Creating the Game Changer..
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Who do you 'Serve and Protect'??
There is a system many people do not know about. It has been played many times in the history of earth but few even know of its existence. It is a system that when used empowers government and takes away more and more rights of the people.
A problem is created. Then later, a solution is provided by those who created the problem. The solution in most cases results in fewer freedoms for you and more power and control for government. If a problem doesn't exit, you have to manufacture one.
When you join the military you are subjected to tests, both physical and mental. You are taught NOT TO QUESTION THE AUTHORITY OF A SUPERIOR OFFICER. The military is second only to the government controlled education system in being the biggest brainwashing organization there is. If your government controlled education doesn't turn you into a remote controlled robot where you think like everybody else does, boot camp will. It makes it easier to control the people if the people are all thinking the same way.
Everybody is taught to respect and defend the flag and all that it represents. ***
When a decision is made in government, it is made at the highest levels. It trickles down through the hierarchy and if that decision involves the Military, it is then transferred to its hierarchical system. Sooner or later the decision reaches the end of the line, the average citizen who chose to serve his or her country, a brainwashed "G.I. Joe".
The Hierarchy of Law Enforcement
The Brotherhood of the Serpent / Snake
(Big Brother)
Freemasonry
United Nations
National Government
Military
Local Law Enforcement
Civilians
Above is a sub-hierarchy chart of the control system. The whole system of control extends far beyond what you see above of course. The pyramidal structure in the hierarchy above should be obvious to you. The mass at the base of a pyramid is much greater than the top.
The initiated (top 5% Satanic) Freemasons reside in and are faithful to The Brotherhood and defend it. Freemasonry is two-dimensional in that it comprises of both initiated and uninitiated Masons, both of which are world-wide. Most Freemasons are ignorant of "the Craft", because of that they are easily controlled and are used by the initiated to defend the Satanic Brotherhood. "Making good men liars" is what they ought to change their saying to.
As mentioned, Masons are scattered throughout the entire control hierarchy but only the initiated are in high places to ensure decisions made high up take their course. This insures that the Brotherhood has absolute control. In some cases an initiated Mason isn't needed in certain areas because he'll make sure the decisions made high up take their course irregardless.
Government, Military and your local law enforcement have Masons both initiated and uninitiated within them. The initiated control is global.
Every Police Officer in America has sworn an oath to DEFEND the constitution. Would it surprise you to see a state trooper pissing on it?
Case in point - Abby Newman
In September, 2000, for no reason at all Abby Newman was stopped at a check point in the state of Virginia. The state trooper who had pulled her over admitted at the scene that he had no probable cause.
The trooper needed Abby's name but Abby didn't have to submit to his request unless she had broken the law. Hence, the stop was unconstitutional. Abby even asked the trooper if she had broken any laws and he said, "No."
Video footage showed two Law Enforcement Officers arresting Abby for NO reason. One trooper violated her constitutional rights by opening her car door and pulling her out. He arrested her for assault and obstructing justice. The only assault seen was the trooper assaulting Abby's constitutional rights.
Abby told the troopers the check point was unconstitutional, but they wouldn't listen. Everything Abby told the troopers went in one ear and out the other.
As the troopers illegally searched her car they had a short conversation. One trooper said, "She's invoked her right to remain silent, even though she don't believe in our laws." As you read the amendments below you will understand that it was the trooper who didn't know our laws!
At left you see Abby being escorted to the police cruiser by one of the troopers with the other bringing up the rear.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
As you can see the Constitution protects Americans against Illegal searches and seizures. The very horror those troopers put Abby through.
Not only do we have to guard against criminals but now we have to guard against ignorant brainwashed troopers? How can anybody feel safe with law enforcement officers like the ones noted above "on the beat?"
One trooper speculated that Abby was a member of some "Klan". When they were illegally searching her car they found books about secret societies and the like. With all of the illegal immigrants, drugs and illegal arms smuggled into AmeriKa, you would think they would be worried more about that then what a women driving down a rural street in the United States is thinking.
There would have been further embarrassment to the troopers if the video footage had been entered into evidence. The patrolman and his colleague were recorded speculating about the far out nature of some of Newman's reading material found in the car -- including a copy of the Constitution! The arresting officer even speculated whether some of the reading material was illegal!
You have to imagine the severity and the magnitude of the damage the global elite have done to this world. Local law enforcement officers not knowing what the constitution is? It's perfectly clear that their government controlled education worked like a charm.
Abby was later vindicated in court. HERE is a transcript of the incident I found on the web.
Cause and effect
Cause and effect is a system they (The Brotherhood) have used many times in the history of this world and it is very important that you learn to recognize it.
They create a problem, and later provide a solution. The solution usually means more power and wealth for world leaders and less freedoms for the people they govern. They figure what their goal is then they create two opposing sides the clash of which will bring about the goal that they wanted and the people will look at it as if it were magic or by accident.
Northwoods Document
With the 60's came the Cuban missile crises. A Soviet military build up on the island of Cuba threatened the western hemisphere.
They needed an excuse to invade Cuba. They actually put the plan to paper. They proposed blowing up airliners full of American people saying the casualty list in U.S. Newspapers would provide a helpful wave of ignination to fuel their plan. The plan was that of General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer chairman joint chiefs of staff, he got approval for his plan all the way up to the secretary of defense. President Kennedy was not amused. In the plan they elaborated on how they could bomb Washington D.C. and blame Cuba, attack marines at guantanimo bay using U.S. Army soldiers dressed up as Cubans.
President Kennedy was always a servant of the global elite but he was so shocked by the Northwoods document that he signed executive order 11110 shortly before his death announcing that he would abolish the federal reserve system. He also began to pull us out of Vietnam, and signed an order to abolish to CIA.
Kennedy was for the people and defended their interests. They killed President Kennedy because he wasn't following the master plan of the global elite. The New World Order couldn't allow that to continue, so they killed him.
Oklahoma
When something like the Oklahoma City bombing happens watch carefully what your government leaders do in the days ahead.
As a result of the bombing at the Federal Building, Oklahoma city, Bill Clinton's Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 which failed to pass just a year before was finally passed. The bill destroyed massive sections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I find it interesting that our Masonic Federal Government refused to release the survalance footage which showed the true perpetrators. They wouldn't use it in court because they knew it would show the U.S. Government's involvement.
Because of Osama Bin Laden's actions, governments can now use the 'War on Terror' as an excuse for things that would have seemed ridiculous pre-9/11.
The mainstream media still hasn't made it clear just who is it all of this benefits. If they did, they would fail those who they work for.
Governer Frank Keeding's Brother Mark Keeding wrote a book called, "The Final Jihad". One of the characters in the book was a Thomas McVey who master minded the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma city. Coincidence? I don't think so! The book was dedicated to the knights of the secret circle, a known Illuminati (Masonic) group. The book was written two years before the bombing.
