EU bureaucrats are openly over-ruling the will of its member states!
Some European nation states have already passed national law that make ACTA and ACTA-like monstrosities illegal in their countries.
EU bureaucrats say that’s too bad, they trump any national laws…
And, if the EU courts decide that ACTA is illegal, they’ll find some way to change the laws.
This is a very, very dangerous precedent!
From TechDirt:
‘In other words, De Gucht won’t accept the idea that the European electorate, through their representatives in the European Parliament, might possibly want to reject something they were not allowed to know about until late in the negotiating process, and to which they were unable to provide any meaningful input. In his view, ACTA must be passed, and ACTA will be passed — whatever anyone else thinks about it.’
And don’t forget, the EU is UN’s mini-me. As at the EU, so in the UN.
We will see this, more and more: bureaucrat-crafted ‘international agreements’ will be forced as laws on member nation states, whether they like it or not. In the EU and UN both!
Remember, the UN, chock-full of dictators and tyrants, is not big on Western values and civil liberties – and its laws/treaties reflect this. Even its Universal Declaration of Human Rights states clearly that human rights may only be enjoyed to the degree that local laws deem appropriate!!!
If you think this should not scare you, because you don’t live in the EU – don’t be so sure. The UN is just using the EU to work out some of the ‘how to’ kinks on its way to regulating humanity into virtual extinction!
‘Law of the Sea Treaty’ – LOST – is the set of invasive rules and regulations with which the UN has effectively replaced the ancient concept of ‘freedom of the seas’, which we have lived with for millenia.
Until now, that is.
It is hard to believe the implications of this thing, but if you read the treaty (and I have only read excerpts – it is not an easy read), it is beyond belief that any country would sign on to this lunacy!
In a nutshell, LOST is UN’s declaration that they and only they have full and unquestionable control over the world’s seas and oceans.
Any mining of any natural resources to be done in areas covered by seas – the UN must approve (and automatically owns the technology used in such mining) but also has the right to choose to develop it itself. Yes – a mining company must present their full plans with projections to the UN which then uses that intelligence to decide to mine itself, to grant the company permission to mine (for a large royalty, of course) or deny it out of hand.
But, it goes far, far beyond that.
In the name of protecting the world seas and oceans, LOST gives the UN unconditional control over waterways that flow into seas and oceans (like, isn’t that almost all of them?). As such, any development along rivers which might impact on the river (even hundreds of kilometers upstream) – and thus on the water flowing to the ocean – must be approved by the UN.
Exactly…
But, don’t take my word on it – check it out yourself. I could not possibly describe just how invasive LOST is…and, of course, we are going to see it applied incrementally, so that nobody would protest any single little tiny step along the way.
US military has, traditionally, supported LOST because it lets them use what other countries consider ‘internal water passages’ – but don’t really care about its other impacts. That is so irresponsible as to be criminal negligence, in my never-humble-opinion…
Hamas is recognized by Canada and the USA as a terrorist organization, right?
And, unless I am mistaken, both USA and Canada have laws on the books that make it a criminal offense to support terrorist organizations, as well as it being illegal to fund terrorist organizations or those organizations that directly support terrorist organizations, yes?
While in the UK, he is accused (not convicted) of breaking US laws in the UK – and is being extradited to the US for it!
Since when does the US have the right to enforce its laws on people outside its borders, who aren’t even themselves Americans?
OK, Kim Dotcom might have ideas of what this feels like – but he has a legal team to help him while this kid just created a website in his free time where people shared links.
His site itself did not host any copyrighted material – just links.
He complied with each and every takedown notice that he was linking to copyrighted material.
Yet, he is still being extradited to the US where he faces over a decade in jail?!?!?
‘Richard O’Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public. Earlier this year, in the fight against the anti-copyright bills SOPA and PIPA, the public won its first big victory. This could be our second.’
We should all pay attention.
Copyright infringement has always been – and ought to remain – a civil matter.
That we have permitted the resources of the state to be subverted for the use of Big Media, that we consider copyright infringement to be the same as theft – even though not a single person or corporation had been deprived of the use of their property – that is just unbelievably misguided.
But that people living in distant lands should be extradited and tried for their activities which, at best (if the prosecutors win their case), did not commit copyright infringement directly, but simply facilitated it…
As if we needed another reason to disband – utterly discredit, send the bureaucrats/delegates home and burn the buildings down, then dance on the ashes – the UN…
I never re-publish another blog’s post in its entirety and will not start now, but Nerfherder has a post which is short, sweet and informative about this issue. It describes what UN’s agency called the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) plans are for restricting access to the internet and gaining huge control over its content. Plus, it is chock full of links!
