Incompressible

Two types of people in the world

2011-12-16T12:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukbwQEA-SZc
A nice riff on the Falcon HTV-2 DARPA weapon.

Exchange Stabilization Fund

2011-12-14T18:22:00.001-08:00

The most important financial agency you've never heard of.

From here.

High-school physics refutation of official 9/11 account

2011-12-08T00:15:00.000-08:00

Here.

This guy does a picture-perfect job of giving every possible concession to the official explanation that can be conceded without violating the most elementary laws of physics and derives numbers that deviate from the official numbers by over 400%.

The New World Order has begun... in Africa

2011-09-21T09:54:00.000-07:00

Here it is in all its Orwellian glory. Africa is just the proving grounds for something much more global I'm sure they have in mind. Bear in mind that Predator drones already regularly patrol the southern US border and perform other domestic tasks.

US says Pakistan fighting through proxies

2011-09-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

al-Haqqani is a Taliban-aligned force which is apparently a proxy for Pakistan. This confirms the view that Taliban itself is nothing more than the fighting force of Emmanuel Goldstein. This is managed dissent.

Another free-market-ish city... now gone

2011-07-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

India's voluntary city

2011-07-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

A city with no government. Thriving.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/indias-voluntary-city.html

Hans Hoppe on the Golden Age Prior to WWI

2011-06-23T16:13:00.000-07:00

Hoppe discusses the golden age prior to WWI starting with some quotes here. I lost this lecture and ended up in a debate with someone about whether the West today is freer or less free than it was 100+ years ago. We are immensely less free. Because it has happened so gradually, it is difficult to truly fathom just how far we have fallen into the pit of bondage.

WSREP - Widespread Surveillance Resistant Email Protocol

2011-01-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

I had an idea while showering today. I was thinking of how hashcash forces would-be spammers to expend considerable computation effort if they want to spam email servers that use hashcash. This imposes a dollars-and-cents barrier on spamming. This got me to thinking about the fact that, even today, the vast majority of email communications are sent in the clear. If the NSA or Mossad or fill-in-the-blank intelligence agency wants to engage in widespread, ECHELON-style surveillance of emails, the fact that they are sent in unmasked text is a great assistance to the would-be eavesdroppers.

Ideally, people might encrypt all communications but it turns out that encryption has a lot of overhead problems. The most significant problem with encryption is key management. If you send me an email and I've lost or misplaced the key, I can't read it. And this brings me to WSREP - Widespread Surveillance-Resistant Email Protocol!

Basically, WSREP is implemented by encrypting emails and sending almost all of the key along with the email. The WRSEP email reader then makes repeated, blind guesses at the missing bits of the key until it gets it right and then decrypts the email into plaintext on the client end. The obvious choice of encryption algorithm would be AES, since that is the new "official" encryption standard.

Let's say Alice wants to send Bob an email. She first types it up, then her WSREP-compliant email client prepends a clever check-phrase like "4thamendment4eva", then chooses a random 128-bit key and encrypts the body of Alice's email. It then chops off, say, 20 bits of the key and transmits the email with the 108-bit key to Bob. Bob's WSREP-compliant email client receives the mail and then begins randomly guessing the missing 20 bits until it gets those bits right (as indicated by successfully decrypting the check-phrase). The number of bits which are dropped should be chosen such that this process takes significantly less than a second on an average computer, say, 250ms. After the key has been guessed, the client decrypts the email, removes the cheesy, clever check-phrase and then displays the email to Bob. If SMTP is extensible, you might be able to implement this protocol with zero changes to email servers.

Now, let's say you're the NSA and you want to read everyone's email without exception. Granted, WSREP-masked emails are logically equivalent to plaintext since they're being transmitted with almost all of the key. The difference, however, is that the NSA must expend the same computational effort as anybody else to guess the missing bits, even if the NSA has "broken" the encryption algorithm in use. This puts a nice dollars-and-cents limit on the number of emails which the NSA can open and read, all while avoiding the nasty complexities of key management and the other difficulties of traditional encryption.

I thought it was a good idea. Hopefully someone out there who knows something about email clients sees this and agrees.

Steven Pinker is my hero...

2010-12-08T00:55:00.000-08:00

Authors@Google

How governments cook the books

2010-12-07T14:03:00.001-08:00

I just wanted to jot down some of the ways that I've noticed the US government cooks its books. I'm sure other governments have their own variations on these themes and, taken together, these methods represent a certain "state of the art" in taxation.

The central problem of taxation is that it is plainly and simply morally and legally unjustifiable. If you could challenge your government's taxation somewhere other than your government's courts, your government would be unable to produce a coherent moral or legal justification for why you must pay the taxes it levies on you.

The result of this problem is that governments must live in constant fear of a beast that lies dormant in the popular consciousness... the tax revolt. I think most people, at least in the West, are fairly well indoctrinated into believing that there exists some valid legal and moral reason for why they must pay taxes. The vast majority of those who are disgruntled with taxation and actively seek to avoid it see themselves as bad and selfish in this regard, much like a gambler who selfishly gambles his children's college money. In other words, the vast majority of tax resisters or would-be tax resisters still acquiesces to the popular indoctrination that there must exist a moral and legal justification for why they must pay taxes... they are simply hedonistic and allow their selfish impulse to override their higher moral understanding.

Governments have gotten a lot better at taxing. In the West, rioting in the streets is almost never seen as a result of tax measures (the UK tax riots in the 1990's were an unusual exception). Here are some of the tricks that our owners use to keep us busily humming away furnishing their tables.

- Debasement/inflation. This trick hardly needs explanation. Reducing the value of a legal tender money taxes holders of money stocks and wage earners whose occupation is not funded by the Prince's purchases. Modern inflation is funded through an insidious mixture outright money printing (Federal Reserve bond purchases) and private purchases of bonds. Of course, inflation is heavily regressive, as the Austrians have explained (wealth is transferred from later users of new money to the early users).

- Transaction taxation. Taxes originate in tribute. Tribute is just an extortionate demand - "Pay $X or ." When you're just collecting tribute from kings or chiefs, this is fairly straightforward since you only have to deal with a handful of people. But when you start trying to implement direct taxation, it gets a lot more complicated. If you literally implement a "everyone must pay $X or die" rule, you end up having to kill of a significant portion of your productive population... as a result, next year's haul will be a lot smaller. The problem is essentially a game of chicken. Everybody is trying to pretend they don't have the money and you (the taxer) are trying to collect the money you know they have but are trying to hide from you.

Transaction taxation makes it a lot easier to judge just how much each person can pay. You basically offer your subjects a choice: refrain from productive economic activity or pay me X% of anything that you receive. Since transactions always involve at least two parties, you have leverage with which to squeeze people and ensure honesty. Only if both people keep quiet can a transaction go unreported. So, all you have to do to ensure honesty is put everyone on the horns of the Prisoner's Dilemma - if one person doesn't report their transaction and you do, you get a reward (maybe reduced taxation).

Of course, taxing transactions has no better moral justification than direct seizure of property under the tribute system did. It just works better for the government's revenuers. Almost all forms of modern taxation are transaction taxation.

- Income tax - This tax is inherently regressive... progressive scales don't help. Those who have nothing to sell but their labor... the poor... are hardest hit by income taxation. It's always possible to cook the numbers and turn investment income into losses or break-evens through perfectly legal means. The only antidote is discretionary taxing power (something that the US used to largely refrain from but we are pretty much there, now). Discretionary taxing power gives the revenue-collection bureaucracy the power to interpret intent and assess fines and punishments on the basis of attempts to avoid the intent of the rules, even if none of the rules were actually broken.

But this sort of legal tax-evasion is only possible for those with enough accrued capital to engage in investment. The average person has naught to sell but his time, skills and talents and no accounting trickery can help him. He will pay taxes on all his labor.

- Withholding tax - This divides your annual tax burden by at least 24 (two paychecks per month), for low earners who are more likely to receive weekly paychecks, the division factor is 50. As any credit-based sales industry knows, dividing a large sum into little payments makes buyers far more likely to say "yes." In the case of taxes, it makes the serfs much less likely to revolt. Income taxes in the United States are nominally progressive but this is just a diversion to keep the masses busy talking about inconsequential details while the real heavy-lifting is done by all the other regressive taxes.

- Payroll tax - The payroll tax in the United States is one of the most perniciously regressive taxes. Basically, the purpose of the payroll tax is to permit the government to reduce the effect your "standard deduction" has on your taxable income. The payroll tax is calculated without a standard deduction. You pay payroll on all the taxable portion of your income which, for the poorer, is closer to 100% of their paycheck... and for the wealthier, is negligible. But it's for when your old and sick and the government, of course, deeply cares about you and wants to make sure you're taken care of when you're old and sick.

Combined with the withholding tax - dividing your annual tax burden by as much 50 - your effective tax burden is made to appear far, far smaller than it really is. Of course, this is all purely psychological but, in politics, perception is everything.

- Tax farming - The Roman empire is famed, and was feared, for its privatized tax collection scheme known as tax farming. Basically, a tax farmer bought the rights to collect taxes for a certain district... but he had to pay the full tax no matter what he collected. Tax entrepreneurs - called publicani - earned huge profits on the difference between what they had agreed to pay Rome and what they collected from their hapless victims. Of course, if you didn't pay Rome in full, your fate was far worse than owing Al Capone. Goodbye lap of luxury, hello Roman galley ship (rowing ships as a prison-slave under the whip to your early death).

In the US (and, I assume, all other Western countries) we have a modern variation on tax-farming... the corporate payroll. Corporate calculates your tax withholdings for the IRS and - each and every paycheck - dutifully sends in your taxes to the IRS. The costs and complexities of collecting the tax have been outsourced onto private industry. This in exchange for the cartel-like regulatory protections which the government now provides to "legitimate" businesses. Basically, this is how it works. Any business of any size (say 20+ employees) will not risk going awry of the IRS. So, they interpret the tax code as conservatively as possible and ensure that your taxes are sent in on each and every paycheck. You will almost certainly overpay each year unless you file your W-4 with creative exemption numbers (technically illegal, I believe, but a common practice). The government relies on this network of dutiful tax farmers, aka corporations - to ensure the masses are calmly, quietly and regularly paying their dues. In exchange, the government provides lavish tax incentives to the corporate class who are essentially a part of the political class. In my view, they're in the same public-private-partnership class that the Roman publicani were.

- Layered taxation - You pay taxes at State and Federal (and, in some locations, Local) levels. These layered taxes, added together, pinch pretty badly. But opposing any one of them, politically, makes you seem like a miser. "What, you oppose paying three dollars a day to your local city government to police the streets, fight fires, feed starving homeless people and make books available to one and all??? You Scrooge, you!"

- Duties, tariffs, wholesale, retail taxes. These tax the supply chain for consumer goods, essentially "hiding" the tax from the consumer. Even a retail tax, which is right there, is a hidden tax once you buy more than one item at a time... who keeps track of how much taxes they're paying on which items??

- VAT taxes. This is European but is on its way to the US, judging by the new 1099 rules (any transaction over $600 must be reported to the IRS). Essentially, you can think of it this way, every business is required to send in all its receipts to the government to "prove" its actual outlays. This closes all "loopholes" which businesses have access to by being able to assess the value of their own inventory or non-monetary costs (such as capital depreciation).

- Legal monopolies and cartels. The inflated profits earned from these enterprises (which must, in turn, pay their master to whom they owe their very existence) are a tax in and of themselves. Phone companies (now, cell phone companies), car companies, electric companies, road-construction companies... basically, all the big-box producers of goods and services who enjoy legal and regulatory privileges as a result of their "scale." These companies are essentially pseudo-governmental agencies and their fees constitute a significant source of government revenues.

- Economic imperialism. This is more with respect to the US but other countries do it, too. Basically, you use "free-trade" agreements to force smaller countries to buy your "cheaper" products. This goes hand-in-hand with the tax-farming nature of corporations since modern, corporate tax-farming centralizes revenues in the producers, not the consumers. The more things being produced here, the more tax revenues there are to siphon.

Inflation-exportation is also part of economic imperialism. "Use our fiat currency as the 'reserve' for your fiat currency... or else." Keeping major commodities - like oil - denominated in your currency also helps force up demand for that currency, giving additional headroom for expansion of the supply of that currency (money printing).

Who ever said the Pentagon's budget is a waste???

Oregon "terror" plot

2010-11-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

I found the number 13 in it. If you calculate a standard "life path number" on the date of the attack, you get 13:

11/26/2010

11+26=37

2010+37 = 2047

2+0+4+7=13

Now, the 13 should reduce to 4 (1+3) but I find it interesting that there's a 13 along the way. Accident? Maybe. But this whole "plot" is just an incarnation of the FBI's own dark imagination.

More numerology

2010-11-22T14:26:00.001-08:00

33 is an important number to Freemasonry. I can't seem to get a clear picture of why. It could be nothing more than that Jesus was ostensibly crucified at 33 years of age. The masons seem to be pretty eclectic about where they get their symbols from.

In any case, here's some places I've found the number 33.

11/22/1963 - JFK assassinated

11+22 = 33

9/11/2001 - WTC attacks

9*11 = 99

2+0+0+1 = 3

99/3 = 33

Admittedly, these are "data-mining" but it's not torturous data-mining.

The Wikipedia article for the number 33 claims that 33 is somehow related to the Star of David but doesn't explain how. There are 13 points in the star, 24 edges and 12 triangles. Sums and differences of these yields 1, 11, 25, 36 and 37. I see no relation to 33. The only way I can squeeze 33 out of the star is to consider it as two triangles super-imposed - each with 3 points (or sides) yielding 3, 3. However, 3, 3 is not the same as the number 33. The highest degree of freemasonry is not 3, 3 it is 33. Argh.

Prince William's birthday is June 21st. In Britain, that would be written 21/6. 6x6x6 = 216

Creepy, huh?

Non-numerical Newtonian gravitation theory

2010-10-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

Hartry Field. Pretty cool.

Gang signs and major news events

2010-10-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

There were 33 miners trapped in the Chilean mine collapse. Fine, 33 is just one number among many. But it happened on Aug. 5th and 8+5 = 13. I'm becoming less and less inclined to believe in coincidences in dates and other numbers in major news events.

This got me thinking about something I've been pondering for a while. If governments are basically just gangs that happen to have captured the moral high-ground of legitimacy (Rothbardian theory of government), then it makes sense that they might have gang-signs. Flags, emblems and other visible signs of affiliation have long served the same roles that gang signs serve: marking territory, vouching loyalty, intimidating victims, warding off enemies, and so on.

For example, this fellow insightfully noticed that the number of dead in the plane-crash that killed the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, and quite a few other high-ranking Polish officials was initially (correctly) reported to be around 95 persons but later (incorrectly) revised up to 132! What kind of journalistic mistake is that? More importantly, he noticed the occurrence of the number 32... 132.

The numbers 13, 32 and 33 are all well-known to have significance to the Freemasons. Now, I'm not so uncritical as to assume that this means that the Freemasons are, in fact, responsible for these acts. Perhaps the numbers also have meaning to other secret societies. Or, perhaps it's the fact that the numbers are simply well-known to have significance that they can serve as a signal - to those who know to look for such signals - that this was a staged or covered-up event.

I posted on 9/11 and numerology sometime back, just for fun. However, the more I look into this, the more I think there's actually some substance to this and it doesn't end with numbers. Shapes of things, such as the Pentagon, also matter. Symbols and shapes from esoteric societies - such as Bohemian Grove - can be found in TV shows (the interior decor of every other sitcom happens to have an owl hanging on the wall! Check out Frank and Marie's kitchen in the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond... I've also noticed owls in George Lopez and Everybody Hates Chris), music, even corporate logos. Just search YouTube, there's dozens of catchy videos (this is my favorite) illustrating my point. Are such references just large-cap versions of those designs left behind by spray-painting taggers?

Anyway, I'll be combing any big news story that hits the wire for this kind of thing. Call me crazy if it makes you feel any better.

Astounding court decision

2010-09-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

The supposedly "liberal" 9th circuit court threw out a lawsuit by five men who were kidnapped and tortured by CIA - the lawsuit was not even against the government, it was against a private corporation for its role in aiding and abetting the government in the commission of these crimes. The majority judges have essentially hinted that the victims in this case should just sue for hush-money and be done with it:

"In the 55-page opinion, replete with ambivalence, the six judges voting for dismissal pointed out that the plaintiffs could still pursue compensation or redress from the U.S. government or Congress. They alluded to the Japanese Americans interned during World War II who were later paid reparations for the violation of their civil rights."

Yeah, you were tortured. No, we won't permit you to sue any private corporation that assisted the US government in torturing you because then we'd have to dig through the dirty actions of the CIA-military-industrial-crime complex. Instead, why don't you just file a lawsuit against the US government itself which will deny you a trial on the same grounds of "national security" but may just - if you get lucky - pay you some hush money (of course, don't expect the checks to arrive any sooner than a decade or two from now).

US citizen added to terror kill-list

2010-09-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here. Al-Awlaki is probably a piece of shit but he's probably also a former CIA asset. In any case, it's all about precedent and once the precedent has been set that the government can do X, then when the government subsequently re-interprets the precedent to include X-squared, the law goes right out the window. "We can kill a US citizen without due process in this one instance" becomes "We can kill US citizens without due process, we've done it before, it's the law." We are definitely entering an eclipse of human progress. I hope people do come to their senses before they drag society all the way back to the Dark Ages.

No, they don't think of us as human-cattle

2010-09-07T23:16:00.001-07:00

As if the schools were not already merely glorified meat-processing centers, now they want to install chips in our kids. Where do they make the people who think this kind of stuff is a good idea? That's all I want to know!

Warrantless cell tracking

2010-09-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

They can track your every move. Not that they couldn't before, just that one government employee (judge) has rubber-stamped baseless snooping and voyeurism by other government employees. Surprise!

Yet more oil accidents...

2010-09-07T22:22:00.001-07:00

I search "oil" in Google News at least once a week. There are more oil accidents since my last blog post. Mexico's third-largest oil refinery exploded today. An oil rig off the coast of China has begun listing, with two people apparently trapped.

Hopefully, these are just some of the ordinary, random, uncorrelated accidents that, of course, occur in the oil industry every year.

Another Gulf explosion... I called it!

2010-09-03T01:11:00.001-07:00

OK, I didn't call the explosion, but I did say the Deepwater Horizon explosion was fishy and I smelled funny business. How many "coincidences" are required before sabotage is considered a respectable hypothesis? Now we have another explosion. Come on, this is just blatant! The author of the linked article notes (apparently not seeing any irony in his statement), "Just as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as worked its way out of the news, a new explosion has taken place." [Emphasis added]

A quick Google search shows that the oil rig company (Mariner Energy) is in the midst of a big merger deal with Apache Corporation which has also bought up a bunch of stakes from BP on the cheap because BP needed the cash to pay for costs incurred by the Deepwater Horizon spill.

That gets a big, fat "Hmmmmmmm" from me (complete with eyebrows raised). Oh, and don't forget the mysterious exploding box of chocolates. Houston seems to be a nexus of corruption.

Voyeur vans for government

2010-08-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

Oh my. Where do they make the people who take these kind of security measures seriously? I mean, do they really believe they're Superman fighting Brainiac? Check out this super-creepy promo video.

My only thought is this - if governments can own these things, then everybody can. I'll be waiting for Backscatter Bang Bus on Blu-Ray or you could do your very own ride-along with Ray's Backscatter Experience Inc. permitting the ordinary voyeur to immerse himself in the full-spectrum experience of technological peeping.

Interesting correlation

2010-08-17T16:04:00.001-07:00

I've been puzzling for some time over why gold took off when it did. Looking at this chart:

... you can see that gold "turned a corner" in the second half of 2005. This is a well-defined corner, the kind of corner that you see in the charts of the Great Depression or other significant economic events. Yet the global economy did not begin melting down until the last half of 2008, nearly three years down the road from that 2005 corner.

So, I asked myself, what was happening in mid-2005? Were there any significant events that year? It turns out that there was a significant event... the 7/7 London train bombing.

If you accept the hypothesis that the gold market is heavily manipulated and if you accept the hypothesis that 9/11 and 7/7 were likely false-flag events, then it's not a big leap to suggest a correlation between 7/7 and the gold price turning a corner in 2005 at almost exactly the same time.

Just a thought.

Interesting spin on Schiff's loss

2010-08-10T22:24:00.001-07:00

Here's a piece celebrating Schiff's loss in Connecticut (McMahon's "victory") as a win for anti-establishment sentiment (dare I say "Tea Party"?). Of course, McMahon spent $24 million of her own cold, hard cash just to win the primary. Schiff reportedly spent $1 million.

The narrative I've heard that makes the most sense to me is that the RNC realized that Schiff really could beat their boy in Connecticut, Simmons. Terrified at the thought of a Senatorial Ron Paul, they sent out an SOS to all the Connecticut big-shots, looking for somebody that could do a "big, big favor", and Vince McMahon's wife answered the call. The McMahons are not millionaires, they are billionaires. That $24M was pocket change and will be repaid a hundred-fold, one way or the other.

At this point, it doesn't matter whether Linda McMahon wins or loses. Mission Accomplished: Schiff has been neutralized.

A real hero

2010-08-10T22:15:00.000-07:00

This guy stood up to the FBI's terrifying Holy Office-style powers in the form of the gagging NSL. He's got some huevos. Hopefully, this is the first chink in the new police state's seemingly impenetrable armor.

Senator Stevens dies in air crash... funny business?

2010-08-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

Here. Whenever someone important dies of something other than natural causes, my suspicions are automatically raised. Interesting that Sen. Stevens was convicted in 2008 of charges that were then later overturned but only after his conviction caused him to lose his re-election. Was he supposed to go away but was just as much of a nuisance out of office as he had been while in office? It's a thought.

Kids these days!

2010-08-09T01:39:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite quotes, ever:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on

the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless

beyond words.

When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of

elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of

restraint.

- Hesiod, Eighth Century B.C.

Black market nukes: Iran saber-rattling is a farce

2010-08-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

I was watching Gerald Celente today and Iran came up. For some reason, the thought of buying a nuclear weapon on the black market flashed into my head. If Iran were intent on "wiping Israel off the map" - as the imperialists claim - why wouldn't they just buy nukes off the black market? They have a fully operational intelligence service. Its acronym is, ironically, MISIRI. So, if drug lords can buy these things, surely a nationally funded intelligence service can. Here's a YouTube video discussing the trek of some freelance journalists to hunt down black market nukes in Bulgaria. It might be a bit of a tall tale but it can't be far from the truth. These nukes are far from accounted for.

