Slashdot Mirror

but you can't have the source

Q1: Is the source code of Jad available?

A1: Currently I have no plans to release the Jad source code for any purposes including porting to other computer platforms.

Could they at least have gotten Scott Baio? Sheesh!

The "No problem Bugroff" license is as follows...

The answer to any and every question relating to the copyright, patents, legal issues of Bugroff licensed software is....

Sure, No problem. Don't worry, be happy. Now bugger off.

All portions of this license are important..

• "Sure, no problem." Gives you complete freedom. I mean it. Utterly complete. A bit of a joke really. You have complete freedom anyway.
• "Don't worry, be happy." Apart from being good advice and a good song, it also says :- No matter what anyone else says or does, you still have complete freedom.
• Now bugger off. The only way to get rid of pushy Jackals is to ignore them and not feed them. The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court. Can't you just see it. Exactly the same thing that happened when some twit (not Linus) registered Linux as his own personal trademark. People got upset, started a fund, and hired, off all ruddy things, a Jackal to try and defend the chicken! Who really benefits from this trademark / patent / copyright thing anyway? The lawyers. Who made it up in the first place? The lawyers.

There already is a java decomipler. It is called jad, and can be found here.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

This thesis.

This keynote at Summer Comdex '99

This 'Presidents letter' at Caldera...

Let's not just say 'heresy'...let's THINK for once!

If managing programmers is compared to herding cats, and cats (due to their independence and "you can go to hell" atttitude) are the most accurate description of programmers, how the hell is a union ever going to work?

Like this.

I get emailed a few times a month by people who are either a) thanking me for putting it up because they referenced my paper in their own, b) thanking me for putting it up because they copied it (presumably) or c) asking me for permission to use it. Heck, someone asked me if they could use my graduation speech at their own graduation. Talk about lazy (you know who you are).

. . .

Um.

Look at the averages of impacts through the fossil record, far back beyond the KT boundary. There have been quiet periods before. Suddenly an asteroid or a comet gets nudged or bumped in the outer solar system, and Earth has an exctinction event.

Do you forget that recently we watched a previously uncharted comet smack into Jupiter, Shoemaker-Levy 9? Less than 2.5 million years ago the crater Tycho was carved out of the lunar surface. There's always Tunguska to think about.

Statistically speaking it is a very safe bet that something already *is* on a collision course with the Earth, we just haven't noticed it yet. Just because no cataclysmic impact has happened within the incredibly brief space of time encompassed by recent human history, you make a very dangerous assumption that this somehow makes such an event less probable.

That's like someone who lived on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens' om May 17th, 1980 saying "it hasn't erupted in my lifetime, so this means it won't erupt in the future." The next day a gentleman named Harry Truman was proved fatally wrong and buried under several thousand feet of mountainside.

I for one feel it is safer (and more sensible) to err on the side of caution than to be unprepared.

I would say that the article in Cinefex pretty well debunks most of the symbolism that is being attributed to the movie. The special effects crew involved in the film recount how many of the "symbols" planted in the movie were accidents or experimentation. That Kubrick would not be involved in the creation of most of the effects elements except in a "I like it" or "I hate it" final approval.

For those interested in movie special effects this article is a goldmine. They invented techniques never before seen on the big screen for this movie. Computer displays and wireframe models before you could just whip it out in a few hours on a graphical workstation. Thousands of hours spend using a photographic animation stand to create the classic computer monitors on the Discovery. A technical description of how they created the stargate light show at the end of the film using a variation of time lapse photography.

Obviously 2001 has alagorical elements built into it, but lets not go overboard. Sometime a cigar is just a cigar people.

I know it was mentioned on the older article:

This guy would do well to look over this web page, and understand why rockets are inverted, rather than hanging, pendulums.

If he continues with his current plan, about all he'll end up doing is making a nice crater in the lake bed...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

Billion dollar boondogle of the 1980's ... Pictures of the SGT York unmanned tank at http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Bunker/8757/SGTY .html

There's a little footnote about it at this site: http://www.pogo.org/mici/f22/f22raptor.htm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~

My impression is that the relational model of databases is more natural to most DBAs than the object oriented model. Object oriented software tends to have a large nunber of derived types, and furthermore operator overloading (or function overloading) makes it impossible to read a snippet of code and really know for certain what it does. For certain applications (e.g. management of large data sets and low level systems programming) these features do not provide a sufficient "win" to offset the additional complexity and overhead. The competing paradigms in programming language design that I think are most compelling are:

1. Procedural languages (and assembly language) for precise control of the machine and mapping onto hardware.
2. Functional Programming (e.g. LISP) for rewriting and filtering of inputs. Many scripting languages do some of this.
3. OOP for providing transparent abstraction, encapsulation of data and programs, information hiding, and code reuse.
4. Declaritive Languages (e.g. Prolog) for goal seeking programs using logical deduction
5. Relational databases for large data set management and manipulation.

