Domain: house.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to house.gov.
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Sadomasochistic Money and "Society"American society is essentially capitalist. Capital is another one of those social fictions which has effaced its own socially-constructed nature to the point that most people accept it as "real," in and of itself, and beyond their ability to control. Like murder, though, money has no reality beyond that which we collectively grant it.
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
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.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.
CONCLUSIONAs 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.
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Re:I have an idea. Charge companies for priv of (CWant to copyright something? Then you have to pay a fee. The fee starts at one dollar and triples each year, for as long as you continue to pay.
This is brilliant! Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US constitution states:
[Congress shall have the power] Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Emphasis mine, on "limited times". Patents extend for 20 years. This has proved fair and covers the "sciences" portion of the above. But Current copyright is the creator's life plus 120 years for new copyrights. Is this "limited". It's eternal for all practical purposes since no one will ever live that long. It gets worse when the "creator" is a corporation. Because they can never "die". Even when they're about to die, all their assets are acquired by someone else and thus continue to live on that way. (e.g., Hasbro now holds the copyright to old Atari 2600 games, even though Atari is dead Dead DEAD).
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The Sadistic Nature of Money
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
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.> 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.
CONCLUSIONAs 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.
-
The Sadistic Nature of Money
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
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.> 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.
CONCLUSIONAs 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.
-
The Sadistic Nature of Money
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
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.> 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.
CONCLUSIONAs 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.
-
The Sadistic Nature of Money
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
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.> 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.
CONCLUSIONAs 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.
-
The Sadistic Nature of Money
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
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.> 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.
CONCLUSIONAs 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.
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He asked for some help, so let's go...Rep. Boucher writes:
As a part of our grassroots effort, I am collecting the electronic mail addresses of individuals who will serve as "activists" on behalf of our measure... send their electronic mail address to jody.olson@mail.house.gov.If you want to thank Rep. Boucher, drop Jody an e-mail so that when legislation we care about is going through, they can coordinate our efforts to contact our representatives. You may also want to pass along a warm "thank you" to Rep. Boucher for his continuing support.
--brian
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Questioning Question QualityI'd like to know how these particular questions were chosen. My impression of the question-selection process was that ten or so questions would be selected from the highest moderated (i.e. +5) potential queries.
While this peer-review process may have merit, I've noticed many of the chosen questions overlap (how do you feel about the DMCA, corporate influence...), in addition to being quite nebulous.
What I find peculiar is that, despite Mr. Boucher's pioneering efforts to reform the patent practices of the U.S. PTO (including co-sponsoring the Business Method Patent Improvement Act of 2000), none of the questions chosen even mentioned software or business method patents. At least one of the potential questions from the +5 pool specifically focused on these topics (allright, I admit I wrote it).
Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell -
Re:Internet Time
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Flip side of Privacy International awards
Neither ABCNews nor the Slashdot write-up seem to link to the actual Privacy International site or their 2001 US Big Brother Awards page.
Also, the ABCNews article and Slashdot write-up dwell entirely on the privacy violators, while the original site also mentions that
2 awards were also given to champions of privacy. The Brandeis Award is named after US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who described privacy as "the right to be left alone." The awards are given to those have done exemplary work to protect and champion privacy.
...and awards the Brandeis Award to...
- Evan Hendricks - 20 years of publishing the Privacy Times. Hendricks goes after companies that traffic in children's private data and tells Congress how important privacy is, since they don't seem to get it most of the time.
- Julie Brill - Vermont Attorney General's Office. Brill spearheaded Vermont's litigation against the tobacco companies, and she goes after banks you sell your private data, record companies that fix prices, and drug companies that try to stamp out generics.
These are the good guys (and girls). They deserve some recognition, too.
-M
You're smart; why haven't you learned Python yet? http://diveintopython.org
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Re:OK, what's the angle?
He's also on the Judiciary Committee's SUBCOMMITTEE ON COURTS, THE INTERNET, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
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Keeping the ball rolling.
I actually just called his office in DC, to express my delight with his statements. When I asked the chick who answered the phone if she knew where I could get some warez and shit, she gave me an url. This dude is hard core.
