From http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

Two excellent comments, one from Gerard Mulholland posted on the BBC website:

For 30 years we -under both Labour and Tory governments- combated serious, organised US-financed Irish terrorism.

We lost 3000 civilians and 2000 soldiers.

We had car bombs.

We had truck bombs.

We had pub bombs.

We had shopping-centre bombs.

We had letter-box bombs.

We had shoot-outs.

We had sieges.

We were mortared.

We didn’t panic.

Nu-Labour are panic-stricken wimps, stampeded into unbelievable panic. They stir up fear and dread.

Stupid Al Qa’ida nutters aren’t the enemy. Nu-Labour is.

One from Anticant on this (http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/)  website;

I’m old enough to remember the Blitz in WW2, when 40,000 people were killed in a single year. They [my parents’ generation] just got on with their lives and said “sod it” when a bomb fell. They didn’t scare themselves witless with phantom plots and plotters like this daft lot, who resemble kids at hallowe’en giving themselves cheap thrills with pumpkin bogies. Yes, there IS a threat – but this government doesn’t seem to have the least clue as to what it actually is. They can’t see that they are a large part of the problem, not the answer. That is what really scares me.

Morphium.info TOR server…beware…

Appears to have been compromised since the arrest of Theodor Reppe.

https://morphium.info

New Scientist Censored… How to spot a hidden religious agenda…

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126975.800-how-to-spot-a-hidden-religious-agenda.html

Here is the original censored article:

Amanda Gefter
New Scientist
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:35 UTC

As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to… well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.

Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else – something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism – where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial – is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid – “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) – to the silly – “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer'”, his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

Bank Fees: Banking on silence

From Wikileaks, republished from the Financial Mail.

The competition commission has allowed banks to spin the report of its inquiry into charges

Secrecy hardly ever works, said former US politician Newt Gingrich, and it absolutely never works when it’s used “in defence of dumbness”.

This seems to apply to the imbroglio that has resulted in the competition commission spitting fire at website Wikileaks for publishing the uncensored version of a 590-page report of the commission’s banking inquiry.

Little wonder, given that the uncensored version reflects poorly on the commission itself and contradicts the theory that the banks are “open and transparent” with the public.

The report from the inquiry, headed by Thabani Jali, was the final outcome of two years of hearings into how banks set fees. Its sweeping proposals, which could save consumers R1bn/year, include capping penalty fees at R5 and overhauling the way banks charge ATM fees.

The report emerged just before Christmas, but there were big blacked-out chunks that were excised at the request of the banks. Thanks to Swedish website Wikileaks, the public now know that most of the excised portions were blacked out to protect the banks from public anger, rather than for true reasons of “confidentiality”.

Take this excerpt, blacked out at Absa’s request: “All the major banks assert that penalty fees, including fees for rejected debit orders, are readily avoidable by the customer by… keeping enough money in their accounts to meet any debit orders they choose to sign.”

WHAT IT MEANS:

• Banks censored report for PR reasons
• Wikileaks will lay charges if the source is hunted

 

But what could be the justification for censoring that statement, other than to prevent consumers finding out what the banks really believe, public relations aside?

As Jali’s panel said: “This fails to take account of social reality, a little like Marie Antoinette saying, ‘Let them eat cake!'”

Absa also claimed “confidentiality” over this statement: “It is evident that Absa failed to pass on… cost savings to any significant extent to its customers by way of price reductions, choosing instead to retain most of these savings as profits.”

Absa asked for no less than 69 excisions. FNB asked for 74, Nedbank 46 and Standard Bank 29.

So the real question is, how could the commission have agreed to censor the report in a way that now makes them look complicit in massaging the facts to suit the banks?

Competition commissioner Shan Ramburuth concedes that the leaked report now reflects poorly on his organisation and the banks.

“Why did the competition commission accept some of the requests to make it confidential? We did it for the sake of progress, to get this thing out there without further delays,” he says.

Ramburuth says that when faced with the requests to black out information from the banks’ lawyers, it became difficult to determine what was genuinely confidential.