My impression is that the relational model of databases is more natural to most DBAs than the object oriented model. Object oriented software tends to have a large nunber of derived types, and furthermore operator overloading (or function overloading) makes it impossible to read a snippet of code and really know for certain what it does. For certain applications (e.g. management of large data sets and low level systems programming) these features do not provide a sufficient "win" to offset the additional complexity and overhead. The competing paradigms in programming language design that I think are most compelling are:

1. Procedural languages (and assembly language) for precise control of the machine and mapping onto hardware.
2. Functional Programming (e.g. LISP) for rewriting and filtering of inputs. Many scripting languages do some of this.
3. OOP for providing transparent abstraction, encapsulation of data and programs, information hiding, and code reuse.
4. Declaritive Languages (e.g. Prolog) for goal seeking programs using logical deduction
5. Relational databases for large data set management and manipulation.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, WHFS used to have an interesting collection of DJs that played eclectic styles of music. Each DJ played what they wanted, not some robot program director's play list. Lots of good music, much of it from bands you had never heard of, in long sets. The DJs were very low key and didn't commit the capital offense of talking over the music. See this page for some history.

Aircraft

Automobile even more links if you look for "build your own sports car"

Nice looking Computer

I can not think of an example where such advancements are made for mass producing consumer goods. But i think the above examples invalidate much of your story.

One point is that lots of inventors never(seldom earn any money, and only few exceptions make a lot of money.

I think that whilst the great discoveries of our time and times gone by will more often be found by scientists and visionaries of the academic kind
Another point is that a lot of inventions were made by accident.

:)

For example: Some of the things I discussed involved the use of color and texture, which would probably have been degraded beyond recognition if I were forced to use pictures taken by pointing a camera at my TV.

If I can use parts of a copyrighted work in my own scholarly works, I must be able to use it at full quality. Anything less would not be adequate.
--

If GM Provided Tech Support.

gs -dBATCH -sDEVICE=epswrite -sOutputFile=myfile.eps myfile.pdf

BTW, it can decode encrypted pdf too with a little modification. Just follow the (very simple) instructions printed when you try to read an encrypted .pdf for the first time...

Combined with pstoedit is a great tool

The big boys acquire their frequency allocations through their political connections and political appeals to ideas like "the people's airwaves", then they want to lease "their" airwaves out? Why don't they lease their air-waves from the government? After all, without the government defending their legal entitlements to the air-waves, there would be little value in owning the air waves.

Rifkin is right to be concerned about the double-standards, injustices and dangers of this situation, but the same problem exists with all real estate and, indeed, wealth in general -- it is just called out in stark relief by frequency spectrum allocations.

As one of the key players in obtaining the first Ka-band allocation from the FCC, I am here to tell you the system of allocations is rigged to hand power over to the politically connected. I won't go into all the stuff we had to do to get a new spectrum licensed, but it wasn't pretty. I'll just stay this: Had it not been for the fact that I volunteered as a get-out-the-vote phone coordinator for Rep. George Brown, chairman of the House committee on Space and Science, I wouldn't have been able to contribute much to the opening of that new spectrum.

It was largely as a result of that experience in trying to advance technological frontiers with the US Federal Government that I came up with a white paper on a net asset tax to not only offload tax burdens from capital gains, income and sales, but also to open up all undefined assets to private claims without government intervention, except as defender of the legal system under which claims to those rights were made valuable assets.