SR735: Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 - Bill Clinton
The act makes terrorism a federal crime punishable by death, as well as aids in the investigation, capture, and trial of terrorists in the United States, and includes provisions that allow U.S. deportation proceedings without being compelled by Terrorists to divulge classified information. Disallows fundraising in the U.S. that supports terrorist organizations, and bars terrorists from entering the U.S.
Sept 11th, 2001 - WTC
On September 7th, 2001, Jeb Bush signed an executive order No. 01-261 allowing him to declare martial law.
W199I - restricting the investigation
A couple months before 9/11 George W. Bush signed W199I threatening FBI investigators with arrest if they try to arrest members of the Al Quida. George Bush signed the papers, he is a traitor to humanity. He is business partners wit Osama Bin Laden and deserves to be thrown in jail.
Within days of 9/11, the Bush Administration provided safe passage out of the US for 14 members of the Bin Laden family, without interrogation.
In 1996 the Clinton Administration discouraged the FBI from investigating links between Osama Bin Laden's brothers Abdulla and Omar and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a known terrorist front organization.
Source: (BBC, The Guardian - UK)
H.R 3162
On October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act. Section 213 delays warrants. They can sneak into your home for any reason, take what ever they want and never tell you they were there and there are NO sunset provisions.
SEC. 213. AUTHORITY FOR DELAYING NOTICE OF THE EXECUTION OF A WARRANT.
SEC. 224. SUNSET (NEWSFLASH: THE SECRET WARANTLESS SEARCHES AND OTHER POLICE STATE MEASURES IN THE BILL ARE NOT SUNSETTED. THE MEDIA AND THE GOVERNMENT ARE LYING TO YOU.)
SEC. 802. DEFINITION OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM.
One sure way to determine who designed the societal system is to look at who it benefits. That's a no brainer. The education system was designed to get everybody to think the same way which makes it easier to control the collective.
Most Americans do not recognize that Congress had passed a bill that would give the government expanded power to invade our privacy, imprison people without due process and punish dissent.
Some of the fundamental changes to Americans' legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act following the terror attacks:
* FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION
Government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigation.
* FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests.
* FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
* RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION
Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
* FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES
Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
* RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL
Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
* RIGHT TO LIBERTY
Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
George W. Bush
March 23rd, 2002, "The Bush administration today proposed dropping a requirement at the heart of federal rules that protect the privacy of medical records. It said doctors and hospitals should not have to obtain consent from patients before using or disclosing medical information for the purpose of treatment or reimbursement. The proposal, favored by the health care industry, was announced by Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, who said the process of obtaining consent could have "serious unintended consequences" and could impair access to quality health care. The sweeping privacy rules were issued by President Bill Clinton in December 2000. When Mr. Bush allowed them to take effect last April, consumer advocates cheered, while much of the health care industry expressed dismay..."
This new law that I signed today will allow surveilance of all communications used by terrorists, including the Internet, email, cell phones.
Government sponsored terrorism pays
The amount of money funneled to organizations within the government is staggering. After the Oklahoma city bombing it sky rocketed. It went up even higher after the World Trade Center buildings were hit.
News articles and the BBC and other credible organizations showed the Bush family's involvement in Osama's businesses. Bush made alot of money from 9/11.
Who do you serve and protect?
It is horrifying to learn that your mind is controlled indirectly though a hierarchy of systems designed to deceive. To know that you are nothing more then a cow. A cow that is herded by the global elite. You are nothing more then pawns in a global chess game. I shouldn't have to tell you who the chess players are. You should know that already.
The good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are the good guys and vice versa. confused? Don't be. A persons track record speaks for itself. If evil is going to make a BIG mistake it will be in its track record. Look at what Clinton and Bush pushed through Congress. Massive sections of the constitution and the Bill of Rights were destroyed by their actions and your in action. The devils greatest triumph is making people believe he doesn't exist. Who do you serve and protect?
"My question to people is, well, if the only honest man in congress is not worth running for President in the next election then, what the hell are you people about? Why am I trying to save you when you're that lost, you want to go after Ross Pero who's in the pocket of the Rockefellers (the Brotherhood), they made him, they created him and all he's doing is working for their interests. He's a Billionaire , he doesn't give a damn about the guy who makes five bucks an hour and never will." - William Cooper (Radio interview 1998)
America has the most advanced military on the planet in having precision bombs, cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and Naval vessels, EMP bombs, you name it. And who is it that controls all that hardware? A vast majority of the military community are what I call, "G.I. Joes.", average citizens. If all of their minds were to wake up and realize who the real enemy was, what do you think would happen? George Bush and the rest of his Masonic buddies would be going to jail for what they have done to the human race.
Instead of pointing your guns at the middle east you should point them at the elite Freemason and the global Brotherhood.
If all you're going to do is follow the orders of your superiors blindly then, you might as well push the button now.
My worst enemy is the average citizen, local law enforcement and military. All three entities are made up of mostly brainwashed individuals who unknowingly Serve and Protect an evil entity.
A state of mind determines whether or not you live in heaven or hell. Your state of mind can be influenced by conditioning tactics and mind control propaganda. Because of that your mind can be placed into hell and your destiny can be controlled by someone else if you don't guard against it.
It is all old and very boring, it is like all this shit is happening at our feet...... and we are above it so it doesn't control us.... it gets old...... it's time for a change
People need to stop looking at the esoteric and pay attention to the occult meaning of a given circumstance.
Homeland Security And Its Urgent Need To Invent Terrorism
"If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are being used by the owning elite's as a publicly-subsidized capitalist goon squad." - Smedley Butler
Only one thing frightens me, and it is the brainwashed robots in law enforcement and the military who follow their programming without questioning it.
It's just like The Matrix movie where the evil "AI" brainwashed law enforcement personnel and used them to fight Morpheus and the rest of the freedom fighters.
Biblical connection:
The bible does say that Satan controls earth. We know this to be a fact because Consumerism is in the world and it has "destroyed you for lack of knowledge". the bible tells us Satan is the Destroyer and that he controls earth (II Cor 4:4). Proof the bible is correct.
Although Satan does not possess a physical body he is a real being who is in eternal opposition to the Father. He and his followers (demonic individuals) seek to destroy the souls of men by tempting and deceiving them into leaving the paths of righteousness.
"Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11th. Malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty." - George W. Bush Jr.
George Bush is misleading you.
Bush at the U.N.
"The hijackers were instruments of evil who died in vain. Behind them is a cult of evil, which seeks to harm the innocent and thrives on human suffering. Theirs is the worst kind of cruelty. The cruelty that is fed, not weakened by tears. Theirs is the worst kind of violence, pure malice while daring to claim the authority of God. We cannot fully understand the designs and power of evil. It is enough to know that evil, like goodness, exists. And in the terrorists, evil has found a willing servant." - George W. Bush Jr.
Do you get the feeling that George Bush is telling you something within those quotes?
Right after the planes hit the World Trade Center all the online news media published their stories. A few days later they began to focus on who might be responsible. They never asked or even thought that part of the ones responsible run the United States government.