Seriously, tho, I did call his office to express my satisfaction, and the chick who answered the phone was quite nice. The Rep used to be a lawyer and she says that he is quite interested in fair use and the DCMA. This URL is a lit of his technology significant statements, letters and bills. Interesting reading.
If you are a constituent of Rep. Boucher's (Live in Southwest VA, 9th District) it is even more important that you call, as he doesn't work for us, he works for you.
Brant -
This guy is great
OK, this guy is the greatest politician, since, well, anybody.
If you're a US citizen, especially from VA, email him, tell him you love him. Congresspeople notice when they get loads of email in support or opposition of their position.
Whatever state you're from, you can make donations to his reelection campaign. The evil double AA's are probably already cutting a check to the GOP in Virginia to get this guy blown out of the water. But if the RIAA and MPAA can buy legistlation, we can too. -
He's also pro-Napster...
It's not the first time he's been mentioned on Slashdot (At least in comments.) He also made a very good statement with his Music Owners' Listening Rights Act of 2000 propsal. Too bad this one got buried in committee.
He's really in tune with the /. community. Take a look at his picture... He really is one of us. -
He's also pro-Napster...
It's not the first time he's been mentioned on Slashdot (At least in comments.) He also made a very good statement with his Music Owners' Listening Rights Act of 2000 propsal. Too bad this one got buried in committee.
He's really in tune with the /. community. Take a look at his picture... He really is one of us. -
Re:OK, what's the angle?
As usual, opensecrets.org has a per-sector breakdown.
He gets a decent amount of money from communications people (and Verizon, SBC, and BellSouth rank high on his list), but more from energy and finance. Virgina... hrm.
Here is his home page. He doesn't list his committee memberships, but he's member of the Energy and Commerce one, which explains the energy and banking money.
Here we see PAC contributions from computer equipment/services manufacturers. AOL, Intel, and so forth show up -- but these contributions are fairly minor. The National Assn. of Broadcasters did give him $7k via a PAC, interestingly. Whereas the MPAA didn't give much at all... -
Re:OK, what's the angle?
As usual, opensecrets.org has a per-sector breakdown.
He gets a decent amount of money from communications people (and Verizon, SBC, and BellSouth rank high on his list), but more from energy and finance. Virgina... hrm.
Here is his home page. He doesn't list his committee memberships, but he's member of the Energy and Commerce one, which explains the energy and banking money.
Here we see PAC contributions from computer equipment/services manufacturers. AOL, Intel, and so forth show up -- but these contributions are fairly minor. The National Assn. of Broadcasters did give him $7k via a PAC, interestingly. Whereas the MPAA didn't give much at all... -
A small step, but in the right directionNow that one member of congress has taken a risk and stood up against the DMCA, we need to pledge our support and rally behind Rep. Boucher in order to encourage others to follow his lead. People here have good intentions, but posting your opinion on Slashdot will not make a difference, we need to contact our representatives directly and let them know that we are behind them completely. I urge everyone who reads this to send Mr. Boucher a congratulatory note to him here.
As a Virginia resident, I'm happy to see our elected officials are doing their job and working for the people instead of pandering to corporate pressure. In addition to his stance against the DMCA, Rep. Boucher has also pledged himself to protecting all rights of Americans, and is an active supporter of the NRA and prayer in school. This man will certainly be getting my vote next election!
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Rick, not Dan
Virginia's 9th district rep is Rick Boucher not "Dan" Boucher.
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Don't just sit and sulk--do something!Congratulations, Slashdot, for once more posting a story which--however factually accurate or inaccurate--is written with such bias that it infuriates everyone who reads it. Well folks, instead of just reading stories like these and getting angrier and angrier at "them," use your irritation to actually do something that will have a positive influence.
The DMCA (PDF), however villified it is here on Slashdot, was not intended to turn out as it did. Sen. Hatch's intent was a law that would allow digital copies to be made. The no-circumvention clause that we're all familiar with was supposed to be a pot sweetener to prod the recording industry into releasing digital media. Unfortunately, we all know how the law was abused by those it sought to protect.
