April 2009

Cambridge University Professor of Security Engineering, Ross Anderson, points out that a very "interesting" court case about failures in the Chip & PIN system will be held later this month. It relates to phantom withdrawals from customer accounts.

Yokel hopes that you will spread the word as widely as you can; there are serious issues at stake here. The most serious issue is the extent to which your bank can abdicate its responsibility for the security of the money that you entrust to it; how much it can blame you for bank errors and for lack of bank security.

The UK Home Office act as though they have long wanted a national police force in the UK. Thus the foundation of ACPO Ltd as one of the stepping stones on the way.

ACPO Ltd has announced that it has chosen the next Chief Constable of the UK in Sir Hugh Orde, currently Chief Constable of the Northern Ireland Police Service.

Read it all, including the notes for editors section. That might explain the current stupidities on Jersey.

Things are going so badly wrong with the country of his birth, that Yokel can no longer keep up with them, let alone comment on them all. But today being a holiday, lets forget for a moment the joyous day that Easter is supposed to be, and record a few of the horrors around us

No 10 Black Operations. Why does the proper government of this country need people of this type? For the time being there is one fewer, but Yokel suspects that Brown will revert to type pretty quickly. It is after all how he got to power!

The Police Agenda. Since NuLabour came to power, and ACPO Ltd was created as a quango to manage the police on behalf of the ruling Party, trust in the police has gone down by leaps and bounds. Even coppers know what has happened to their force. It is a shame that we must go to British Columbia to find a web page proudly displaying the Prinicples of Policing that were enunciated by Sir Robert Peel when founding the Metropolitan Police. The present "service" has a slogan (Working together for a safer London) instead. But it sure has a Diversity Strategy, though the Equal Opportunities policy returns a 404 Page Not Found error at the time of writing this. We know that Rupert Murdoch manipulated NuLabour into power with the instructions and guidance he gave his editors. When his editors now permit the publication of articles like this, perhaps that is an admission that things have got very bad indeed!

UPDATE: This just noted at the bottom of Sunday's column at Peter Hitchens' place: * The unlovely Bob Quick ought to have resigned after his indefensible arrest of the Tory MP Damian Green. The police are not supposed to get involved in politics and should be smacked down very hard when they do, or we are well on the way to a police state. So what was Mr Quick doing in Downing Street with plans for ‘anti-terror’ arrests? I am amazed that everyone concentrates on the exposed documents rather than on this curious fact. Operational matters of this kind should have nothing at all to do with Ministers, and in a proper free country they wouldn’t. The police enforce the law, not Government policy. This incident increases my suspicion that these ‘anti-terror’ operations are in fact political propaganda, aimed at increasing police power rather than making us safer.

Good point!

Parliament. Yokel had thought that we (the grateful nation) paid for Sadiq Khan MP to be the Member for Tooting (inner South London for those unsure of the geography). Instead it seems that he is MP for Waziristan and the Tribal Areas. Yokel had thought that the British abdicated their responsibility for these areas during a previous Labour administration, thereby unleashing a bloodbath of religious intolerance by the Religion of Peace. However, it must be alright because the said Mr Khan is Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Community Cohension and Fire and Rescue Service), in the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Friends? What are they? In the continuing EU integrationist theme of crapping on our former friends and colleagues, this NuLabour government are making it difficult for British farmers to get their sheep shorn this spring. Just another little help to ensure we all turn vegan, no doubt!

Database State. Thank God that someone with clout is saying NO! Mark you, Yokel suspects that the law will shortly be changed to make it a criminal offence not to comply, with civil sanctions so that they can drive what remains of the private education system in this country bankrupt.

Surveillance State. What with people being tracked and recorded in databases whenever they drive their cars (ANPR), use the buses and trains (Oyster and all other electronic card payment systems), walk down the street (Facial Recognition), carry their passports and items bought in shops (RFID tags), have their phone calls, mobile phone location, emails and website visits all logged (British sponsored EU Data Retention Directive) there surely couldn't be anything else left to record, could there? Oh yes there could: Have you taken your medicine? We have ways of finding out, you know! Of course it is not only those who might be forgetful who will be monitored, it will be everyone because the microchips will be added during manufacture! As if the NHS Records database wasn't good enough reason never to go near the medical profession ever again, this is another.

Now, what was that good news for today?

Tipped off by Old Holborn (warning: Swearblog), Yokel has been for a look at the Statebook. Have a browse around, and see how much of it is already in use!

Will it all help the government to find the dreaded terrorist? Bruce Schneier, a well respected cryptographer, Chief Technical Officer of BT Counterpane, and clear thinker, is very doubtful.