The Telecommunications Act of 1934 got government into the business of handing out "the people's airwaves" to the politically connected media giants (a pattern that is continuing to this day with Reston, VA-based AOL/Time-Warner enjoying a government assist against Microsoft), as well as establishing a state-backed monopoly on wire communications. I'm actually of the opinion that the banking panic of 1907, the great stock market crash of 1929 and the New Economy Crash of 2000 were, all, part of a pattern in which new media technologies are created, social controls are being threatened and capital manipulations occur in such a way as to depress prices of newly emerging media companies enabling them to be bought on the cheap. Such social controls need not, of course, be consciously planned since they may be evolutionary emergent controls and evolution is, almost by definition, not a conscious process. Nevertheless, if this theory is correct, then just as cinema came under the control of a few giants after 1907 and broadcast came under the control of those same giants after 1929 (via the TCA of 1934), the NASDAQ crash of 2000 may allow giants to buy up and centralize Web/Internet media assets on the cheap. This sort of nonsense is profoundly destructive to culture, itself the basis of human social organization including technological advances, given the key role media companies play in defining culture.

Ultimately, this gets back to the true nature of "fiat" money and how otherwise worthless assets acquire value with the assurance of rights by warriors.

In the past a few prosecutions have been brought by claiming the use of radar detectors was contrary to section 5(b)(i) of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 as amended by section 3 of the Post Office Act 1969. However the Acts refer to the interception of wireless communications for the purpose of obtaining information as to the content, sender or addressee of any message. The Court concluded that the radar transmission was not communicating a 'message' and therefore equipment designed to detect the presence of the transmission could not decode any such message. It was further stated that section 1(1) of the Act, which requires a licence for the reception of radio signals, has been superseded by the Wireless Telegraphy Apparatus (Receivers)(Exemption) Regulations (SI 1989 No123) which exempts radar detectors and similar equipment from the need for such licenses.

As the author of the first 3D, first-person shooter multi-user game I can tell you it is pretty dang silly to expect to see basic, far-reaching patents in this area. I mean, it was 1974 when I first devised that system, and it was pretty "obvious" at that time -- including chat system, limitation of visibility and alteration of rendering methods by distance and view, etc. All it really took was the vision to actually write a 3D game (a vision which had been around for a long time when I first put finger to keyboard), some programming skill and access to the PLATO system. In the quarter of a century since then, there has been so much work done in multiuser distributed 3D gaming (including Kevet Duncombe's LAN-based microprocessor game hosting system which he built and demonstrated in the early 1980s, client-side rendering, etc.), that it is very hard to believe any broadly blocking patents are left in this arena that aren't of the "one click shopping" variety.

As the author of the first 3D, first-person shooter multi-user game I can tell you it is pretty dang silly to expect to see basic, far-reaching patents in this area. I mean, it was 1974 when I first devised that system, and it was pretty "obvious" at that time -- including chat system, limitation of visibility and alteration of rendering methods by distance and view, etc. All it really took was the vision to actually write a 3D game (a vision which had been around for a long time when I first put finger to keyboard), some programming skill and access to the PLATO system. In the quarter of a century since then, there has been so much work done in multiuser distributed 3D gaming (including Kevet Duncombe's LAN-based microprocessor game hosting system which he built and demonstrated in the early 1980s, client-side rendering, etc.), that it is very hard to believe any broadly blocking patents are left in this arena that aren't of the "one click shopping" variety.

Looks like it's time to drag the Hello Kitty Vibrator out again. Just so you know, Kitty's head goes in first.

A fellow in Australia caught some pretty good pictures of thieves who came into his house and forgot to steal the webcam.

http://www.geocities.com/osz/rob2/wanted.htm

Am I the only one who misread the story title "IT" as "it"? I thought maybe the Americans for Purity had gotten a Slashdot story. :P Scary.

-Puk

It is gone again. In fact, the entire directory is unavailable for viewing. Geocities sux if they can't handle getting slashdotted. The page (mirror here) is just text.

Goldman's mistake was two fold:

1) He didn't put a phrase like "to be disbursed at my sole discretion" at the start of the description of the prize award.

2) This he failed to do so within an arena where the distinction between "tricks" and "solutions" is frequently nonexistant: mathematics.

It's a good place to get mass for earth orbital facilities. What's the point of being human?

If there was some sort of econimical point, rather then braging rights sure we would go to the moon again.

There is, and "we" aren't therefore "we" can't. QED

Lunar oxygen for use in orbital transfer of geostationary satellites will be the first material to be sold for large amounts of cash and it will not be the United States of America ("we") or any of its companies that does it because that pioneering culture of the USA has now been successfully destroyed by The Culture of Critique.