Sen. Hatch's office has links to a number of letters and opinions regarding his true stance on the issue of digital media copying. I don't doubt he will bring this issue back up, and as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee the old media companies will be in the hot seat for what they have done.
So get moving! Do something that will have a real impact. Write your represantitive! Many of them were elected on non-technical issues and don't really know about the topic. Maybe it will be your letter that shapes their opinion.
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Tax cut comment
OK, I don't claim to know anything about NASA reuseable launch program, or the psychological guilt factor of being 'rich' . I don't claim to know a hell of a lot on taxes, politics, or economics. What I do know is that if the Bush tax plan is approved then I will be paying five percent less, my parents will be paying six percent less, and my girlfriend's parents (who support seven kids on about $30K/year and can barely keep up) will have to pay NONE.
I suggest you avoid bringing up topics you apparently know nothing about, especially if you are considering it in jest. Leave ignorance to those people who don't care about things. I'd like to think that we slashdotters would like to be informed and accurately informed, and to form our opinions based on truly legitimate information, not just some crack editorialist for Salon.com. I had observed that the website containing the article does not list any of the author's credentials, save for "editor." I do believe I would much more likely trust someone described as "veteran economist," or (wink, wink) "masters in business degree from Harvard."
Now, in true slashdot fashion, if anybody would like to get the FACTS and make an INFORMED decision, try following this link. It is on the House of Representatives website. While I couldn't find a copy of the actual tax proposal itself, feel free to browse house.gov and even better, c-span has loads of information on everything that the house and the President does.
If somebody happens to find a link to that tax proposal, please post it!
BTW, Now that I think of it, this whole tirade could be considered off-topic... but I believe that a call for awareness of the facts is highly important, and core to what has made slashdot so great.
-- < RANT > I propose to the IETF that the surrounding tags become official identification for slashdot.com readers! < /RANT > -
Tax cut comment
OK, I don't claim to know anything about NASA reuseable launch program, or the psychological guilt factor of being 'rich' . I don't claim to know a hell of a lot on taxes, politics, or economics. What I do know is that if the Bush tax plan is approved then I will be paying five percent less, my parents will be paying six percent less, and my girlfriend's parents (who support seven kids on about $30K/year and can barely keep up) will have to pay NONE.
I suggest you avoid bringing up topics you apparently know nothing about, especially if you are considering it in jest. Leave ignorance to those people who don't care about things. I'd like to think that we slashdotters would like to be informed and accurately informed, and to form our opinions based on truly legitimate information, not just some crack editorialist for Salon.com. I had observed that the website containing the article does not list any of the author's credentials, save for "editor." I do believe I would much more likely trust someone described as "veteran economist," or (wink, wink) "masters in business degree from Harvard."
Now, in true slashdot fashion, if anybody would like to get the FACTS and make an INFORMED decision, try following this link. It is on the House of Representatives website. While I couldn't find a copy of the actual tax proposal itself, feel free to browse house.gov and even better, c-span has loads of information on everything that the house and the President does.
If somebody happens to find a link to that tax proposal, please post it!
BTW, Now that I think of it, this whole tirade could be considered off-topic... but I believe that a call for awareness of the facts is highly important, and core to what has made slashdot so great.
-- < RANT > I propose to the IETF that the surrounding tags become official identification for slashdot.com readers! < /RANT > -
Re:Takedown orders? This is racketeering!The "payoff" is bascially an agreement, we won't sue you for what you did if you pay us off.
Which agreement is that? The one where I give up my 6th Amendment Rights?
Article [VI.] In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Guilty until you pay off THE MAN! Where can I sign this FUCKING agreement?
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL." -
Re:Right....Freedom of expression does not apply to racist speech.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is pretty clear on that:
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
The UDHR is law in the United States as it was ratified by the US Congress and became a treaty and therefore according to the US Constitution part of the "law of the land".
Article. VI.
Clause 2:This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Criminalising hate speech is mandated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and therefore by the United States Constitution.
This takes precedence over the Bill of Rights.