It just goes to show that the saber-rattling from Washington DC & Co. is all a big farce put forward by the war-mongers to justify the war they want.

Hmmm, another Operation Seaspray?

2010-08-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Check this out, from 1993. Something similar happened back in 1951 and 1952, the US Navy was responsible for that outbreak. Given the dead-end of the investigation in Milwaukie, my first suspicion is that this was a public experiment.

Lemonade stand busted...

2010-08-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

Thank God for the government. What is interesting to me is that people can comprehend that the State's cartel enforcers are coercive bullies only in the instance of a little girl selling lemonade without a "license." But why is it only heartstring-pulling little girls innocently selling lemonade who get a pass to break the rules? Logically, there is no difference between her and, say, a Mexican burrito wagon. Both are looking to make a little money by providing a good which is - they hope - demanded by consumers.

Oh my... Google, CIA to "predict the future"

2010-08-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a little gem. This goes to reaffirm my running hypothesis that there is some serious coziness between Google and CIA (or US intelligence more broadly). In principle, I don't see anything wrong with the idea but I think they've got it turned around backwards. They want to predict what you and I are going to be doing. That's easy. We'll wake up in the morning, go to work, eat lunch, go back to work, go to the gym, go home, watch TV, eat dinner, relax and then go to bed. Repeat. Peons have very predictable lives. A much more interesting (and useful) problem to solve is what the wealthiest and most powerful individuals will be doing with themselves. What choices will they next make? For that, you'll likely need a crystal ball.

James Turk spins a plausible hypothesis for BIS wierdness

2010-08-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

Here. Of course, this was fishy from the beginning. I would add that this disclosure was completely voluntary and likely calculated to ward off further prying by feigning full disclosure from the beginning. If so, then this is probably just the tip of a fairly sizable iceberg. What other agreements go on between the BIS and central banks, either to manipulate the gold price or (what is the same thing) to push currencies up or down?

I'm not buying Wikileaks anymore

2010-07-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

There have been suggestions from the more conspiracy-theoretic end of the spectrum that Wikileaks may be a CIA front. After this latest "leak", I think it's pretty obvious. I saw this news item on CNN which is what tipped me off that it must be "safe for public consumption." If it's safe for public consumption, it sure isn't a leak that's worth a damn. Why would someone go to all the risk to themselves and their career to submit Secret clearance docs that get handed around to thousands of people? It doesn't make sense. And why would the only really sensitive documents finger the ISI? Isn't the point of leaking to blow the whistle on your boss?? This seems like a rather transparent attempt to put public pressure on ISI to reduce their support for the Taliban while pretending that it was an uncontrolled "leak". What also doesn't make sense is where Wikileaks gets its money. If Wikileaks really were the grassroots organization it makes itself out to be, it seems to me they'd have to be hosted on peer-to-peer networks since it's expensive to maintain servers and bandwidth to permit millions of people to download videos and libraries-worth of documents from your website.

And Wikileaks's Top-10 successes aren't anything to get excited about. Probably the most substantial item was the CRU emails that were supposedly "hacked" by Russian teenagers or something. I have a working hypothesis that the April 20th Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion was actually a retaliatory strike against whoever was really behind the CRU leaks. If CIA is aligned with US oil interests (likely), then this makes sense... the Deepwater Horizon explosion would materially damage offshore drilling in the Gulf and put the hurt on the interests backing CIA that defected and derailed the Copenhagen agreement.

Kingpin theory of power elites

2010-07-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

I enjoy power-elite analysis. I did some amateur research on the JFK assassination last weekend and have been piecing together all sorts of decade-spanning conspiracy theories for some time. These theories exist in a sort of "quantum superposition" since there is so little solid information and evidence to work with.

When dealing with such difficult problems, it's helpful to use metaphors to keep things straight in your head. One such metaphor I've recently adopted I call "Kingpin theory."

The Kingpin is a character in the Spiderman comics. He has no superpowers but he is Spiderman's arch-nemesis, more powerful than all the other villains who do have superpowers. The Kingpin's power comes from his mastery of human nature, his willingness and ability to manipulate people by threatening their loved ones and his uncanny ability to remain at least one step ahead of everyone else.

In the real world, there are villains and then there are Kingpins. Pablo Escobar was a villain. Hank Paulsen is a Kingpin.

Now, when Kingpin theory is applied to politics, an obvious problem arises. The public doesn't like villains of any sort, Kingpin or otherwise. They want their leaders to be kissing babies and making absurd promises in stump speeches. So, the Kingpins have two options. The first option is to become a Twoface Kingpin (Twoface is a Batman villain, interesting in his own right). As the name implies, a Twoface Kingpin is like an inside-out Sour Patch Kid... sweet on the outside and sour on the inside. The other option is to become a Puppet Master or Corruptor.

Twoface Kingpins are relatively easy to identify. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the cornucopia of pre-20th century tyrants. Basically, any autocrat is a kind of Twoface Kingpin, though the more unmasked his power, the less of a Twoface he is (whether this is a virtue or not is highly debatable). Puppet Masters, on the other hand, are much harder to find. Robber Baron theory basically takes the working hypothesis that the richest of the rich (say, the top 0.5%) are the Puppet Masters who control everything. This might be a good first approximation but it lacks depth. People in positions of formal power, but of lesser means, wield significant, real power. Consider the Defense Secretary. He might be a millionaire, but his wealth is nothing compared to Bill Gates. Yet I have no doubt the Defense Secretary wields a hell of a lot more power than Bill Gates does.

What makes Puppet Masters more powerful than Twofaces is that they are not easily identifiable targets, like Twoface Kingpins. Puppet Masters hide behind the scenes, pulling strings.

The most powerful Kingpins of all, in my theory, are Godfathers. A Godfather is a patriarch of a wealthy and powerful family. A Godfather family might have many Kingpins within it. David Rockefeller is a Godfather. Evelyn de Rothschild is a Godfather.

The formal power structures of law, government and the market create power centers or Hilltops. The object of power elite analysis is to understand the visible events of the times in terms of a struggle between Kingpins for control of Hilltops. Hilltops are strategic positions of power within the social fabric. The Presidency is a Hilltop. The papacy is a Hilltop.

Twoface Kingpins seek to personally occupy Hilltops. They engage in "King of the Hill" struggles versus other Twoface Kingpins. This is a first-order approximation of an election campaign between two candidates for elected office or the power-politics involved in clawing one's way up to the Papacy.

Puppet Masters sit behind the scenes pulling strings. A puppet-string is anything which acts as leverage to get someone to do what you want. Maybe it's a tit-for-tat business deal, special legal privileges, access to natural resources, the threat of blackmail, whatever.

Godfathers are the most powerful Kingpins of all. For this reason, they rarely seek to occupy hilltops themselves. Rather, they usually act as Puppet Masters and delegate the role of occupying a hilltop to Lackeys or they act as a Corruptor and seek to buy those who already occupy hilltops by corrupting them. As an aside, old-fashioned kings during the era of absolute monarchy (say, Louis XIV) are examples of that rare breed, Twoface Godfathers. A Twoface Godfather can't exist in the era of modern demagoguery, mass media and mass politics because as soon as a Godfather reveals himself to the public for what he is, it is a simple matter for other Kingpins to take him down through populism and class envy. Read about Nelson Rockefeller's political career to see what happens when a Godfather tries to reveal himself.

Wealthy, powerful families with a long history are Dynasties. Dynasties have a proven track record of holding Hilltops and maintaining their power, through thick and thin. Prior to WWI, there were 22 monarchies. After WWII, there were nine and the Windsors were one of those monarchical families. The Windsors are a Dynasty (Elizabeth is the "Godfather"), the Rothschilds are a Dynasty, the Rockefellers are probably a Dynasty, the Kennedys tried and failed to become a Dynasty.

The ultimate unit of loyalty is blood relation, that is, the Family. The Family is the power-base of the Godfather and is what makes a Godfather so much more powerful than a mere Puppet Master. The Godfather not only pulls strings and gets Lackeys to do his bidding on his Hilltops, he can place his brothers, cousins, uncles and other blood relatives in positions of great trust. This permits the Godfather to force-multiply himself vis-a-vis other Puppet Masters. A Puppet Master without a Family can only really trust himself. While blood does betray blood from time to time (and more often when there is a struggle over the Patriarchy Hilltop), there are biological reasons that make the Family less likely to betray its own than for two friends or buddies to betray each other. Human biology dictates a greater degree of loyalty between people carrying common genes than between people who are not.

Basically, the Family can introduce the division of labor into the business of being a Kingpin. All other Kingpins have to self-produce all aspects of the Kingpin business. This is what makes Dynasties possible and this is why Dynasties are the tip-top pinnacle of power.

But Dynasties have competition: fraternal organizations or Brotherhoods. A Brotherhood is essentially a gang. Gangs use the primitive act of a blood ritual (often murder, like the Aryan Brotherhood's "Blood-in, Blood-out") to initiate new members. This initiation process is psychologically powerful and parasitically leverages pieces of human psychology that evolved long ago for surviving attacks by wild animals and foreign invaders. Once initiated, members of a Brotherhood can be extremely loyal. National militaries, secret societies, intelligence agencies, street gangs, crime rings, and so on are examples of Brotherhoods which typically command a high degree of loyalty from almost all their members. However, the command-post of a Brotherhood is itself a Hilltop and is, therefore, subject to King-of-the-Hill struggles between Kingpins for control. In the end, Brotherhoods can be extremely powerful but in a head-to-head match, a solid Dynasty will win every time.

I don't really have a summary, this is about as far as I've thought this out.

Exploding box of chocolates... BP connection?

2010-07-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

Here's an astounding news item: an "oil executive's wife" in Houston has been targeted by an exploding box of chocolates. I would desperately like to know if this "oil executive" is in any way connected with BP.

Godfather Part IV?

Why does government exist?

2010-07-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

Rothbard and Hoppe use the idea of a "natural order" against which to criticize the State. One of the difficulties of this approach is that it makes an arbitrary distinction between what is "natural" and what is not - why is it the case that the State is unnatural and what does it even mean for something to be "unnatural", given methodological naturalism? Whether the government is "natural" or not, the question remains: why does it exist? Here's my video on what the government is.

My current view regarding why government exists:

The essence of the State is the accepted or legitimized double-standard
This is puzzling since humans generally find double-standards revolting... the Golden Rule is a culturally universal ethical principle
My solution is as follows:
Humans evolved from primates which largely engage in alpha-male mating patterns
Alpha-male mating separates the males into two categories, the commoners and the elite (alpha)
The costs of reproduction were shared communally (pregnancy and birth costs borne solely by the mother)
The human nuclear family (culturally universal), on the other hand, evolved to "privatize" the costs of reproduction (Hoppe), making reproduction more efficient
This privatization occurred by resolving the problem of paternity uncertainty with a combination of monogamy and concealed fertility*
In alpha-male mating, paternity uncertainty was resolved by granting a monopoly on mating privileges to the fittest male
The congenital tolerance that the vast majority of people have for the State is a vestige of our alpha-male morality, where everyone accepted as a matter of course that one special male would be permitted the privilege of reproducing while all other males would be prohibited from having this privilege

I believe this explains why a State can exist at all. Try going to a national park and blatantly breaking one of the rules with a large crowd of people standing around. Within seconds, you will hear loud grumbles or even threats of calling a ranger. This "crowd morality" is the result of an instant, visceral reaction on the part of people within the crowd to the effect "Who does he think he is? I guess he thinks he doesn't have to follow the same rules as everybody else. We each have to obey the rules in order for this park to work. Somebody needs to put him in his place."

But when a police officer engages in blatantly illegal or immoral behavior - even on videotape - it's almost as if a fnord has been inserted into the brains of the public. What is it about a uniform and association with the territorial monopolist of law and force that causes people not only to not apply their ordinary, visceral reaction to a double-standard but to apply that reaction to anyone who points out the double-standard?!? I think the answer is my alpha-male vestige theory, or something like it.

*Biologists believe that human females have concealed fertility - unlike our primate ancestors whose fertility is advertised - to make it hard to engage in cuckoldry, that is, accepting support from a less fit male (to get the benefit of his labor) while reproducing with a more fit male (to give her offspring the benefit of his excellent genes)

Live Free or Die = Collectivism

2010-07-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a collectivist under-current in some of the thinking of folks involved in the Free-State Project and other libertarians. This collectivism is subtle but real.

Sure, "live free or die" as a personal motto or ethic is ultimately an expression of individualism. But many libertarians incorrectly diagnose the ills of modern statist society to be due to a lack of willingness to die for one's liberty on the part of the masses. They are asserting something along the lines of "if only people were more generally willing to die for their liberty, we'd all be truly free." The idea is that a tyrant can't dominate a people composed of individuals who are mostly willing to die rather than be enslaved to the tyrant.

But I think this is subtle or stealth collectivism because dying for one's liberty is not really dying for one'sown liberty (you can't be free when you're dead). Instead, dying for liberty is dying for the liberty of others. And such self-sacrificial acts - while laudable in their own right - are not performed in one's own interests but in the interests of the collective. Those who subscribe to the theory that we are not free because enough people are not willing to die for freedom ultimately have no faith in the self-organizing nature of society composed of uncoordinated individuals pursuing their own, independent ends.

Even if it's just an expression of one's personal credo or motto, I still cringe every time I read the phrase, "Live Free or Die."

2010-07-19T00:00:00.001-07:00

So, I spent all weekend watching JFK assassination videos and doing armchair JFK assassination research. Here are my notes:

1) Most of the debate seems to rage around trying to get evidence or proof that JFK's assassination was a conspiracy. This is silly because it grants - from the outset - the bizarre assumption made by the official theories that political figures are as likely to die at the hands of "mad attention-seekers" as they are to be assassinated by their enemies who actually stand to benefit. How many people are insane enough to think that the electric chair is a fair trade for "being remembered" by history, even if in infamy? And of those people how many are resourceful enough to pierce the security perimeter of the President of the United States? Kennedy was threatened by Richard Pavlick in 1960 after Nixon lost the election and, by all accounts, Pavlick was a lone nut. But all we know of his "assassination attempts" are his own tall tales and 10 sticks of dynamite.

2) Of course Kennedy was assassinated by his enemies. Barring extraordinary, overwhelming evidence of a crazed, lone gunman, the "assassinated by his political enemies" theory has the advantage of fitting with 99.99% of all other recorded murders of powerful men throughout history. It's like if a top Mafia boss got shot and the police said it was a "stranger homicide". It's possible, but extremely unlikely. And, of course, this leaves aside the possibility of foreign attack instead of internal coup d'etat. Either way, "crazed, lone gunman seeking attention and to be remembered (in infamy) by history" is by far the least plausible explanation*.

3) It is doubtful that LBJ was the mastermind of Kennedy's death. Given a conspiracy, we can reason that he almost certainly had foreknowledge and was likely involved to one degree or another (since he stood to benefit the most publicly), but we know that, long before Obama, US Presidents have not been much more than puppet figureheads for the real, unseen political powers. Assuming LBJ was able to orchestrate, on his own, the necessary measures to take out Kennedy, those "in the know" would have a pretty good inkling of who was finally responsible for the President's death and, being outsiders now, would have a huge incentive to go after Johnson and get him impeached. Instead, the opposite happened, every government person and agency involved in the case and "in the know" covered up evidence, altered evidence, silenced or ignored witnesses and turned a blind eye while dozens of witnesses important to solving the murder were systematically eliminated.

4) JFK has more confessed assassins than Mel Gibson has racist slurs. The attention-seekers are those claiming to be JFK's assassin(s) - a much less risky venture than actually assassinating a sitting US President. As a matter of our social and political history and future, however, the identity of the trigger-man (or men) is relatively unimportant. The important point is trying to identify the mastermind(s), that is, the power center or alliance of power centers which moved to have JFK killed.

5) A popular hypothesis is that JFK was murdered because he or the Kennedys generally had "gone rogue", that is, he or they were acting in the true interests of the American public and against the interests of the Establishment. This hypothesis (with the slight modification that Kennedy was acting in the Kennedy-family's interests, not the interests of the US public except where the two happened to coincide) carries some weight in my opinion for two reasons. First, the cover-up was across the board, no one tried to make hay out of JFK's death by suggesting political funny business. Second, the long string of assassinations and attempted assassinations of Kennedys. The Kennedys must have made very powerful enemies but failed to sufficiently protect themselves, either on their own cognizance or by aligning with a more powerful interest than themselves. Or, perhaps JFK ruined the whole Kennedy family by betraying his sponsors once he got into office. If so, the Kennedy family would have been forever a pariah to the Establishment... something along the lines of "you can't trust a Kennedy."

6) Kennedy did several things in office, the combination of which probably united otherwise antagonistic power centers around one goal - eliminating Kennedy. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." While I don't think EO 11110 was really that important from the point-of-view of the Fed, it was the opposite of the direction the Fed wanted to go (which direction Nixon finally went in 1971). So, the Fed and its allies (Bank of England, Bundesbank, Bank of International Settlements, and so on) would have not been sad to see Kennedy go. They might have even pitched in some black funding or something (when you can legally print money, this is quite easy to do). He had enemies in the Mafia but I think it is a big mistake to think the Mafia could have taken out the President. If you subscribe to the gang theory of government**, it just doesn't make sense. It's like saying some small-time crack dealers could unite and take out a Mafia boss. Just not possible, they're outgunned, outsmarted, out-organized, out-everything. CIA may have been the ops guys and they may have sub-contracted out to Mafia assassins who were the most experienced in covert assassinations in broad daylight in American cities but that would be as far as it goes.

JFK had threatened to dismantle CIA and it's clear that, after the Bay of Pigs, there was real bad blood between the Executive and CIA. People say, "The CIA killed Kennedy" and while this may be true, I doubt very much that CIA masterminded JFK's death, that is, I doubt CIA was the power-center "finally responsible" for JFK's death. CIA and the FBI have tons and tons of bad blood but the FBI was in charge of the investigation. Surely, the FBI would have taken the opportunity to knock CIA down a few pegs on the power ladder and surely CIA would have been aware that the FBI would do this, from the outset. Assuming CIA involvement, someone, somewhere had to have been able to get CIA and the FBI to play nice.

But I think the biggest single motive is located in the Pentagon. Again, I'm skeptical that the Pentagon were the "masterminds" of the JFK assassination but I think they may have been the real motivational powerhouse. Here's a quote from Wikipedia's article on LBJ:

"At Kennedy's death, there were 16,000 American military advisors in Vietnam. As President, Lyndon Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963 with his own NSAM #273 on November 26, 1963. Johnson expanded the numbers and roles of the American military following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (less than three weeks after the Republican Convention of 1964, which had nominated Barry Goldwater for President).

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the President the exclusive right to use military force without consulting the Senate, was based on a false pretext, as Johnson later admitted.[60] It was Johnson who began America's direct involvement in the ground war in Vietnam. By 1968, over 550,000 American soldiers were inside Vietnam; in 1967 and 1968 they were being killed at the rate of over 1,000 a month."

So, we have in this order:

16,000 US servicemen in Vietnam as "advisors"
On Oct. 11, Kennedy orders 1,000 soldiers withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1963 in NSAM 263
On Nov. 22, JFK shot
4 days later, JFK's order to withdraw 1,000 men from Vietnam reversed by LBJ in NSAM 273
Aug. 1964, Gulf of Tonkin incident (false flag/fabricated incident)
Deployments to Vietnam go through the stratosphere, reaching 550,000+ men in less than 5 years, see this PDF (page 9) for a chart showing the "hockey stick" from 1963 onward in troop levels in Vietnam

While the Pentagon is the operational arm of the Military Industrial Complex, the power center that killed JFK had to have its locus outside formal government while having significant control of and access to formal government. We understand the confluence of interests between central bankers and the war machine for generating profits through the expansion of the money supply and funding of the war machine, so JFK's murder is likely a confluence of several, very powerful interests who had independently decided "enough is enough, Kennedy has become a nuisance and has got to go" and decided to work together for the time being to eliminate him.

7) Kennedy's assassination was obviously supposed to be very public but in a controlled way. After all, if they just wanted him dead, they could have shot down Air Force One on a cloudy day and declared it an accident. But he was shot in broad daylight, surrounded by cameras though not professional news cameras. All the film from these cameras was immediately seized and effectively locked up for almost a decade before the first pictures started to trickle out, damaged and likely altered. My theory on this is that there was a script for how the assassination was supposed to go and something went wrong. Oswald was supposed to be the patsy while some real professionals took Kennedy out in a way that would be consistent with Kennedy being shot by Oswald who would then be painted a "lone nut assassin" while the amateur photos could be splashed across televisions and the front-pages of newspapers to decry the "new extremism" that had taken over US politics. Governor Connally's first statement on camera includes this little memorized diatribe about extremism in American politics and how it is transforming things, and so on. This was clearly scripted. But something went wrong and the video evidence was too inconsistent with the official theory of Oswald-the-crazed-assassin which had been immediately put out to the public on the very day of the assassination and then sent with Oswald to his grave two days later.

There were no commercial media cameras trained on Kennedy at the time because that part of his route was considered unimportant by the media. One question I've always had is why were there so few people on each side of the assassination bottleneck? I mean, there's this huge, thronging crowd just a hundred feet away, and then a few stragglers. The crowd was being held back by policemen, obviously, so why were those few people permitted through? Zapruder, Nix, Babushka Lady, Tina Towner, Moorman and the guy filming Kennedy from the curbside visible in the Zapruder frames 343-358 (does anyone know who this is???! his film would be 100x better quality than Zapruder's, he was standing right on the curb!), among others. Hell, it seems that roughly 50% of Dallas residents must have had amateur cameras if the people on either side of the assassination bottleneck are a representative sample of Dallas residents circa 1963. All these folks claim to have had no knowledge of anything but then they sure are some cool customers, calmly documenting the historic, defining moment of the US government while all hell is breaking loose with gunshots and cars and motorcycles speeding off, sirens wailing, people yelling, etc.

8) The Rybka video shows the Secret Service bodyguard detail being called off the rear bumper of the Presidential limousine while back at the airport, 7 miles from Dealey plaza. Just an interesting little detail. :-)

*Can anyone say, "19 crazed, suicidal 'religious extremists' seeking to get 72 virgins in heaven by committing mass suicide/homicide..."

**Basically, that the government is the most powerful gang of all and the President the biggest, most powerful Don of all

Quick note on the oil spill...

2010-07-18T23:58:00.000-07:00

A gaggle of Senators including Chuckie Schumer are clamoring that BP may have been involved in the repatriation of the Lockerbie bomber back to Libya as a concession for removing drilling restrictions off the coast of Libya. Clearly, there's some kind of political tug-of-war going on under the surface.