If you're looking for entertainment of a different strain, try crapflooding my ring of 3l337 Geocites Slashdot-related wepages:

http://www.geocities.com/timothy_is_gay/

http://www.geocities.com/hemos_wedding/

--

If you're looking for entertainment of a different strain, try crapflooding my ring of 3l337 Geocites Slashdot-related wepages:

http://www.geocities.com/timothy_is_gay/

http://www.geocities.com/hemos_wedding/

--

A model of a solar or planetary system is called an orrery.

• Hand Crafted Orreries
  A Java Orrery Applet
  Another Java Orrery Applet

If you're looking for these, including this word in your search will find a lot more. Many types of orrery have been made of brass for hundreds of years.

While we're talking about IBM's dirty tactics, Here is a nice advertisement. (For the goatse.cx weary, it's http://www.geocities.com/zekester1945/) I recommend WebWasher for Windows users and JunkBuster for Linux users to eliminate GeoCities popup ads.

First (Graphical) Post!

Yes there is. I use a hauppauge card for capture, and avifile & vcr ( both can be found on Freshmeat ). I make a small script like this

#!/bin/sh
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
export PATH
DATE=`date +%m%d%y`
FILENAME=/path/to/myshow-6pm-$DATE.avi
v4lctl setstation 3
vcr -t 60m $FILENAME

An call it from 'cron' or 'at'. Works very good, and the files are DivX;-) avi's so they are fairly small. Linux VCR-HOWTO

help steer me right here.

in the article you linked, and i'll try to quote:

regarding the lisa, it was "First proposed in late 1978 by Steve Jobs..."

then, later, the discussion goes "When we started the Lisa project in late 1978..."

next, "The first Lisa application was a Forms Editor...(Figure 2 - 7/79)" (i'm going to assume that means july, 1979).

so, it seems here that we can infer that the interface design occurred between late 1978, and mid 1979. everything up to late 1978 was just concept inside apple per this documentation.

so, later we see "While consistent with the appearance of business equipment of 1979, the first Lisa interface was not very exciting to use" suggesting that they hadn't yet been satisfied that this was a sellable product. thus, it was still an R&D exercise.

good enough, makes sense.

now notice:

"The visit to Xerox was prompted after a number of people read papers published by Xerox about their Smalltalk environment [Goldberg 1978]."

interestingly enough, i can't find reference to anything published by adele goldberg while at PARC during 1978, but let's assume it is real.

if this is the case, that means that the majority of the thought that went into this paper occurred at WORST during the first half of 1978, or maybe the latter half of 1977 (they probably were NOT in any big rush to publish something here.. it was still pretty much an unknown how this would impact the world). this still places things at a half year, or so, out front apple. in reality, i think the collected thought behind the implementation of UI components in smalltalk actually predate 1977 by a few years per the documentation i'm finding at PARC on the topic.

now, all this would be fine & good, until you look at the history of "Star".

check here for that history.

one little snippet:

"When Star was first introduced in 1981, its bitmapped screen, windows, mouse-driven interface, and icons were unique in the marketplace...", and it should be noted that this was a SHIPPING PRODUCT.

seems to me that assuming that paper was published by goldberg when it was, and that the history of "Star" is as published in the linked document, the PARC researchers still deserve the vast majority of the credit for advancing the state of the art, while apple deserves the credit for popularizing it...

seems pretty cut and dry to me...

am i missing something?
is this history as documented inaccurate?

just curious :)

cheers.

Peter

Sharky's Home LAN Guide
Gamecenter's "Build a Home LAN"
"Configuring an Internet Firewall and Home LAN With Linux"
The CNET home LAN guide (if you're not a /. reader)
The Home LAN Project
The do-it-yourself under 50 bucks home LAN guide

whew. um... anyone got something that ain't covered already?

Whot? When? I don't believe you! Argh, well Canada is still the world leader in man-moose sexual relations, and you can take that to the bank! With maple syrup, eh?

Anyhoo, we're catching up to you Statesmen right fast! You may have the PenisBird and PenisFish, but beware! for Canada is now armed with the one and only PenisTimothy, running OpenBSD! Eh!

--

This fact, alone cuts all counter arguments off at the waist, but there is an even more fundmental problem: PBS should not receive any government support, not even from tax exemption let alone direct funding because there is no way for a government supported organization to avoid political bias. If nothing else, it will have a pro-government stance -- whether that be on the right or left of the political spectrum. It just so happens the real authoritarians in the US have been leftists since around the time of Roosevelt.

I dig watching shows about the ring-tailed fox-bat or whatever, but I don't want to hear about how I need to do something to save it from extinction.