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Complain to Bill and Al
Perhaps now the bleeding hearts that make up
so much of the /. community will wake up and
smell the coffee - Clinton/Gore oversaw the
largest erosion of personal privacy ever. The
so called 'champions of the people' did nothing
more than bring Orwell a very large leap closer
to reality, thru action and inaction.
Your privacy was tossed out by executive orders
and sponsored legislation, not to mention the
wink of the eye to companies like Sun. Reminds
me.. isn't Sun about to cut a big check to Clinton
to speak? Maybe somebody from the audience will
have the balls to standup and interrupt Scott and
Bills great adventure to ask about this. But I
think they will be way to busy fawning over them.
Maybe now those of you who don't care about
politics will get a clue and write your reps and
senators about these (and other) things. But
since many of you probably have no idea who your
elected representatives are, let alone how to
contact them...
House of Reps.
Senate -
Links to House & Senate Hearings
The full house hearing stuff is at http://www.house.gov/commerce/hearings/telecom020
8 2001.htm.
And the full senate hearing stuff is at http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/issues/telco.htm#H earings. [NOTE: visiting the Senate committee's web site will produce a noise like a modem retraining. This is a feature, for no explainable reason, and just a sound effect. It's not your modem.]I had the dubious distinction of testifying at both hearings...Since some of the above is in
.pdf, here are links to HTML versions of my House and Senate prepared statements. -
Social Identity Neurons and AutismA hypothesis for the sincere to consider:
A great deal of extended phenotypics in humans is grounded in the manipulation of mirror neurons of susceptible populations. Autism, in particular, is symptomatic of genetically recessive populations that are experiencing extended genetic dominance -- autism being a pathological byproduct of the imperfect intervention in social identity mechanisms that normally produce such extended phenotypic social structures as religions, bodies politic, etc.
The inappropriate attention historically given to autism and mirror neurons by the academic establishment is an indirect result of the genetic interest among urban elites in maintaining the extended phenotypic social structures that rely on the manipulation of mirror neuronal responses. Recent defections by Italians and Jews (e.g: Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti and their colleagues at the University of Parma and Hugh Fudenberg), ethnic groups that have historically been the prime beneficiaries of such urbanizing social structures in the West, are being driven by the increasing presence of Dravidians (V.S. Ramachandran and Vijendra K. Singh) whose group is not as dependent on the existing extended phenotypic structures of JudeoChristian civilization, and whose relatedness to the recessive European populations, combined with their own genetic dominance, creates a unique relationship with northern European ethnicities -- the primary victims of autism in the U.S.
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Re:PTO Question
Two things about your hundreds of PhDs link:
1. It's funny that the congresscritters' names are in normal text and the lawyers' names are in bold.
2. Yes they had 350 Ph.D's in the PTO. But they're Ph.D's who have chosen to work for gummint pay. When I was finishing up my MSEE I happened to become fairly well acquainted with the then-President of the US Patent Law Assn (he lectured at a biz class I took and then I discovered he lived right around the corner from me). I talked to him about the field, more from the technical than the legal side. The work looked kind of interesting ("poring over other people's never-before-seen stuff, day in, day out, in a dingy, humid office in a sub-basement in Crystal City? Cool!"), but the pay scales outright sucked, especially for new-hires. And I'd had enough of the insensate management style of institutions when I was in the Army, thank you. I took an easy job at HyperMegaSemiCorp and got rich, instead. I still wonder what the thought process was behind the career choice for every advanced-degreed individual working at the PTO.
--Blair -
Re:PTO Question
The PTO has lots of technical people, and few lawyers. The PTO has hundreds of PhDs. Sure, they hire hundreds of people with less than Ph.D. level degrees, but then, I don't expect that every critic of the work they do has one either. Hey, if you want to solve the problem, here's some info on becoming an examiner.
The shortcomings of the PTO have more to do with the time given to examine applications, and the money spent on examination, not the smarts of the examiners. Money is short in part because Congress is using the PTO as a piggy bank. Fees go in, and instead of putting all the money into making patents, Congress sucks about a quarter of the money out for other things.
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Re:I'll pay the Napster guilt tax"I know what I'm doing is illegal and that bugs me."