Oil Spill Must Be Sabotage

2010-05-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

OK, now I'm sure that the gulf oil spill was sabotage... a "Presidential commission" is going to "investigate" the explosion. Whenever the government insists on investigating something, you know there's corruption. My current wild-guess theory is that this strike is payback against whoever shot down the Copenhagen summit.

Silicon Valley: Hotbed of Cold War Defense Spending

2010-05-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Just watched this fascinating lecture on the "secret" history of Silicon Valley. One of the most spectacular facts revealed at the end of the lecture (spoiler alert) is that the godfather of the computer chip, William Shockley - whose proteges Bill Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel (full disclosure: I work for Intel) - was heavily involved in the signals intelligence community, working for the Army Air Force during WWII and later working on projects related to the development of ICBMs.

The lecturer also discusses the incestuous relationship between Stanford University and the US intelligence agencies that developed out of WWII, spearheaded by Frederick Terman, a big electronics spook type in academic research. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, were educated at Stanford University. I have another blog post discussing possible incest between Google and CIA here.

Specifically, I am suspicious of this whole "the government was taken by surprise by the Internet" narrative that has been growing since the 90's. Some people want to say the government invented the Internet. That's a ridiculous caricature of ARPANet and a failure to comprehend the essence of the Web (user content). But on the other hand, liberals and libertarians tend to characterize the Web as something beyond the government's control and which largely blind-sided the government. The early, heavy investment of the MIC into electronic intelligence and weapons casts this narrative into doubt. Did the MIC really develop such a massive blind-spot that they forgot to take an active interest in semiconductor, digital and software technologies? I find that hard to believe... and what better way to get out in front of the problem of the information revolution than to use a portion of the defense budget to fund the start-up of the premier search engine on the Web? As the lecturer notes, Frederick Terman pioneered and has as his lasting legacy university-industry partnerships... Stanford-Google... or perhaps Stanford-Google-CIA-NSA, maybe?

Leaving aside the potentially nefarious population-control interests of the Federal intelligence agencies would have in a company like Google, Google is in a unique position to collect and collate all sorts of tidbits of information from individuals all over the globe. Anyone who uses Google - foreign diplomats, foreign spies residing within the US, and so on - is potentially yielding information useful to intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies when they type in search terms. Google could very well be the U2 of the Web.

The latest on my views on Somalia

2010-02-13T16:35:00.000-08:00

P.T. Leeson, an economist of the Austrian bent, wrote an article a few years ago titled, "Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse" where he presents a persuasive case that much of the world would be better off without a government, judging from the case of Somalia. Since the time he wrote this article, things have changed a great deal.

The existence of even one government, especially a democratic government, is a threat to freedom everywhere. Hoppe says something to the effect that, in a private law society, crime insurance agencies would charge higher premiums in areas that are next to government-controlled territory. He reasons that government employees would likely be categorized, for crime insurance purposes, the same as other criminals... it would be difficult for a government employee to live in a decent neighborhood in free territory because no one would want to be neighbors with him because their premiums would go up.

What's amazing is that Somalia's recent history has really borne this conception out. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Barre regime, warlords took control of Somalia. The US tried to "correct" this "problem", through UN agency, via our involvement there during the early 90's. We got run out on a rail by Aidid culminating in our withdrawal after the tragic Black Hawk Down incident. For some time during the 90's, UN intervention in Somalia was extremely limited and the Somali economy began to heal, with education rates and nourishment increasing at an extremely rapid pace (check out PT Leeson's paper on this, Better Off Stateless). In 2006, Ethiopia, then, tried to invade but they were repelled. This resulted in a splintering of the ICU, and the new proto-governmental group called al-Shabaab.

The most recent battles over Mogadishu have been the result of -- surprise surprise! -- the attempt to impose a "real state" on Somalia from above, by the miserably underfunded AU and its "AMISOM" troops, mostly rerun Ethiopians who got their butts kicked out last time they tried to invade. After months of not being paid, some of the AMISOM soldiers have sold their weapons to buy food, which should give you an idea of the level of willpower the AU has in this mission. The al-Shabaab and other ICU groups smell blood in the water and the AU's meddling in Somalia has created a "capture the flag" atmosphere in Somalia... each group maneuvering itself to be in the best position to project governmental power if and when a government is "created" - aka "imposed" - in Somalia. But most remarkable is that the Somalis have treated the UN/AU's "Transitional Federal Government" as a mortal threat rather than buying into the benign administrative cloak with which the TFG has tried to wrap itself. One TFG emissary to the UN said (paraphrase), "They are trying to kill this baby in the cradle. al-Shabaab knows that if this thing takes hold it will become a government and they want to prevent that from happening." But, of course, it is the local al-Shabaab - not the AU's Ethiopian troops protecting a tiny garrison in Mogadishu called the "Transitional Federal Government" - who are solely to blame for the killing of innocents in Mogadishu. I'm not saying al-Shabaab gets a cart blanche by virtue of being local... if al-Shabaab kills innocents, that is as immoral as anyone else killing innocents. But al-Shabaab has a perfectly sound justification for going to war against the TFG... it's a baby government!

Unfortunately, objective material on the Islamic Courts Union seems to be in short supply. I've looked around the net and the few sources that have any interesting details describe the ICU as an "Islamist organization" which I suspect is as accurate as that label is when applied to any organization in the post-9/11 world where anything with a turban or a Q'ran is target practice for the Pentagon.

Michael van Notten moved to Somalia and was involved with Somaliland which is a region in the northernmost tip of Somalia that, even today, is largely peaceful and unmarred by the king-of-the-hill struggles going in in Mogadishu and the surrounding region. You can read his discussion of Somali law after the collapse of the Barre regime here. He has written a book which is very next on my to-read list. My understanding is that the Somali customary law system is still largely intact in the Somaliland region.

In my view, the root debate is about how law is to be administered - should law be administered by a single organization (government), empowered to settle all disputes and issue dictates (statutes)? Or, should law be administered by anyone who opens up shop to provide law services (open competition)? We in the West are so used to thinking of law as statutes - commands issued from a "higher power" - that it is difficult for us to even conceive of living in an orderly society where there is no single monopolist of law.

Why should anyone want to live in a society which is not controlled by a central monopolist of law? For the simple reason that, as Hans Hoppe notes in many places in his writings, the State is the monopolist of law even - or especially - in disputes involving itself. This is an obvious conflict of interests. You might be able to argue with the government over how much you owe in taxes, but no State court will ever seriously entertain a legal challenge to the government's right to collect taxes at all. The IRS has a pdf available that catalogs and addresses all such "frivolous tax arguments" that have been heard and dismissed by the State's courts. Of course the Courts will not bite the hand that feeds them, so they never rule against the State, even though the State's final argument for why it has the power to collect taxes ("because we said so!") is transparently self-serving. The State is also able to insist that all disputes be liable to be brought to its courts for final review, which prevents the emergence of pockets of resistance to the law monopoly, that is, the emergence of competitive law systems within the purview of the State's authority.

So, there's the long-form version of the current evolution of my views on Somalia

State invasion of everyday life... a different interpretation

2010-02-02T14:44:00.001-08:00

In this awesome mises.org daily (excerpted from Journal of Libertarian Studies), Hans Hoppe makes the case that the state's predation has increased inexorably under democracy vis-a-vis the levels of State predation which prevailed under monarchy. I think Hoppe's case is historically and logically sound.

However, there is another interpretation of the increasing invasion of the State into everyday life which I think deserves some consideration. If we go back to the origins of the State, it began with simple robbery ... plunder and tribute collected from tribes by war raiders. These war raiders, through one means or another, eventually transmuted into "steady-state" plunderers, extracting regular payments from a subject population rather than running one-off raids. In the beginning, the State existed without apology. Might did make right. There was no other reason to obey the State than that they could put a spear through you.

As time went on, however, alliances between the State formed with priests, merchants and judges. This alliance was originally very small, so that only a very tiny number of people enjoyed the privileges of belonging to the predatory class. Since the defining features of the modern State are its territorial monopolies of law and force (and coercive revenuing), we can start with the emergence of these features as the birth of the fully-developed State in human history.

Note, however, than since the State is naught but organized crime (aggression), its only distinction with other criminal organizations is its success in establishing a territorial monopoly on the means of legitimizing its aggressions. Because people were poorer and less well educated in the past, less sophisticated justifications for State aggression were needed. So, the Pharaoh wore a funny hat and employed the priest class to build astrological temples and that legitimized his coercion. However, over time, the State has had to employ ever more expensive and rigorous justifications for its parasitism. The ideal situation, from the point of view of the State, is to employ no one and to waste none of its revenues justifying its coercions, while collecting all the revenues solely for consumption on its own pleasures.

Looking at social welfare measures, such as the New Deal, it is clear that, while power elite analysis clearly demonstrates the ways in which these measures served the interests of those most urgently pressing for them, it also shows that the State has had to distribute its largesse to a wider and wider subgroup of the public. Initially, the proto-State raiders employed no one and spent none of their spoils justifying their raids. They simply consumed the proceeds of their raids on their own pleasures. As the State emerged, the plunderers began to employ judges, priests and merchants to put up a facade of legitimacy, to justify the plundering. As time has gone on, the costs of State apologetics have grown inexorably, to the present system that consumes 50% of GDP, most of which is spent on ends which are ancillary to the State's raison d'etre: plunderous aggression.

Hoppe points out the invasion of the Federal government into everyday life.

"... the 1994 edition of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), the annual compendium of all US Federal Government regulations currently in effect, consists of a total of 201 books, occupying about 26 feet of library shelf space. The Code's index alone is 754 pages. The Code contains regulations concerning the production and distribution of almost everything imaginable: from celery, mushrooms, watermelons, watchbands, the labeling of incandescent light bulbs, hosiery, iron and steel manufacturing, and onion rings made out of diced onions, revealing the almost-totalitarian power of a democratic government."

This brings me to my alternative interpretation, namely, that the growth in the numbers of the parasitic class, and the dilution of the revenues commanded by the parasitic class, can be seen as a loss of power by the State, analogous to the loss of power by monarchs with the rise of democracy in the late-19th and early-20th century. Suffrage was extended to ever-wider groups because the counter-arguments to extending suffrage are too de-legitimizing. The State has had to share its parasitic revenues with an ever-growing subgroup of the public. It might seem that communism is an extremum of this process but I do not think that it is... communism is a concentration, not a dilution of state power and state revenues. While everyone is technically on the payroll of the State, the reality is that the State is consuming the vast majority of production and the people are being paid slave's wages by the State while the capital stock of the economy is burnt up and the communized economy eventually grinds to a halt on the precipice of tribal economics. I do not think this is analogous to the ever-expanding network of bribes and payoffs that constitute the parasitic class of the modern society. Now, the State has to pave the roads, run the phones and innumerable other ancillary tasks that it never had to bother with before, in order to continue legitimizing its core purpose of enabling the parasitic class to live at the expense of others.

This dilution of power not only applies to revenues but also to regulations. One interpretation of regulations is that they reflect an "omnipotence" on the part of the government... but anyone who has driven over the speed limit or smoked a joint knows that the government's regulations are not an expression of its actual omnipotence but its pretensions thereof. But why does the government pass so many regulations that it does not really intend to enforce? One reason is so that it has plenty of infractions to slap onto the innocent citizen with the temerity to stand up to the powers that be. But I think we have to ask why these regulations? Why does the government regulate this but not that? The reason is that regulations are a reflection of the expectations of the statist public from "good government". Good government won't let our kids drink and smoke cigarettes and will do everything in its power to ensure this doesn't happen. Every "immoral" behavior which can be construed in any way to have some effect on another person, however remote and indirect, is to be regulated by good government... government of conscience. This is part and parcel of the legitimization of government, the use of coercion to implement the will of the moral majority. This placates the majority with the feeling that the government is on God's side, something that their Pastors and priests - usually inadvertently - reinforce with every sermon on the duty of the individual to do everything in his or her power to stop others from behaving immoral (due to the damage they are doing to their immortal soul). The government is only following the sound advice of our spiritual leaders by doing everything in its power to stop people from behaving immorally. Spending the night in jail might suck, but if it teaches you not to drink the devil's liquor, why, you've been saved a great deal more suffering in the fires of Hell.

So, the increase in the size of the public sector and the increase in the number of regulations are symptomatic, I believe, of the weakness of the State's case for its own powers. While it is true that State expenditures have never been higher and State regulations have never been greater, this cannot in itself be interpreted as the result of a real increase in the State's power. The State ultimately derives its power from the legitimacy it commands in the public's eye. The more money the State has to spend on the pursuit of this ancillary goal, the less money it has for its own consumption. The more regulations the State has to implement to legitimize itself are a reflection of the greater demands of the public for the State to meet the criterion of legitimacy.

Intellectual property is the essence of the State's self-delegated authority

2010-01-28T16:33:00.000-08:00

There are a variety of manifestations of intellectual property - trademarks, copyrights, patents. Many things can be copyrighted and patented ... even business methods can be copyrighted! Famously, Amazon patented its so-called "1-click" purchase option, threatening other online sellers who dared to imitate its brilliant invention with lawsuits!

Leaving aside conceptual definitions of IP, what are its ultimate effects? The ultimate effects of IP are to prohibit certain sorts of actions by individuals which are construed to be violations of the "intellectual property" rights of others.

Now, the essence of property - in a Hoppean/Rothbardian conception - is to assign rights to exclusive use of a physical resource to a specific individual. If John owns a car, that means John has the exclusive right to operate and control the car and to determine who else is allowed to operate and control the car. When the State arrogates to itself the authority to license John's operation of his own property, the State is actually aggressing against John by infringing on the exclusivity of John's rights to operate and control his car.

But does this mean John is free to do anything he likes with his car, lest we commit the unpardonable sin of aggressing against John's all-hallowed "liberty"? No - if John uses his property in such a way that it interferes with the exclusive rights of another individual to control their own property, John is aggressing against that individual and they, thereby, have justification for the use of force against John to prevent him from using his property in that way (or taking him to court to seek retaliation against him). But the State, in licensing (or not) John's use of his own property is not suffering from any interference on John's part. If John refuses to be licensed, this does not harm any State property or anyone else's property, for that matter. The dispute between the State and John - regarding licensure of the use of his vehicle - is completely gratuitous. Gratuitous disputes can and will arise even in the absence of an aggressive State but those who initiate such gratuitous disputes at least have to bear the costs of their decision to harass a peaceful citizen. Gratuitous disputes which are subsidized by the State, on the other hand, pass the costs off onto the taxpayer - explaining why gratuitous disputes (e.g. victimless crimes) are far more numerous than disputes originating from property conflicts.

Intellectual property, in my opinion, is a form of gratuitous dispute. I say "in my opinion" because it's impossible to know in the absence of a market in law. The only way to know for sure is to have a free market in law. In a free market of law, I believe that the costs of pursuing such gratuitous disputes would swamp any possible benefits which could be garnered. It is only the subsidization of intellectual property claimants* by the State that makes such enterprises profitable. If a musical band recorded themselves in a studio to CD and released the CD in a stateless society, who would combat the "pirating" of the band's CD once they released it to the public? In each case, they would have to bring individual lawsuits against every individual who they deem to have "illegally" copied their IP. Such legal action would be prohibitively expensive (witness the RIAA's losing battle to legally intimidate people into not copying songs... and that with the aid of State subsidy!) One could take a Coasean approach and say that this, in itself, proves that IP should not be considered property but something deeper is at stake and that is that all property rights consist of rights to exclusive control of scarce physical resources for the purpose of avoiding conflicts. Expanding the definition of property to include intangibles - such as numbers, images, patterns, business methods, and so on, results in the multiplication of conflicts.

Gratuitous conflicts are the essence of State-delegated authority - look at the number of persons filling our prisons for "crimes" related to the possession, distribution and consumption of marijuana or other drugs. Whenever the State issues and enforces statutory or regulatory dictates - "Thou shalt ____" or "Thou shalt not ___" - it is creating gratuitous conflict. This is why I say that intellectual property is the essence of the State's self-delegated authority. Ordering people around like they are slaves is what the State does and intellectual property is just one example, among millions, of this.

In a competitive law society, we would expect that only those conflicts which it is profitable to prosecute would be prosecuted. A family seeking retaliation against a murdered family member will pay the costs (or their crime-insurance agency will) needed to convict the perpetrator, making such prosecution profitable. Victims of theft or assault will be able to profitably sell claims to repossession and retribution against their aggressor to for-profit bounty/repo businesses. But the reason that these things can be profitably done is exactly because they concern the allocation of scarce resources. Just like nobody can profitably sell air, so no one could profitably prosecute violations of perceived IP.

Finally, it is conceivable that societies of individuals who value ultra-high-quality media - and are willing to pay for the privilege to consume it - could develop. For example, perhaps you could have an enclave of blockbuster movie addicts who live in the Hollywood area and, as part of the contractual agreement to owning property in that region, they agree to abide by what is essentially IP law. Tourists might travel to the territory - a "Las Vegas for blockbuster buffs" - to get a taste of the rich media experiences which can only exist in a territory with ironclad IP rights. This would not be unlike other enclave communities that would likely develop around cult religions, anachronistic religions or tribal economics, such as the FLDS, Amish or anarcho-communes. There is nothing inherently anti-liberal about this, so long as these enclaves do not become aggressive and attempt to export the costs of their irrational social structures onto individuals living outside their territory. But it is highly unlikely, in my opinion, that international private law would ever recognize and enforce such bizarre legal rules.

*For example, the FBI warning regarding piracy at the opening of every Hollywood movie - who pays for the vigorous investigation and prosecution of piracy by the FBI? Not Hollywood... we do!

Get a degree in Homeland Security!

2010-01-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

What the hell??

Government = Mafia

2010-01-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

Case closed.

LA declares war on Mary Jane

2010-01-27T00:33:00.001-08:00

Well, it looks like the Prohibitionists aren't giving up on California without a fight. LA city council voted 9-3 to impose heavy new regulations on medical marijuana distribution centers, including capping the total number of distribution centers in the city to 70 (there are currently estimated to be 800 to 1000 in the city). This is disappointing, as California has thumbed its nose at Washington more than any single state with its de facto nullification of Federal drug laws on marijuana. We'll just have to sit back and see how this one turns out. It will be a good barometer of the strength or weakness of US drug policy. If the Feds can be defied in California, they can be defied almost anywhere... and if that starts happening, our international drug policy will begin crumbling around the world. The repercussions would be widely felt.

Spending cap

2010-01-27T00:32:00.000-08:00

This spending cap is a joke. It only applies to a tiny fraction of the Federal budget... $350B out of, what, close to $4T? Exempt are DHS, DoD and foreign aid. How transparent can you get? US gov won't stop sending more welfare to international bankers (through foreign aid) and won't stop spending even more on its already ridiculously outsized war budget. The charade is getting to be downright unbearable. I would prefer it, for sanity's sake, if these assholes would just own up... "yes, we're bilking you for close to 50% of everything you earn because we can... so get used to it." At least I could have the satisfaction of bitching about it and having everyone in the room nod their heads in agreement. How do they pull this off?? I'm in the wrong line of work.

What Law Is

2010-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

Law

What is law? Frederic Bastiat, in his treatise The Law, defines law as the collective use of force. As much as I love Bastiat’s treatise, I think his definition is not sufficiently analytical. It is certainly the case that the law plays a role in the collective use of force but the law is something more basic than this. We can begin by looking at law as it is today. The website for the Oregon courts has an excellent summary[1] of modern law and courts. I will quote it at length:

Throughout history, people have had disputes and have needed some means to settle their disputes. As civil societies develop, they need an orderly system of conflict resolution. One system that developed in "western" cultures is the "law court" or court of law. In England, those early law courts developed a "body of law" called the common law, which defined both the rights of the people and the government and the duties people owe each other and their government. There was no legislature yet to adopt statutes.

English settlers brought this common law with them to the American Colonies, where it developed into the American common law. Over time, state and federal constitutions and statutes have superseded much American common law. Courts continue to look to the common law for guidance if no statute defines the rights and duties in a particular case.

As in other states, courts in Oregon are both rooted in this common law tradition and governed by a state constitution and statutes that supersede the common law. Oregon's statutes are organized by subject matter in a set of books called Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS).

As in other states, Oregon law has two broad branches: civil law and criminal law, each with origins in the common law and each now governed primarily by statute.

Civil law includes statutes and "case law" that define or interpret individuals' and organizations' private rights in their relationships and disputes that involve property, contracts, personal injury, family relationships, tax, or government rules and regulations.

Because Oregon does not have laws that define every private right, courts rely on the "court-made" law called "common law" to resolve some disputes.

Criminal law is the body of laws that define a person's basic rights in and duties to preserve a peaceful and safe society. A person who violates the duties to preserve social peace and safety may be guilty of a crime "against the people" and so face jail, prison, or some other punishment. In addition, if the lawbreaker's act injured another (the "victim"), the victim may have a right to a private, civil law claim for damages.

Modern criminal law is almost all statutory. Criminal cases require courts to decide whether and how certain criminal laws apply and whether those laws as applied violate the state or federal constitution.

The legislature can change the common law by enacting a statute, so long as the governor does not veto the new law. The courts must follow that law so long as it does not conflict with the state or federal constitution. However, if no statute "governs" the issue in a particular case, the court may look to the common law rules for guidance.

When an appellate court must interpret statutory or common law in order to decide a case, the court's decision becomes "precedent" for deciding future cases with similar issues.

A precedent that interprets a statute makes that interpretation part of the statute.

A precedent that applies the common law to a new situation becomes part of the common law.

Although courts usually "follow precedent," courts may modify the earlier common law rules in some circumstances.

The legislature enacts other statutes that affect courts as well. The legislature determines the budget for the state courts and defines the amounts they charge for filing fees and other court fees. The legislature also defines how state courts collect fines and distribute the money collected.

This summary contains all the essential elements of the modern law. We have a common law tradition which forms the foundation on which the law rests. Statutes override the common law to force the courts to operate in accord with the State’s interests. Interpretation of the common law or statutory law forms new legal precedent. New precedents are folded into the common law and statutory law to extend the body of law.

Hans Hoppe, in a recent lecture[2], defines the State in the following manner:

Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And, implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent's power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position.