Although I am usually regarded as somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan on the "political" spectrum, this is one of PBS's messages with which I agree. Humans are special in the following sense: We can reason about our futures and can choose the degree to which we identify with "the other". In the case of genuine diversity including other life forms, I am far more "leftist" in thoughts and actions than Alan Alda, Cokie Roberts or Margot Adler. All these people (or more precisely, their backers) do is use humanity's natural identification with the surrounding ecosystem as a weapon in the millenia-old conflict between urban vs rural populations -- primarily to justify high taxation rates levied on agrarians in support of cosmopolitans (hunter gatherers are almost gone because they don't provide as good tax base for the cosmopolitans). Rural populations, agrarians as well as hunter gatherers, are more strongly linked to their natural surroundings must more closely identify with nature than urban populations. By preaching to the rural populations about preservation of the natural environment, the urban populations can use the social circuitry of the rural populations to instill guilt which can be redeemed only by paying penance in whatever form the urban priesthood dictates -- in the case of today, April 15, taxation is highlighted as the form, as mythologized in the phrase: Death and Taxes. Other than that, these neopriests preach to us that we must use transport technologies to scramble ecosystems lest we be guilty of "provincial xenophobia". They say they merely want this for human populations because "we are all the same" and at the same time they say they want to preserve human diversity as well as that of nonhuman ecosystems. But by uprooting human populations from their "blood and soil" relationships, the neopriests in fact effectively scramble everything, including non-human cultures, into a homogeneous grey goo. This grey goo, unlike Bill Joy's fears about nanotechnology, is a clear and present biological danger that is destroying vast natural wealth this instant. The problem is the grey goo is the result of a process that is of great temporary benefit to those who are well adapted to cosmopolitan environments, from which the PBS culture, itself, arises. The PBS "altruists", without any need for conspiracy, thereby follow their self-interests and lead us all to destruction.

I am especially alienated from members of my own species who destroy the primary strength of humanity by climbing atop the pulpits and preaching, usually in all self-deceptive sincerity, doctrines that cause the sacrifice of virtually all other peoples, cultures and ecologies, on the alter of their cosmopolitan heavenly city -- an artifice that itself will ultimately fall once its supporting anthrosystems and ecosystems are destroyed.

This is a uniquely human problem.

Those who claim that this is all simply "natural" evolution must then also accept the "natural" reactions thus provoked.

I can't believe she's only on 6.5! She's the hottest chick I saw on there.

Now if only I had the damn link so you could all go and vote for her!

From the "Disperse Life" pages:

(An "inforb" is an orbit occupied by informational entities. A "biorb" is an orbit occupied by biological entities.)

The first biorb is likely to be around Earth growing out of the . It will grow Before growing far toward being heliocentric, the first biorb will need to begin the defense of Earth against celestial attacks.

Kinetic energy asteroidal weapons are the most likely technology to represent the greatest threat to Earth as a result of the growing solar biorb. Once asteroid mining begins in earnest, as it will once life becomes heliocentric, asteroids can be redirected via carefully planned celestial mechanics. Within a matter of decades, a malicious interest could send a swarm of tiny asteroids toward Earth at speeds comparable to that of the Swift Tuttle comet -- a popular candidate for global disaster scenarios. Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, the important thing is to find small asteroids with the right trajectories. This would most likely be carried out on the basis of a fairly complete atlas of the trajectories of small asteroids, searching for some large number of them that could be manipulated to converge on Earth with maximum relative velocity over a fairly narrow window of time.

The most economic defense will likely be the preemptive survey, cataloging and monitoring of all celestial objects (comets as well as asteroids) large enough to survive high speed passage through Earth's atmostphere with little loss due to ablation. This means the initial prospecting for asteroidal resources will be carried out by Earth shielding entities. It is difficult to second guess the technologies that would be available for this task so far in the future, but candidate technologies are already upon us and surveys are already being done.

Perhaps the most positive aspect of this situation is that when an asteroid is identified as a threat, it is also identified as a particularly attractive source of "fuel" for space transportation. Any asteroid that has a high velocity relative to Earth, or can be easily made to have such a velocity, and which has an orbit that can be made to come near Earth, can be used as reaction mass to navigate the inner solar system. Each time this is done, the threat represented by such asteroids diminishes. It's as though someone had discovered a way to burn nuclear fuel in jets without pollution. The bombs would get burned up due to economic demand.