What you are doing is not illegal. Just because Lars says something is stealing doesn't mean that it is. Since we (well, the lucky ones) don't live in Russia where laws can be kept secrete, you can just download Title 17 of the US Code off of some of the various web sites and check it out. It's a bit dense, but understandable. I left it by the toilet and worked few a few more pages each day.
I think the conclusion you will draw is that as long as no money is changing hands, as long as you aren't paying for the music files, then you are not in violation. (Of course, one still might hold the position that Title 17 should be updated to cover the non-commercial distribution of computer files, but I don't think the position that it is currently illegal is tenable.)
You see, what is happening is similar to the big anti-piracy propaganda campaign of the 80s and 90s. Remember those posters in school computer labs extorting people not to pirate software ? Remember the ads in industry magazines ? They made a big deal about illegal copying in the media, but the cases they brought to court always were carefully choosen instances of people using illegal software for a business, or people selling copies of software. (Occasionally a they did go after someone else, and the strategy was to run them into bankruptcy with legal fees before the case was adaquatly reveiwed, but they still failed occasionally.)
So don't be such a pansy. Don't let the legal shit intimidate you. (I'm not saying that you shouldn't look for ways to support the music you like to make sure their will be more of it, although I would suggest that to little of that $16 for the CD serves that purpose to make it cost effective.)
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we should stop bitching and do something...
Of all the people on Slashdot who bitch about what the MPAA and RIAA are doing to consumers and how horrible the DMCA is, how many have actually written law makers, MPAA, RIAA and associates there-of about how you feel?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WILL CHANGE WITHOUT YOU! period, don't expect the rest of the world to fight your battles. It's time we start pushing congress to balance the laws. Copyright laws need to be revised. It's time lawmakers start asking if such laws infringe on the rights of consumers. For those of you who have written these people don't stop. This is the first step to changing something and nothing changed without action.
Once the letters start coming in Officials will have to pay more attention to the issue. Once we can show them that many americans do feel that XYandZ are wrong they will have to take such things into consideration. If they choose to ignore it we will just have to be louder.
need to know how to contact your senator or rep? House of Representatives
Senate
Now don't give me any of that crap that this is off topic because this is Direct TV's decision. It's obvious that the MPAA's anticopying tatics are to blame. This is what happens when we stay quite. It's all been trickling down from the DMCA. -
A Couple of Nits to PickOverall the article is accurate, but I get a bit fried at the continued bashing of so called censorship in the US. In other countries, yes, the government is censoring all of its citizens network access (China is a prime example).
But what do we have to complain about in the US? A cybercrime treaty that the outgoing President signed. Well everyone ought to know that the treaty has to be ratified by congress before it is binding in the US. Odds of that happening are low, and if you call or email your congresscritters and let them know what you think it will be even lower.
Complaints about eBay. Well, they've been censoring things for a long time now. Try selling a gun on eBay (which you could do when they first opened). Not any longer. As a matter of fact, you cannot even sell a legal high capacity magazine on eBay these days! What's the answer? Other auction sites! Places like gunbroker.com have moved in to take over the segment of the market that eBay refuses to satisfy. That's freedom at work.
And the other thing that really frosts me is this insistence that requiring filtering on school and library computers (owned and paid for by all of us tax payers) is some kind of evil censorship. It isn't. If you want to browse your porn sites then get your own damn internet connection, don't do it on my dime. But they censor more than just port sites, you say. Well the answer to that is to lobby to get them to change (and reveal) the lists of the sites they block, not to remove the blocking completely.
And what reasonable parent would want to send their kid to the library to check out the latest Harry Potter book, only to have to walk by some pervert drooling over the latest Porn Pics.
Liberty and Freedom doesn't mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to pay for your habits. Keep it in your home, where it belongs. And don't forget -- when you accept Taxpayer Funds you have to also accept the strings that are attached.
For more of my rants and views drop on over to www.libertynews.org
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Teach them the truth about ICANNI read lots of comments from geeks like us saying "F-ck ICANN lets just start our own root". And, while that's all well and good- it's not going to help your grandmother, or your neighbors, or 96% of the population of the US who is too stupid to set the clock on their VCR.