Look at who stands to gain from all that has happened. More power for government and less freedoms for the people. Look at the societal system you live within. Who does it benefit? Certainly not you! (TAKE THE MARBLE TEST AND FIND OUT) Are these Government leaders so dumb they cannot see these things? Certainly NOT! They are responsible for the design! Humanity is actually being rewarded for its IGNORANCE by salaries paid for by the companies it works for. Why hasn't George W. Bush or even his father recognized this TRAVESTY?
People have to stop and THINK about how their minds have been raped by the global elite.
I'm surprised the FBI isn't smart enough to realize these hard truths. The real terrorists are those who control government, and they are all Freemasons.
Garbage on the Web
All the garbage on the web concerning cruise missiles, UFOs and other fanciful theories keeps the most important issues clouded. A lot of garbage has been posted on the web about 9/11, way out stories designed to distract people from the horrifying truth. Members of the United States government planned, aided, trained, defended the terrorists and allowed them to crash those planes into America.
To support a government who was and still is involved in the poisoning of the people it governs, continues to violate human rights and ecological laws is insane. People vote for change at it never comes.
You people in the Military who visit The Revelation website regularly ought to stop and think about just who you are serving.
Stop looking at the esoteric or what people are throwing out for you as bait and start looking at the occultic meaning of what happens and who stands to gain from it.
I look down upon earth and see a people who would rather bleed physically and emotionally rather then seek the knowledge that would free them from the horrors ignorance and inaction brings.
Anybody who fights to defend the constitution is a terrorist by their definition now. Since local law enforcement seem to be totally incompetent regarding the constition it renders them as an enemy. You saw this echoed in The Matrix movie where law enforcement were being used by evil to fight the freedom fighters.
If the global elite are not brought to justice they will continue to get more and more control over our lives, brainwashing military and local law enforcement personel to work for them and not the people.
Every description the bible gives concerning Satan is correct and a link to modern government leaders can be found and exposed if one is to think long and hard enough.
"Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the devil as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour" ( 1Peter 5:8).
Nice analogy isn't it? Those who are unaware, ignorant and not alert will suffer the consequences; continued suffering/slavery/oppression under Satan's rule.
The hijackers were instruments of evil, we see that government leaders are "instruments" of evil as well.
Your lives are in grave danger..
Earth is comprised of..
Groups of mind controlled human beings which are used as pawns in a global chess game..
Where wars are orchestrated in favor of those who initiated it..
The global elite..
Those who never read the Bible have no idea..
What it is that they profess to believe but follow the words and actions of others because it is the path of least resistance..
These are the ones who readily follow a false prophet, as they have no thirst for the truth..
Unless one reads how does one know if one is being deceived or not???
It is up to each of us to seek the truth..
Learning is an individual responsibility..
There is Tranquility in Ignorance..
But Servitude is its Partner..
America is no longer the land of the free..
America’s Caesar..
A book by Gregg Durand
In Senate Report 93-549, the U.S. Congress made the astonishing admission that, since at least 9 March 1933, the American people have lived under a state of national emergency (martial law)..
Instead of a federal Government of delegated and limited powers, what now operates from Washington, D.C. is a centralized military despotism which claims ultimate sovereignty over its citizens and rules them by statute in all cases whatsoever..
Beginning with the usurpations of Abraham Lincoln, this book explains how the so-called emergency powers of the President of the United States developed over a period of seven decades and finally culminated in the virtual supplanting of the Constitution by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal democracy..
The author draws heavily from a wealth of rare political literature from the past two centuries, as well as long-forgotten Government documents to paint an unsettling picture of American history and to show why nothing ever seems to change in Washington, no matter which political party is in power..
ORIGINS OF AMERICAN LIBERTY..
Cato's Letters, widely echoed by the founding fathers, was a central inspiration for what became America and for the rest of the world..
Cato's Letters on Liberty and Property..
by Gary Galles
[Posted October 21, 2003]
On November 5, 1720, the first letter from Cato (pseudonym for John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, honoring Cato the Younger, whose dedication to principles of liberty led him to oppose Julius Caesar) appeared in the London Journal..
Many more followed, reflecting the ideas of John Locke, soon making it England's most influential newspaper, and leading to collections of Cato's Letters that were, according to Clinton Rossiter "the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period."
As one of the letters said, "it is and has been the great design of this paper to maintain and expose the glorious principles of liberty, and to expose the arts of those who would darken or destroy them..."
That theme was what made it so important to our heritage as Americans..
According to Ronald Hamowy, "From its first publication in the 1720s through the revolutionary era that ended the century, its impact on both sides of the Atlantic was enormous..
Its arguments against oppressive government and in support of the splendors of freedom were quoted constantly and its authors were regarded as the country's most eloquent opponents of despotism...[and] frequently served as the basis of the American response to the whole range of depradations under which the colonies suffered. Freedom of speech and conscience, the rights possessed by all Englishmen both by virtue of their constitutional heritage and by their nature as human beings, the benefits of freedom, the natural restraints on government, the nature of tyranny, the right of men to resist oppressive government—all these notions found an eager reception in the colonies."
It is worth revisiting Cato's Letters' devotion to liberty, its central theme, which so powerfully influenced our founding as a nation. Consider some of its memorable insights (in the order of their appearance):
...general liberty...is certainly the right of all mankind...
...brand those as enemies to human society, who are enemies to equal and impartial liberty..Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together..
The defense of liberty is a noble, a heavenly office...
Few men have been desperate enough to attack openly, and barefaced, the liberties of a free people...Even when the enterprise is begun and visible, the end must be hid, or denied..
...the people would constantly be in the interests of truth and liberty, were it not for external delusion and external force..
...government executed for the good of all, and with the consent of all, is liberty; and the word government is profaned, and its meaning abused, when it signifies anything else..
...the inestimable blessing of liberty. Can we ever over-rate it... It is the parent of virtue, pleasure, plenty, and security..
In all contentions between liberty and power, the latter has almost always been the aggressor..
...I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason...
The people's jealousy tends to preserve liberty; and the prince's to destroy it..
Now, because liberty chastises and shortens power, therefore power would extinguish liberty; and consequently liberty has...cause to be exceeding jealous, and always upon her defense..
...with the loss of liberty, shame and honor are lost..
In most parts of the earth there is neither light nor liberty..there being, in all places, many engaged, through interest, in a perpetual conspiracy against them..
Wherever truth is dangerous, liberty is precarious..
Only government founded upon liberty is a public blessing; without liberty, it is a public curse...
...no nation ever lost its liberty, but by the force of foreign invaders, or the domestic treachery of its own magistrates..
...with liberty light has sprung in...We have learned that we are as fit to use our own understandings, as they are whose understandings are no better than ours...
...all mankind will allow it a less crime in any man to attempt to recover his own liberty, then wantonly and cruelly to destroy the liberty of his country..
...liberty is the unalienable right of all mankind. All governments, under whatsoever form they are administered, ought to be administered for the good of the society; when they are otherwise administered, they cease to be government, and become usurpations..
All men are born free; liberty is a gift which they receive from God himself...
...the nature of government does not alter the natural right of men to liberty, which is in all political societies their due.