‘ A pair of researchers from George Mason University created a website called WCITLeaks.org in the hopes that someone with access to the secretive proposals would leak them and make them available to the public. Last Friday, that’s exactly what happened. Someone leaked the 212-page planning document being used by governments to prepare for the December conference. You can read it yourself here.’
We really need to start raising awareness about this.
Information is the best weapon in the preservation of freedom.
If you went to University or College before electronic textbooks were a reality, chances are you bought at least some of your textbooks second-hand – or, perhaps, sold the ones you were done with in order to buy new ones. Textbooks are hundreds of dollars!
One could understand that: with a small target audience, the printing setup costs would drive the prices of individual books sky high!
Electronic textbooks are an excellent way to make education more accessible. Everyone should be happy about that!!!
‘The result is less money for publishers, and fewer opportunities for professors like himself[Joseph Henry Vogel] to get published. With Vogel’s invention, however, this threat can be stopped.
The idea is simple. As part of a course, students will have to participate in a web-based discussion board, an activity which counts towards their final grade. To gain access to the board students need a special code, which they get by buying the associated textbook.
Students who don’t pay can’t participate in the course and therefore get a lower grade.’
In other words, when you register for the course, you only get access to part of it. To access the full course, you also have to buy the textbook. New.
Like many of the people in the modern anti-religion (anti-ALL-religions), I have, on occasion, been accused by modern-day Christians of unfairly lumping their religion in with all the other unreasonable dogmas which are so destructive to society, yet whose malignancy is tolerated under the guise of ‘religion’.
Sure, they agree, Islam is guilty of persecuting, jailing and executing people on the vacuous charge of ‘witchcraft’. That is obviously wrong and evil and ignorant. (Or, so the narrative goes…) Christianity is better than other religions because we have shed the shackles of ignorance and, for centuries, indulge in these sort of unenlightened practices and have not for centuries…
Show me – they dare – an inquisitor or a witch hunter today!
Well, OK – let’s do that!
Christians today – and not just in developing countries, but in the UK and the US – are active in hunting down and torture-killing witches. The new twist to the narrative is that these modern-day ‘witches’ are children.
Yes, children!!!
Here is a bit about a 15-year-old boy who was murdered (and his younger siblings tortured) by relatives in the UK because they suspected the children of witchcraft. The trial of the family members has concluded with a guilty verdict earlier this year – that is 2012!!!
And, the US is not immune…
Recent surveys show that some 20+% of the adults in the USA believe in ‘witches’ – of the malignant, fairy-tale type, not of the neo-Pagan religious practitioners type…
So much for Christianity having come out of the dark ages!!!
The short of it is: unreasonable belief leads to unreasonable actions. Adults must be free to do stupid things, but children must be protected from their parents’ religious beliefs.
We accept that a parent, while responsible for a child, does not have the freedom to abuse them sexually. It is high time we extended this protection of children to include protection from religious abuse, because it is no less destructive than sexual abuse!
And while I am at it…
Most of us consider Judaism to be another one of the ‘civilized’ religions – one which has produced some of the most enlightened minds in the field of science and which is not ‘oppressive’ on its practitioners the way some other religions are…
Yet, there is Judaism and there is Judaism…
Many Jews are well integrated into their host societies and for them, being ‘Jewish’ is more of a national identity than it is a religious faith. Many do practice some of the customs which identify them as ‘Jews’ as a form of private observance and, as long as they do not impose it on their children before they are old enough to give informed consent (and, yes, I am referring specifically to the intolerable practice of arbitrary amputation of part of a penis in infants, which ought to be illegal), I have no argument with it.
However, there are other forms of Judaism alive and well in our society – ones which I consider much less benign.
When a group of people refuses to integrate and takes great pains to segregate itself from the society in which they live, bad things happen.
Always.
When religion is the ‘carrot and the whip’ to enforce such a segregation, we ought not tolerate this: it is one thing for adults to exercise their freedom of religion, it is quite another one for them to strip it away from their children.
Because we have learned that over and over and over again , and as one of my role-models, Asma Jahangir, has taught us – when a religious minority demands special rights, they will always use these ‘rights’ to oppress minorities within themselves, most commonly children and women.
