Yeah, used to be Rock and Roll stars had to crash cars into swimming pools to be noticed. Nowadays all they have to do is smoke during a concert. Way to live!

Now police in the UK can invoke the 2006 Violent Crime Reduction Act to issue directions to leave, basically banishing a person (or group of people) from an area for up to 48 hours if they look like they might cause alcohol related disorder, no matter if they’ve actually had anything to drink.
This is so wrong on so many levels, my jaw has dropped and I just don’t know where to start…

Techdirt has two articles running pertaining to how music could use the new digital paradigm to improve there sales and services.

The article on Prince and how he exploits the new media show an interesting business model:

The second article is on how independant record label Labrador Records has been asking (begging!) people to post a free give away MP3 of theirs on the Pirate Bay, because the demand for the MP3 is killing their servers. They don’t want to dissappoint their customers so they’re using bittorrent instead.

The US not only wants to extend the amount of time it keeps EU citizen data travelling to the US from 3 to 15 years, it not also only wants to keep information on race, sex lives, credit card numbers and purchases, religion and other incredibly personal biographical data, it also wants to reserve the right to pass this data on to any third party it deems fit!
Thankfully the EU is in an outrage over this. The UK is pretending it’s nose is bleeding, even though this agreement will come into effect in the beginning of August!

Oh… and what’s the excuse? Yep, you guessed it: Terrorists!

In an apparent mistake, Stoke-on-Trent has managed to evade the blanket smoke ban in public places in the UK, by not approving the enforcement powers on time in the city council. Everyone there is overjoyed. Was it really a mistake though? 🙂

Estonia is accusing Russia at NATO summits of attacking the IT infrastructure of the country – newspapers, TV stations, government websites, et al are being brought down. Russia is denying.

Simple: Ask Peru to turn your building into a consulate. It’s legal to smoke in Peru, so no problem in the pub!

DIE, evil anti-smoking nazi’s, we will find a way to prevail!!!

Welcome to the USSR!

This guy has built a 90 seat pub extension to his house, where his mates and family can come in, drink a pint and not worry about those anal retentive anti-smokers. Despite a ban on pub smoking in Wales, he gets away with it because it’s not really a pub. Everything in his place is free – he’s giving it away, and it’s not really a place for the general public. This is a direct stance against the anti-smoking nazi’s.

The smoke Nazi’s are being thwarted much like the anti-tobacco czars during the prohibition in Philadelpia. Smoke easies refuse to enforce the anti-smoking laws in effect and allow people to act like people with free choice: they can smoke, drink and eat as they like inside. Let’s hope the rest of the free world follows suit.

Zathur thought this one out for us:

People will have to do their own research. I just googled to get some topics out. Not saying that I support any of the topics discussed, I’m PRO making people think about society and issues around them and not to take stuff for granted.

IRS is illegal in US
The well researched and documented legal allegations by citizens comprising what has become known as the “tax honesty movement” include the following:
1) In 1913, the 16th Amendment (the “income tax” Amendment) was fraudulently and illegally declared to be ratified by a lame-duck Secretary of State just days before leaving office;
2) There is NO LAW that requires most Americans to file a tax return, pay the federal income tax or have the tax withheld from their earnings;
3) People who file a Form 1040 “voluntarily” waive their 5th Amendment right not to bear witness against themselves;
4) The IRS routinely violates citizens’ 4th Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure, by failing to properly obtain warrants issued by a court upon probable cause and supported by oath and affirmation; and
5) The IRS, as standard operating procedure, routinely and grossly violates citizens’ due process rights in its administrative procedures and operates far outside the boundaries of U.S. law.
A must see film/documentary then is: Aaron Russo’s America – From Freedom to Fascism (the interview with the director of IRS is really funny)

http://infowars.net/articles/October2006/251006Russo.htm

Using Pension Funds to pay of Foreign Debt or losing the money all together

i.e. privatization of Pension funds… a fucking mess
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/site_packages/ss_privatization/050115memo_experiments.html

For u non-Hubbert peak oil theorists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

Corporation as a Psycopath

My discussion was not how free market economy is bad, the opposite, free market economy stimulates growth and competition….

Its just that the concept of a “corporation” (not a company or business, no a corporation is a company which is owned by private investors) is just so wrong and does not fit in the free market economy….

How is it that in a corporation
a) Priority number one (over all other rules/regulations/laws) investors MUST get paid out and the corporations must return investment to them
b) Investors can never directly be sewed. The corporation can be sewed i.e. NO ONE IS LIABLE!
c) Etc, etc, etc

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2004/08/the_corporation.html

A must see film/documenta4ry then is: The Corporation – a film by Mark achbar, Jennifer Abbot & Joel Bakan

Lobbying in the Economy

The concept of the commercial sector pushing your government decision making is just plain wrong. Though it is a necessity in modern society…..