By liberty, I understand the power which every man has over his own actions, and his right to enjoy the fruits of his labor, art and industry, as far as by it he hurts not the society, or any members of it, by taking from any member, or hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys..
The fruits of a man's honest industry are the just rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own private actions and property...no man living can divest him but by usurpation, or by his own consent..
True and impartial liberty is therefore the right of every man to pursue the natural, reasonable, and religious dictates of his own mind; to think what he will, to act as he thinks, provided he acts not to the prejudice of another; to spend his own money himself, and lay out the produce of his labor his own way; and to labor for his own pleasure and profits, and not for others who are idle, and would live...by pillaging and oppressing him, and those that are like him...
Free government is the protecting of the people in their liberties by stated rules: Tyranny is a brutish struggle for unlimited liberty to one or a few, who would rob all the others of their liberty, and act by no rule but lawless lust.
The love of liberty is an appetite so strongly implanted in the nature of all living creatures, that even the appetite of self-preservation...seems to be contained in it; since by liberty they enjoy the means of preserving themselves, and of satisfying their desires in the manner which they themselves choose and like best..
Where liberty is lost, life grows precarious, always miserable, often intolerable. Liberty is to live upon one's own terms; slavery is to live at the mercy of another...
This passion for liberty in men, and their possession of it, is of that efficacy and importance, that it seems the parent of all the virtues...
Indeed liberty is the divine source of all human happiness...The privileges of thinking, saying and doing what we please, and of growing rich as we can, without any other restriction than that by all this we hurt not the public, nor one another, are the glorious privileges of liberty; and its effects, to live in freedom, plenty, and safety..
...all civil happiness and prosperity is inseparable from liberty...
Now the laws which encourage and increase virtue are the fixed laws of general and impartial liberty...Where liberty is thoroughly established, and its laws equally executed, every man will find his own account in doing as he would be done unto, and no man will take from another what he would not part with himself...
The property of the poor will be as sacred as the privileges of the prince, and the law will be the only bulwark of both..
Every man's honest industry and useful talents, while they are employed for the public, will be employed for himself; and while he serves himself, he will serve the public...
...the entering into society, and becoming subject to the government, is only the parting with natural liberty, in some instances, to be protected in the enjoyment of it in others.
Where there is liberty, there are encouragements to labor, because people labor for themselves, and no one can take from them the acquisitions which they make by their labor...
To live securely, happily, and independently, is the end and effect of liberty...Nor did ever any man that could live satisfactorily without a master desire to live under one...
...all the advantages of liberty must be lost with liberty, and all the evils of tyranny must accompany tyranny..
...liberty: You are our Alpha and Omega, our first and last resource; and when your virtue is gone, all is gone..
You are born to liberty, and it is in your interest and duty to preserve it...your governors have every right to protect and defend you, none to injure and oppress you..
...make good use of this present dawn, this precious day of liberty...if you suffer it to be lost, will probably be forever lost..
Nothing is too hard for liberty...
This therefore is the worst of all prostitutions and most immoral of all sort of slavery...supporting servitude with the breath of liberty, and assaulting and mangling liberty with her own weapons..
...liberty and tyranny... concerns the whole earth...
Why should not the knowledge and love of God be joined to the knowledge and love of liberty, his best gift, which is the certain source of all the civil blessings of this life?.
Liberty is salvation in politics...We, who enjoy the precious, lovely, and invaluable blessing of liberty, know that nothing can be paid too dear to purchase and preserve it..
Without a doubt, every man has a right to liberty...
A free trade, a free government, and a free liberty of conscience, are the rights and the blessings of mankind..
It is madness in extremity, to hope that a government founded upon liberty...can be supported by other principles; and whoever would maintain it by contrary ones intends to blow it up, let him allege what he will..
...a power inconsistent with liberty...will never be asked with an intention to make no use of it..
...when a government is founded upon liberty and equal laws, it is ridiculous for those in the administration to have any hopes of preserving themselves long there, but by just actions...
Thus it is that liberty is almost everywhere lost: Her foes are artful, united and diligent: Her defenders are few, disunited, and inactive..
Truth has so many advantages above error, that she wants only to be shown...she breaks the bonds of tyranny and fraud...I would not destroy this liberty by methods which will inevitably destroy all liberty.
The cause of liberty, and the good of the whole, ought to prevail...This truth every man acknowledges, when it becomes his own case...
...liberty...the people's zeal to preserve it has ever been called ingratitude by such as had designs against it...
You are born, Gentlemen, to liberty; and from it you derive all the blessings which you possess..
...civil governments were instituted by men, and for the sake of men...men have a right to expect from them protection and liberty, and to oppose rapine and tyranny wherever they are exercised...
On the subject of property, the Letters are equally eloquent:
...the security of property and the freedom of speech always go together...where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything else his own..
The people...the security of their persons and property is their highest aim...
The same can rarely be said of great men, who, to gratify private passion, often bring down public ruin; who, to fill their private purses with many thousands, frequently load the people with many millions...
...men have been knocked down for saying that they had a right to defend their property by force, when a tyrant attempted to rob them of it against law..
...property, the preservation of which is the principal business of government...
The truth is; if the people are suffered to keep their own, it is the most that they desire: But even this is a happiness which in few places falls to their lot; they are frequently robbed by those whom they pay to protect them...
...every man has a right and a call to provide for himself, to attend upon his own affairs, and to study his own happiness..
As the preservation of property is the source of national happiness; whoever violates property, or lessens or endangers it...he is an enemy to his country...
When a magistrate fancies he is not made for the people, but the people for him; that he does not govern for them, but for himself...the magistrate gives the name of sedition and rebellion to whatsoever they do for the preservation of themselves and their own rights..
Every plowman knows a good government from a bad one, from the effects of it; he knows whether the fruits of his labor be his own, and whether he enjoy them in peace and security..
...one man is only safe, while it is in the interest of another to let him alone...
The two great laws of human society, from whence all the rest derive their course and obligation, are those of equity and self-preservation: By the first all men are bound alike not to hurt one another; by the second all men have a right alike to defend themselves..
Government therefore can have no power, but such as men can give...
no man can give to another what is none of his own...
Nor has any man in the state of nature power...to take away the life of another, unless to defend his own, or what is as much his own, namely, his property..
This power therefore, which no man has, no man can transfer to another..
Nor could any man in the state of nature have a right to violate the property of another...as long as he himself was not injured by that industry and those enjoyments. No man therefore could transfer to the magistrate that right which he had not himself..
No man in his senses was ever so wild as to give an unlimited power to another to take away his life, or the means of living...But if any man restrained himself from any part of his pleasures, or parted with any portion of his acquisitions, he did it with the honest purpose of enjoying the rest with greater security, and always in subservience to his own happiness, which no man will or can willingly and intentionally give away to any other whatsoever..
The fruits of a man's honest industry are the just rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks fit:
And thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own private actions and property. A character of which no man living can divest him but by usurpation, or by his own consent..