Additional global threats to Earth are most likely decreased by removing technological civilization from its biosphere.

From the "Disperse Life" pages:

(An "inforb" is an orbit occupied by informational entities. A "biorb" is an orbit occupied by biological entities.)

The first biorb is likely to be around Earth growing out of the . It will grow Before growing far toward being heliocentric, the first biorb will need to begin the defense of Earth against celestial attacks.

Kinetic energy asteroidal weapons are the most likely technology to represent the greatest threat to Earth as a result of the growing solar biorb. Once asteroid mining begins in earnest, as it will once life becomes heliocentric, asteroids can be redirected via carefully planned celestial mechanics. Within a matter of decades, a malicious interest could send a swarm of tiny asteroids toward Earth at speeds comparable to that of the Swift Tuttle comet -- a popular candidate for global disaster scenarios. Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, the important thing is to find small asteroids with the right trajectories. This would most likely be carried out on the basis of a fairly complete atlas of the trajectories of small asteroids, searching for some large number of them that could be manipulated to converge on Earth with maximum relative velocity over a fairly narrow window of time.

The most economic defense will likely be the preemptive survey, cataloging and monitoring of all celestial objects (comets as well as asteroids) large enough to survive high speed passage through Earth's atmostphere with little loss due to ablation. This means the initial prospecting for asteroidal resources will be carried out by Earth shielding entities. It is difficult to second guess the technologies that would be available for this task so far in the future, but candidate technologies are already upon us and surveys are already being done.

Perhaps the most positive aspect of this situation is that when an asteroid is identified as a threat, it is also identified as a particularly attractive source of "fuel" for space transportation. Any asteroid that has a high velocity relative to Earth, or can be easily made to have such a velocity, and which has an orbit that can be made to come near Earth, can be used as reaction mass to navigate the inner solar system. Each time this is done, the threat represented by such asteroids diminishes. It's as though someone had discovered a way to burn nuclear fuel in jets without pollution. The bombs would get burned up due to economic demand.

Additional global threats to Earth are most likely decreased by removing technological civilization from its biosphere.

*cough* Quickies *cough*

http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/

or, for those adventurous enough to click a link:

http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/


kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.

Sorry, got my songs crossed. I meant The Saga Begins was derived from American Pie but poked fun at Episode I. Yoda, of course, poked fun at Episode V.
--parking_god

Unchock the wheels of your lower companion and roll into the Reserved Space.

Correct (other comments notwithstanding). The reason is the difference between parody and satire: satire is deriving from a protected work to poke fun (in this case) at the work itself, while parody is deriving from a protected work to poke fun at another protected work. Satire is always fair use; parody is not necessarily so. Fat was derived from Bad and poked fun at the work itself, so it was satire and Weird Al didn't need permission (although getting it was probably a good idea from a 'goodwill' standpoint). Yoda was derived from Lola but poked fun at Episode I, so it was parody and Al was wise to get permission (source: Writer's Digest, sometime in 1998, I forget which issue).
--parking_god

Unchock the wheels of your lower companion and roll into the Reserved Space

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

This is false. Money buys protection against punishment for nonpayment of taxes and taxes are not "collectively" collected -- they are collected by sadistic police-power:

Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913

by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".

THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY

Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.

In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.

Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".

And that brings us to the morality of governance.

The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.

The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)

These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.

WARRIOR INSURANCE

The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.

Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".

Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.

Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.

Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.


THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok

Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:

The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.

Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.

Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.

In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.

With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.

But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:

How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?

The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:

Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.

By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.

The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.

Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.

CONCLUSION

As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.

Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.

The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.

The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.

References

(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.

(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html

(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.ht m

An excerpt:

"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."

(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.

(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.

(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.

(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.

In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.

This is false. Money buys protection against punishment for nonpayment of taxes and taxes are not "collectively" collected -- they are collected by sadistic police-power:

Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913

by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".

THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY

Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.

In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.

Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".

And that brings us to the morality of governance.

The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.

The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)

These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.

WARRIOR INSURANCE

The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.

Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".

Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.

Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.

Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.


THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok

Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:

The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.

Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.

Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.

In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.

With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.

But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:

How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?

The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:

Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.

By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.

The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.

Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.

CONCLUSION

As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.

Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.

The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.

The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.

References

(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.

(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html

(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.ht m

An excerpt:

"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."

(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.

(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.

(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.

(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.

In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.