Peter Hain had a very hard time and seemed to handle it well, it looked to me like he was changing his mind.
Peter Hain?
That man is the King of the Kronies, he wasn't changing his mind, he was the only member of the panel that was defending the government?s indefensible position on a number of controversial issues, and he knew it...
The best response was to nod a bit and to sound like he was agreeing whilst not saying anything much really. He slipped-up a bit when he said he was against ?G Bay?, but then backtracked as much as he could in front of an audience and panel of normal individuals who quite rightly questioned the wisdom of the majority of the g?ments recent actions.
Yes I agree Hain is king of kronies (good term) but he must have a conscience(sp?) and a certain level of intelligence. I enjoyed his facial contortions as he was having so much difficulty. It is that that made me think he may be being won over to the good side.
Hell its Friday, probably being foolishly optimistic. I thought the panel was excellent and it was the best QT I've seen in ages. John Sergeant was superb.
THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber.
Bandidoz wrote:I used to think like that, but with knowing more history I do not any longer.
To me it's like saying a medical problem is in the symptom rather than the cause....
...In short I would argue that the fear of "ID cards ameliorating genocide" is an unfounded one; history demonstrates that genocide occurs due to the motivation when the conditions are there - ID cards or not.
So humans are basically so easily persuaded to do absolutely anything that those in power don't need any extra tools?
There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read. Isn't that why the Patriot Act specifically requires libraries to release information on who's reading what? For this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the popular DODGY TAX AVOIDERS wishlists.
DODGY TAX AVOIDERS wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on DODGY TAX AVOIDERS and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator's city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private. DODGY TAX AVOIDERS's popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists.
For an all inclusive search by name, you could compile a comprehensive list of first names and nicknames from the baby names databases available on the internet. Armed with this list, and by recording the search results for each first name, it is possible for you to retrieve the vast majority of public wishlists on DODGY TAX AVOIDERS.
For the purposes of this exercise, only a single name was chosen ? a common male name that returned over 260,000 wishlists. I'm not going to divulge what name was actually used. Let's pretend it was "Edgar," in honor of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
The American president and the British prime minister have spent half a decade exploiting Bin Laden for political ends, in thrall to their security/industrial complex. They have relied on terrifying their electorates with new and bloodcurdling threats, with what Runciman calls ?spook politics?. But they will pass. The half-baked ?message? laws passed by Britain?s limp parliament last week will fall in disuse. The vitality of British and American democracy has always been its ability to produce antibodies when truly challenged by an internal or external menace. The West will rediscover its self-belief and restore the liberalism, properly defined as freedom, that it once exemplified to the world.
Bin Laden is not going to win and never was. But Bush and Blair are giving him an astonishing run for his money.
There will be no dramatic developments. We will not step out of our homes one morning to discover that the state, or our boss, or our insurance company, knows everything about us. But, if the muted response to the ID card is anything to go by, we will gradually submit, in the name of our own protection, to the demands of the machine. And it will not then require a tyrannical new government to deprive us of our freedom. Step by voluntary step, we will have given it up already.
The following happened in the United States of America on Feb. 9 of this year.
The scene is the Little Falls branch of the Montgomery County Public Library in Bethesda, Md. Business is going on as usual when two men in uniform stride into the main reading room and call for attention. Then they make an announcement: It is forbidden to use the library's computers to view Internet pornography.
As people are absorbing this, one of the men challenges a patron about a Web site he is visiting and asks the man to step outside. At this point, a librarian intervenes and calls the uniformed men aside. A police officer is summoned. The men leave. It turns out they are employees of the county's department of Homeland Security and were operating way outside their authority.
The Prison Service has announced plans to set up a database of inmates who abscond from open jails, after its director general was forced to admit he did not know how many were on the run.
This story fills me with hope...
Realistically there is no chance of a comprehensive, functioning ID card system being properly implemented.