It is a mistaken notion of government, that the interest of the majority is only to be consulted...otherwise the greater number may sell the lesser, and divide their estates among themselves; and so, instead of a society, where all peaceable men are protected, become a conspiracy of the many against the minority...
Every man is in nature and reason the judge and disposer of his own domestic affairs...Government being intended to protect men from the injuries of one another, and not to direct them in their own affairs...
Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best; and if they do not, a sufficient punishment will follow their neglect, without the magistrate's interposition and penalties...
True and impartial liberty is therefore the right of every man to pursue the natural, reasonable, and religious dictates of his own mind; to think what he will, to act as he thinks, provided he acts not to the prejudice of another; to spend his own money himself, and lay out the produce of his labor his own way; and to labor for his own pleasure and profits, and not for others who are idle, and would live...by pillaging and oppressing him, and those that are like him..
Indeed liberty is the divine source of all human happiness..
To possess, in security, the effects of our industry, is the most powerful and reasonable incitement to be industrious: And to be able to provide for our children, and to leave them all that we have, is the best motive to beget them..
But where property is precarious, labor will languish..
The privileges of thinking, saying and doing what we please, and of growing rich as we can, without any other restriction, than that by all this we hurt not the public, nor one another, are the glorious privileges of liberty; and its effects, to live in freedom, plenty, and safety..
Now the laws which encourage and increase virtue are the fixed laws of general and impartial liberty; laws, which being the rule of every man's actions, and the measures of every man's power, make honesty and equity their interest..
Where liberty is thoroughly established, and its laws equally executed, every man will find his own account in doing as he would be done unto, and no man will take from another what he would not part with himself:
Honor and advantage will follow the upright, punishment overtake the oppressor..
The property of the poor will be as sacred as the privileges of the prince, and the law will be the only bulwark of both..
Every man's honest industry and useful talents, while they are employed for the public, will be employed for himself; and while he serves himself, he will serve the public...
Force is often dangerous; and when employed to acquire what is not ours, it is always unjust; and therefore men, to procure from others what they had not before, must gain their consent...
Where there is liberty, there are encouragements to labor, because people labor for themselves, and no one can take from them the acquisitions which they make by their labor...
To live securely, happily, and independently, is the end and effect of liberty...
Nor did every any man that could live satisfactorily without a master desire to live under one...all men are animated by the passion of acquiring and defending property, because property is the best support of that independency...
as happiness is the effect of independency, and independency the effect of property; so certain property is the effect of liberty alone, and can only be secured by the laws of liberty; laws which are made by consent, and cannot be repealed without it..
All these blessings, therefore, are only the gifts and consequences of liberty, and only to be found in free countries, where power is fixed on one side, and property secured on the other; where one cannot break bounds without check, penalties or forfeiture, nor the other suffer diminution without redress...
...chose whether you will be freemen or vassals; whether you will spend your own money and estates, or let others worse than you spend them for you: Methinks the choice should be easy.
...while men are men, ambition, avarice, and vanity, and other passions, will govern their actions; in spite of all equity and reason, they will be ever usurping, or attempting to usurp, upon the liberty and fortunes of one another, and all men will be striving to enlarge their own..
Dominion will always desire increase, and property always to preserve itself; and these opposite views and interests will be causing a perpetual struggle: But by this struggle liberty is preserved...
This is not a dispute about dreams or speculations, which affect not your property; but it is a dispute whether you shall have any property, which these wretches throw away...
Would you allow the common laws of neighborhood to such as steal or plunder your goods, rob you of your money, seize your houses, drive you from your possessions, enslave your persons, and starve your families?.
No, sure, you would not..
...[pretending concern for the public good] will appear only to be a project for picking pockets, and getting away other people's money; which, in reality, at present makes, and ever did make, most of the squabbles which at any time have disturbed the world..
...government is only the union of many individuals for their common defense...
...to prevent the unfair gains and depredations of one another; which is indeed the business of the government; viz. to secure to every one his own...
A free trade, a free government, and a free liberty of conscience, are the rights and the blessings of mankind..
The first care which wise governors will always take is...to secure to them the possession of their property, upon which everything else depends..
...the product of the whole people's labor and sustenance is not suffered to be devoured by a few...
...political power...This is the greatest trust that can be committed by men to one another; and contains in it all that is valuable here on earth, the lives, the properties, the liberties, of your countrymen...
This great trust, Gentlemen, is not committed to you for your own sakes, but for the protection, security and happiness of those whom you represent..
Cato's Letters, widely echoed by our founding fathers, was a central inspiration behind what became America, and a light of liberty to the rest of the world..
As we pass the anniversary of its first appearance, it merits revisiting that commitment to liberty which we are all now beneficiaries of, and asking ourselves whether we, or our government, are still as committed to liberty.
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1355
FINANCIAL FREEDOMS KILLED BY PATRIOT ACT..
Americans’ Financial Liberty Placed at Risk by Patriot Act..
by James Bovard
The Justice Department recently revealed that the Patriot Act is being routinely used to prosecute a wide array of non-terrorist offenses. While many Americans assumed that the Patriot Act only concerned terrorists, the reality is that the act poses a grave threat to Americans’ financial privacy and property rights.
The Patriot Act makes it far easier for the feds to vacuum up Americans’ financial records without a warrant. Banks are now required to gather far more information on their clients - their background, their sources of income, their financial behavior, etc. Money Laundering Alert, a pro-government newsletter, described one financial provision of the Patriot Act as a “dream-come-true information gathering tool for U.S. agencies,” extending a “welcome mat to the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and other U.S. counterparts” to look at the new financial information on American citizens and others.
SUBJECT TO U.S. LAW
The Patriot act entitles the U.S. government to penalize anyone in the world who allegedly violates U.S. money laundering laws. If a foreign bank has a single dollar deposited or held in a U.S. bank, or wires a single dollar through the United States, the Bush administration claims jurisdiction over that bank’s operations anywhere in the world. Treasury Department chief counsel David Aufhauser warned foreign economics ministers that “there will be hell to pay” for any nation that doesn’t aid the U.S. war against terrorism.
The Justice Department is exploiting powers gained via the Patriot Act to confiscate millions of dollars from foreign banks operating in the United States in cases with no terrorist connections or allegations. The Justice Department used the Patriot Act to confiscate the bank accounts of Canadian telemarketers accused of fraud.
The Patriot Act creates other new pretexts to seize private property. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the Customs Service’s routine confiscation of money from international travelers who failed to declare their cash to the government “violates the Excessive Fines Clause [of the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights] if it is grossly disproportional to the gravity of a defendant’s offense.”
SERIOUS OFFENSE
The Patriot Act effectively overturned the Supreme Court decision by creating a new crime of “bulk cash smuggling.” Anyone who leaves or enters the U.S. without declaring that they possess more than $10,000 in cash or currency instruments can be stripped of their money and sent to federal prison for five years.
The Patriot Act declared: “The intentional transportation into or out of the United States of large amounts of currency... is the equivalent of, and creates the same harm as, the smuggling of goods.” Congress never explained how a person became a smuggler merely by transporting his own money.