Pillaging IRAQ

How contractors are pillaging iraq….. look for more companies who just rip out the money outta iraq…

“Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37822-2004Aug3.html

Want to read “Freedom” Press in South America?

Want to know the shit that happens in S.America? The absolute mess that’s left behind by everyone and the constant fingerpointing and political farce? How the DEA/FBI/CIA leave a trail of chaos and mess behind?

Good place to keep track of the mess in Mexico now?

www.narconews.com – The Freedom Press of S.America

Impeach Bush!

lol, kk thx bye bbq

http://infowars.net/articles/december2006/051206Impeachment.htm

IMF: Corrupt Piece of Junk, how to rape and pillage ur economy

Stiglitz caused controversy in October 2001 when he exposed rampant corruption within the IMF and blew the whistle on their nefarious methods of inducing countries to fall under their debt before stripping them of sovereignty and hollowing out their economies. Stiglitz agreed that the process of hijacking and looting key infrastructure on the part of the IMF and World Bank, as an offshoot of predatory globalization, had now moved from the third world to Europe, the United States and Canada.

The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold Joe Stiglitz: Today's Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

There we go. Australia implements a compulsory ID Card Scheme, whilst promising that the data wouldn’t be stored in a central database or be easily accessible and as soon as it’s implemented… WHACK! The police are allowed to search the central database without a warrant!

Who’d have thought you couldn’t trust the politicians?

Didn’t we win the cold war for our Freedoms? Didn’t we win WWII for our Freedoms? Then why is the UK implementing a measure that sees all children aged 11 and less to be compulsorily fingerprinted from 2010? Are they all guilty of crimes they haven’t committed? When will people understand the dangers of centralised databases? I’m shocked.

Maine has rejected the US Federal Real ID act – a digital, machine readable ID card that will be required to do just about anything in the US despite the usual fearmongering about terrorists and protection. It seems Maine is citing cost as an issue, but also lack of interest. Have they realised that it’s not the piece of paper (which is eminently forgeable if it’s machine readable) that proves who you are, but the person itself that is who he/she is?
Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana and Washington state are also debating the act and opposing it to some degree or another.
There is hope for the US yet!

A man wins $102,000 in a slot machine, the casino scratches it’s head, calls it a computer malfunction (as the slot machine wasn’t set to pay out!) and instead gives the man two dinner tickets. Isn’t gambling supposed to be a game of chance?
In other words, give the Philadelphia Park Casino a miss.

Illegal bars – in sheds, houses, etc. where people come to drink and smoke… This unlicenced drinking leads to more drink driving and more drinking under minors.

Novell claims that SCO is going down, and seeing as all of SCO’s intellectual property is actually licenced from Novell, they want all the money SCO owes them before SCO goes bust as a result of frivolous lawsuits.

Yet again a big database has been compromised – the US Secure Flight Database was accedentally opened up to an organisation that wasn’t supposed to have acces.
Why do people insist that this won’t happen or that it’s somehow safe to have huge amounts of personal data in one place?

That PC has come to this: Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF) is pissed off with how if academic research stirs controversy for some reason and challenges conventional wisdom, disciplinary action (eg. firing) is being taken against the academic who voiced the research. I thought the whole point of research was to challenge accepted wisdom, otherwise we’d still think the world was flat with heaven above and hell below. The result is that now academics try to avoid controversy – and thus destroy potentially valuable science – in order to not be disciplined in some way. Shouldn’t we be open to free speech and discussion on any subject in the halls of academia?

That this isn’t some weird splinter group is evidenced by the Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) which have a site filled with examples of students being disciplined for “offensive” (ie. someone, somewhere, for some reason doesn’t like it) science.

This makes me sick in the stomach, that we are willing to prefer Political Correctness to furthering knowledge and our understanding of the world we live in, not even allowing for proper debate to refute or support unpopular views.

They own a fair chunk of YouTube – and got that chunk just scant hours before the sale with Google was signed!

This is the in depth story of how plane spotters found out about the secret CIA flights / torture taxis to detainee prisons based in Europe.

Yes, the USA will have all your passenger data. Untill June 2007, when they’ll “renegotiate”. Well done on the crumpling front, Europe.

Yet again there will be a bill in the EU parliament for software patents, but there has been some sort of compromise which means it’s likely to be ratified this time. Just what the compromise is, I can’t really find out, except that it seems to make lawsuits on patent infringements more expensive, meaning IMHO that small companies have even less of a chance to fight the behemoths.

IBM sees flaws in the patent system, which is remarkable considering it’s the largest patent holder in the world. They will post their applications on the web before acceptance, considering that technological advance is preferable to stagnancy and they will oppose any non technological advancing patent. Good stuff IBM!

Limewire is slamming the RIAA with antitrust, consumer violations and other misconduct lawsuits. Good luck boys!