The American Form of Government

A really great video.

The Calamity of Bush's Conservatism

I've been meaning to post this for a while now and haven't gotten around to it. This is a video of Lew Rockwell's Speech made at the Ron Paul Rally in Minnesota.

9/11/2001 Is A Conspiracy Theory No Matter How One Looks At It

Whether one believes that the United States Government had foreknowledge of the attack and allowed it to happen to be used as a pretext for President Bush's personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein for making an attempt on Daddy's life or whether one believes as the official story goes that al Qaeda is the guilty party, it is a conspiracy theory regardless of who believes what.

From the back of Jim Marrs' book The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11 and the Loss of Liberty:

According to the U.S. Government's official conspiracy theory, nineteen suicidal Middle Eastern Muslim hijackers, their hearts full of hatred for American freedom and democracy, hijacked four airliners. Reportedly, two planes were crashed into the Twin Towers of New York City's World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in rural western Pennsylvania after its passengers fought with the hijackers. This whole "Misson: Impossible" operation, able to defeat the United States' four-hundred-billion-dollar defense system, reportedly was under the total control of a zealous Muslim cleric using a computer while hiding in a cave in Afghanistan.

According to http://www.dictionary.com/, a conspiracy is "an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons". Conspiracy is a derivative of the Latin word conspirare, literally translated into "to breathe together". In our culture it is taboo to believe in a conspiracy theory. This is a culturally fascist attitude never more strongly represented than by those who "debunk" conspiracy theories. These attitudes wreak of state worship and arise from a sense that our elected officials couldn't or wouldn't act against the interests of the people with deliberate intention. This is a false philosophy. I understand that quotes are quotes and are only good to the extent of their usefulness but I'd like to quote Frederic Bastiat and say that government is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expensive of everybody else. Government from its inception is evil incarnate because for it to function it has to rely on thievery.

That's what these Stalinists and Trotskyites, or more commonly referred to as the Democrats and the Republicans (respectively), don't understand.

No matter what one believes, the events of 9/11/2001 were the result of a group conspiring together. This fact is not up for debate.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We do this every year. It's a ceremonial ritual and has become a vapid holiday because of sanctimonious commercialism that has bled into American culture. But as political as I have become over the years -- well, two years ago -- I'm thinking how the government figures to benefit every year in a way to garner more worship from its subjects.

From the following article, which you will be able to read in its entirety:

In a word, the reason for Thanksgiving Day is government. It is on this day that the government – specifically the President of the United States – orders us to be thankful. Since our government is secular in form and content, we really are supposed to be thankful to government for our bounty.

For example, I almost certainly will hear someone at church say that he or she is "thankful that we live in a country where we can freely worship God." Yet, people around the world have that freedom. One can put it another way, a way that is guaranteed to offend others: "I am thankful that the American state has not yet destroyed all of our freedoms, including the freedom to worship God."

While I write this, the U.S. Government actively is debasing the dollar, waging war against people who were not at war with us, arresting people and falsely charging them with crimes, blocking mutually beneficial economic exchanges, making it more difficult to produce and sell goods (and then condemning producers for not producing enough), and then propagandizing us in saying that the government is the only thing that gives our lives meaning.

While we think of the Pilgrims celebrating a successful harvest in 1621, Thanksgiving as an official government-sponsored holiday came to this country via the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1863. While armies under his command were destroying the harvests of the southern states, burning houses and forcing families to face the winter without food and shelter, and generally plundering and pillaging, he declared an official day of "Thanksgiving."

The next president to further make Thanksgiving a government-sponsored holiday was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. Thus, two of the presidents who were most active in destroying the liberties and social fabric of this country were at the forefront of telling everyone else how thankful they should be.

Bill Hicks: Outlaw Comic

"For all the talk about Bill being Hendrix or Dylan or Jim Morrison or Lenny Bruce, it was Jesus Bill wanted to be. He wanted to save us all. But Bill got freeze-framed in the scene where Jesus went through the temple and said 'this is my father's house and you have turned it into a den of thieves.' 'Cause that's what Bill always wanted to do. He wanted to be Christ at His angriest!" - comedian Brett Butler, documentary Bill Hicks: It's Just a Ride

When someone teaches me how to link all the videos together so they stream without interruption, I'll come back and edit this post so it doesn't take up so much space. Hopefully one of my fellow contraptionists can leave a comment below. That's a hint, guys!

Cracking the Code: The Fascinating Truth About Taxation in America

All credit goes to Peter Eric Hendrickson. Everything that follows henceforth is not of my prose.



For the 64 years of its existence, the U. S. Internal Revenue Code has been ridiculed, feared and despised by virtually everyone. And why not? As presented by the Internal Revenue Service, the code appears illogical, inconsistent and incomprehensible. As presented, the code defies practically the entire Bill of Rights– requiring citizens to testify against themselves, allowing searches and seizures without warrants, levying fines and penalties without trials and imposing a tax on the basic right to earn a living. As presented, the IRC would appear to turn everything we all thought we had learned in grade school English and Civics on its head.

Is it possible that we all just misunderstood those simple lessons? Maybe. But researcher, analyst and scholar Peter E. Hendrickson believes that after Cracking the Code, you’ll agree that what has been misunderstood is the 3,413,780 word monstrosity itself– and how, and to whom, it applies.