Customs inspectors have used this provision to confiscate the money of over 600 outbound travelers - many, if not most, of them American citizens.
While federal officials perennially portray these seizures as strikes against terrorist money, the government has offered no information linking the confiscations to terrorist activity. Most of these “forfeitures” have nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with tightening controls on peaceful citizens.
It is paradoxical that Customs portrays seizures of outgoing currency as a major victory against terrorism when the overwhelming majority of money raised for Al Qaeda comes from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The report of the House and Senate intelligence committees into pre-9/11 federal failures concluded: “The activities of the September 11 hijackers in the United States appear to have been financed, in large part, from monies sent to them from abroad.”
In the wake of 9/11, the federal government rightfully concentrated far more resources in going after terrorist money. But the vast majority of the arrests and seizures have had little or no link to Al Qaeda.
In a speech last month at the FBI Academy, President Bush bragged, “Terror networks have lost access to some $200 million, which we have frozen or seized in more than 1,400 terrorist accounts around the world.”
WRONG STANDARD
Because the new standard of proof for asset freezes is so low, the raw amount of money frozen—rather than a gauge of victories over terrorism—is simply a measure of government power.
There is no need for the U.S. government to wait passively for the next wave of terrorist carnage.
But Congress and the Bush administration, rather than concentrating on Al Qaeda, enacted a laundry list of proposals to empower government bureaucrats to surveil on and punish citizens and businesses that pose no threat to national security. The government should concentrate on protecting Americans from aspiring foreign mass murderers and cease exploiting terrorist threats to intrude into Americans’ lives and wallets.
Tagline: James Bovard is the author of the new book, “Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice & Peace to Rid the World of Evil.”
http://www.jimbovard.com/Patriot%20Act%20vs%20Financial%20Freedom%20article.htm
PENTAGON DOMESTIC SNOOPING STILL CONTINUES?.
Congress blocked funding of the "Terrorism" Information Agency..
But it now appears it may be carried out by a different agency,
the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).
Data-mining advisory group at Defense may continue work
By William New, National Journal's Technology Daily
The independent advisory committee established to examine privacy concerns with the development of data-analysis technologies at the Defense Department is leaning toward recommending that it be made permanent, as suggestions mount that such research be continued.
But details of the committee's composition remain to be worked out, committee members said after a two-day meeting of the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC).
Meanwhile, the committee is "seeking clarification" of reports that research for a Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) may be transferred to other agencies, TAPAC Chairman Newton Minow said after a Tuesday meeting of the committee.
Out of concern for citizens' privacy, Congress stopped TIA funding in the fiscal 2004 Defense appropriations bill still to be signed by the president. Minow said the committee is interested in reports that some TIA functions will be transferred to the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). INSCOM conducts foreign intelligence work, which Congress agreed to let continue TIA-like activities.
"We understand our charge is beyond TIA," Minow said. He also noted that a confidential annex to the appropriations bill might contain more details on plans for data-mining research and that the act creating the Homeland Security Department encouraged data mining.
TAPAC has eight members, including lawyers from top national firms who have worked without pay, according to Minow. Minow, counsel to the Sidley Austin Brown and Wood law firm in Chicago, indicated after the meeting that the current committee members would not seek to continue but that an advisory body would be recommended in some form.
The committee's report and recommendations are not due until March. The next meeting will be held Nov. 20-21 in Washington.
Committee member William Coleman, a senior partner at O'Melveny and Myers in Washington, said, "I think there should be some way to keep an eye on these issues."
Committee member Zoe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation, said on Monday: "We were chartered to look at issues related to TIA in the Department of Defense. The question is whether we continue looking beyond TIA. The issues are as important today as before."
In the Tuesday meeting, TIA contractors said a need still exists for their technologies. They defended DARPA's mission as a research agency but generally agreed that the public reaction to TIA had not been well handled. Panelists described privacy technologies under development for DARPA and said their funding may be doomed by Congress's action.
"I'm assuming we are killed ... when the president signs the bill," Brian Sharkey of the contractor Hicks and Associates told the committee. But Sharkey said after the meeting that the actual language of the bill could mean that his work continues. "I imagine I will get a phone call some day" to say his project is still funded, he said.
A second panel of privacy experts and technologists debated whether privacy issues related to technology should be addressed by policy or by researchers in the lab.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0903/093003td2.htm
American style contingency lawsuits growing in the UK..
'The Protection of the Foolhardy or Reckless Few'?.
By Scott Norvell Published 10/02/2003
LONDON .. To an expatriate accustomed to the excesses of American trial lawyers and the courts that indulge them, it is a novel notion .. a panel of senior British judges says it's high time people stop whining and start to take responsibility for their own actions.
In an opinion decrying the culture of blame and compensation creeping across the Atlantic, the judges said it's time to stop belly-aching when your coffee is too hot. Time to stop crabbing when you trip on a cracked sidewalk. It's time, they said, to stop suing at the drop of a hat.
The scolding came in an opinion in the case of John Tomlinson, who in 1995 was paralyzed when he ignored No Swimming signs and dove into a lake in Cheshire County. The judges agreed that Mr. Tomlinson suffered a terrible tragedy, but refused to accept the idea that the county was to blame and should pay up.
"It is not, and never should be, the policy of the law to require the protection of the foolhardy or reckless few (and therefore) to deprive, or interfere with, the enjoyment by the remainder of society of the liberties and amenities to which they are right entitled," the Appellate Committee from the House of Lords opined.
The judges aren't the only ones concerned about the expansion of what here is called "the compensation culture." Scurrilous lawsuits make headlines almost daily. A woman sues a travel agent after a coconut falls on her head on a remote beach. A homeowner who shoots and wings a burglar breaking into his house is then sued by the criminal. A cop sues a widower because he was traumatized by seeing the man's wife die in a car crash. You can't make this stuff up.
Some of the fear of money-grubbing plaintiffs run amok may be just that: fear. The Institute of Actuaries last year put the annual costs of liability claims at £10 billion a year, increasing 15 percent annually. But another report by Datamonitor found the number of complaints declining more recently.
Most here blame the 1995 introduction of no-win, no-fee litigation for the proliferation of ambulance-chasing lawyers, along with changing public opinions. It is now acceptable .. even expected .. that people will sue when something goes awry. The mere fear of these lawsuits, warranted or not, is tangible enough to be quickly sapping the country of some of the things that make it so special.
For a father of three young children coming from America, one of the more remarkable things over here is the playgrounds. A new adventure playground in Central London's Holland Park, for example, is full of the sort of amusements that can .. and probably do on occasion .. smash little fingers, sprain little ankles and bloody little noses. There's a massive tire swing with room for about half a dozen kids. There are rope swings and a spider web-like maze of wires and platforms dangling four feet off the ground. All sorts of things that make a playground great; things that would never fly in America.