Here are some of the main problems with ICANN:
- There are no "checks-and-balances" to their power.
- They are accountable to no one but the Dept. of Commerce
- A bunch of scum-bags like Louis Touton, Ken Stubbs, and Joe Sims are pulling "double-duty" as both members of the ICANN board and paid consultants, lawyers, or board members of the companies who are getting rich because of ICANN.
- There is no "bottom-up" approach; only "top-down" decrees.
- They are funded by corporate interests
If you really feel strongly about the issues you should go to The Committee on Energy and Commerce homepage, click the link labeled "Feedback" and help to educate these members of Congress who may not fully understand just how badly ICANN is screwing the people on the Net.
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Re:Make Congress WorkSorry... no.
The "original framers of the consititution" made the Senate appointed by each state legislature. It wasn't until ratification of the 17th amendment in 1912 that Senators were directly elected by the people.
For this discussion, I also find it strangely ironic that the only state to have rejected this amendment (and never subsequently ratify it) is none other than... you guessed it... Utah.
Coincidence? We'll never know...
See: http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Amend.html for the gory details.
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Re:PLEASE WRITE YOUR REP
write to your house Rep HERE
Let me add one thing. Legislators tend to put a lot more stock in written mail than email. (I think this has been said before on
/.) By all means, write your representative. But I would encourage you to use snail mail if possible. -
Re:Make Congress WorkRather than passing line-item veto, they should pass something that says any rider tacked on must be related to the main bill.
The US House already has such a rule. An explanation of this rule can be found here. However the Senate has subjected itself to far fewer rules than the House. Therefore Senator Hatch is within the rules to suggest a stupid thing like this. If you want this changed, now is your chance. Matters of agenda rules are adopted individualy by each house of Congress. The rules for the upcoming Senate session have not been approved yet and won't be until sometime next month. Write to your Senator(s) now and express your concerns.
Make the salary of a congressman equal to the average salary of the American worker, and then we'll get the right kind of people in there.
It is interesting to note what the salaries of the US representatives are.
Rank-and-file Members of Congress (U.S. Senators and Representatives) are paid a base salary of $136,673 annually. They are also allowed to make an additional maximum 15 percent of their salary ($20,500) from outside sources, like speaking, legal practice and consulting. In addition, they are allowed unlimited income from book royalties.
While these salaries are substantially higher than the average salary in this country they do not seem to be excessive given the responsibility of the position. It has always been held as an important value that our representatives be paid well. Our founding fathers valued the idea of a paid legislature as a means to keep Congress from being populated only by the super rich who can afford not to work. This has been fairly successful, particularly in the House.
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Constitutional Convention
...this would be a fantastic avenue for issues with broad public support but little chance of congressional action, for example, Campaign Finance, Line-Item Veto, Same-Subject Legislation, or Term Limits. Unfortunately, it could also be a fast track for less constitutionally-appropriate, but popular, "hot button" issues like Internet Porn or Flag Burning.Your latter point, whether the scary issues are defined as porn, flag burning, abortion rights, cross-species marriage, or whatever, is precisely why most people (including me) wouldn't support a constitutional convention.
I do, however, support single subject rules. The House and Senate at the start of each session adopt rules for each body. Usually, they carry over rules from the prior sessions with a few minor modifications. One of the rules they should add is a single-subject provision. That's worth writing to your representative or senator about.
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Write your senator/rep
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PLEASE WRITE YOUR REPPlease do us all a favor, write to your house Rep HERE
Just my $.02
Take the time, write something meaningful and express how much you dislike this bill.
Thanks in advance -
Re:On Lawsuits
The lawsuit idea is not new. And it *IS* doable, but requires people to work together. And, a bit of software. For the Open Source community, comming up with software is easy. To work together, and be willing to spend $100 to take a spammer to small claims court, now THAT is hard.
The 'pecked to death by ducks' method is used by local religious groups, local community groups concerened about slum landlords or drugs and others.
I could not find a 'how to sue the local porn shop into non-existance' link, but I did find this part of the congressional record:
Link
Defendants are then compelled to settle for nuisance value. *smile* A spammer settling because of the nuisance they caused.