Hoppe goes on to describe the alliance between intellectuals, as social opinion-molders, and the State. The State, Hoppe says, subsidizes the production of intellectual goods in exchange for intellectual loyalty to the State and production of philosophical justifications and rationalizations for the State’s existence. The same line of reasoning can be applied to the State’s monopolization of legal services. Dispute-resolution is surely older than the organized State. At some point in human history, the State took an interest in monopolizing the courts. The fundamental exchange is the same as that described by Hoppe regarding the monopolization of intellectuals. The State grants its preferred jurists a monopoly on the production of dispute-resolution services in exchange for the courts’ loyalty in disputes involving the State itself. The state guards its monopoly on dispute-resolution as jealously as it guards its monopoly on the use of force or its monopoly on the coercive collection of revenues.

Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe and other notable anarchist philosophers approach the problem of law from the point of view of natural rights. They begin with a Lockean approach to infer inalienable, unassailable rights from the human need to survive. David Friedman, an “anarcho-capitalist”, takes a different, value-free approach to law. I do not think either approach is a satisfactory intellectual foundation for law.

I will put forward a view of law which is a hybrid of the positive law view of Friedman and the normative law views of Hoppe, Rothbard and others. In a rebuttal to Hans Hoppe’s argumentation ethics[3], David Friedman says the following:

… consider an ethic according to which there are no rights at all; everyone is morally free to coerce everyone else whenever he can get away with it, but many people succeed in defending themselves well enough so that they control much of their own [property]. According to their ethic they have no right to self ownership, nor to anything else, but they have physical control over themselves... One might plausibly claim that this comes close to describing the world we now live in. [Emphasis added]

I think that Friedman’s assessment of the state of affairs, while value-free, is accurate. The value-free nature of Friedman’s assessment is not its defining virtue. Rather, it is its congruency with the state of affairs we observe in the real world which makes this assessment valuable.

This leads us back to the question of what the law is. In a world where amoral coercion is consistent with physical reality, what is law, really? Let’s start from the definition used by the Oregon courts, “Throughout history, people have had disputes and have needed some means to settle their disputes. As civil societies develop, they need an orderly system of conflict resolution.” Law, that is, the court system, is an orderly system for the resolution of conflicts.

What are conflicts and how do they arise? Hans Hoppe says[4],

Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe can do whatever he pleases. For him, the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct — social cooperation — simply does not arise. This question can only arise once a second person, Friday, arrives on the island. Yet even then, the question remains largely irrelevant so long as no scarcity exists.

Suppose the island is the Garden of Eden; all external goods are available in superabundance. They are "free goods," just as the air that we breathe is normally a "free" good. Whatever Crusoe does with these goods, his actions have no repercussions — neither with respect to his own future supply of such goods nor regarding the present or future supply of the same goods for Friday (and vice versa). Hence, it is impossible for there ever to be a conflict between Crusoe and Friday concerning the use of such goods. A conflict is only possible if goods are scarce. Only then will the need arise to formulate rules that make orderly, conflict-free social cooperation possible.

Hoppe’s argument suggests that there are two conditions for the existence of interpersonal conflict: more than one person and scarcity. There seems to be many forms of conflict which do not originate from scarcity, such as debates over metaphysics or religion, which may even go to fists. However, law is concerned only with real (physical) conflicts. Until a verbal argument goes to fists, it is not a real conflict. Law, in a private law society, is not concerned with resolving moral or metaphysical disputes[5].

As an example of a real dispute, consider the case of a traffic accident. When one person strikes another person’s vehicle with his own vehicle, there arises a dispute. This dispute has arisen because property damage has occurred. The question that is to be settled in the dispute is who was at fault, and this question is typically answered in the case of moving traffic accidents by determining who had the right-of-way, that is, who was in the right. Who had the right to proceed unhindered? Determining who was in the right establishes whether the property damage will be borne by the owner of the damaged property or will be transferred in some proportion to the offending party.

Real conflicts arise from scarcity, that is, property conflicts. So where do human rights fit into this picture? Murray Rothbard says[6] of human rights,

… there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person's right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a "human right."

In Rothbard’s view, only humans have rights and all rights are property rights. All real conflict is conflict over property because the body itself may be thought of as property.

This leads to the question, what is property? We can begin with the concept of property in the human person then move on to personal property and the emergence of property in land as a guide to understanding the origins of the human conception of property. This is the Lockean approach used by Hoppe, Rothbard and others. We can look to dictionary or legal definitions of property but none of these definitions touch the heart of the issue as it regards a theory of the private production of law: what evolutionary purpose does property serve? Why did property arise in the first place?

Property serves the purpose of conflict-avoidance by acting as a generally recognized heuristic allocating physical objects to the exclusive control of one or another individual.

If you pick up my camera from a seat at the airport, I will probably only need to say, “excuse me, that’s mine, can I have it back?” to settle the matter of whether you may use it. There are many conflict-avoidance schemes in human affairs, from religious rituals to social customs. When someone says, “Pardon me” after bumping into you in a hallway, the odds of a physical conflict arising as a result of the mishap are lower than they otherwise would be. From the standpoint of biology, it should be easy to see how persons who engage in conflict-avoidance strategies have a reproductive advantage over those who do not.

Property serves to avoid conflicts by allocating scarce physical objects to the exclusive use of a single decision-maker. But what is property? I will provide a working definition of property but I will not attempt to justify my definition here. Stephan Kinsella, in an article discussing the difference between intellectual property and radio waves, says the following:

… every scarce resource–things that can be contested; rivalrous things; resources that have exclusive use, so that use by me excludes use by you, and so on–is assigned an owner; that owner is the person who first appropriated or used the property in an embordering way–that is as an owner. It’s the first person to erect publicly visible boundaries that others can respect and see; he has a better claim to the resource than any latecomer.

Any property must be physical because non-physical objects are not scarce (real conflicts cannot arise). Property is not necessarily tangible. In other words, you can own physical matter (dirt, water, rocks, paper, etc.) or energy (for example, electrical energy) but you cannot own ideas or patterns, such as a number or an image. Property is the exclusive claim to the use and disposal of a particular, scarce, physical object, defined in space and time. You cannot own a general class of physical objects, such as, “I own all ceramic dinner plates.” You may happen to own all members of a class of physical objects, such as, “I own all of Rembrandt’s self-portraits”, but you cannot own them as a class qua class, that is, you cannot claim, “Because that is a self-portrait of Rembrandt, I own it.” Because classes are ideas and ideas are not scarce, so-called “intellectual property” is not property at all. Intellectual property is an invalid claim of ownership of a class of physical objects, for example, all objects bearing a certain mark or conforming to a certain pattern.

How do physical objects become property? It seems natural to someone who has been surrounded by property all his life to assume that almost everything is and ought to be owned by somebody. Who owns the moon? Who owns Mars? There is a slice of the Antarctic continent, called Marie Byrd Land, which is not claimed by any sovereign nation. Who owns it? These questions open up the larger question of how any physical thing came to be owned in the first place. I can give no good reason why I have rights to exclusive use of some portion of the Moon or a portion of Marie Byrd Land. So, no portion of the moon or Marie Byrd Land is my property.

Property becomes owned through original appropriation. Original appropriation is the rule of first use: the first to use an otherwise unowned resource thereby becomes its rightful owner. If I am wandering through unowned wilderness (say, a thousand years ago when much of the Earth’s surface was unowned wilderness) and I pluck an apple from a wild apple tree, the apple becomes mine because I am using it and I am the first to put it to use. It is clear that use of unowned resources constitutes an improvement of social welfare since no one is hurt by my consuming the apple yet I am helped thereby. Since physical objects exist in a context of space and time adjacent to other physical objects, they are entangled, that is, how I use this physical object may affect some other physical object to which I do not have a property claim. Defining what constitutes valid or justifiable uses of physical resources is part of the problem that law solves.

Once owned, property can be exchanged with other persons. When people exchange property voluntarily, we know that human welfare is being improved by virtue of the exchange taking place. Voluntary exchange and original appropriation result in conflict-free improvements in the state of affairs. But property or any other conflict-avoidance strategy is imperfect because it is impossible to foresee the future or divine all possible consequences of following a certain conflict-avoidance strategy. No rule can, in all cases, prevent conflicts from ever arising. Hence, conflicts are inevitable.

Property conflicts arise as a result of unilateral changes of property boundaries. The voluntary redrawing of boundary lines obviously results in an improvement of the human condition. But since I can always be materially better off by unilaterally redrawing the boundaries of property to give myself more at the expense of others, I am motivated to do so. Real conflict results when individuals act according to the incentive to unilaterally redraw property lines. The definition of real conflict is unilateral redrawing of property boundaries.

Conflicts also arise as a result of threats, even threats which are not malicious. Presenting risks to the lives and property of others is a threat of unilateral property line redrawing. The pugnacious bar brawler who starts waving his fist in someone’s face is also threatening unilateral redrawing of a property line. Threats are as actionable as completed acts of unilateral property line redrawing. Someone who drives recklessly increases risk of property damage to those around him, even if he did not in this instance lose control and cause actual property damage.

There are two possible ways to resolve real conflicts: martial contest or non-violent resolution of the dispute. In societies where duels are permitted, parties to a dispute may choose which route they would like to pursue to resolve the conflict. However, since martial contests are terribly risky and costly, there is a large incentive to avoid them. We can see in the animal kingdom the costliness of martial contests. When they occur within the same species they are almost always non-lethal. Alpha male behavior can likely be thought of as a conflict-avoidance scheme where most serious conflicts only occur with the alpha male instead of being all-against-all. Only a single contest is required to settle the matter of who will have the benefits of being the alpha male for long stretches of time.

It is safe to assume that parties to a legal dispute are primarily motivated by adversarial self-interest. The US legal system makes this presumption very explicit. Given that the parties to the dispute are only in court to avoid physical conflict, in a private law society, this is not a very strong assumption. But this assumption leads to the breakdown of both the natural law (Rothbardian) and positive law (Friedmanian) approach to anarchic or private law. Friedman presents the case that anarchic law leads to the best or most efficient outcome for society. That is, Friedman is arguing from the point of view of social justice or social welfare. But this approach assumes that the individual cares about social welfare. That is, by presenting his arguments for anarchist law in the frame of how it improves social welfare, Friedman is assuming that the reader – and by implication anyone who is trying to ascertain what the law is and ought to be – cares about social justice or social welfare. This may accurately describe the typical, liberal academic but those most affected by the question of what the law is – real participants in real legal disputes – are not likely to share the same proclivity for social justice wherever it conflicts with their own interests. Since law, in a private law society, is the production of voluntary, non-violent resolutions to real disputes, only a definition of law which is acceptable to adversarial, self-interested individuals will suffice.

Rothbard argues from the point of view of natural law, starting first from the physical fact of an inalienable will in the living body and reasoning in the Lockean fashion from this fact to property rights in the body and thence to the preconditions for the body’s continued existence: standing room, air to breath and liberty to appropriate unowned natural resources or to utilize the body to produce and exchange for vital necessities. Leaving aside the potential technical problems within the natural rights arguments, there is a greater deficiency vis-à-vis applying natural rights to law. In a legal dispute involving a clear aggressor and a clear victim, the aggressor has already exhibited a disregard for morality and human rights. The purse thief is hardly concerned with the fact that his actions are immoral or violate the rights of his victim. Hence, it is of no use to expound upon his violations of natural rights. As with Friedman’s approach, Rothbard’s approach fails because it is not applicable to real disputes. That is, Rothbard’s definition of law is not useful to real individuals involved in real conflicts.

So what is the law? Law is the alternative to violent conflict when conflict-avoidance strategies (such as property lines) have failed to avoid conflict. In terms of rights in property, law is the production of new, stipulated property-lines which resolve real conflicts without further violence.

This definition immediately raises the question of how disputes can be resolved between asymmetrically powerful parties. In modern law systems, the aggressor (accused) has an incentive to resolve the conflict with his victim by means of law because the state will immediately retaliate against the accused for failure to comply with a court trial. In other words, the state offers the options of non-violent dispute resolution or immediate, overwhelming retaliatory violence (appear in court or be arrested or possibly even killed for failure to comply). In a stateless society, it appears that an aggressor would have no incentive to seek non-violent resolution of a dispute with his victim. After all, an aggressor usually will not attack unless he reasonably believes he can get away with the attack in the first place. That is, he has already calculated that he can win a martial contest with the victim.

Therefore, the victim must be able to present a sufficient threat to the accused in order to motivate the aggressor to come to court. That is, both parties must have an incentive to seek a peaceful settlement of the matter. Law and security, then, are inseparable. You cannot have real rights without the capacity to present a real threat to aggressors who refuse peaceful settlement of disputes. In other words, if you steal my television, and I send you a notice saying, “You must appear in court regarding the matter of the theft of my television,” I must also be able to take forcible action in the event you refuse to settle the matter through non-violent means. Otherwise, you will simply ignore my summons.

So far, I have not mentioned the non-aggression principle. In the characterization of rights and law that I have presented so far, what is called the "non-aggression principle" follows from the simple fact that prior success in redrawing the boundaries of property does not constitute a valid verbal argument for the property lines remaining unchanged. If I steal your purse and you bring me to court, simply noting that I won the physical contest for your purse does not constitute a valid verbal argument for the purse remaining in my possession. It is, in fact, a circular argument. The point in contention is whether the outcome of that physical contest should remain unchanged. If I refuse to defend my actions or if I am unable to defend my actions in court (using reason, ethics and accepted principles of law), the ultimate recourse is a new martial contest. In other words, rejecting the non-aggression principle is no different than saying “I don’t care to settle this through non-violent means, let’s just settle this matter through martial contest.” Note that this argument is inspired by Hoppe’s argumentation ethics which is essentially a presuppositional approach to the non-aggression principle. However, I find Hoppe’s attempt to elevate the NAP to an axiom to be deficient because it is not useful to real parties to a real legal dispute, as noted above.

Stephan Kinsella follows what he terms an “estoppel approach” to argue that a party to a non-violent dispute must accept violence against himself in proportion to that which he has already used against his victim because he is “estopped” by his past actions, that is, he would be committing what Hoppe calls a “performative contradiction” to argue otherwise. This argument is deeply unsatisfying, not least because it is easy to wriggle out of Hoppe’s performative contradiction by accepting that one has acted as a hypocrite. So, no one would ever commit a crime worse than hypocrisy, which does not seem to me to be a very serious crime, if it is a crime at all. However, Kinsella’s approach falls on the same criterion that Rothbard’s, Friedman’s and Hoppe’s approaches fall – it is not useful to parties in a real legal dispute. One side need only reject the doctrine of estoppel[7], which is not a very large leap, since the doctrine is not even in use in modern law, as Kinsella himself admits.

This brings us to the issue of justifiable violence. We know that any violence which is accepted through a stipulated resolution reached through non-violent means (court) improves social welfare because the receiver of the violence preferred it to martial contest. The context in which the violence occurs – defense, pre-emptive attack or retaliation – is irrelevant to this point. All that matters is that the parties stipulate that one or both parties will be subjected to some level of violence as an alternative to martial contest. Even though the terms under which the dispute is resolved involve the use or justification of violence, we know that it is an improvement to social welfare because both parties preferred the stipulated agreement to martial contest.

Specifically, there are three categories of violence which I believe can be justified. Violence which may be justifiable could include defense from present attacks or threatened future attacks against person and property and retribution for past attacks. In other words, any violence which a party would accept as a non-violent resolution to a real dispute is justifiable violence. That is, all violence which is more acceptable than direct martial contest is valid violence.

First, there is defensive violence. Despite the significant focus by libertarians on violence used in self-defense, there is nothing inherent in self-defense that magically elevates it above all other forms of justifiable violence. A wider principle of non-violence would be the following: only interpersonal violence which corresponds to a valid property argument is justifiable. A valid property argument is one which has become a part of the canon of customary law. This means that individuals can expect that courts will rule that violence used in a manner consistent with customary law was justified and the only alternative to accepting justified violence will be martial contest. In other words, if you grab a woman’s purse and she strikes you and you sue her, customary law will likely rule that her use of violence to defend her property was justifiable and your use of violence to attempt to snatch her purse was not.

Defensive violence is used to stop a present attack. It is easy to see that defensive violence follows the principle “first, do no harm” since defensive violence causally reduces the use of violence. The person who uses violence to defend his person or property has demonstrably reduced the amount of violence in the world by halting or neutralizing the violence used by the aggressor. Defensive violence “nips in the bud” conflicts which arise from failure of property boundaries to avoid conflicts.

The second category of justifiable violence is pre-emptive attack. Pre-emptive attack is used in the neutralization of threatened future attacks. Note that a future attack need not be malicious to warrant pre-emptive attack. Actions which pose risks to others which they have not agreed to bear may justify pre-emptive attack. For example, setting up an M2 on a tripod in your front yard trained into my living room constitutes a threat (possibly not malicious) to my person and property which may justify the direct use of violence (for example, disabling or destroying the weapon).

The third category of justifiable violence is retaliation. However bad the retaliatory violence stipulated in the agreement may be (let’s say, a public whipping of 40 lashes), the punished party preferred that resolution to martial contest. Hence, we arrive at a conclusion which has evaded libertarian treatments of punishment: retributive violence can constitute an improvement in social welfare as evidenced by revealed preference. One corollary of this is that it is not likely that the death penalty would be justifiable retaliation since no one would ever accept a stipulated agreement in which they certainly die… better to take your chances with a martial contest in which you may only possibly die. The exception to this may be in clan societies where a family sacrifices one of its own for the sake of keeping the peace between the rival clan.

An open question is whether retaliation can be justified on the basis of past threats. Is it justifiable to fine someone for having endangered your person or property? If you set up the M2 in your front yard and then later take it down without incident, if I sue you, can I collect damages for the past threat, even though no real conflict (unilateral redrawing of property boundaries) occurred? Traffic tickets for speeding or DUI are an example of this sort of thing. Or, can threats only be neutralized “on the spot”, that is, with direct action? Perhaps it would turn out that I could justify taking a sledge hammer to the ammo feed on your M2 while it is pointed at my living room but I could not justify asking you to pay damages after the weapon has been removed.

What about stop signs private property? Can I be fined for driving past a stop sign on private property? The act of driving through the stop sign does not, in itself, constitute a violation of any of the property rights of the owner of the land on which the stop sign is situated since I am operating my property (the vehicle) as I see fit. However, a driver who was almost hit by virtue of my failure to observe the stop sign may have a case against me for endangering his life, at least, if retaliatory violence can be justified for past threats.

Since the court, in a private law society, is only selling its services as a mutually agreed-upon decision-maker, the rules which emerge governing what is justifiable violence will be those decisions which have in the past succeeded in settling disputes. That is, case law emerges out of the chaos of innumerable disputes and attempted resolutions of those disputes. Both the natural law and positive law approaches agree that a body of precedents will emerge from non-violent resolution of real conflicts in a private law society and that it is this body of decentralized dispute-resolution which becomes law per se. Rights and general laws emerge from the pattern of successful resolution of past real conflicts by non-violent means, just as common law developed in England and the US prior to the creation of legislatures.

Appendix on Voluntary Slavery

Rothbard uses the principle that promise does not constitute contract to argue that voluntary slavery is impossible, since the “voluntary” slave may at any future point renege on his promise to be a slave. Block counters that voluntary slavery ought to be valid since it is valuable, that is, there are cases where it would be worthwhile for someone to choose to enslave themselves to another person. In line with my analysis of law, the key issue is the slave’s capacity to present a threat to his master in order to bring his master to court. In the case of a victim of crime, the victim may hire a security agency to backstop the summons to court… failure to go to court can result in direct retaliation by the victim’s security agency. In the case of a slave, if a dispute arises, the slave may be unable to hire a security agency to backstop his case.

If the slave can hire a security agency to backstop his case, then the master has a reason to go to court. In this case, the slave has rights, because a property dispute (whether the slave must, indeed, remain a slave) is being argued verbally, that is, a non-violent resolution is being sought. It is doubtful that the slave will accept Block’s social welfare argument (society benefits if voluntary slave contracts are enforceable), that is, the slave will always prefer martial contest to accepting the principle of voluntary slavery, even if he has signed away his rights in a voluntary slavery contract.

It seems to me that voluntary slavery really can go either way in a private law society and it depends on the court and security services. Perhaps all respectable courts would reject the principle of voluntary slavery. In that case, it would be impossible to find a court that would uphold a voluntary slave contract and any slave that could obtain security services might be able to emancipate himself and even bring his would-be owner to court for kidnapping or false imprisonment. On the other hand, it could emerge that courts would find that voluntary slavery was sufficiently beneficial to society that voluntary slave contracts must be upheld. In this view, the slave would still retain rights (because he could take his master to court), but the rights held would only be the “right to non-violent dispute resolution”, since the courts would uphold the general abrogation of the slave’s human rights within the slave contract. In any case, the slave who can retain protection will always have the right to a trial. Consider a falsely enslaved individual – the slaveholder claims the individual is legitimately his property but the enslaved individual contests this. Surely, the enslaved individual has as much right to have the slaveholder’s claims reviewed by a court of law as anyone else. The key issue is his ability to present a sufficient threat (hire a defense agency willing to backstop his case) to the slaveholder to motivate him to go to court.

Appendix on False Accusations

False accusations are themselves a crime… [work in progress]

[1] http://courts.oregon.gov/OJD/aboutus/courtsintro/index.page?

2 http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe18.html

3 http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/On_Hoppe.html

4 http://mises.org/story/2265

5 I am taking this as a point of faith, Hoppe justifies this position in his writings [looking for cite…]

6 http://mises.org/story/2569

7 It could be argued that the doctrine of estoppel would become part of the body of law in a private law society but my observation is not with respect to the content of law (specific legal precedents or arguments), rather, it is an existential observation… if a party refuses to accept an arbitrator who applies estoppel, there can be no non-violent resolution of the dispute on the basis of an argument based on the principle of estoppel.

Errata: Missing cite for Kinsella's definition of property: http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/08/09/why-airwaves-are-arguably-property/

Missing cite for Kinsella's application of estoppel: http://mises.org/journals/jls/12_1/12_1_3.pdf

[1] http://courts.oregon.gov/OJD/aboutus/courtsintro/index.page?

[2] http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe18.html

[3] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/On_Hoppe.html

[4] http://mises.org/story/2265

[5] I am taking this as a point of faith, Hoppe justifies this position in his writings [looking for cite…]

[6] http://mises.org/story/2569

[7] It could be argued that the doctrine of estoppel would become part of the body of law in a private law society but my observation is not with respect to the content of law (specific legal precedents or arguments), rather, it is an existential observation… if a party refuses to accept an arbitrator who applies estoppel, there can be no non-violent resolution of the dispute on the basis of an argument based on the principle of estoppel.