Holland Park's new fantasyland notwithstanding, the U.K. is well on the road to replicating the regime of America's safety police. A survey by the Children's Play Council last year found that many public playgrounds have banned such stalwarts as tree-climbing, skateboards and tag. Rugby is being removed from some school programs, and a game called conkers, in which players whack at horse chestnuts dangling from a string, is being sidelined.
And it's not just schools. Fireworks displays are being cancelled because insurers won't cover the liability, costs of which have risen five-fold since the mid-1980s. Even an event in which locals chase wheels of cheese down a hill in Gloucestershire was said to be scuppered because of safety concerns.
The Appellate Committee judges must be fans of cheese-rolling or conkers, because it is precisely this sort of outcome to the spreading compensation culture that they fret about. If John Tomlinson wants to do bone-headed things, they said in their opinion, that's quite all right. But don't come crying to us when you crack your noggin.
Scott Norvell is the London Bureau Chief for Fox News.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/100203A.html
America is no longer the land of the free.
America’s Caesar..
A book by Gregg Durand
In Senate Report 93-549, the U.S. Congress made the astonishing admission that, since at least 9 March 1933, the American people have lived under a state of national emergency (martial law)..
Instead of a federal Government of delegated and limited powers, what now operates from Washington, D.C. is a centralized military despotism which claims ultimate sovereignty over its citizens and rules them by statute in all cases whatsoever..
Beginning with the usurpations of Abraham Lincoln, this book explains how the so-called emergency powers of the President of the United States developed over a period of seven decades and finally culminated in the virtual supplanting of the Constitution by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal democracy..
The author draws heavily from a wealth of rare political literature from the past two centuries, as well as long-forgotten Government documents to paint an unsettling picture of American history and to show why nothing ever seems to change in Washington, no matter which political party is in power..
TERRORISM AND TYRANNY..
Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil..
James Bovard
Palgrave Macmillan
Political Science & International Relations
ISBN: 1403963681
Being at war with an abstraction generates a multitude of perplexities, not the least of which is the problem of how one is to identify enemy combatants. The new Homeland Security Department has tried to be helpful, advising Americans to be wary of people who become impatient while waiting in line to pay for groceries, people who recently might have shaved off a beard, and people whose faces show no emotion but whose eyes appear to be focused and alert.
In U.S. airports, meanwhile, flight schedules are being disrupted by women wearing something called an underwire bra, which routinely sets off the metal detectors. Typically, these women are not terrorists but become unreasonably hostile when guards undertake to "pat them down" to ascertain whether the so-called underwire bra is in fact a concealed weapon.
Even in the worst of times Americans usually find something to laugh at, a means of relieving the pressure. The gallows humor of James Bovard, a bright fellow with a sharp wit, helps to underscore the more outrageous blunders and miscalculations that have been committed by the several intelligence communities and law-enforcement agencies, the opportunistic power grabs by high-ranking bureaucrats, and the heavy damage inflicted on the Bill of Rights not by terrorists, but by friendly fire from both the Justice Department and the White House, all under the banner of defending freedom. Bovard finds much that he considers ridiculous and he does not shrink from ridiculing it.
The most conspicuous example, in his view, is the centerpiece of the new maximum-security America, the USA-PATRIOT Act. The letters stand for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," and the acronym "PATRIOT" was chosen presumably to suggest that true loyalists shouldn't quibble over the assortment of rights and freedoms that would have to be dumped into the Potomac in order to equip the government with the tools it deems "appropriate," which turns out to mean: largely unencumbered by constitutional restraints.
Bovard argues that expanded powers amount to a reward for incompetence and misconduct on the part of federal agents who failed, with tragic results, to uncover and prevent the 9/11 plot. This is of central importance in Bovard's analysis of the response to 9/11 --- the fact, which has been affirmed by the Joint Intelligence Committee, that the government had all of the information it needed to detect and block a conspiracy to hijack four airliners. Some of the information was lost, Bovard says, and the rest, which was in Arabic, was put into storage to await the arrival at some future time of a translator. In any event, he says, after the government failed to analyze and exploit the information in its possession, it granted itself the right to seize vastly more information and to treat all Americans as if they were collaborating with the terrorists.
A case in point is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978. It established a less demanding legal standard of probable cause --- diluting probability to the realm of possibility --- for spying on foreign agents within the United States and a separate court (FISC) to oversee that surveillance. At Ashcroft's urging, the Patriot Act extended FISA's authority to include surveillance of American citizens, effectively bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
As a libertarian, Bovard objects strongly to the act's broad powers, which breach fundamental provisions of the judicial system, particularly those dealing with privacy, presumption of innocence, due process and judicial review. At the same time, he cannot resist pointing out the irony of the President's repeated assertion that the nation is "fighting for freedom," when the government itself --- notably the Attorney General --- has made clear that the Constitution only impedes the fight.
Under the aegis of the Patriot Act, foreign nationals may be held in custody for indefinite periods without access to legal counsel. FBI agents may now walk into a bookstore or library and demand records of books purchased, checked out or simply asked about --- highly invasive violations of privacy that had been strictly prohibited before passage of the Patriot Act.
Bovard is deeply concerned by the expanded federal surveillance under which Americans now live their daily lives. Old rules are no longer relevant when the FBI turns on its DCS 1000 email wiretapping system, which is capable of scanning and collecting millions of emails per second, filtered or not. Because Americans may as easily be terrorists as anyone else, every American is potentially guilty and therefore to be regarded as a suspect, if only in some not-yet-committed crime. To obtain an even closer look, the FBI uses software called "Magic Lantern," which enables it to monitor and record all keystrokes on targeted computers. The Patriot Act also permits "national roving wiretaps" of telephones not limited to persons who have in some way aroused more suspicion than the average U.S. citizen, but covering large geographical segments of the population.
Yet another tool is the National Security Letter, a subpoena letter issued without a court order that compels the recipient --- an individual, business, organization or institution --- to surrender all confidential or proprietary information, including records of bank accounts, Internet usage, phone calls, email logs, lists of purchases, and so on. Persons receiving such letters are prohibited from telling anyone. Disclosure carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.
The government's reasoning is that in the post 9/11 context the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches must be reinterpreted. What is deemed unreasonable in time of peace, Ashcroft argues, shouldn't necessarily be viewed as unreasonable at a time when America still faces the threat of further attacks.
Bovard accepts the argument but not the extent to which its conclusion has been used to justify essentially unrestricted spying on U.S. citizens. In any event, he says, allowing the government to nullify constitutional rights in defending the country against terrorism isn't the correct response to the terrorist threat because it fails to address the cause, which he says is U.S. meddling in the affairs of foreign governments.
Unable to display concrete evidence that America is bringing terrorism to its knees, Bovard says, the various governmental news providers have begun to rely on numbers as indicators of progress, in the same way that enemy body counts became integral to reports issued during the Vietnam War to persuade the public that U.S. forces were making headway. Now the FBI or the President announces triumphantly how many wiretaps and searches have been carried out, how many persons of "special interest" have been detained, how many bank accounts have been frozen, and how much money was in all of those accounts. Of course, the enemy body counts turned out to be largely irrelevant, as were figures on wiretaps, detainees and frozen bank accounts, without additional information such as how many of the persons whose phones were tapped turned out to have terrorist links. As it is, Americans can only speculate as to whether the numbers signify success or simply activity.