As is the case in this story of a self-segregated Orthodox Jewish community, their ‘internal courts’ and child abuse…
Aside: when we fought – and succeeded – against the opening of Sharia courts in Ontario, we also fought against separate ‘Jewish tribunals’ – in effect, the Jewish versions of Sharia courts. I am pleased to say that, unlike in the linked article, Ontario is free of this malignancy: a society cannot exist unless there is one set of laws for everyone, equally applied to everyone by both the police and the courts!!!
To sum up: one law – and one and equal law enforcement – for all members of society is necessary in order to maintain society. Children have innate rights which even their parents must not be permitted to violate – and permitting parents to violate their children’s right to religious freedom (through childhood indoctrination) is deeply connected to and, in reality, little different from permitting parents to commit or facilitate child sexual abuse. It is about time we started treating the two crimes alike!
‘But many epidemiologists and public health experts say poor handling inside laboratories, rather than bioterror, is the real threat. More than 100 accidents in high-security labs took place between 2003 and 2009, involving everything from flu-infected ferret bites to dropped vials of encephalitis, slips with Ebola needles and lost shipments of bubonic plague. The 1977 “Russian flu” epidemic may have involved a lab escape. Less accidentally, anthrax used in the 2001 attacks almost certainly originated in U.S. military laboratories.’
Of course, there have been a lot of questions about the origins of some recent epidemics: say, from Mexican neighbourhoods right next to immunology research facilities….
In the mainstream media, we have – of course – not heard enough to put the pieces together, and only those epidemics for which there were already developed vaccines got any press at all, even though some much more virulent and deadly epidemics occurred. (Example: 4 strains of hemorrhagic fever epidemic occurred almost simultaneously at one such Mexican neighbourhood a few years ago…thousands got sick, hundreds died – but most press has not deemed this news-worthy.)
From when, in my student days, I had an opportunity to peek into immunology labs, I have been a strong critic of their lack of rigorous adherence to proper scientific procedures and their flawed governance. But, if I start ranting on that topic, I will be typing for days and never post this…
Let me just say that it was sufficient to make me highly skeptical of the scientific validity of any claims to come out of specifically ‘medical’ laboratories. Most people working there have such an inflated sense of purpose that they don’t think that regular rules of proper science apply to anyone of such exulted status as theirs.
On a related note…
Have you ever read a novel where some rogue group develops a deadly virus in a dastardly plot to kill everyone but the chosen few, whom they protect with a vaccine?
No immunologist would go for this!
Why?
Because vaccines just aren’t that effective.
The best estimates are that the efficacy rate (how they actually protect people in the real-world) of vaccinations is less than half their effectiveness as measured under laboratory conditions. In Canada, vaccines with as low efficacy rates as 17% have been approved. (Yes, I cannot support these numbers, but know this directly from an immunologist who resigned in disgust over the approval…and who is still active in the field, so it is imperative that I protect this source.)
That means that less out of 10 people vaccinated, between 2 and 5 will actually derive any protection as a result of having been vaccinated. (Since the efficacy rate is about half the rate in labs, so even the best vaccine will not give any protection to half the people who receive it.)
Remember, the purpose of vaccination is sufficient ‘herd immunity‘ to slow down transmission, not individual protection!
While even many run-of-the-mill MD’s are unaware of these statistics, most immunologists are. So, the novels with the ‘vaccinate ‘our people’ and release a deadly virus’ would not be carried out by any immunologist, because they understand the limitations of vaccination.
Which, really, is something we should all be educated about.
After all, if we think we are protected from a disease, we will not take the same precautions against catching it as if we were aware that we may – or may not – be protected…a very important distinction with real-life consequences.
Don’t get me wrong: I am convinced that vaccines are a very powerful tool. I just think that any tool, if used improperly, has a potential to do more harm than good. Vaccines are no different!
In the last few (OK, many) years, the only journalists who seem to be doing their jobs are bloggers.
Not all all bloggers, of course, but there are a few shining stars.
BlazingCatFur (BCF) is one of these.
Here are two connected stories he has been uncovering:
One Islamic school (Madrassa) has been preaching hate-speech directed both at Jews and and Muslims of differing denominations. And not the usual ‘hate speech’ which the Human Rights Commissions are persecuting, which is a thinly weiled code for ‘not politically correct speech’. We are talking REAL hate speech…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 