Hendrickson delves deep into the history, statutes and case law behind the Code to reveal its startling and liberating secrets; and unless you live in a cave, you need to know what he’s uncovered.

Once you’ve finished “Cracking the Code”, the tax laws will never mean the same thing to you, or your bank account, again!

What You Will Learn in 'Cracking the Code':

• That the vast majority of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) is not the law itself, but is only evidence -- a representation -- of the actual statues in force, and like in the game of post-office, the real language has beena bit garbled in transmission.
• That "income", "wages", "self-employment income", "employee", "employer" and "trade or business" -- as these and certain other terms are used within, and in regard to, the tax law -- have narrow legal meanings exclusive involving, applying to, certain privileged activities, such as holding or administering a government office, or working in one.
• That altough the tax statutes make perfectly clear that, for instnace, language describing the obligations of "employees" -- and the taxes to which "employees" are subject -- only apply to a small minority of American workers, the distinction is artfully concealed int he IRC representation of the law, and is never forthrightly acknowledged in any IRS publication (although it is obliquely acknowledged whenever necessary for the avoidance of legal jeopardy).
• That an elaborate system has been created which causes some people to whom the tax laws do not otherwise apply (maybe including you) to inadvertently declare themselves to be among the poersons to whom those laws do apply.

"The revenue laws are a code or system in regulation of tax assessment and collection. They relate to taxpayers, and not to nontaxpayers. The latter are without their scope." United States Court of Claims, Economy Plumbing and Heating v. United States, 470 F.2nd 585, at 589 (1972)

From the Forward:

It was not until the late 1990's, when the Internal Revenue Code was digitized (and thus made searchable) that it became possible to decipher its deliberately confusing and misleading construction. Only then could complete searches be doen of all 3,413,780 or so words (not counting regulations!) for every incidence of "liable", "imposed", "income", "employee", and dozens of other key or misleading terms -- checking every reference, exception, definition and sources. Only then could it be established that, as written, the laws behind the code and the taxes that they impose technically comply with the Constitution, just as all the judges have said over the years.

But the same analysis also reveals that, as written, these laws don't apply to most of the receipts of most private citizens. Indeed, the two things are interdependent -- the former couldn't be true unless the latter was also true.

What you will learn as you read this book is that specific Constitutional limitations on the federal government’s power to tax do shape related law, and have generated a coherent Supreme Court doctrine which clearly and soundly answers the question of what is taxable "income”. Both the statutes and the doctrine acknowledge the exemption of the vast majority of private-sector receipts from that taxing power’s reach.

However, you will also learn about a complex combination of craft, routine bureaucratic incoherence, and casual-- and not-so-casual-- corruption by virtue of which many people are led to inadvertently allow, and even participate in, the legal transformation of their untaxable earnings into taxable "income”. Such people are tricked into voluntarily and utterly unnecessarily enabling the diversion of a river of wealth from their own hands, usually never to be seen again.

Thanks to an unhappy coincidence of reiterations and amendments of the law, a series of complicated judicial rulings, and the passage of time and memories, the details of American tax law-- and the principles upon which it is based-- have come to be widely misunderstood. The opportunities presented by that reality have been seized upon, by those paid to maximize revenue flow to the government, to successfully construct an elaborate and deceptive tax scheme rooted in today’s Internal Revenue Code.

This scheme capitalizes on widespread public ignorance of general legal doctrine and rules of statutory construction. It practices a careful gauging of extraction levels to the tolerance limits of key demographic segments. It relies upon the concealment of the underlying actual-law-in-force behind the misleading words of the code, which is legally no more than ‘evidence of the law’, and not the law itself.

Fundamental to the scheme is designing that code to be so dauntingly and profoundly confusing as to force the vast majority of those against whom it’s directed to abandon even a pretense of personal comprehension. These targets are thus compelled to surrender their decision-making to the code’s administrative bureaucracy or a professional class of fixers and go-betweens-- the members of either of which are dependent on the scheme for their own earnings.

Unsurprisingly, both assure any who ask that of course private-sector receipts are taxed under the law. If pressed, these experts will trot out carefully selected, out-of-context and ambiguous fragments of law calculated to convincingly suggest that what they claim must be in the law, somewhere. But somehow, they never manage to demonstrate exactly where. ‘Cracking the Code’ is going to provide that missing context, unravel the tangle of deceit and confusion, and make clear that not only is it not in there anywhere, what is in there is just the opposite.

http://www.losthorizons.com/

Articulated Starfish: Ayn Rand and The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An excerpt from Ayn Rand's 1961 publication, For the New Intellectual, of an excerpt form her 1957 publication, Atlas Shrugged:

This is a statement made by Hank Rearden at his trial for and illegal sell of a metal alloy which he had created and which has been placed under government rationing and control.


"I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record....I work for nothing but my own profit-which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage-and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with-the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and to do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people-the fact that my work is of greater value than that of my neighbors and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for my ability-I refuse to apologize for my success-I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests let the public destroy me. This is my code-and I will accept no other. I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow man then you can ever hope to accomplish-but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work-my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good-that nobody's good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices-that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation-as any looters must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won't. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own-I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"

Articulated Starfish: Ayn Rand on Faith and Reason

"I will not die, it is the world that will end."