Should the government filter the internet?

2009-12-30T03:04:00.000-08:00

The Australian government is at it again, trying to clean up the wild, wild West of the Internet. They want to implement a "mandatory ban" on 1,000 URLs (the web address in our browser).

The proposed 1,000 URLs are, of course, so objectionable that no decent human being could possibly justify wanting to visit them. But that's beside the point. The question is whether individuals or the government should filter the internet - I have never visited nor ever will visit any of those 1,000 URLs. I doubt anyone else on this debate forum has or will. Within Australia, there are probably only a very small number of people who visit sites of that nature. So what's the point of banning them?

This is a wedge issue, an attempt to get a "foot in the door" on controlling the broader internet. The problem is that ISP filtering - what the AU "internet filter" attempts to implement - is not even close to enough. Any website on the blacklist can mirror itself (make another URL that accesses all the same content), or an interested Australian can use a Web anonymizer, Tor, or other proxy services, some of which will encrypt all traffic making it impossible for any 3rd party to "filter" the content.

To really filter the internet means not only blacklisting a set of wholly objectionable URLs, but constantly updating the blacklist to target any potential mirrors, blacklisting web anonymizers, banning peer-to-peer networks, banning the use of cryptography (which is itself problematic... define "cryptography"!), ad infinitum, ad nauseum. China makes it simple by simply criminalizing any attempt to effectively circumvent the intent of its filtering policy. Do we really want to implement those kind of "intent" laws here in the West? Laws whose application is purely subjective, whose extent is undefined?

We're talking about stopping a very small handful of people within Australia from accessing just 1,000 (out of millions) URLs. Who does this benefit? Who does it help? What good is it? And what cost (in dollars and freedoms) is it worth to stop those few people from accessing those few websites? How far are you willing to go? Maybe Sen. Jay Rockefeller's ruminations are right, "Would it have been better if we had never invented the internet and had to use paper and pencil?" Perhaps the Internet is just too inherently evil and the whole thing should just be scrapped.

And check out this little gem... now the internet is actually attacking national leaders! The internet must be controlled before somebody gets killed by it!

Some numerology and 9/11

2009-12-30T02:56:00.001-08:00

I've searched high and low for numerological interpretations of 9/11/2001 but none are very satisfying. So, I've invented my own. Here it is:

Let's start with the number of the beast: 666. Many theologians interpret 666 as, in fact, a truncated representation of the fraction 2/3, representing the fraction of humanity that Satan will succeed in deceiving and bring with himself to eternal Hell. But 666 not only represents this fraction of lost souls, but it is the symbol of the Beast himself. In this sense, I interpret the three 6's as each representing one third of humanity and the grouping of all three 6's together as the false theology of universalism, that is, that all men will go to heaven. This is widely believed, even between different religions, to be the central dogma of any world religion operating under the umbrella of a Satanic world government. The 6's are all the same because all men are to go to heaven, all men are good ... all men go to heaven.

But the truth contained in the lie of 666 is that only 1/3 of humanity (the "remnant" or "elect") will obey God and the remainder will perish in eternal Hell. To expound upon this truth, the secret society of Skull & Bones uses the number 322, but with the proportion of humanity destined to heaven and hell reversed, that is, 1/3 goes to Hell and the 2/3 remainder goes to heaven. This is figured in the single digit '3' (one third of the digits) and the double digits '22'. But 3 is greater than 2 signifying that the 1/3 destined to eternal Hell are greater (on this earth) than the 2/3 majority destined to Heaven. The servants of Satan are the remnant, they are the elite, signified in the 3 being greater than the two 2's. Of course, '2' and '3' that are the composite digits of 322 can be used to form the fraction 2/3 = .666...

So, 9/11 is the superlative statement of this principle. The elite 1/3, those who are serving Satan in his quest to rebuild the lost tower of Babel (originally located in Iraq, by the way... any connection to the occultic Bushes' obsession with Iraq?), aresuperlatively greater than the remaining 2/3, just as 9 is as much greater than 1 as any single digit can be than any other single digit. 911 is a statement of class superiority. "Look what we can do, we can smash buildings and murder thousands of people right in front of your eyes on camera and you know we did it but there's not a damned thing you can do about it!" Also, the digits of 911 evenly multiply and divide 322: (3*3) (22/2).

The 7/7/5 bombings use the same numerology and the same modus operandi (military/police "exercises" of the exact nature of the real attack which occurred going on at exactly the same time and place as the real attack to confuse and delay first-responders) to leave a plausibly deniable "signature". 775 is, again, two digits and one digit. The values are reversed (7 > 5) but this is not the purpose of the date signature in this case, it is to leave the "fingerprint" or calling card, so to speak.

If you dig deeper, you find this same "one digit/two digits" calling card elsewhere. The first bombing of the WTC occured 2/26/1993... 226.

The USS Cole bombing occurred 10/12/2000. Ignoring zeros as in occult numerology... 112.

Timothy McVeigh executed: 6/11/2001 ... 611
Madrid Bombings: 5/11/2004 ... 511

WTC Bombing: 226 <---> 2/26/1993

Bill Hicks dies: 226 <---> 2/26/1994

112 <---> 11:20pm

USS Cole Bombing: 112 <---> 10/12/2000

Alex Jones born: 211 <---> 2/11/1974

John Allen Muhammed pronounced dead at 9:11PM on 11/10/2009.

The groundbreaking ceremony of the Pentagon occurred on 9/11/1941.

I love datamining. :-P

NIST discovers new property of the universe

2009-12-30T02:55:00.004-08:00

This is a great video discussing the NIST report on WTC7. Looks like NIST has made new fundamental discoveries regarding the laws of physics... time to send Einstein et. al. back to the drawing board!!

Why monopolies are bad (with applications to education and healthcare)

2009-12-30T02:55:00.003-08:00

I live a few blocks from two movie stores, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. A month ago, the Blockbuster store began a Going Out of Business sale. That leaves the Hollywood Video store as the only movie store for several miles in every direction. I was surprised to find out, last night, when I stopped at Hollywood to pick up a movie at 10:55pm that the store was closing in five minutes. I was shocked... how can a movie store close at 11pm on a Friday night?? I asked the clerk when they started closing at 11pm. It's been since a few weeks ago. She claimed that it's because business is too slow after 11pm. But when she let me out of the store, locking the door behind me, two cars pulled up, and the customers walked up to the door, shocked to find it locked.

After puzzling on this for a few minutes, it struck me that the new Hollywood hours were instituted right about the same time Blockbuster put up the Going Out of Business sale signs. Why should Hollywood stay open past 11pm for the convenience of those last few late-night stragglers when Blockbuster is no longer across the street, staying open for late-night stragglers? Blockbuster had to stay open till midnight because Hollywood did and vice-versa. But now that Hollywood has a monopoly of sorts in this area, they can require their customers to plan around the store's convenience, rather than the other way around. Both Blockbuster and Hollywood were likely losing money staying open that last hour from 11pm to midnight, but they had to absorb that loss or risk losing customers to their rival.

As I have explained on these boards in the past, the public education system creates a monopoly on low- and mid-level education by subsidizing the government schools so they can offer $0 tuition. It is impossible to compete with $0 tuition, so only private schools which cater to high-end, wealthy customers (and some religious schools) can co-exist with the subsidized state schools. But the monopoly on education is bad for customers (parents & children) in the same way that Hollywood's lucky monopoly on movie store presence in this area of town is bad for customers. The customer must adapt his life around the convenience of the monopolist. In a competitive market, the producers must cater to consumers' demands or risk losing potential repeat business to their competitors.

The clamor for universal health care (monopolization through subsidization) is like customers wishing for Blockbuster to close up shop to give Hollywood a monopoly on videos. The only beneficiaries are the monopolist and its employees (and stockholders). This can only lead to a reduction in the quality of healthcare, just like the reduction in quality of education which we have experienced under state monopolization of education and just like the reduction of quality I experienced from Hollywood Video last night.

Unfortunately, the political opposition to universal health care has not prosecuted the argument from this point of view, the root cause of the degradation in quality which can be predicted to occur as health care becomes more heavily subsidized by the state: monopolization. Instead, the argument is over whether the state budget can fit universal health care or whether "socialized medicine" can't work for mysterious, unstated reasons apparently related to its being "socialist". If government can successfully produce education, art and all the other things that it is attributed to be able to produce, there is no good reason that it cannot produce health care. The only really convincing argument against universal health care is to address how monopolization inevitably results in a degradation of quality and increase in costs... which indicts all the services which the state monopolizes.

Just as with public education, public health care will, predictably, result in a degradation of health care quality and a rise in health care costs for the same reason Hollywood Video charges a dollar more than they did a few months ago and now close an hour earlier than before.

Walter Williams applies Frederich Hayek's - Nobel Prize winner in economics - knowledge problem to the issue of health care in this brief, incisive article. I strongly recommend everyone read his remarks.

People: 0, Feds: 4

2009-12-30T02:55:00.001-08:00

2003: George Bush invades Iraq over massive popular dissent.
2008: George Bush bails out banks over massive popular dissent.
2009: Barack Obama bails out banks a second time, over massive popular dissent.
2009: Barack Obama increases troop deployment to Afghanistan over massive popular dissent

It's 4-0, people. The elites get what they want every time and you get stuck with the bill. Keep believing in the Red, White and Blue propaganda they're shoving down your throat on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no left versus right anymore. It's just them versus us. We don't even have majority rule, anymore. That's when you know the whole political machine has become detached from reality and serious problems lie directly ahead. The US Federal government is on a crash course with the US citizenry.

The War on Kids

2009-12-30T02:54:00.005-08:00

Looks good, I'll be looking forward to its release.

Folks, the problem with American schools is simple:

1) State subsidy of K-12 education creates a de facto monopoly of mid- to low-end education

2) All monopolies provide low and ever lower quality services at high and ever-higher prices. Parents: "Our schools are failing!" Schools: "We demand more money!"

That's it, folks. Your children's education is doomed so long as the state subsidy exists - unless you're rich and you can afford to send your kids to an elite private school. There is no surer way to destroy something than to subject it to state subsidy.

The solution is equally simple. End the state subsidy and open the market for education to free and open competition. The lush quality and variety that characterizes your local grocery store - the retail market being the closest thing we have to a free market in the US anymore - will once again characterize the education market. Rather than being dictatorially assigned to some school district - love it or hate it - you will have a wealth of choices from ethnic-, cultural- or religious-based education to classical or modern education. Schools in competition will cut administrative costs without fanfare to compete for customers and offer the lowest tuition at a given level of educational quality.

If you don't like your children's teachers, there is no need to file formal complaints or get signatures for petitions to have someone removed from the school administration. No votes or ballot measures needed. Just sign up with the friendlier, more customer-service oriented school across the street. If your local grocery store doesn't listen to your demands, you just shop at the competitor across the street. If enough people agree with you, the offending business will either change or cease doing business.

For our children's sake, we must end the state's War on Kids.

Google and the CIA

2009-12-30T02:54:00.003-08:00

According to Alex Jones' website prisonplanet.tv and this online video, Google has clandestine ties with US intelligence agencies. It's difficult to imagine, in fact, a company the size of Google not having relations with the intelligence agencies.

While I have no evidence to support my worries, it seems to me that Google is the closest that you could come to a mechanism for controlling the Internet. Let me explain:

- Every conceivable piece of information is available on the Internet, at least, information which is not highly commercially valuable

- Much of this information is of the sort that governments would prefer to have censored, consider the "Great Firewall of China", for example

- Information on the Internet only becomes visible if it turns up in search results. That is, if a webpage containing information damning to the government is buried on page 11,000,000 of your search results or is not present at all, you'll never see it.

- Google is offering a lot of things for free that their competitors can't seem to figure out how to offer for free. If data storage is really so cheap or so easily subsidized by search results or targeted advertising, how come Yahoo or MSN can't offer similar levels of free data storage as Gmail?? Just today, Google has announced a "free, public DNS service". No other for-profit company is offering free DNS services... how can Google afford to?

Given these considerations, I can imagine the government colluding with Google in the following way. One of the clandestine services allocates a fairly significant black budget to subsidize Google. Google uses these subsidy revenues to offer "free" services to lure in users of the email, DNS and other services that yield lots of personal information. In exchange, Google provides a highly secret "back door" that allows the clandestine service to basically log in with read-only rights and peruse Google's servers at will. Additionally, Google could add in some classified code that only top-level individuals at the company can see that can suppress or manipulate specific search results for political or operational goals of the clandestine agencies. The NSA or CIA could raise sufficient budget (billions $) to do something like this.

Please note that Google has access to almost every type of data which the government could wish its intelligence agencies had access to, but which they could never get their hands on due to the political problems it would cause. So, rather than trying to gather this information "in-house", ala the "Total Information Awareness" program, they just let Google do the collecting in the course of doing ordinary business. Then, they just comb through the servers for data that they are interested in, as needed. If you're NSA and you want to find Ahmed al-Qaida, you just peruse the Gmail servers for his name or that of any of his contacts or mosques he's attended, Imams with whom he is associated. You peruse Google's search records for the same data. If you get a hit, you look up the IP address from which the search or email originated or, if you're lucky, you pull up the associated Google account information if the individual happened to be logged in. Then, you continue the investigation through other channels (digitally wiretapping the ISP or serving them with a gagging NSL, etc.)

I'm not saying this is the case due to insufficient evidence but something like this surely could be the case. Never underestimate the audacity of the state in waging war against its citizenry.

Innocent man in coma after police takedown

2009-12-30T02:54:00.001-08:00

Video and article here. Of course, no charges or even disciplinary measures will be taken against the assaulting officer. It's always the big, fat bully slobs that do this stuff.

Tasering children

2009-12-30T02:53:00.001-08:00

Here is an example of disproportionate use of force by a police officer. He told her to stop running and warned her that he would use a taser. Well, that makes it perfectly all right.

As bad as this is, the news story under discussion in the other thread is the tasering of a ten year old girl. Several posters have tried to make the case that even a 10-year-old can be a "threat." Well, kids younger than 10 have killed people, so I guess there should be no lower limit. Taser that 2-year-old, he might quick-draw a gun from his ankle-holster!

The average weight of a 10-year-old girl is 70.4 lbs. The average weight of an adult male is 189 lbs. That's roughly three times the weight of the child. The difference between a heavy-weight boxer and a light-heavyweight boxer is just 25lbs (12.5% mass difference). In terms of a boxing match, this would be like a 150 lb. man boxing a 450 lb. man, all-muscle. The absurdity of describing the officer's actions as being defensive or somewhere along the continuum of force (but the alternatives are worse!) does not even rise to the rank of being ludicrous. It is, in fact, disgustingly immoral and reflective of the deep moral decay of our sick culture which cheers rampant state-violence.

If you can defend the actions of this officer (and the mother's suggestion that the officer take this course of action), you are not ignorant or misguided or mistaken or just see things differently. You are deeply immoral and your stance reflects an utter lack of conscience.

Murray Rothbard on the Power Elite

2009-12-30T02:52:00.002-08:00

Listen to the Rothmeister (right-click and download, takes about 10 minutes to download) explain the real power structure underlying American politics for the last century or so.

What is private property?

2009-12-30T02:52:00.001-08:00

POSTED: NO TRESPASSING

When you hear the phrase "private property", you might think of those obnoxious red-and-black signs intended to evoke the image of a grumpy old hermit in a ramshackle house with a shotgun and two Dobermans ready to shoot on sight anyone who dares cross his property. In the Austrian tradition of economics, this is not what is meant by the phrase "private property".

Property is an exclusive right to use a physical resource. Some people (including some Austrian economists) hold that classes of physical objects (such as images, texts, motion pictures, inventions, blueprints, and so on) can be property but I think this is a categorical mistake and results from a fundamental failure to really grasp what property is.

Ask yourself, why is there property? Our nearest living evolutionary relatives have little or no concept of property. Somewhere between the time we parted ways on the evolutionary tree and today, humans began to engage in behavior that implied a conception of property. Property arose because it serves the purpose of conflict-avoidance by acting as a generally recognized heuristic allocating scarce physical objects to the exclusive control of one or another individual. If you pick up my camera from a seat at the airport, I will probably only need to say, “excuse me, that’s mine” to settle the matter of whether you may use it. There are many conflict-avoidance schemes in human affairs, from religious rituals to social customs. When someone says, “Pardon me” after bumping into you in a hallway, the odds of a physical conflict arising as a result of the mishap are lower than they otherwise would be. From the standpoint of biology, it should be clear to see how persons who engage in conflict-avoidance strategies have a reproductive advantage over those who do not. David Friedman approaches the problem from a game-theoretic point of view in this essay on property rights.

Property is the division of scarce resources in the physical world into regions (in both space and time) over which individual persons have exclusive control in order to avoid conflicts. There is no such thing as "common property" in this view of property. Common property is simply property in dispute, that is, property over which the boundary lines have not been settled. All disputes, in this view of property, are property disputes (conflicts over the use of scarce resources), a subject I will address in a future post.

Peter Schiff: Obama should learn economics to stop job losses

2009-12-30T02:51:00.002-08:00

Peter Schiff discusses Obama's upcoming summit to find the root cause of job losses and come up with a "solution."

Quote:

In the private sector, all individuals have a choice to either work for themselves or someone else. Since labor is far more productive when combined with capital (office equipment, machinery, business models, and intellectual capital), those who lack these assets themselves often choose to work for others who have sacrificed to accumulate them. This increased productivity is shared between the worker and the owner of capital, and both are better off.

However, for one person or company to choose to offer a job to another, there must be an incentive to do so, and they must have the necessary capital. In the first place, employers must commit to paying wages and benefits, comply with government mandates and regulations, and subject themselves to potential lawsuits from disgruntled employees. All of these costs must be measured against the extra profits an employer hopes to earn by hiring an additional worker.

If profit opportunities exist, jobs will be created. Otherwise, they will not. Of course, anything the government does to raise the cost of employment, such as a higher minimum wage, mandated heath care, or greater regulatory burdens, not only prevents new jobs from being created but also causes many that already exist to be destroyed. [Emphasis added]

The solution is for government to stop raising the costs of employing people. Even better, the government could eliminate many of the barriers to employment it currently creates thus lowering the cost of employment. The lower the cost of employment, the more profitable it will be to employ people and the more people will be employed. It's elementary.

John Allen Muhammed (DC sniper) case is fishy

2009-12-30T02:51:00.001-08:00

Whenever they execute them quickly, you know there's something fishy. Gore Vidal believes, and persuasively argues, that the government's "Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, acting alone and out of revenge for Waco, bombed the OK City building" story is either false or, at least, substantially different from what really happened. There's an Atlantic article that I read some time back which went over the whole thing in detail and pointed out quite a few subtle inconsistencies in the state's arguments and rather glaring loose ends in the FBI's investigation which were never pursued. McVeigh was rapidly executed (6 years from date of charges!).

Muhammad's case smells fishy in the same way to me. I remember when Ashcroft reassigned his case to Virginia. At that time, I was nearly neocon in my politics and I cheered the decision's obvious purpose to get him executed ASAP. But reflecting back, I see a lot of weirdness about the case against Muhammed.

First, both McVeigh and Muhammad were executed rapidly. If the government has something to hide or has a weak case, the ideal scenario is to eliminate the one person who knows for a fact they are lying as quickly as possible. Second, both McVeigh and Muhammad are veterans. If a sinister splinter group within government, for example, were going to frame or dupe somebody, a veteran would be the obvious choice because you have full access to their records and can select someone that fits the profile you are looking for. Second, the evidence against Muhammad are all things that would not be difficult for members of a clandestine service to fake. This is similar to the kind of evidence on which Oswald and JFK's killer (can't remember the name) were convicted. Third, Muhammad's bizarre opening statement.

My hypothesis: Muhammad was depressed from his inability to see his children very much. He may have committed a variety of crimes for which he was not caught. The rogue element that wanted to frame Muhammad wanted someone who was depressed and who they already knew was guilty of violent crimes, but which the FBI and local police had not yet pieced together. I can imagine someone saying to an FBI investigator, "the next case you solve, don't press charges, just identify the perpetrator and give us his file... and here's a non-descript briefcase... there's another one like it when you get us that file." Once they had selected Muhammad, the rogue element commenced operations. Some black ops type(s) were sent into DC with the mission to make random killings in a specific type of car and gun (matching those which Muhammad used). Once they had incited a sufficient degree of terror, they planted the key evidence which would connect Muhammad with the crimes in other states and lead to Muhammad's capture.

Muhammad was caught through the most improbable of channels, an anonymous tipster (who could possibly have known if Muhammad was running as tight a ship as the government alleges??) told a priest to look into an open case in another state. The priest then reported the tip to the cops who eventually matched Muhammad's prints found at one of the scenes to the crime in the other state and fingered Muhammad. This is far more complicated than a pulp-fiction detective mystery novel! I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is highly unlikely, dramatic and unusual. As complex as my hypothesis is, it's not any more complex than the state's hypothesis and the motives of the actors involved actually make sense.

The rogue element planted the necessary evidence then pointed the cops to Muhammad who then immediately picked him up. Muhammad may have had his hands dirty to some degree or another judging by his opening statement given in court - he never protests his innocence. He only claims no connection with the DC shootings. I haven't dug into the evidence of the other crimes, so who knows, he may be guilty as sin. Knowing his kids were his weak spot, the rogue element secretly spoke with him (posing as investigators) and let him know that his children would be safe if he just plea-bargained (i.e. accepted death sentence).

There's definitely something fishy with this DC sniper thing. On the face of it, it just doesn't make any sense. The prosecution can't even offer a coherent theory of his motive, first claiming he was shooting random people in DC to "scare" his wife back in Washington state. Then, they later claimed he was doing it to collect ransom money, based on the testimony of some agent who claims he spoke with Muhammad on the phone (!) and Muhammad made demands for money to stop the shootings. Read Muhammad's opening statement, the lights are very much on upstairs, theories of erratic or random behavior just don't hold water with me. The more I learn, the less I believe people ever act without a reason that, with effort, can be understood by anyone willing to apply critical thinking to the matter.

P.S. - For those who read my 9/11 numerology post, I just found two more! McVeigh was executed on 6/11/2001... 611, and, I realized that the USS Cole attack date, 10/12 could be "112" since, in occultic numerology, you ignore all zeros. Slowly, but surely, I'm connecting the dots!!

Gun control

2009-12-30T02:49:00.001-08:00

I've posted on gun control in the past. Here are reproductions of those posts for your consideration.

