What Sort Of World Do We Live In?

It's a funny question I suppose, but one we'd all do well to keep asking ourselves.  Superficially we seem to live in a generally benign state where the government only wants what's best for us and most people are happy to accept that premise.  The government wants to help us and smooth life's difficulties with job-hunting, preventing homelessness, ensuring we eat our 5-a-day, lose weight, stop smoking and drinking, tide us over if we fall on hard times, cure us if we are ill and generally act as benefactor.  It says.

I've just caught up with this article which was published in Games Monitor while I was offline earlier this month.  It concerns security measures being taken for Olympics 2012 which include the construction of an 11 mile, 5,000 volt electric fence, topped  with 900 daylight & night vision surveillance cameras spaced at 55-yard  intervals.

"A new genre of military futurology has emerged which owes as much to  apocalyptic Hollywood movies as it does to the cold war tradition of  ‘scenario planning. Often outlandish and bizarre in its prophecies, and  always dystopian, this new military futurism sees threats to the western  way of life emanating not only from rogue states, weapons of mass  destruction and terrorism but also from resurgent nationalism, conflicts  over dwindling resources, migration, disease, organised crime, abrupt  climate change and the emergence of failed cities where social disorder is rife.

"Other security measures to be implemented for London 2012 will include facial and iris recognition, finger-print and hand recognition, guards with attack dogs and search dogs. New software is planned to integrate all of London's CCTV cameras, and will have the capability to follow you through the city. A scheme to search people and vehicles will include machines capable of looking through your clothing. The Air Force will deploy its Reaper pilot-less drone aircraft, which will carry laser-guided bombs and missiles including the Hellfire air-to-ground weapon. While on the Thames, the Royal Navy will deploy its new £1 billion Daring class Type 45 destroyer. These are also to be fitted with laser-guided missile systems able to shoot down a target the size of a cricket ball.

"The Olympic Act 2006, which sets out various laws relating to the Olympics, gives the right of forced entry into private property to remove unauthorised advertising or protest banners.  ... the right of forced entry is extended outside the police force to staff contracted to the ODA.

"... security measures for the London Olympics will include the nationwide use of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, allowing police stop and search without suspicion. The London Olympics and its security does not exist in isolation but in a continuum of increasing state surveillance and security hysteria."

Take a look at this article too: The Police are considering the forcible chemical sedation of suspects.  "The Federation is currently undertaking work to formulate a strategy which we intend to lead to recognition and acceptance of excited delirious syndrome by the British medical profession."
Are you feeling safer yet or can you feel the noose tightening?  When has any government voluntarily relinquished power and control once gained?  Oh, grandma, what big teeth you have!

Cross-posted from Calling England

What Sort Of World Do We Live In?

Watford Parents Only Have Themselves To Blame!

'Prove You're Not A Paedo' screams the headline in The Sun today, a brutal yet concise summing up of the absurd situation that has been allowed to develop in Watford as the council seeks to ban parents from their adventure playgrounds on the grounds that they cannot be trusted with their own children.

This state of affairs would be laughable if it wasn't so malignant. The very fabric of our society is being ripped apart under a sustained assault on our right to live our lives as we see fit with as little state intrusion as possible. The plain fact of the matter is the state does not agree with us, it wants our compliance and our control. To be good citizens we must adhere to the rules and laws that the state sets out for us. Common sense is gone, burnt on the same funeral pyre that is consuming our civil liberties and right to privacy.

I can't help wondering though how many of those parents complaining this morning voted Labour or Lib Dem at the last election, national or local? For all their complaining, I am sad to say that those parents in Watford who voted for either of the two leftist parties are just as culpable for this travesty as Dorothy Thornhill (pictured), the Lib Dem Mayor of Watford who has defended the decision, and the council officials who decided to push this through. Those parents only have themselves to blame. Unfortunately, I have a sad feeling that many of them will not learn their lesson. And before they know it, it will be too late.