First National Bank CEO Michael Jordaan admits the bank’s lawyers were perhaps overcautious.

“We never saw the report, only our lawyers did. Lawyers do what they think is in the client’s best interest, and you know what they’re like: if they see anything they vaguely don’t like, they’ll just take it all out,” he says.

For much of the inquiry, FNB was seen as the shining light of transparency, willing to assist the inquiry at every turn. The leaked report seriously tarnishes this image.

For example, FNB asked this statement to be excised: “Standard Bank and FNB have also enjoyed an increased number of transactions, unit cost savings and increased profits, without using these as an opportunity to mount a vigorous challenge to their rivals by way of price competition.”

This appears to be the inquiry’s conclusion. So why should it be excised under the guise of being “confidential”?

“Because it is factually inaccurate,” says Jordaan. “As liberal as we were, there’s always the risk that this information can be used legally. So we can’t afford to let these kinds of incorrect assumptions through.”

Though it is clear that Absa asked for a large amount of excisions, Absa GM for pricing Keith McIvor disputes that this was out of line with the other banks.

“Our lawyers said that in the initial parts of the report we did make more requests than others but, on balance, our legal team says all the banks claimed confidentiality equally,” he says.

McIvor said the leak was “disappointing”, especially as the bank voluntarily co-operated fully and went through a lengthy confidentiality process.

Peter Schlebusch, Standard Bank CEO for personal and business banking, says the bank’s claims of confidentiality had nothing to do with “trying to position ourselves from a public relations perspective”.

But in some instances it seems farcical.

For example, at the hearings Standard Bank openly discussed the findings of research from Genesis which showed the cost for customers of switching accounts between banks.

This showed that for Mzansi customers, the cost of switching accounts was R8,63 – 8% of their average annual R111 bank fees. For E Plan customers, this cost was R21,92 – 6% of their R374 annual bank charges.

Yet in the final report, it requested that this information, which it had already publicly disclosed, be blacked out, as it was “confidential”.

Schlebusch admits this was an “error”.

“In the complex process of sorting out the confidential information, we claimed confidentiality in respect of information that was already in the public arena,” he says.

Interestingly, the competition commission didn’t agree with Genesis’s analysis, saying it excluded certain key costs, so it did its own. This put the switching costs at 35% for an Mzansi customer (R39,18), 29% (R108,45) for an E Plan customer and 29% (R543) for a Prestige account.

Yet Standard Bank requested this be kept confidential, too. This seems iniquitous. Surely the public should know the real costs of switching accounts.

Absa, Nedbank and FirstRand have prohibited their staff from looking at the uncensored report. Curiously, Standard Bank hasn’t issued any such ban.

Nedbank CEO Tom Boardman says it would be wrong to allow the reading of the report. “I’d love to know what it costs the other banks to process a transaction, for example. But our position is that it’s not appropriate to read confidential details like that in a leaked report.”

But Jordaan says the commission could face legal claims over this leak.

“If a bank were to suffer losses because their confidential information was compromised, they might have a damages claim against the commission,” he says.

Ramburuth responds: “Look, we took every reasonable precaution, but something went wrong, and when the uncensored version was revealed, we did everything to limit the damage.”

The commission requested Wikileaks to remove the uncensored report, but Wikileaks told it to take a hike.

Wikileaks said if SA investigators tried to expose the source of the leak, they could face “criminal sanctions for spying on journalist-source communications [under Sweden’s Press Freedom Act]”.

Unfortunately, the uproar over what was censored threatens to cloud the incisive conclusions of Jali’s panel, which reached findings that were anything but complimentary to the banks.

Besides making 28 recommendations, the panel said “competition has not been effective in constraining the banks from keeping prices above competitive levels over a significant period of time”.

The ill-conceived effort by the banks to spin the message, and the willingness of the commission to let them, is an unfitting postscript for Jali and his panel.

First appeared in Financial Mail Thanks to Rob Rose and FM for covering these documents. Copyright remains with FM.

Fight Smash Win

From Street Sweeper coming album… Street Sweepers feature Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine. Good stuff. Music with meaning…