I propose that most people reason about gun control in the following manner:

- Guns enable the more efficient production of violence, much like textile machines enable the more efficient production of clothing
- Since violence is undesirable, we should want its production to be as inefficient as possible. This is in contrast to the production of desirable things, like clothing, which we want to be as efficient as possible.
- Obviously, it's impossible for guns, once invented, to be wished out of existence entirely since someone will always produce them, and the fewer there are, the greater the incentive to do so.
- Therefore, we should desire the fewest number of owners of guns possible since this will make the production of violence less efficient for all but the few persons/organizations which do own guns. And, we can then turn our attention more fully to the oversight of these few gun holders.

However, I think that this analysis is deeply flawed in that it misidentifies what it is that guns (and other weapons) actually produce. Guns do not produce violence, per se. Rather, weapons are used in the production of security. This mistake arises as a result of thinking about guns and other weapons primarily in their offensive capacity rather than in their defensive capacity.

Security is the nullification or dissuasion of violence and violent threats to persons or property. Many technological devices are used in the production of security - locks, cameras, vaults, fences, keypads, burglar alarms, motion detectors and, of course, weapons.

Deadly force is the "last line of defense" in any security scheme because almost any passive technological measure can be defeated if the attacker has free and clear access without fear of violent assault. A properly equipped crew (thermite torches or semtex) can dispatch even the beefiest bank vault in a matter of hours. It is the imminent violent assault which would be launched against such a crew which deters them from trying it. The violent assault nullifies the attack against the bank's property by potentially rendering the attackers lifeless and, therefore, inactive.

Hence, all physical security is ultimately founded on the potential for the use of deadly force to stop an attack. A world of violence-free security is purely fictional.

If we reason about weapons (and their application, violence) as means for the production of a positive good - security - then we realize that we should not desire there to be the fewest number of producers possible. In fact, like any other good, we should desire the production of security to be as competitive as possible. This will ensure the highest quality and lowest price by forcing producers to fiercely compete with one another for customers.

Good security minimizes attacks, thereby minimizing the need to resort of violence to stop attacks. Therefore, efficient (competitive) production of security minimizes violence. This means that widespread weapon ownership and competitive production of security services (including the use of deadly force) should be expected to tend to a minimum of violence.

So:

- Gun control advocates and (thinking)* gun freedom advocates both agree that violence is undesirable
- Gun control advocates and gun freedom advocates disagree on the conditions under which violence is minimized
- Therefore, the debate should center on the reasons and evidence for the conditions under which the production of security is most efficient (i.e. the conditions under which the production of violence is minimized) and not on abstract states of affairs which are assumed to produce conditions of minimal violence

Now, let's say gun control advocates are right: guns kill people and more guns means more people getting killed. After all, this is not completely unreasonable, guns do kill things (including people) and we might surmise that the more there are, the more people will get killed. But let's assume that all the evidence is on the side of the gun-control advocate. Does it then follow that we should trust the government to control guns?

Enter critical thinking. The part of critical thinking that I did not learn in school, college, from family or friends is that of incorporating motive into understanding the things that other people say. Henry Hazlitt says in the opening paragraph of his famous book Economics in One Lesson,

Quote:

"The inherent difficulties of [economics] would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible."

And remember that the government, the police and military in particular, comprises a special interest (contrast public employees' retirement benefits with taxpayer interests, and so on).

So:

- Special interests will, predictably, argue "plausibly and persistently" the case for policies which benefit themselves even at the expense of all other social interests

- The government itself comprises a special interest

With this in mind, let's go back to the question of whether gun control is a good idea, even if advocates of gun control are correct that more guns = more deaths. One of the foremost proponents of gun control is the government itself. State police agencies spend large amounts of money in buyback programs to "get guns off the street", a lot of money is spent on the ATF and similar agencies and taskforces whose job is to investigate "gun crimes", and so on. Anti-gun education programs are paid for out of police budgets.

The state has an interest in maintaining a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If it maintains such a monopoly, then its will cannot be opposed since it alone possesses the means to kill without consequence. Combined with a monopoly on decision making, the will of the government is nearly omnipotent. Together, these monopoly powers enable the government to maintain a system of unopposed property confiscation (taxation) with which to perpetually fund its dual monopolies on force and decision-making. A lot of you may find such a cynical view of government to be repulsive but is this emotion or reason? Does the government not have an interest in maintaining these monopoly powers? If so, on what evidence or reason do you base your argument?

Given that the state is a foremost proponent of gun control and given that the state has a vested interest in gun control (elimination of competition with its monopoly on force), we should view its arguments - whether delivered directly through officials or through political proxies - with a heavy dose of skepticism. In addition, we should view any proposal that attempts to solve the problem of "more weapons = more deaths"* by increasing government monopolization of the means of force (weapons) with skepticism.

Assuming gun control advocates are right, I don't have an alternative solution to the "more weapons = more deaths" problem, but I am skeptical that increased government control of weapons really results in less deaths. This does not mean I cannot be convinced on clear and persuasive evidence, but pointing to random statistics that show a correlation between this or that guns vs. deaths statistic doesn't make the case, in my view. Something approaching a hypothesis establishing cause and effect needs to be shown - I'm willing to grant that more weapons = more deaths for the sake of argument, but I need to see a rational hypothesis on why I should believe that more government monopolization of weapons = less deaths.

Now, for some history. We speak of "gun control" today, but that's only because firearms are the "state of the art" in personal combat and defense. In times past, it was swords, bows, knives and other personal combat weapons that the government sought to control. Some locales are more serious than others about controlling non-firearms weapons but, today, we largely regard such weapons with a measure of amusement more than anything. Not so 1500 years ago when - as discussed in this LRC article - Byzantine Emperor Justinian I imposed severe weapons controls:

Quote:

It was January 13, 532 AD when the anger of Justinian’s subjects reached a fevered pitch in what is known as the Nika riots. When it was all over Justinian was still in power but some 30,000 who had opposed him were dead; leaving Justinian free to enforce his brand of law.

Among Justinian’s laws, is Title XIV, Concerning Arms, Eighty-Fifth New Constitution (P.313) in which we find the following:

Chapter I

"Therefore, desiring to prevent men from killing each other, We have thought it proper to decree that no private person shall engage in the manufacture of weapons, and that only those shall be authorized to do so who are employed in the public arsenals, or are called armorers; and also that manufacturers of arms should not sell them to any private individual…"

Chapter III

"Therefore, God directing Our thoughts, We decree by the present law that no private individual, or anyone else whosoever shall, in any province or city of Our Empire, have the right to make or sell arms, or deal in them in any way, but only such as are authorized to manufacture them can do so, and deposit them in Our armory…"

Chapter IV

"But in order that what has been forbidden by Us to private persons and all others may become clear, We have taken pains to enumerate in this law the different kinds of weapons whose manufacture is forbidden. Therefore We prohibit private individuals from either making or buying bows, arrows, double-edged swords, ordinary swords, weapons usually called hunting knives, those styled zabes, breast-plates, javelins, lances and spears of every shape whatever, arms called by the Isaurians monocopia, others called sitinnes, or missiles, shields, and helmets; for We do not permit anything of this kind to be manufactured, except by those who are appointed for that purpose in Our arsenals, and only small knives which no one uses in fighting shall be allowed to be made and sold by private persons…"

Sound familiar? Why does anyone need anything other than .22 rifles for target practice or sports competition? Or maybe farmers can have some .223s for rodent control. Or maybe sportsmen can have same rifles for hunting deer or ducks. "... only small knives which no one uses in fighting shall be allowed to be made and sold by private persons." Only weapons which no one uses for fighting... Assault Weapons Ban. I find the prohibition on the private manufacture and sale of breastplates particularly striking in its resemblance to the regulations on the manufacture and sale of body-armor. How are breast-plates (or body armor) a danger to anyone? Why does the state have an interest in not only disarming us, but leaving us unable to protect ourselves - even by purely defensive means - from armed criminals (including itself)?

The state is always seeking to solidify its monopoly on force. When viewed through this lens, it is clear that gun control has nothing to do with saving lives, unless you accept the very dubious hypothesis that "government monopoly on guns = saving lives". The horrific stories of berserk individuals shooting up malls or places of employment with guns are truly heart-breaking, but does solidifying the state monopoly on force actually prevent or reduce the occurrence of such incidents while not increasing the occurrence of other incidents (such as police shootings of innocents, etc.)?

The question of whether gun control is a net benefit to society is a difficult one to answer and the gun control advocate had better do due diligence to demonstrate it. Just citing some random statistics that purport to show a correlation between availability of firearms and firearms-related deaths doesn't cut the mustard. You need to explain to us why we should look past the obvious self-interest of the government in monopolizing the means of force (weapons) and how exactly the long-term effects of gun control laws on all groups results in a reduction of the incidence of violence and/or death.

A curious bit of flag history ... and some flippant speculations

2009-12-30T02:48:00.004-08:00

So, it turns out that the US flag is actually an adaptation of the flag of the East India Company, a private corporation granted monopoly license under the British Crown. Originally, rebels were turning the flag on its side and affixing some stars as an emblem of the rebellion. George Washington later introduced a version of the flag that put it back in its correct orientation, with the cross of St. George redacted.

Have you ever asked yourself why Washington, D.C. is not part of the 50 states? The answer is simple: It is actually the property of a corporation granted monopoly privileges by the British Crown... the US Federal Government is actually a sister corporation of the British East India Company! We have been a British colony all along and only a small number of people on the inner circle of Washington (and London) have known about this... the first to know would have been our first President, Mr. Freemason himself, George Washington. When King George could not hold onto the colonies any longer by force, he decided to hold onto them through subtlety. He sent agents from London to buy out and corrupt the so-called "Founding Fathers" on the condition that they consolidate the 13 colonies under the umbrella of a more easily controlled Federal government. By controlling this puppet government, the British Crown could keep all the American colonies in line and all without the active resistance of the Americans themselves, with the hand of the monarch now hidden behind a Constitution, Congress, Bill of Rights and so on.

The war of 1812, then, should be interpreted as an attempt at a silent secession by the Federal government, which it ultimately lost. The Crown retained control over Washington and it continued to do the Crown's bidding. All the hand-wringing by Lincoln about the possibility of British recognition of the Confederacy was just disinformation. As CEO of the Federal Government holding corporation created in 1789, he was the Crown's handservant and the Crown would not tolerate the loss of its colonies.

There are just a handful of wholly private, sovereign patches of land throughout the globe: the City of London - a 1 sq. mi. wholly private block with port access carved out from London, England - Washington, D.C. (also with port access) and the Vatican, that I know of. Is London the handservant of the Pope, just as Washington is of the Crown? Bear in mind the Vatican actually maintains embassies in most countries in the world and has its own intelligence (i.e. "spy") service. The Pope looks like an impotent old man. He is a lot more powerful than he looks.

Let's ban declawing! No, let's ban bans on declawing!

2009-12-30T02:48:00.003-08:00

Only in California.

I posted this story because it beautifully illustrates the dynamics of how political power, special interests and pet peeves (pun intended) interact to create the ramshackle hodge-podge of statutory laws, layers of (often contradictory) regulations and bureacracies we call "government".

Here's the long and short of the story. A local city councilman is horrified when he learns what declawing actually is (amputation from the last knuckle down), only learning after having had his cat declawed. So, he decides - "lefty" that he is - that he should do his best to ban declawing in the city.

This idea begins spreading around to other cities and veterinarians grow concerned. So, to head off the locals, the state veterinary association petitions the state government to pass a law banning bans of declawing! And now, local governments are scrambling to implement their bans before the ban of bans (try not to get confused) is passed.

The one person who was not consulted in all of this is the consumer. The veterinary association has acted, as all merchant associations do, to wield its concentrated political power to keep the business interests of its members from being interfered with. What is unique about this case, and what makes it a great object lesson on the true nature of political power, is that this all stems from the personal outrage of one, lone lawmaker who failed to do his homework before bringing his cat to the vet for declawing. The lawmaker's agenda is blatantly fascistic, imposing his private dictatorial will on the community by banning provision of a service that people demand (we know they demand it because they are willing to pay for it).

And the response of the veterinary association is a picture perfect illustration of how mercantile special interests operate hand-in-hand with big government. The bigger government is more immune to local sentiments and more in tune with money. So, special interests are able to ram through measures that some, or even most, local jurisdictions do not want but which will be profitable for the special interest (most Federal commercial regulations fit this description). In fact, what other motivation is there for passing a law at a certain jurisdiction level except to override the distributed judgment of smaller, local jurisdictions?

It's obviously absurd to ban declawing. But it's equally absurd to ban bans of declawing. The solution to this mess could not be more simple: If you think declawing is cruel don't get your animal declawed. But you have no business forcing those who want to get their cat declawed to drive 250 miles or ship their animal to get it done (which is what would actually happen). But even if you (like me) think local jurisdictions should not ban declawing, the state has no business banning such bans. The inevitable result is that, yes, there will be some quirky jurisdictions that do ban it. So what? As veterinarians relocate, those quirky jurisdictions will bear the full weight of their own quirky decisions. While the declawing-banning cat-loving city councilman who started this whole thing in California is a petty fascist, it can never be an improvement of the state of affairs to remove the decision-making yet further away from those who are affected by the decision-making. The veterinary association has made things even worse by going over the heads of the local governments to ban bans of declawing at the state level. We should prefer that decisions be made as close to the region and the persons by whom the costs and benefits of such decisions will be felt. Otherwise, human nature creates fascist ban frenzy (Caution: some language).

The question the media won't ask about Ft. Hood incident

2009-12-30T02:48:00.001-08:00

"What is the US government doing in Iraq and Afghanistan that is driving men like Hasan and, earlier, Akbar to kill their fellow soldiers out of rage against the US government and its military?" The official line, "they went nuts" just isn't reasonable. Neither is the Israeli-esque suggestion that they were brainwashed by clerics. Maybe you can believe that, in one case, someone just went nuts and started shooting people up for no reason. But this is now a pattern. This has happened on more than one occasion. A (presumably) Muslim member of the US Armed Forces starts shooting/blowing up fellow soldiers in what can only be interpreted as an act of one-man-war* against the US military in retaliation for its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What are these men seeing that our media is not showing us?

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not expressing anything other than moral outrage and condemnation of this man's actions. Murder is murder. But events so terrible as to drive someone to commit murder-suicide to get the attention of the public should be investigated by the media. Instead, our so-called mainstream media will blank this question out as they do any meaningful question that might get to the root of problems within the government-media complex. It's time that we Americans start holding the media responsible. Shut your television off, stop surfing the big name media sites. Read overseas news. Watch YouTube clips from Russia Times or even the BBC. The US media has zero credibility. They think you are all idiots, even if you are well educated, you're an idiot because you can't think outside the invisible box they put you in. It's all a game to them. But when a dozen people are murdered and dozens more wounded, PTSD doesn't cut it, asymptomatic schizophrenia doesn't cut it, clerical brainwashing doesn't cut it. Stop eating up the garbage the MSM feeds you and start thinking for yourself.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are imperialist wars and the behavior of the US government directly reflects its imperialist aims. This has nothing to do with saving Iraqis or exporting freedom, democracy and all that jazz - we've killed roughly 100,000Iraqi civilians in 6 years. If that's not a genocide, I don't know what is. Yes, I said it. Your government is committing genocide all the while strutting about the world stage as if it has some kind of moral authority. It's high time that Americans started introspecting a bit about throwing support behind wars against countries they can't even find on the globe.

On a closing note, my support for the Afghanistan and, later, Iraq war extended clear up through 2007. I am not being sanctimonious. My process of introspection started from a completely unrelated study of economics which resulted in a transformation in my view of human affairs. Most people will not take the route to understanding the evil of this war that I took but no matter which route you take, it will not happen overnight. If you consider yourself a "conservative", I recommend you go back and take a look at the conservative principles of the Founding Fathers, many of whom were strict non-interventionists. We've allowed our government to become involved in the politics of empire. In the process, our political system has been corrupted. The only way out is a general shift in the attitudes of Americans about the imperial globe-strutting of the US government. Until there is a shift in attitudes, our Presidents will continue trying to play Caesar and America (the people, not the government) will be bankrupted and parceled out to foreign creditors.

This is how fascism works

2009-12-30T02:47:00.003-08:00

Found this little gem linked on lewrockwell.com. The author of the article describes in breathless language, "a bedroom door bangs open and two men in black bulletproof vests storm shouting into the kitchen. 'Broward Sheriff's Office!'" as swat-clad officers take down a major menace to society... (dun, dun, DUNNNN): the unlicensed contractor.

Here's the reason that deploying paramilitary cops against people who perform construction work without a license from government is justified: ""We try to stick to people doing work that could cause safety issues. If you improperly install exterior doors, they could blow in during a hurricane," said Det. Daniel Belyeu, of BSO's economic crimes unit." That is very serious. Why are we relying on the local sheriff to take care of this problem? We should really bring in the national guard, or even better, the 20,000 US soldiers permanently deployed within the US, or even better yet, we should call in Delta force or one of the other black-ops units whose names none of us know. People could die, this is serious stuff... and there's been lots of complaints:

"Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach county residents filed 603 complaints with the state about unlicensed construction professionals last year, and 141 complaints about electrical professionals. Regulators expect more as South Florida's slumping economy leaves more construction workers unemployed and looking for odd jobs - and more homeowners looking for cut-rate work." Now wait a minute, who is doing this complaining? I'm sure customers also register complaints for licensed contractors... why is there any reason to believe the complaints about unlicensed contractors constitute a greater proportion of the jobs performed by unlicensed contractors than the proportion of jobs performed by licensed contractors which result in complaints? And, even if it is higher, what's the big deal, they hired the cheaper guy in order to save money, if he doesn't do as good a job, what were you expecting??

Obviously, it's not the customers who are doing the complaining. It's the other licensed contractors who went through all the expense of obtaining and maintaining that state license. "Belyeu, also a certified electrical contractor, played the father and was wired to record his conversations with the contractors." The guy running the sting is a licensed contractor! Surprise! Welcome to fascism, people. This is what fascism is: "Get permission to do anything - just like the rest of us did - or expect paramilitary psychos wielding fully automatic weapons to kick down your door, hog-tie you and drag you to jail."

Think about this: While every action you take, as a member of society, must be justifiable, not every action must be justified. That is, while it is true that you should be able to defend your actions in a court of law if someone brings a complaint against you, that doesn't imply that you must always seek permission before acting. We have become a permit/license society where you must beg the state's permission to engage in any economic production on the grounds that you could engage in shoddy business practices. Well, so do licensed people (where else do the majority of civil cases come from?)... seeking permission does not guarantee justifiable behavior, nor does it increase the likelihood that someone will not do shoddy work. The very concept of begging someone's permission to be allowed to engage in production of a good or service that a customer is willing to pay you to produce is an offense against reason. And the logic of permits and licenses, which seems on the surface to be innocuous, leads straight to the situation described in Florida, with the State kicking in people's doors and hauling them to jail for what? For trying to do things people need done at a lower price by avoiding the State's red tape games. How dare they! Lock them up and throw away the key!!

Carl Sagan on the futility of empire

2009-12-30T02:47:00.001-08:00

Carl Sagan, on the event of the Voyager probe's distant image of Earth, called the "Pale Blue Dot", said the following (excerpt):

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds."

Rivers of blood, indeed.

Rights versus social engineering

2009-12-30T02:46:00.000-08:00

In another thread about a video discussing the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF), the issue of rights has come under discussion.

Taken separately, most of the statements excerpted from the IPPF's declaration on sexual rights are relatively innocuous and I don't understand the outrage directed towards them. However, the general unease of evangelical conservatives towards the IPPF's agenda is not completely unfounded because the IPPF (and, locally, Planned Parenthood) really is not a human rights organization. Founded by big-mouthed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's agenda was originally to reduce the birth rate of undesirable populations (Google "Negro Project") by making birth control readily available (preferably free) and educating (indoctrinating) on its use.

Eugenics is one of the most egregious failure of social engineering. Social engineering is the attempt to use government to bring about a certain outcome within the social order. Most social engineering projects are motivated by the desire to achieve ends that are, prima facie, desirable. Three-strike laws, hate-crime laws and firearms sentencing kickers, for example, are social engineering laws whose intent is to bring about a crime-free society. Any decent person would like society to be crime-free. In fact, we might state this a little more strongly, that every person has a right to live in a crime-free society. So, it's imperative for a moral government to implement laws which will eradicate crime.

But the problem with defining rights in accordance to the aims of social engineering is that it always results in half-hearted rights. For example, reproductive rights organizations are generally opposed to polygamy and often prostitution, in line with the belief that polygamous society and societies with prostitution result in reduced rights for women. But this is obviously inconsistent - if individuals ought to be free to have sexual relations as they see fit, so long as they are not being coerced directly or indirectly, then any sexual arrangement which people choose to form is by right. This half-heartedness can be found in all forms of "rights" that originate from social-engineering projects.

While the horror of evangelicals at the idea of sexual/reproductive freedom is unfounded, the general apprehension about the sincerity of IPPF and similar organizations who claim to favor "sexual rights" is justified. Any organization whose purpose is to engineer a "better" society will inevitably run amok of individual rights.

Democracy is immoral

2009-12-30T02:45:00.003-08:00

In this article, Bob Higgs indicts the moral deficiency of democracy - it is no different than the moral deficiency of any form of government. The root problem is a double-standard where one set of moral rules governs one class of people and another set of moral rules governs everybody else.

As I explained recently in another post, the root problem lies in a grave misunderstanding of law. Law is a system for non-violent resolution of real disputes. Real disputes (not just academic disputes) can only occur where there is scarcity (Hoppe). You and I cannot have a real dispute over air or salt-water (or religious ideas or logical beliefs) because there is a super-abundance of each of these, in nature. Real disputes concern who has the exclusive right to control (use, dispose of) a particular scarce resource.

There are two possible ways to resolve a dispute. First, is by martial contest: the winner takes the spoils. This is how scarce resource disputes are decided in the rest of the animal kingdom. For humans, there is a second alternative, and that is by verbal debate, or non-violent resolution of the dispute. The terms of verbal debate, in turn, rely upon the linguistic capabilities of humans... our ability to make deductions, our ability to form analogies and make metaphors, our ability to recall the past, and so on. The impetus for resolving disputes non-violently is to avoid the costs and risks associated with violence. "Rights" exist as a concept within the realm of non-violent dispute resolution, that is, law.

Right and wrong, morality, as it pertains to interpersonal disputes (not personal beliefs about how one should act under any circumstances) must, by definition, reject any argument which rests on force. In logic, this is called the "argument ad baculum" fallacy or "argument by force" fallacy. But, in law, it's not merely a fallacy, it's actually a departure from the realm of law (non-violent dispute resolution) into martial contest (violent dispute resolution).