And it certainly blows a hole in any claims the Lib Dems may make about being the party of 'civil liberties'. If this is what it's like to live under a Lib Dem controlled council as Watford is, imagine the damage they'd do if put in charge of the country. Labour and the Lib Dems, two cheeks of the same arse!

Watford Parents Only Have Themselves To Blame!

The Price Of Experience

The European Union has long been angling for control of banking and financial centres and it's no secret that it would rather see Frankfurt or Paris more pivotal than London.  (Check out previous posts tagged 'Frankfurt').

Draft legislation published today gives more details of a 'banking super watchdog'.  If agreed, it will be implemented next year.  There is talk of a 'local watchdog' and 'local supervisor' so, for Britain, I assume that would mean our Bank of England.

The draft laws, which is the result of an agreement thrashed out by EU leaders earlier this year, also threaten to erode the authority of Britain, which is fighting to keep control over the centrepiece of its economy, the City of London.
The new European watchdog is given the power to order national supervisors to take specific action, in the draft. It leaves it up to the European Commission or EU executive to decide when they should be allowed overrule the local watchdog.
The draft law also allows the banking super-watchdog to intervene with individual banks if, for example, the local supervisor does nothing, EU officials wrote in the document.

As I've said before, the current trend towards devolution and localism is all very well but fits in too well with the EU's own blueprint for a new supranational state.  Once this legislation goes through, as it will, expect it to be closely followed by the Euro (with designs decided at 'local' level, of course).  Like it or not, we're in it up to our necks.

What is the price of Experience ?
Do men buy it for a song ?
Or wisdom for the price of a dance in the street ?
No, it is bought with the price of all Man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wm. Blake
Cross-posted

The Price Of Experience

Think Of The Children

The following comment was made in response to a debate on the Telegraph's website regarding the Independent Safeguarding Authority, the not so independent quango charged with vetting whether adults represent a risk to children they come into contact with through work. There is nothing much more to add as this comment says it all and I implore you to read it and consider the implications for our society and where we are being taken.

The logical extension of this is that biological parents will have to be vetted when children are born.

If they are deemed unsuitable then the children will be taken into the care of the state.

This is already happening piecemeal, as a trial, to try it out and to de-sensitise the population to it.

We have read reports recently in the DT of decent families whose children have been abducted by the state, not because of any criminal offences or abuse but because - well, because the state wanted to and they could.

This makes sense as we all know the grim statistic that most crimes against the persons of children are committed by people they know and very often by people in the family.

'You know it makes sense', as that appaling woman in the cabinet liked to blather, or as Ed Balls would say - he having now taken up speaking on behalf of everyone else - 'we all want it' (reference his comment on Lockerbie terrorist).

The point about all this is first to insert the state between adults and children - the point has already been reached where most adult males are afraid to speak to children they do not know - and then to insert the state between parents and children.

The aim is to destroy the civil society and family life.

The state is going to destroy all ties between people and then the atomised individuals will have only one relationship - with the state.

The blueprint is in George Orwell's book '1984'

The extremist left-liberalnot nutters will keep at it. It is their Common Purpose (try Googling that if you dare).

UPDATE - I have added 'Common Purpose' to the labels for this post because after doing a cursory check of the members of the board of the ISA, virtually all of the members of this organisation (with a few exceptions) have some sort of connection to the Common Purpose charity. Dr John Belcher, for instance, previously sat on the board of the People for Places Group with none other than Julia Middleton, which was an unusual appointment in the first instance given the fact that, as stated in this article, she acknowledged at the time that she had no real experience of working in housing. How very strange!

UPDATE II - Daily Mail reporting that 1 in 4 British citizens will come under the microscope of this unelected and unaccountable organisation. At what point do we say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?

Think Of The Children

Important quotes

"You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. -
- Author Unknown -

This is exactly what is happening Will no one wake up?

Important quotes