Reading from "Gates of Vienna", Yokel noted an article by Fjordman, always worth a read. In this he is showing how the government of the USA is defeating itself and its former allies, and suggest why. In the course of it he quotes from Caroline Glick who was writing originally in The Jerusalem Post. From the part quoted by Fjordman, there is a sentence that jumped out at Yokel, not for what was said, but for what was missing.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history — both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US’s nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America’s missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, “Don’t worry, be happy,” as he leaves them to Moscow’s tender mercies; humiliating Iraq’s leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world’s aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Yokel's emphasis on part of that sentence. Here we have the Czechs, Poles and other East European states scrambling to join the EU for protection, and the EU doesn't even rate a mention as their protectors! When will the EU realise that it is only a corrupt talking shop? When will the EU realise that it hasn't even got the guts to say "Boo" to a goose, and that the only enemies that it will ever take on are its own citizens?

You may have noticed, like Yokel, that the moment a member of the "Left" starts to lose an argument, they start calling their opponent names. Names like "fascist", or "racist", or even "islamophobe".

Andrew Klavan on Pajamas TV sums it up very well. He is warning ordinary Americans what is coming. On this side of the pond we can vouch for its truth!

Yokel heard a short sentence in one MiniTrue Radio 5 news broadcast that the Obamessiah was praising France as being 'our oldest ally, our first ally'. But it isn't on any of their web pages, that Yokel can find. Yokel wonders why. Indeed not even the Yankee mainstream media reports it.

Instead, it is down to an American blogger to provide us with the full text of the Sarkozy/Obama Press Conference. Aided by the UK Government's deliberate dumbing down of the teaching of most subjects, including history, it is doubtful if many UK citizens could understand why Yokel finds Obama's statement so offensive. But there it is, in Obama's opening remarks.

For those who are not aware, the alliance to which the Obamessiah is referring is the help the French gave to the US at the time of its War of Independance. France had supported the fledgling USA merely on the principle that "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Anything for the Frogs to score one over the Brits, so they took the opportunity. In the recent past of course, the French have been anything but loyal allies of the USA, but clearly that is irrelevant to the One who was elected to change the USA out of all recognition.

There are great changes coming for the USA, changes that most of the people who voted for the Obamessiah can't even contemplate. Those of us in the UK have had the "benefit" of hardline Socialist incompetent dogma inflicted on us for the past 12 years. We know whats coming. We have their future, and we don't like it!

To Yokel, this is the first solid indication of the impending collapse of the USA. Welcome to the midden that our rulers have made our home.

Update:

The similar event (abandoning your real friends) came to the UK in the 1970s when Ted Heath lied to us about joining the "Common Market". That was when we started crapping on our Commonwealth colleagues. Trade restrictions against non EEC produced foodstuffs (to aid the lazy French micro-farmers) did wonders for the economies of New Zealand and Australia (not)! Ever since then, we have been on a visibly downward spiral.

Yokel has (like many others) been first puzzled and then annoyed by the new Policing Pledge posters produced by Minijust. The typeface is clearly a straight copy of the font used in the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster that has been used widely across the internet since its rediscovery by Barter Books of Alnwick. One can now get reprints, mugs and rubber stamps from various traders, as it is out of copyright.

Interested in the history of this poster, Yokel stumbled upon a website of a certain Rebecca Lewis (now Dr Rebecca Lewis), whose PhD research was about "The planning, design and reception of British Home Front propaganda posters of the Second World War". On her site she has a list of some relevant posters. She also posts a relevant chunk of her PhD thesis. Of course someone with a sense of humour has updated the series for today's world!

In browsing through some of Rebecca Lewis's list of posters, a couple stood out as being perhaps more relevant today than any time since WW2.   The first is this one "If only they'd tell us what to do". As NuLabour have forbidden and made compulsory in equal measure, there is now nothing that falls into neither category!

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The second one deserves a little bit of updating, with more modern photographic images. It is "Your Britain - fight for it now!" The scene is from a typical part of the Sussex Downs.

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A quick think about other government propaganda recently drew Yokel back to thinking about the "Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes" campaign of the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, via his plaything Transport for London. And now there is the "anti-terror" posters of the recent past, that others have had a good bash at. They appear to be designed to further develop paranoia and fear in as many of the population as can be achieved.

During the last war, the nation's survival was at stake, and the government was on the side of the people.

Now the nation's survival is once more at stake, but the government appears to be on the side of those who threaten our nation; whether that threat is by Migrate, Multiply, and Manipulate or the threat is that we must simply give our nation away.

We must do something. Riot is not the British way, not just yet anyway. But don't just wait for someone else to vote for this year or next, because each of the main parties is just as rotten as all the others. Get out there and be the alternative for people to vote for. Or find a trustworthy candidate and campaign for them. This is your Britain. Fight for it now. If we sit on our arses and do nowt, we will get what we will manifestly deserve: Sharia Law governed from Brussels. If that is what you want, fine. But Yokel suspects that most will find it rather a shock, and will wish that they had done something while there was still time. (Yokel was going to provide some links to illustrate his point, but feels unable to do so. Should you have any doubt about the facts of the matter, rather than the proponents' spin and PR, then google for sharia punishment.)