Democracy ultimately rests, like any government system, on a two-tiered morality that derives its justification from the appeal to force (the majority is more powerful than any minority). Democracy, like any form of government, is immoral and ultimately lawless. Law is that which applies to the behavior of all men, without exception or distinction. No one would willingly agree to resolve their disputes non-violently in a court which did not acknowledge the principle of universalizability (Golden Rule), so any system of governance which employs a moral double-standard (rejects universalizability) is ultimately founded on the simple calculation that those in power could defeat those who object to present policy in any martial contest.

What's wrong with the world? Women trying to get to the World Series

2009-12-30T02:45:00.001-08:00

Oh boy, I'm sure glad the cops are keeping us all safe from this predator. With the American economy crashing down around our knees, a collapse unwittingly engineered by the "genuises" on Wall St. (while the Marie Antoinettes in Washington extend the Bush spending frenzy into the Obama era like there's no tomorrow, crying "let them eat cake!"), with a prison population of 1% of the entire US population, with growing social ills and tensions, with cops that are deploying paramilitary weapons and tactics against civilian protesters (Pittsburgh G20)... Susan Finkelstein's desperation to get to the World Series and how she intended to go about getting there is what is wrong with the world.

Let's not lose sight of what's really important, what's really wrong with the world and that is Susan Finkelstein. May she rot in prison and never be let out!

Walter Williams: distrust of government is what made America unique

2009-12-30T02:44:00.000-08:00

Walter Williams, in this article, pillories the power grabbing American government and critiques the debates surrounding bailouts (and, I would add, war) as never going above the political tactical question of whether Congress and the President can maneuver toward the desired objective without losing too much popularity. Politics in America has gone from distrust of government's ability to respect the rights of individuals to a moral nihilism whereby the only check on government power is the potential for popular revolt or civil war.

Government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. Liberals should be careful what they wish for in government interventions into the economy. Conservatives should be careful what they wish for in government interventions into foreign affairs. Both prongs of government action empower the permanent bureaucracy and increase the control government has not only over our mercantile but our hedonic activities.

Even though he didn't practice what he preached, Reagan spoke the truth when he said that government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem. It doesn't need to be reformed, it needs to be ruthlessly beaten back like overgrown weeds in a garden. If you value personal liberty to think and speak as you see fit without government telling you what to do or if you value personal liberty to do business and engage in private exchange of property as you see fit without government telling you what you can and cannot do (and taking their cut), then you need to join the revival of old-fashioned American skepticism towards government. As many people on this forum know, I am not merely skeptical of government, I believe it is evil and must be abolished. But I understand most people find that to be absurd. But even if you find complete abolition of the state apparatus to be absurd, you should at least be able to exercise critical thinking and skeptical analysis of the government's actions. It's what made our country great. Start doing it; our country could be great again.

H1N1 vaccines: the real failure

2009-12-30T02:43:00.000-08:00

As always, the failure is government. This should never be surprising yet people never fail to be amazed when the government fails and, incredulous that government failures can be indicative of a deeper problem with government qua government, turn to blame everything in the world except government.

Despite the conspiracy theories on this forum, the reality is that the demand for flu vaccines is real and, in particular, the demand for H1N1 vaccines is real. I see lines of co-workers in the cafeteria getting the jab. I forgo the flu vaccines each year and suffer for it. This is because I believe it's good for my immune system to get a full-body workout once in a while but those flu shots are looking better and better each year. Now that my kids are entering school this year, I'm really re-thinking the flu shot.

To ascribe to the government an over-arching conspiracy to engineer and release H1N1 and then brainwash us through the media to go get the shots is to give them far too much credit for competency. In reality, government bungles everything it touches. The only real competency government has is war and, in the last five decades or so, even that it cannot get right.

We should not discount the possibility of the commission of biological crimes. From what I have read, it does not require a great deal of capital to culture and manufacture deadly biological agents, such as Anthrax. I think it is good that we have detailed epidemiological investigation into new strains of flus and other bugs. Medical manufacturing corporations have a real interest in releasing infections for which they have the exclusive cure, so long as they can be sure not to get caught in the act. And, as always, we cannot rule out the government itself as a suspect in these cases. Western governments possess the largest biological weapons knowledge capital. The US Army's Anthrax is what was used in the 2001 Anthrax scare, one month after 9/11. Whether a co-conspiracy with the 9/11 attacks or the act of a copy-cat, the potential for misuse of the biological weapons cache and know-how within the US and other Western governments is an ever-present danger, especially given the large revenue boost that the public gives the government in the wake of catastrophic attacks.

Wisconsin bans text messaging: an object lesson in pre-crime

2009-12-30T02:41:00.000-08:00

This article exemplifies many of the processes by which bad laws are rationalized:

Quote:

MADISON, Wis. — All Wisconsin drivers, not just teenagers, would be banned from sending text messages while driving under a bill that passed the state Senate on Tuesday.

Lawmakers approved a bill 27-5 that would prohibit drivers from using a text message device such as a cell phone, I-Phone, or Blackberry. The penalties would be between $20 and $400, the same as disorderly driving.

The ban passed after lawmakers balked at the initial proposal affecting only drivers under age 18. Some senators said if texting were dangerous for young drivers, it was dangerous for all motorists.

Because there is no correlation between inexperience and probability of collision.

Here, there is a false appeal to equality, that is, by reasoning that unequal things (more experience and less experienced drivers) are equal. Driving at freeway speeds may not be safe for many 17 year olds but is safe for most 37 year olds who drive. Hence, it clearly follows that we should ban all speeds above 35 mph.

Quote:

"Why are we resistant to protect all of the population regardless of their age?" asked Sen. Mike Ellis, R-Neenah.

Here's the age-old "protection" argument - how can anyone be opposed to saving life? Since it is obvious that this bill saves lives (it is?), anyone who opposes it is opposing the saving of lives. And who can be against saving lives?

Quote:

A similar proposal in the Assembly has been introduced but not yet heard in committee.

Opponents argued that texting, just like putting on makeup or searching for loose change, is already covered under the state's disorderly driving law.

We are going to make it doubly illegal! It's like those catch-all charges like "obstruction of justice", "resisting arrest," "interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duties" that can be tacked onto any charge just to add more jail time or increase fines or both.

Quote:

It will also be nearly impossible for a police officer to determine if someone is texting, said Sen. Neal Kedzie, R-Elkhorn.

All he has to do is give his "professional judgment".

Quote:

"There's a limit as to how many laws you need before we have laws on the books that are unenforceable," he said.

Who cares about enforceability? Next on the agenda... outlawing poverty! Enforcement of laws is immaterial to the question of showing properly proscriptive gusto.

Quote:

Supporters said a law would get the public's attention.

Exactly, since that is the purpose of laws... to get the public's attention. Of course, the public doesn't pay attention to laws that they don't get ticketed or fined under. So, this is a clear threat that they intend to issue plenty of tickets under this law.

Quote:

"We all know that texting while driving is dangerous behavior," said Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona.

Maybe for pampered lawmakers whose driving experience amounts to the trip to the nearby 7/11 at midnight when their paid driver isn't available.

Quote:

"But if it's illegal, most of us will change our behavior."

Yes, because people predictably stop doing whatever the government outlaws. *AHEM*pot*AHEM*

Quote:

The Senate's vote comes as momentum increases nationwide to address the problem of distracted driving.

The first laws banning text messaging while driving passed in New Jersey and Washington in 2007. Since then, nine states have passed laws banning texting for young drivers and 19 states have banned it for everyone, regardless of age, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

States may be feeling pressure from Congress to act as well. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democrats are pushing legislation that would require states to ban texting or e-mailing while operating a moving vehicle — or lose 25 percent of their annual federal highway funding.

And here's where inflation is so important - the Federal government is able to impose a government mono-culture because it can always threaten to cut off Federal grants, which are greater than state revenues exactly because the Federal government has the Federal Reserve to print up the extra money, whereas the state governments have to live only off what they can tax directly from their people.

Quote:

Those who are pushing the laws say it's all about safety.

Nearly 6,000 people were killed and a half-million were injured last year in vehicle crashes connected to driver distraction, including texting, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

0.002% of the US population. Not that these 6,000 lives don't matter, I just fail to see how a) texting is what killed them and b) a law prohibiting texting will save them. Certainly, there must be rules on the road, especially high speed roadways, but methinks this has more to do with empowering cops to tack on an extra $100 fine for having your cell phone in hand when pulled over for whatever. It's just a revenue generator.

Quote:

In July, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that when drivers of heavy trucks texted, their collision risk was 23 times greater. Dialing a cell phone and using or reaching for an electronic device increased risk of collision about six times in cars and trucks, according to the university research.

This is bogus - people who choke on their soda are also many times more likely to be involved in a collision, so I suppose we should outlaw choking on sodas? The point is not that texting while driving is not a risky behavior, of course it is. But so is driving at all. Or drinking water. The point is whether individual drivers or the Federal government is best suited to determine when and to what extent the risk should be engaged in. Perhaps I'm rushing my pregnant wife to the hospital and text her OB. This could contribute to saving a life. The Federal government has no idea whether I made a good choice in texting or not texting. But they do know what generates ticket revenues.

Quote:

The sponsor of the Wisconsin bill, Sen. Alan Lasee, R-DePere, said he was motivated to introduce his proposal after a 2006 car crash in New York that killed five recent high school graduates. Police didn't blame cell phone use for the wreck, but records showed a succession of calls and text messages on the driver's phone minutes before the crash.
"I think this will certainly go a long way to saving innocent lives," Lasee said.

Anecdotal evidence is, always, the most powerful tool of persuasion in the politician's arsenal. The actual, social importance of some policy is irrelevant if you have a heart-wrenching story to tell.

Quote:

Emergency responders, as well as licensed amateur radio operators and those texting to report an emergency, would be exempt.

So, how does the police officer determine whether someone is "texting to report an emergency" - like he's going to peer through the driver window, go "oh, he's handling an emergency, I don't need to pull him over." Sure.

This is just so childish.

Quote:

This is the second time in as many years that the state Senate has passed a texting ban. Last year, the Senate passed a ban for all drivers but it died in the Assembly.

This year's bill has broad support including the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association, which represents some wireless networks in the state, AAA Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance and the Wisconsin Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs Association.

No one was registered in opposition.

Once something becomes politically unopposable (the opposition can be made to look to be opposed to "saving lives"), there will be no opposition.

What government cannot do

2009-12-30T02:36:00.000-08:00

As Americans expand their belief in the unlimited powers of government, it is important for thinking Americans to reflect on what government cannot do. Lew Rockwell has written an excellent article discussing the unwinnable "war on drugs", aka Pot Prohibition, which has been ongoing for nearly a century and particularly active in the last half-century. The opening paragraphs of the article are like a verbal punch to the face of statism:

Quote:

Ludwig von Mises said that the great accomplishment of economists was to draw attention to the extreme limits on the power of government. His point was not merely that government should be limited, but that it is limited by the very structure of reality. It cannot make all people rich by its own initiative. It cannot provide universal housing, literacy, and health. It cannot raise wages across the board. It cannot ban products. Those who seek to accomplish economic ends such as these are choosing the wrong means. That is because there is something more powerful than government: namely economic law.

And what is economic law? It is a force that operates within the structure of all societies everywhere that governs the production and allocation of material resources and time according to strict bounds of what is possible. Some things are just not possible. It just so happens that this includes most of the demands that are made by the public and pressure groups on the government. This was the great discovery of the modern science of economics. This was not known by the ancients. It was not known by the fathers of the early church. It was the discovery of the medieval schoolmen, and the insight was gradually elaborated upon and systematized over the centuries, culminating in the classical and Austrian traditions of thought.

So, here are some things government cannot do:

1) Government cannot create wealth, it has no money of its own

So many people say, "The government should pay for ___________" as if the government has some capital reserves upon which it can draw to pay for things people need. But the government has no money that it did not take from some or all of us.

2) Government cannot abolish or even reduce scarcity

Many people say, "the government should provide universal healthcare" or "the government should provide universal education" so that all may have access. But government subsidy of an industry, whether healthcare or education or whatever, does not alleviate the root problem which is that there are only so many doctors and teachers and, ultimately, there are only so many people (to produce any good or service) and only so much time and only so many natural resources. The government cannot, for wishing, alter this reality one iota.

The only real way to alleviate scarcity is production and/or conservation. The incentive to produce comes from the potential for profits (wages are a kind of individualized profit, or wages less the cost of living, to be more exact) and the incentive to conserve comes from the desire to maximize the satisfaction of wants attainable with a given amount of resources (in other words, buying or self-producing just the things you need to meet your needs and desires in the most efficient way). The use or threat of force (government) nowhere factors into this equation.

3) Government cannot improve social mores

Many people say, "the government should ban ___________" where the blank is filled with some morally repugnant behavior, such as prostitution, sodomy, pornography, bestiality or whatever. But the government is naught but force or the threat of force - so a government ban on immoral behavior does not make people more moral. At best, it causes those who comply with the intent of such laws to become hypocrites because the only reason they do not act out their morally repugnant behaviors is to avoid the State's use of force against them. But most people simply use more cunning when engaging in socially sanctioned behaviors.

4) Government cannot prevent or reduce the incidence of bankruptcies

It is thought by many that the government can, through regulation or bailouts, prevent bankruptcies or at least reduce the incidence of bankruptcies. But bankruptcy is the result either of mismanagement or mistaken investment or both. That is, bankruptcy is caused by things which the government cannot change by threatening force. People will mismanage investments no matter what consequences may lie ahead because mismanagement is a human trait. People will make mistaken investments no matter how heavily the government regulates markets or how severely the government punishes "speculators".

5) Government cannot "stimulate" or otherwise invigorate the economy

The threat of force does not spur productivity. Compare the productivity of an independent contractor versus a member of a chain gang. No matter how much the guards abuse the members of the chain gang, they will never maintain productivity even close to that of an independent contractor. Government is naught but force or the threat of force.

You might say "but government spending can spur the economy!" Nonsense. Every dollar the government spends was taken from someone. That someone would have spent the dollar too (sooner or later, nobody burns their money). The only difference iswhat the dollar is spent on. The government buys JDAMs and blows up mosques in Iraq and Afghanistan but the Americans whose dollars were seized to buy those JDAMs might have purchased construction materials to build a church or car parts to fix a car. You tell me which application is genuine economic productivity.

The Keynesians argue that the government spends the dollar sooner than the individual from whom the dollar was taken (thus putting the dollar "back into the economy" instead of being "hoarded"). This might be true (we can't really know), but it still does not stimulate the economy, here's why. Let's look at all the possibilities:

a) The government spends the dollar no sooner than the individual from whom the dollar was taken. This represents a net loss to social wealth since the government's expenditure of the dollar came no sooner than the individual who originally held the dollar but now it has been spent on government interests instead of the interests of society, impoverishing society.

b) The government spends the dollar sooner than the individual from whom the dollar was taken. The question to be asked, then, is why was the individual refraining from spending his or her dollar? There are just three alternatives regarding the use of every dollar: consumption spending, investment (saving + lending), or "hoarding" (pure saving). The individual saves only dollars he has chosen not to use for consumer spending, that is, only when an individual's consumption demands have been fully met does he allocate money to saving. Saved money can be used in one of two ways. It can be lent out (put at risk) or "hoarded". Only when an individual's risk tolerance has been exceeded does he hoard money since invested money pays interest (return on risk) but hoarded money does not.

Individuals who have "hoarded" their money, that is, chosen not to consume or invest for the time being, are the target of Keynesian "stimulus". But the seizure and disbursement of "hoarded" money does nothing to address the root problem which is the individual's decreased risk tolerance and/or increased expectation of investment risk. When a lot of people just "stop spending" all at once, that tells us that there is a common denominator. Many people are reducing their risk tolerance and/or increasing their expectations of investment risk all at the same time and this is why consumer spending and investment both decrease. The application or threat of force does nothing to alleviate the problem. In fact, it is really the root cause of the problem. That is, the popular expectation of increased future State redistribution (increased investment risk) and concomitant economic problems (resulting in reduced risk tolerance) is what drives the economic depression. This was the driving force of the Great Depression and it is the driving force of this economic collapse.

This is just a selection of a few things the government cannot do. In fact, there is only one thing the government can do: wage war. Everything else, the government cannot do, its promises are empty rhetoric. Machiavelli in his book The Prince said:

Quote:

The Prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art. Francesco Sforza, through being martial, from a private person became Duke of Milan; and the sons, through avoiding the hardships and troubles of arms, from dukes became private persons. For among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised, and this is one of those ignominies against which a prince ought to guard himself, as is shown later on.

This is no less true today than it was 500 years ago.

Chemtrails again

2009-12-30T02:35:00.002-08:00

I knew about chaff, but who knew they could drop so much of it? Chemtrails is such a cheesy conspiracy theory but I can't stop watching YouTube videos about it!

2009-12-30T02:35:00.001-08:00

I want to caution the lobotomized Yak Baks of the MSM and talk radio warmongers: You may experience medical danger while reading the following article, including epileptic seizure, coma, schizophrenia or even death. Please read this with caution.

OKC tapes released, appear edited

2009-12-30T02:34:00.002-08:00

From antiwar.com:

"Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence," Trentadue said.

He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because "they had run out of tape" or "the tape was being replaced."

"The interesting thing is they spring back on after 9:02," he said. "The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see."

Wag the dog.

What exactly is Najibullah Zazi guilty of?

2009-12-30T02:34:00.001-08:00

You know the authorities have a bogus case when they charge you for lying to them while questioning you for some other crime they can't pin on you. Now, I'm not asserting that Mr. Zazi was not attempting to bring about a terrorist plot, I have no idea if he was or not. I'm not asserting he had no contacts associated with the ex-mujahedeen group that the CIA calls "al Qaeda". Frankly, the stuff that has been put out in the media so far smells of typical jury-tainting dirty tricks that investigators and DAs routinely use. The most serious evidence against him so far seems to be that he bought a lot of nail polish remover. Forgive me for being nonplussed.

In any case, Mr. Zazi needs good legal representation regardless of his guilt or innocence but his lawyer sat him down for 28 hours of free-wheeling question and answer session with the FBI without immunity. I am predicting that this case will be built almost completely from what Mr. Zazi said during those 28 hours. The prosecutor is likely going to rely on a mix of contradictions between Mr. Zazi's testimony to the FBI and the FBI's long-running surveillance to build the government's case.

It is perhaps no coincidence that several key provisions of the PATRIOT Act are up for renewal this year when the FBI suddenly foils the "biggest terror plot since 9/11". Maybe. Maybe not. I remain skeptical of anything the incompetent thugs in the FBI say after they patently lied to the 9/11 commission on many things (search "The Ground Truth" by John Farmer for more information). The Zazi case is an improvement over their usual MO of arresting some random people then claiming they foiled some major plot, while telling us they can't release any details of what the plot was or might have been due to "national security reasons."

Najibullah Zazi is innocent until proven guilty. Because of the particularly pernicious and anti-justicial nature of the PATRIOT Act, we should be especially skeptical of the government's claims about Mr. Zazi and we should hope that Mr. Zazi has the very best and brightest legal defense on his side, though it looks like his lawyer Folsom may already have irreversibly destroyed Mr. Zazi's prospects for a fair trial.

2009-12-30T02:33:00.001-08:00

Every agency that testified to the 9/11 commission lied. So says John Farmer:

"The 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. The details of this massive cover-up are carefully outlined in a book by John Farmer, who was the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission.

Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities' School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report."

How much more reliable of a source can there be than the man responsible for drafting the first 9/11 report? The Dean of Rutgers University? I'm just waiting to see what kind of twisted rationalization you cook up to reinforce your presupposed conclusion that the government is as pure as the wind-driven snow and could not have covered up the truth about 9/11.

There are no conspiracies

2009-12-30T02:32:00.003-08:00

Believe the boob-tube. There are no conspiracies. No disinformation. No psyops.

Private property, freedom and modern insanity

2009-12-30T02:32:00.001-08:00

Dr. Hans Hoppe, president of the Property and Freedom Society, delivered this speech earlier this year which is a stunningly broad summary of the insanity that constitutes the "accepted wisdom" of our day.

I encourage everyone on this board to read this speech. While Hoppe does not confront the absurdities of modern Orthodox Westernism, he presents them in their stripped-down, naked form, ready for a thorough debunking. I would be interested to see if anyone thinks Hoppe is straw-manning modern Westernism.

Intel officer Codevilla: Elvis more alive than bin Laden

2009-12-30T02:31:00.002-08:00

From this article in the Daily Mail, "former U.S. foreign intelligence officer and senior editor Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, stated bluntly: 'All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.'"

If bin Laden is dead, the US and UK governments surely know this. So why, in that case, have they been concealing bin Laden's death and apparently contriving to convince the public that he's still alive?

Raimondo: Inside job or not, 9/11 questions unanswered

2009-12-30T02:31:00.001-08:00

Antiwar.com journalist Justin Raimondo challenges the official story of 9/11. I think Raimondo gets to the heart of the issue by avoiding getting lost in the trees of blackbox recorder data and nano-thermite molecules while missing the forest of the implausibility of the official explanation.

Take a look at his archive of articles detailing the evidence of involvement of foreign intelligence services, particularly the Israelis, within the US. Unmentioned in this article is the unusually cozy relationship between the CIA and ISI and their joint involvement with bin Laden pre-9/11. The official story is obviously sanitized and the single most important question surrounding the events of 9/11 is why. If the official story is so obviously true, then why does it need to so heavily redact the relevant facts? And by "facts", I mean accepted, uncontroversial facts, not speculations about whether WTC 7 was demolished or what trajectory the Pentagon plane actually flew.

We should never forget that our government alone is responsible for the deaths of 100's of thousands of innocent human beings (our involvement in European carpet bombing, fire bombing, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Operation Keelhaul). We should never forget 9/11 and we should never stop asking questions wherever the facts do not fit with the "accepted" explanations. The government refused to do a proper investigation of this tragic event, so that leaves the US citizenry with no choice but to do our own, without the millions of dollars of tax funding.

Swine flu: engineered panic?

2009-12-30T02:30:00.002-08:00

Here's an interesting article that my fellow conspiratorialists may find interesting.

Chemtrails: Unthinkable, right?

2009-12-30T02:30:00.001-08:00

If the government was spraying aerosols into the atmosphere, what possible purpose could there be for such behavior? One can dream up a litany of possible motivations, but not one of them have anything to do with our good. I don't know if the government really is spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. But one thing I do know, it's not unthinkable and it's not "past them."

