forward rapidly

Or maybe babies, when they are born?

Get even more information about human chipping at AntiChips.com where Dr. Robert Bnenezra, Director Cancer Biology Genetics Program Memorial Sloan-Ketterin Cancer Center is quoted:

There’s no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members. Given the preliminary data, it looks to me that there’s definitely cause for concern.

Here’s a reworked old quote that surely seems very appropriate today:

When Verichip micro-chipped the Alzheimer patients I remained silent I was not an Alzheimer patient

When Verichip micro-chipped the Diabetic and AIDS patients I remained silent; I was not an AIDS patient nor a Diabetic

When Verichip micro-chipped the Military I did not speak out; I was not in the Military

When Verichip came for the activists I remained silent; I was not an Activist

When they came to microchip me , there was no one left to speak out

WeThePeopleWillNotBeChipped.com

Verichip fact sheet:

Verichip Waiver “Patient…is fully aware of any risks, complications, risks of loss, damage of any nature, and injury that may be associated with this registration. Patient waives all claims and releases any liability arising from this registration and acknowledges that no warranties of any kind have been made or will be made with respect to this registration. ALL WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, HOWEVER ARISING, WHETHER BY OPERATION OF LAW OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MECHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXCLUDED AND WAIVED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COMPANY BE LIABLE TO PATIENT FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING LOST INCOME OR SAVINGS) ARISING FROM ANY CAUSE WHATSOEVER, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THEIR POSSIBILITY, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER SUCH DAMAGES ARE SOUGHT BASED ON BREACH OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE, OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY.”

MUCH more on the page.

IBM RFID commercial- Shopping in the Future as a Chipped Human (YouTube video)

Sounds nice and easy? Yeah, well, just think about what else can be tracked with such a device in a surveillance state.

The Sleeper must awaken.

Big data: Welcome to the petacentre

Cory Doctorow has done an awesome article for Nature.com on the absolutely huge and hugely expensive petacentres.

Here’s what he wrote in the email notification for the article:

I wrote a feature for this week’s issue of the journal *Nature* on “petascale” data-centers — giant data-centers used in scholarship and science, from Google to the Large Hadron Collider to the Human Genome and Thousand Genome projects to the Internet Archive. The issue is on stands now and also available free online. Yesterday, I popped into Nature’s offices in London and recorded a special podcast on the subject, too. This was one of the coolest writing assignments I’ve ever been on, pure sysadmin porn. It was worth doing just to see the the giant, Vader-cube tape-robots at CERN.

At this scale, memory has costs. It costs money — 168 million Swiss francs (US$150 million) for data management at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva. And it also has costs that are more physical. Every watt that you put into retrieving data and calculating with them comes out in heat, whether it be on a desktop or in a data centre; in the United States, the energy used by computers has more than doubled since 2000. Once you’re conducting petacalculations on petabytes, you’re into petaheat territory. Two floors of the Sanger data centre are devoted to cooling. The top one houses the current cooling system. The one below sits waiting for the day that the centre needs to double its cooling capacity. Both are sheathed in dramatic blue glass; the scientists call the building the Ice Cube.

The fallow cooling floor is matched in the compute centre below (these people all use ‘compute’ as an adjective). When Butcher was tasked with building the Sanger’s data farm he decided to implement a sort of crop rotation. A quarter of the data centre — 250 square metres — is empty, waiting for the day when the centre needs to upgrade to an entirely new generation of machines. When that day comes, Butcher and his team will set up in that empty space the yet-to-be-specified systems for power, cooling and the rest of it. Once the new centre is up, they’ll be able to shift operations from the obsolete old centre in sections, dismantling and rebuilding without a service interruption, leaving a new patch of the floor fallow — in anticipation of doing it all again in a distressingly short space of time.

The first rotation may come soon. Sequencing at the Sanger, and elsewhere, is getting faster at a dizzying pace — a pace made possible by the data storage facilities that are inflating to ever greater sizes. Take the human genome: the fact that there is now a reference genome sitting in digital storage brings a new generation of sequencing hardware into its own. The crib that the reference genome provides makes the task of adding together the tens of millions of short samples those machines produce a tractable one. It is what makes the 1000 Genomes Project, which the Sanger is undertaking in concert with the Beijing Genomics Institute in China and the US National Human Genome Research Institute, possible — and with it the project’s extraordinary aim of identifying every gene-variant present in at least 1% of Earth’s population.

Nature magazine:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080903/full/455016a.html

Podcast:
http://nature.edgeboss.net/download/nature/nature/podcast/extras/big-data-2008-09-04.mp3?ewk13=1

Flickr photos from the research:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/sets/72157606675048531/

Cory did a great job on all of it; the article, the podcast and the Flickr! photo gallery!

Get a feeling for “…the relentless march from kilo to mega to giga to tera to peta to exa to zetta to yotta. The mad, inconceivable growth of computer performance and data storage is changing science, knowledge, surveillance, freedom, literacy, the arts — everything that can be represented as data, or built on those representations. And in doing so it is putting endless strain on the people and machines that store the exponentially growing wealth of data involved. I’ve set out to see how the system administrators, or sysadmins, at some of the biggest scientific data centres take that strain — and to get a sense of how it feels to work with some of the biggest, coolest IT toys on the planet.“

Never in known history has the ability to store so much data on so many people as well as the knowledge of mankind, marketing, banking — the intellectual data of the world could be stored like this. Awesome and scary at the same time. Hitler would have loved to have such capabilities during his reign….