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Re:Failing Grades in Government Computer Security!
Sorry, I typed the URL in wrong.
The real URL is here.
I left the h in http:// out, so the page will not load... -
WTF
Jay Satiro, 19, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Westchester County Court to first-degree computer tampering. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
The average prison time served after conviction for homicide, willful murder, is 5 years, 11 months.
First degree computer tampering? A 19 year old with obvious talent belongs in federal prison. You bet.
The greatest crime you can commit in America is first degree curiousity. -
Re:Florida BallotsWhat court? Federal court? It has no jurisdiction over how states run their own elections-- and all elections are state-level. There's no such thing as a Federal election. Don't beleve me? Check out the Constitution.
Each county in each state chooses its own ballot system. Each county buys their own equipment and prints their own ballots. Each ballot is scrutinized for weeks before use. For the most part, voting systems in use have been around for quite some time and everyone in that county knows how to use it, or they ask a poll supervisor for directions.
I agree that electronic scanning of ballots at the box does reduce the number of spoiled ballots that get cast; the guy right in front of me in line to the box had his ballot rejected due to a half-filled mark that would have voided his intended vote on one issue. It would not, however, catch mis-voted ballots. As long as a ballot is valid it's accepted. The ballots cast for Buchanan in Palm Beach county were valid ballots and would not have been caught by the tallying ballot boxes.
There's no need for a court case; indeed, there's no grounds. The one thing we get from this is a good lesson on why it's vital to completely understand a ballot before even approaching the act of marking it. Blindly following a sample ballot brought from home doesn't abdicate the need for completely reading and comprehending the actual ballot to be cast.
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Re:We need to move America into the modern worldMr. Erikson:
Might I suggest actually reading the United States Constitution? It would give you much valuable insight into how our Electoral process works.
In particular, please note Article 2, which describes the President, his powers, and how he gets elected.
For example, I quote Section 2, clause 2:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
Do you not vote for your own state legislature? There is your say in how your Electors get chosen. Simple as that. Don't like the current system? Get cracking and write your state congressmen!First order of business: Everyone on my Christmas list gets a copy of the United States Constitution this year.
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Dick Armey
Recall that Richard "Dick" Armey's site is blocked by Netnanny, Surfwatch, Cybersitter, N2H2, and Wisechoice because of his nickname. Of course this is more than mildly funny only because Armey is one of the many conservatives who believes that Censorware is the solution to the country's problems.
More information is available at http://dfn.org/Alerts/contest.htm -
Harshbarger's lucky; can all artists be?
Harshbarger's Mona Lisa was commissioned by Dave Michelson, a programmer who's bought several of Eric's other works. And it's really wonderful to see the ancient practice of artistic patronage by the wealthy paying off in this 21st century.
But, sadly, not all artists are so lucky, and the current political climate in the US isn't so forgiving. Back in 1997, NEA funding was severely cut, and private giving hasn't increased to make up for the deficit. And with current debates about eliminating the estate tax failing to see how the estate tax actually increases patronage of museums and public art institutions by wealthy people eager to divest themselves of inheritted works, we're little assured of a brighter future.
How many other lego scuplters would our nation produce if we were more liberal with funding for the arts? How many nascent artists, how many little Erics, are picking through their lego tubs, searching for that flat 3x1 piece, but more importantly, searching for a nation who would see their promise and help them deliver? And if they ever receive the funding they so desperately need, will they be saddled with draconian political restrictions on what sort of art they may create? Sure, no one's offended by a lego Mona Lisa, but will the same be true when someone finally builds a lego Piss Christ?
I urge all of you, write your congresspersons and support funding for the arts. Especially our international friends over in the Netherlands, since you seem to have something extra to do with legos and all. It's imperative that the promise of tomorrow doesn't get squashed today like so many little pieces of plastic under the foot of an angry parent walk barefoot to the bathroom in the middle of the night. -
Re:VOTE VOTE VOTE or LEAVE and pay taxes elsewhereModeration Totals:Troll=1, Total=1.
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You forgot to mention the international zionist conspiracy.