You think the government seeding the atmosphere with poisons or deliberately sabotaging the planet with greenhouse particles is unthinkable? Think again. When you think of people as cattle and yourself as the rancher, the inevitable result is Mengelean pseudo-science and social engineering experiments. Nothing but nothing is past the sickos ensconced in the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, and the rest of the asylum for those with delusions of grandeur known as "Washington, DC."

And, of course, the government is always "immune" from the consequences of its own actions: "The Nevin family appealed the suit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to overturn lower court judgments upholding the government’s immunity from lawsuits." I have no idea whether they're presently spraying us or not, but one thing's for sure: I don't put it past them.

Can you face the truth about your government?

2009-12-30T02:29:00.001-08:00

hat is the truth about your government? Murray Rothbard eviscerates every myth surrounding the State in this short essay. The truth about the government of whatever country in which you reside is that it is nothing more than a crime syndicate with a monopoly on law and force that maintains the perception that it is morally legitimate. Does this sound like insanity to you? If you are scientifically inclined, do you remember the feeling of bewilderment and borderline disbelief the first time you read about Einstein's theory of relativity or Schrodinger's and Heisenberg's formulations of quantum mechanics? If you are mathematically inclined, do you remember how you felt the first time you encountered Newton's and Leibniz's calculus of variations? Anyone who has experienced a mental "conversion", that is, a realignment of the mental model by which they interpret the world has experienced the initial feeling of disbelief and disorientation upon encountering a staggering challenge to their own preconceived ideas - possibly cherished - with evidence and clear, consistent reason.

Most people believe that modern government is "pretty good overall", that while it has some bad apples in it, most of those eventually get found out and drummed out by exposure and embarrassment in the media, and so on. But if you look at history dispassionately, it does not appear that there is any improvement or reduction in the corruption of the State. Granted, the State finds it harder to control the flow of information to hide its crimes, with the advent of new technologies that enable the rapid dissemination of information. However, this indicates no "progress" or "enlightenment" on the part of our rulers from the times of whips, racks and crucifixions. Consider the eagerness of the Bush administration and its allies (Blair, Brown, Chirac, Sarkozy, Merkel, Howard, and the US puppets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) to resurrect these powers in kind: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, indefinite detentions even of US citizens (Padilla) and "outsourcing" of torture to foreign countries (Egypt, Syria) and private contractors (David Passaro), secret imprisonment (extraordinary rendition... some vestige of this program still exists under Obama), warrantless wiretaps, sneak-and-peek search warrants, no-knock warrants, gagging National Security Letters (all thanks to the most wonderful PATRIOT Act), shoot-to-kill protections (Australia), even summary execution of innocent civilians in broad daylight (de Menezes). Western governments are supposed to be models of enlightenment and moral decency in politics but the intent to exploit the populace to whatever extent it will bear has never diminished and the evidence bears this out.

As for the supposed moral goodness of Western governments, history shows again and again that there never was any moral superiority of Western governments over others. We need only look at the war crimes of the Allies in targeting civilians in the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the Allies were much more successful and deadly in their efforts to kill civilians than the Axis powers were even if it was the Axis powers that first resurrected the doctrine of targeting civilians) - not to mention the unapologetic war crimes of General Sherman against fellow Americans during the war of 1861-1865 - the war crimes committed in Operation Keelhaul, the conspiring of US generals at the level of the Joint Chiefs to initiate and simulate terrorism against American citizens in Operation Northwoods, the war crimes committed by the CIA in MKULTRA and the crimes against humanity committed during the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments on black men. Not to mention the orchestrated deposition of an elected leader like Mohammed Mossadegh in Operation Ajax and innumerable other imperial interferences in the affairs of other countries, especially in South America and the Middle East. And I have not even touched on the rampant abuses of basic human decency and dignity within our own borders in the brutal crushing of civil rights protests, the FBI's targetting of anti-war movements and even intimidation of celebrities and people of note.

Reason tells us (see Rothbard's essay above) that the inevitable result of granting an organization the powers which we entrust to the government (monopoly on law and force) is exploitation, war, destruction and constant conflict. The historical record amply confirms what reason tells us. The state is a crime syndicate, a protection racket and nothing more.

The State's territorial monopoly on decision-making in action

2009-12-30T02:28:00.001-08:00

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out the conflict of interest of granting a territorial monopoly on ultimate decision-making in many places in his writings. In the article above, he says,

"... a monopolist with ultimate decison-making powers is particularly bad. While other monopolists produce inferior goods, a monopolist judge, besides producing inferior goods, will produce bads, because he who is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict also has the last word in each conflict involving himself. Consequently, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage.

... The result of a state, then, is not peaceful cooperation and social order, but conflict, provocation, aggression, oppression, and impoverishment, i.e., de-civilization. This, above all, is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of innocent state victims."

Hoppe's analysis of the state's territorial monopoly on ultimate decision-making is not the incoherent rantings of an academic madman aloft in some philosophical ivory tower. A judge in New Jersey has just dismissed a lawsuit against the Federal government over its invasion of Iraq. Underscoring the media's complicity in state aggression yet again, the AP news story covering this rather important event could not be more perfunctory.

The judge in the case claims that "second-guessing Congress is not the judiciary's duty." But that is exactly what the judiciary's duty is! What else is the Supreme Court doing, other than second-guessing Congress, when it strikes down a law or portions of a law as unconstitutional? Furthermore, Congress and the Executive have begun colluding against the public by circumventing the Constitutional requirement for a declaration of war before commencement of armed aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Vietnam, Grenada, etc.) making relief from the judiciary our only recourse against the warfare State.

The courts will allow us to get abortions. They'll allow us to ride anywhere on the bus we like, even if we're black. They'll allow us to attend any public school we choose no matter our skin color. They'll allow us to marry if we're gay. But they won't allow us to directly challenge the State's right to wage war because war is the health of the State and war is the single biggest argument by which the State justifies its astronomical expenditures. To challenge the State's wars of aggression is ultimately to challenge the State's power to tax. The judge's paycheck being drafted on the US Treasury, he will never directly challenge the State's power to tax or its power to wage war in order to justify its power to tax.

The territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making, in Hoppe's words, not only produces inferior goods at unconscionable prices (tax/inflation rate), it invites conflict and aggression in order to settle the dispute in its own favor. No one can really challenge the State's decision to wage war in Iraq, ultimately killing nearly 100,000 innocent people so far, not to mention the torture and state-sponsored terrorism of the Bush administration. Politicians in Congress can't challenge it because they have to worry about re-election. The President will never challenge it because war is the reason the Presidency exists (under the umbrella of the MIC, that is). And now, the people also have no recourse through direct complaint within the courts. Not that this should be surprising, the State's courts have never allowed the people to challenge the legality of the State's wars. It's just that this goes to show that the American State is no different than any other State. Its claim to be morally exceptional is falsified.

The US judicial system is devolving into a bunch of Star Chamber courts. The Federal government has become as bad as the British crown used to be. Maybe it's time to go back to the basics, like our parents did in the 60's, challenging the status quo, challenging the pat answers and moralisms of elected and religious leaders. Maybe it's time to start challenging authority and demanding answers that make sense and hold up under anything more than superficial examination. Like in a courtroom.

Boy scouts training ground for drug war?

2009-12-30T02:27:00.000-08:00

Is this really what the Boy Scouts of America is about? Should BSA really be allowing the government to turn their organization into a training and recruitment tool for the Border Patrol and DEA? The Boy Scouts organization is about getting outdoors, having fun and learning the skills needed for self-reliance in any situation. Training and recruiting for perpetration of a "war" on victimless "crimes" such as drug use or vastly exaggerated dangers, such as terrorism, doesn't seem to be in the charter of the BSA.

But that's just me.

Global Warming exaggerated

2009-12-30T02:26:00.002-08:00

Global warming is an exaggerated problem says one of the principal contributing scientists to the IPCC report. Which is not surprising, really. I posted the views of one of Germany's leading climate scientists as reported by Der Spiegel way back in 2005.

Global warming may very well be a problem, it may be human caused and it may even be a serious problem. But this is where it is crucial to apply critical thinking skills to the issue - even if these things are true, we must examine the likely motives and intent of the chief proponents of solving the problem of global warming, namely, governments, politicians and scientists in the employ of governments.

Particularly troubling to me is the frequent use of the phrase "scientific consensus" as if science is a democracy. Science benefits the most from the lone contrarian who happens to be right and can prove it. We should be very wary of language that stifles out-of-favor scientific opinions (so long as they are, really, scientific). Science is rarely, if ever, a black-and-white matter and is usually a matter of competing hypotheses which fit the available data better or worse. As data changes (due to technological advances or advances in experimental methodology), hypotheses that were once in favor can rapidly be falsified and replaced by previously obscure hypotheses.

In the case of the United Nations, the problem of global warming is especially convenient for making the case of global governance and especially global taxation and regulation. Global warming, by virtue of being a global problem, naturally requires international coordination not likely to occur between independent nations. It should not be surprising, then, that the organizations with the best chances of being in a position to exercise global governance power - either directly or indirectly - are the most passionate in making the case for the need to solve the problem of global warming.

Lastly, we should not think about the problem of global warming in terms of the nightmare scenario catastrophes that the Al Gore & Co. alarmists would have us think. Rather, we should think about solving the problem of global warming in terms of costs and benefits. That is, we should apply economic reasoning to the many humanitarian problems facing mankind today. The Copenhagen Consensus has done just this and they rank global warming at the bottom of the list of humanitarian issues in terms of the return-on-investment of lives saved/improved versus dollars spent.

All in all, global warming may be a real problem, it may be caused by human action and it may have very serious consequences over the long term. But these facts, if true, do not in themselves prove the case for massive global government interventions and costly national government measures, especially during this economic downturn.

The right of free association, divorce and secession

2009-12-30T02:26:00.001-08:00

From Wikipedia,

"Freedom of association is the individual right to come together with other individuals and collectively express, promote, pursue and defend common interests. The right to freedom of association has been included in a number of national constitutions and human rights instruments, including the US constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Freedom of association in the sense of workers' right to organize and collectively bargain is also recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Labor Organization Conventions.

The right to freedom of association is sometimes used interchangeably with the freedom of assembly. More specifically the freedom of assembly is understood in a political context, although depending on the source (constitution, human rights instrument etc) the right to freedom of association may be understood to include the right to freedom of assembly."

The right of free association is a fundamental human right and tyrants have always agitated against this right throughout history. It's one thing if a lone crank says something crazy, but when 10, 100 or 1,000 people start saying it together, the tyrant has a tendency to take an interest and suddenly develops the urge to disperse crowds in the name of "public safety." Cf Tiananmen Square.

As Wikipedia notes, the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have acknowledged that the freedom of association is a basic human right.

But there's another freedom that's just as important, and it is the other side of the coin: the freedom of non-association. Everyone is free to not associate with persons that they do not want to associate with. Divorce, as messed up as divorce laws are and always have been, is an example of this principle in action. No man has the right to force a woman to stay in a marriage which she no longer wants to be part of for any reason, and vice-versa. This is the freedom of non-association. Marriage is voluntary and both parties must continue their consent to be married, or the marriage is dissolved.

Secession is the freedom of non-association on a political scale. No political entity has the legitimate right to force a group of people to remain in union if they do not want to be part of that political entity anymore. Interestingly, majority-rule advocates suddenly become advocates of the rights of the individual when it comes to the issue of secession... "but what about the people in the seceding territory who want to remain in the political union?" This is easily answered since the seceding political unit can have no less claim to sovereignty on the basis of the consent of a territorial majority than the territorial majority of the larger political union from which it is attempting to withdraw. Their claims to sovereignty being equal, and one unit no longer desiring to be party to the relationship, the relationship should be dissolved in accordance with the freedom of non-association.

Properties owned by the larger political unit can be handled through compensatory payment by the seceding political unit. All further entanglements can be dissolved and the seceding political unit can peacefully become its own, sovereign territory, collecting its own taxes, producing its own border defense and regulating its own money and domestic and international commerce.

The American "Revolution" was, in fact, an act of secession from the Crown. The South attempted, and failed, to secede in the war of 1861. The US Federal government with its astronomical deficits and burdensome debt and the Federal Reserve and its rampant inflation to finance the Federal debt, are saddling us with trillions of dollars of subsidies for the power elite orbiting Washington DC and the global power stratosphere. I can't tell any US state whether they should or should not secede. However, it must be understood that secession - like non-assocation - is a basic human right and that the objections of the larger political union ("You didn't get permission from 75% of the states, you can't secede!") are not valid so long as a majority of the population in the seceding territory want out.

Federal Reserve: Looking out for Goldman errr, I mean, us

2009-12-30T02:25:00.004-08:00

Turns out that private-public partnerships = private sector raiding public treasury. While the coziness between the Federal Reserve and the banking sector doesn't quite rise to the level of an all-out partnership, it's pretty close. Few married people are as close to their spouse as Goldman Sachs is to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Of course, conflicts of interest abound and you and I are the ones footing the bill.

But you're right, we all have a patriotic duty to pay our taxes. God bless Goldman Sachs, errr I mean America, Support our Troops and purple mountain majesty or something like that. Wall Street didn't just heist America to the tune of a few trillion, this is all just to protect the "necessary financial infrastructure" of the American public. It's the little people who would get hurt if these big fish weren't able to line their pockets. America is nothing like the mugging victim who gets hurt if he doesn't line the mugger's pockets. In fact, America is the heroic policeman riding in to save the day for everyone. Aren't you proud of your country? Be glad to give back just a small portion of what your country gives to you... after all, April 15th is the only day of the year that your country asks anything of you unlike the heroic public servants who contribute to the country's welfare 365 days a year. God bless Wall Street errr, I mean our public servants.

Now they're coming for Craigslist

2009-12-30T02:25:00.003-08:00

There is a sudden nexus of negative energy in the media regarding Craigslist. Maybe people all over the country suddenly got into their heads all at the same time to start committing more crimes on Craigslist. Given that this would be an astonishingly improbable coincidence, I wonder if this was on this year's Bilderberg agenda. It's a more likely explanation, anyway.

Liberalism

2009-12-30T02:25:00.001-08:00

Classical liberalism is, I think, little understood by the average American (or the average person from any country, for that matter). Misconceptions about what liberalism is abound. In American parlance, liberalism has become synonymous with democratic socialism. "Libertarianism" is roughly synonymous with classical liberalism in American parlance. American conservatives denounce liberalism because they reject democratic socialism. Many American liberals denounce libertarianism seeing it as nothing more than an adjunct wing of the Republican party, a front for Wall Street-style crony capitalism.

This is perhaps the most succinct summary of the ideas of classical liberalism I have encountered. It is the epilogue to a work of fiction titled Jonathan Gullible. I cannot speak for all libertarians, nor will I engage in an argument over who are the true heirs of classical liberalism. But I find the moral arguments of classical liberalism put forward in this document to be insuperable. I think it's important that people understand what classical liberalism really is - it is not a front for country-club Republicanism, it is not a front for a hidden, anti-values agenda. It is a principled commitment to the rights of all people based on the conviction that a world of people free to self-determine is the best of all worlds which can be realized in this physical universe and that a public policy of liberty is the most moral.

It's just a few hundred words... please read it.

The government has displaced God & family

2009-12-30T02:24:00.003-08:00

Author Christine Smith has written a superb article discussing the displacement of God and family for which the government is responsible. The Christian community has long been saying that the government seeks to displace Christ as the role of savior, but the government does so much more than just this and the cultural displacement of the modern omnimax government has had profoundly negative effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that the government has had a central role in the breakdown of marriages, families, parent-child relationships, and the once-common expressions of personal faith and religious beliefs.

I believe it's time we revive the ancient principle of liberty - not just for myself or my special interests - but for all people. It's time for a return to a principled commitment to the freedom of individuals to speak, think and act as they please so long as they respect the life, liberty and property of their fellow man. There is no salvation through political activism. The government is owned and operated by the same money interests to whom you are ultimately paying your taxes via these bailouts. We don't need a violent revolution. We don't need reform. We need moral, intellectual, cultural and even religious clarity on the God-given right of every man, woman and child of any race or nation to be free. All people should be free to own the fruits of their own labor, to not have it seized by corrupt or over-reaching governments, and to move and act as they see fit, knowing that God (or Nature, as your beliefs may be) designed men with the natural disposition to co-exist peaceably long before humans came up with the terrible idea of legitimate coercion and aggression (government).

As more people begin to see the inescapable truth that the government has vastly over-extended any legitimate claim it may or may not have to regulate and tax, spontaneous resistance to the corrupt policies of the state will emerge without organization, planning or direction. We see this occur in the case of tax resistance where people spontaneously begin to "cheat" on their taxes or find new ways to earn tax-exempt income as the burden of the state becomes so heavy as to become worth the risk.

The way forward is so simple that most people overlook it: believe in liberty, understand its moral and historical basis, and share with others what you have learned. The Internet is an immensely powerful tool to facilitate this. Read, learn and share. That's it. As more of us spontaneously begin this process, the state will find it increasingly difficult to continue on its path of unrestrained power and property seizure.

Killing civilians - governments just can't help themselves

2009-12-30T02:24:00.001-08:00

It's 2009 and government still targets civilians. It's been 64 years since the end of the Great Wars of the 20th century in which untold millions of humans died violently at the hands of men armed by their government with pistols, machine guns and atomic bombs.

Thank God for government!

Fiddling while Rome burns

2009-12-30T02:23:00.001-08:00

Let them eat cake.

Edited to add: Of course, there aren't any more important matters to attend to.

Let's stop talking about torture in the abstract

2009-12-30T02:22:00.002-08:00

The UAE government brutally tortured a man who failed to deliver a load of grain valued at $5,000. The R-rated snippets of the XXX torture tape that are shown are stomach turning. This, friends, is torture. Waterboarding is also torture, just like the things shown in this tape are torture. That is not abstract, that is concrete. This man was brutalized, humiliated, and forced to undergo psychological and physiological destruction and terror (torture). Victims of waterboarding are forced to undergo psychological and physiological destruction and terror (torture). I don't understand what is abstract about that.

Note that, while he has mercifully, graciously and most beneficiously repealed the US government's power to torture with its own hands, his Worshipfulness Don Obama has not prohibited the practice of extraordinary rendition which allows the US government to outsource torture. Rendition is a far more fearsome weapon since the worst the US government could inflict with its own hands are tortures that are plausibly deniable... i.e. tortures that don't leave marks or destroy body parts. Other, less pretentious governments are comfortable with doing our government's dirty work (probably in exchange for handsome financial rewards) to a much higher standard of "quality" - that is, tortures with more destructive effects on the victim.

We must stop allowing the government to throw us political bones to quiet us. The extraordinary rendition programs must stop and Congress must be allowed to go in and investigate all the abuses that occurred in the secret prisons. The abuses of FISA, warrantless wiretaps, gagging NSLs, etc. must all be opened up and audited by Congress now before the executive seizes so much power that it is politically unstoppable. The Roman and Weimar Republics both fell to the trap of consolidated power in the hands of the executive. Let's not let the US government enslave us to the same model of centralized tyranny.

Flyover was not a psy-op

2009-12-30T02:22:00.001-08:00

So, there are one of two possibilities with today's buzzing of Manhattan by Air Force One - incompetence or psy ops. Now, if you support Obama, then you are not going to be inclined to believe that he and his administration (and the executive branch, by extension) are not incompetent. It seems to me, therefore, that the only logical conclusion that Obama supporters can come to is that today's flyover was a psychological operation designed to rekindle the flagging memory of the 9/11 events.

Whether the result of intentional malice or of negligent incompetence (we will likely never know which), this was a big, big mistake. Some heads need to roll.

NHS revives eugenics in the sick

2009-09-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Don't get too sick in the NHS - they'll pull your fluids. Of course, the NHS were certainly not the first to think of this.

Incompressible

Two types of people in the world

Exchange Stabilization Fund

High-school physics refutation of official 9/11 account

The New World Order has begun... in Africa

US says Pakistan fighting through proxies

Another free-market-ish city... now gone

India's voluntary city

Hans Hoppe on the Golden Age Prior to WWI

WSREP - Widespread Surveillance Resistant Email Protocol

Steven Pinker is my hero...

How governments cook the books

Oregon "terror" plot

More numerology

Non-numerical Newtonian gravitation theory

Gang signs and major news events

Astounding court decision

US citizen added to terror kill-list

No, they don't think of us as human-cattle

Warrantless cell tracking

Yet more oil accidents...

*Another* Gulf explosion... I called it!

Voyeur vans for government

Interesting correlation

Interesting spin on Schiff's loss

A real hero

Senator Stevens dies in air crash... funny business?

Kids these days!

Black market nukes: Iran saber-rattling is a farce

Hmmm, another Operation Seaspray?

Lemonade stand busted...

Oh my... Google, CIA to "predict the future"

James Turk spins a plausible hypothesis for BIS wierdness

I'm not buying Wikileaks anymore

Kingpin theory of power elites

Exploding box of chocolates... BP connection?

Why does government exist?

Live Free or Die = Collectivism

Quick note on the oil spill...

Oil Spill Must Be Sabotage

Silicon Valley: Hotbed of Cold War Defense Spending

The latest on my views on Somalia

State invasion of everyday life... a different interpretation

Intellectual property is the essence of the State's self-delegated authority

Get a degree in Homeland Security!

Government = Mafia

LA declares war on Mary Jane

Spending cap

What Law Is

Should the government filter the internet?

Some numerology and 9/11

NIST discovers new property of the universe

Why monopolies are bad (with applications to education and healthcare)

People: 0, Feds: 4

The War on Kids

Google and the CIA

Innocent man in coma after police takedown

Tasering children

Murray Rothbard on the Power Elite

What is private property?

Peter Schiff: Obama should learn economics to stop job losses

John Allen Muhammed (DC sniper) case is fishy

Gun control

A curious bit of flag history ... and some flippant speculations

Let's ban declawing! No, let's ban bans on declawing!

The question the media won't ask about Ft. Hood incident

This is how fascism works

Carl Sagan on the futility of empire

Rights versus social engineering

Democracy is immoral

What's wrong with the world? Women trying to get to the World Series

Walter Williams: distrust of government is what made America unique

H1N1 vaccines: the real failure

Wisconsin bans text messaging: an object lesson in pre-crime

What government cannot do

Chemtrails again

OKC tapes released, appear edited

What exactly is Najibullah Zazi guilty of?

There are no conspiracies

Private property, freedom and modern insanity

Another Gulf explosion... I called it!