Big Brother to be watching the UK?

Ed Balls is aptly named. He’s got some cojones as he wants to spend 400 million pounds of taxpayer money to spy on UK citizens in their home. Oh, but don’t worry because he’s doing it for the children. Oh, in that case. . .

Ugh! His plan is to catch families who aren’t raising their kids properly in the eyes of the state. Families who fail to satisfy the government standards for child rearing would be placed under a kind of house arrest that Balls calls the “Sin Bin” because of course bringing religion into this makes me far more likely to support such a measure [rolls eyes].

CCTV cameras would be installed in their homes, and they would be monitored by authorities to make sure their children go to school, eat proper meals, and get a good night’s sleep. Security guards would also be deployed to carry out random home checks. This horrible parody of free society has been going on at the local level already, but Balls wants to spread his taint all over Great Britain.

I’m all for reasonable measures taken by child protective services but sticking cameras into people’s homes to watch their every move in the name of protecting children is a perversion of such child protective services. Not only is this a bad idea but it’s possibly the worst idea in human history. It represents everything Orwell warned us about, a totalitarian society where citizens lacked even the basic human right to privacy.

As Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Fortunately, I can’t even fathom citizens of the UK or in the U.S. for that matter ever becoming so desperate as to accept this level of security.

Sudanese woman punished for wearing pants

Lubna Hussein was just sentenced to 40 lashes for wearing pants. This is how the justice system in Sudan works. A woman wearing pants in public while out to dinner is a violation of their decency laws and punishable by 40 lashes!

There were chaotic scenes as Lubna Hussein, a former journalist who works for the United Nations, attended the hearing wearing the same green slacks that got her arrested for immodest dress.

THE SAME PANTS?! GET OUT!

Seriously, this is one of the most absurdly barbaric nations in the history of the cosmos. Fortunately, Hussein is courageous enough to put herself on the line to change the system:

After the hearing, defence lawyer Nabil Adib Abdalla said Ms. Hussein had agreed to resign from the United Nations in time for the next session on Aug. 4 to make sure the case continued. “First of all she wants to show she is totally innocent, and using her immunity will not prove that,” Mr. Abdalla told reporters. “Second she wants to fight the law. The law is too wide. It needs to be reformed … This is turning into a test case. Human rights groups will be watching this closely.”

He said Ms. Hussein was ready to face the maximum penalty for the criminal offence of wearing indecent dress in public, which was 40 lashes and an unlimited fine.

. . .

“Thousands of women are punished with lashes in Sudan but they stay silent,” she said. “The law is being used to harass women and I want to expose this.”