Okay; the post wasn't a troll, and isn't simply conspiracy theory, and to attempt to equate it to some kind of racist mentality is just wrong.. Pick up any economics textbook and read up on Fractional Reserve Banking. Here are some slides used in Economics classes at Ohio State. Try a class from Missouri. Or Colorado. Or Columbus State. Don't like those? Try the Britannica. Go the the Fed's website and read about how it works (prepare for reading a LOT). Read about expansion of the money supply in "Money Supply for Dummies ". Pick up a copy of William Greider's Secrets of the Temple -- his book was issued to MBA students at the MIT Sloan School of Business and describes the process which I outlined in my post. For another view, refer to the words of Representative Jack Metcalf.
You can even read the words of a Fed Chairman (William Poole, President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis):
Before 1933, the Federal Reserve did conduct monetary policy by adhering to an external standard-the gold standard. Now, the U.S. dollar is pure fiat money, whose purchasing power is determined by the Fed's decisions and their interactions with the U.S. and world economies.
America DOES have debt-based fiat money, and the elimination of debt eliminates money. It is that simple.
a highly inflationary tax cut,
Now that is an interesting state of affairs. Letting citizens keep their own money is inflationary. He have to take it away via taxes to "save the economy" from the ravages of inflation. Has anyone stopped to think that inflation exists because of hte federal reserve? Inflation is actually devaluation of the currency, and is a consequence of there being "too much money" available. Of course, the reason there is too much money available is because the fractional-reserve banking system, lead and controlled by the Federal Reserve, has created too much money. The Fed buys government debt and gives the treasury credits in its Fed accounts. This acts as "reserves" for lending and as backing for the issusance of currency. It is money created from nothing. Commercial banks borrow money at the Discount Window at the Fed -- again, a debt-for-credit swap. This creates more money out of nothing. Banks make more loans based on deposits and Discount Window loans, making more money from nothing.
The sad thing is, because the U.S. has had a debt-based monetary system since 1933 (and earlier, but only partially), we can never get out of debt because it would destroy the money supply. Before the advent of debt-based money, there was usually little debt on national, corporate or personal scales (wars excepted; they simply printed money to finance early wars). 70% of all business growth was self-financed (financed without borrowing from banks) in the 20s. The Fed put a stop to that by offering loans at below market rates with money created out of thin air.
To pay off the national debt, we will first have to switch back to a commodity-based money system, such as the original silver-backed money system. Commodity money systems don't let the government inflate the money supply at will. The other thing we'd have to do is reform banking. Banks should protect your money, offer useful services, and charge fees for doing so. If you want to invest your money, then do that. Currently, a bank invests 97% or more of your money when you deposit it. This is what causes bank runs; if more than 3% of depositors want to withdraw their money, the bank runs out, because it's given it away to other people. Essentially, when you deposit money at a bank, the bank issues to several people the right to withdraw it. It does this by telling you that you can get it back out, and then loaning the very same money to someone else, who immediately withdraws it to pay for their house or whatever. If the bank runs low on "liquid funds," it borrows from another bank. It may also borrow from the Fed's Discount Window. All the loaning out of the money promised to depositors creates more money on the fly. This process gets recycled several times. I borrow $100k to buy a house. I deposit it at my bank to pay for the construction. The bank then loans it back out to someone else. I write checks; the builder deposits them; his bank loans the money out. Repeat. Because of reserve-fraction regulations made by the Fed, this process has a terminus; but it creates nine dollars for every dollar put into the system (approximately). This is the deposit multipler.
Not a troll. Just the facts.
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Contact Your Local Representatives!
Don't just contact your congressman or senator, contact your local legislative representatives. Local representatives respond (usually) to pressure from their constituents. The best thing to do is to write a letter. Followed by calling them up. And last (and least) drop them an email message. Find your local representatives at the Nationcal Conference of State Legislatures site. Or try one of these other two directories: here and here.
Some day I hope to have a .plan. -
What can YOU do besides complain?
It's been said before, but:
Vote Libertarian.
Support the EFF.
Support the ACLU.
Use encryption (someone post me a Linux link).
Call your representative.
Don't just sit there, do something. Put the right people in power and this crap will get fixed.
--jb