Bovard's position is firmly established on a foundation of classical liberalism and libertarianism to which he is deeply committed, and he is profoundly troubled by some of the measures taken by the Bush administration to secure the nation against terrorist attack. Yet the chief value of this book rests on the author's reporting, not on argument or interpretation. He has fully answered a good reporter's basic question: "What are the facts?" His sources are credible and his presentation, except for an occasional sarcastic comment, is objective and straightforward. Every item of information is properly declared and accounted for in 68 pages of endnotes.
One may disagree with his conclusions --- that the price exacted by the federal government for enhanced security is exorbitantly and unreasonably high, that the government has trashed principles that defined this nation and made it unique, and that what has been taken away might never be fully restored.
Reaching the closing pages, readers may recall a much-quoted statement made at a news conference years ago in Saigon. Explaining to correspondents why a particular South Vietnamese village was no more, a military spokesman said simply, "We had to destroy it in order to save it."
--- Reviewed by Harold V. Cordry
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/1403963681.asp
BIG BROTHER TO WATCH YOUR U.S. MAIL..
"Return to sender" takes on new meaning.
'Smart stamps' next in war on terrorism..
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Sending an anonymous love letter or an angry note to your congressman? The U.S. Postal Service will soon know who you are..
Beginning with bulk or commercial mail, the Postal Service will require "enhanced sender identification" for all discount-rate mailings, according to the notice published in the Oct. 21 Federal Register. The purpose of identifying senders is to provide a more efficient tracking system, but more importantly, to "facilitate investigations into the origin of suspicious mail."
The Postal Service began to look into updating mailing procedures after the anthrax scares in October 2001 when an unknown person or persons sent several U.S. senators and news organizations envelopes filled with the deadly toxin. Two post office workers died from handling envelopes laced with anthrax.
"This is a first step to make the mail more secure," said Joel Walker, customer service support analyst for the mailing-standards office.
But what has privacy advocates concerned is a report by a presidential commission that recommends the post office develop technology to identify all individual senders, which is directly referenced in the Federal Register notice. The proposed regulations are open for public comment through Nov. 20 to the Postal Service.
"The President's Commission on the United States Postal Service recently recommended the use of sender identification for every piece of mail," the Federal Register stated. "Requiring sender-identification for discount-rate mail is an initial step on the road to intelligent mail."
Also cited in the notice are two congressional committee recommendations urging the Postal Service to explore the concept of sender identification, including the "feasibility of using unique, traceable identifiers applied by the creator of the mailpiece."
"We're not ready to go there yet, but we are trying to make an initial step to make all mail, including discount mail, easily identified as to who the sender is," Mr. Walker said.
"Smart stamps" or personalized stamps with an embedded digital code would identify the sender, destination and class.
In October 2001, a letter was sent to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, from a bogus New Jersey address. In theory, smart stamps would allow authorities to better identify would-be assailants.
"The postal notice itself says this is the first step to identify all senders, so this is not a matter of paranoia, this is reality. The post office is moving towards identification requirements for everyone," said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Mr. Hoofnagle scoffed at the notion identification could prevent crimes such as the anthrax attacks on members of Congress and news media two years ago.
"Anyone resourceful enough to obtain anthrax can get a stamp" without going through the new channels, Mr. Hoofnagle said.
A Treasury Department report from the Mailing Industry Task Force also recommended that "the industry promote development of the 'intelligent' mail piece by collaborating with the Postal Service to implement standards and systems to make every mail piece — including packages — unique and trackable."
"What happens if I buy stamps and you need one, is it legal for me to give it to you?" Mr. Hoofnagle said.
Ari Schwartz, associate director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said intelligent mail can play an important role and improve the mail system.
However, privacy issues must be seriously addressed, and moving forward with the rules on bulk mail could alleviate some concerns, he said.
"There is a right to anonymity in the mail. If you look back in the history of this country, the mail has played an important role in free expression and political speech and anonymous mail has provided that," Mr. Schwartz said.
Capitol Hill staffers dismissed the potential for abuse by politicians who might use the system to track anonymous critics.
"A petty staff member, maybe, but I doubt a member of Congress would do that," said one Senate aide.
Added a senior House staffer: "A politician getting even with someone? Nah, it just saves us the trouble of having to reply to the letter."
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031026-124606-8419r.htm
Liberal Hypocrisy on the Unpatriotic PATRIOT Act..
By Stuart K. Hayashi, 10/28/2003 12:08:53 AM
I overall support the War on Terrorism, but not the PATRIOT Act. ("PATRIOT" stands for "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.")
This ironically-named edict defies the Founding Fathers' laissez-faire philosophy by bestowing the federal government with powers that abrogate rights to life, liberty, and property.
It legalizes, de-jure, federal spying on everyone's phone conversations, emails, book purchases, and bank records, all without warrants, ignoring that the fourth amendment prohibits our government from making "unreasonable searches or seizures."
Moreover, Arab immigrants have been detained, thrown into cells, again unwarrantedly, and have been held indefinitely. They should be treated with the same legal procedures as regular citizens.
Republican-haters complain about this legislation. And they'd be right to do so, except for their own movement's shortcomings in this controversy.
First, many liberals grievances against the Patriot Act are, primarily, a cynical ploy to win popularity contests in the public eye.
Hence the gleeful implication that all right-wingers agree with the Patriot Act. From what some say, one wouldn't know that the New York Times's token-conservative columnist, William Safire, and Republican Congressman Ron Paul both harshly criticize it.
Worse is the Democrats' hypocrisy on the Constitution.
Welfare-state liberal policies continually violated individual property rights since 1890. So it's silly for liberals to invoke the fourth amendment, as it its chief purpose was always to protect private property.
For British soldiers to arbitrarily search Americans' houses, and for Republican U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft (the Patriot Act's staunchest proponent) to arbitrarily snoop on people's phone/email conversations, is an attack on the right to private property, as houses and phones belong to their respective owners.
Ownership not only entails that no one can rightfully steal my phone/computer, but that I'm the one who makes the rules over its usage, meaning that no one, not even the government, has the right to do anything to it without my permission, unless it has probable cause to believe I may harm someone else's life, liberty, or property.
Speakers on the ends of phone lines mutually consent to participation in the electronically-amplified conversation. No third parties (i.e., governments) can ethically barge in through speaking or eavesdropping on the exchange without the other phone/e-mail-users' consent.
One may say that this isn't about property, but privacy. But privacy is itself a property right -- because one owns his life and belongings, he has the right to peaceably do what he pleases without others' incessant monitoring (a form of harassment).
One's exclusive self-ownership is also the reason why Arab detainees and other suspects deserve fair trials, with the nature of the criminal charges disclosed to them, before long-term imprisonment.
Yet ACLU president and Patriot-Act-critic Nadine Strossen, who poses as a strict constitutionalist, asserts there's no right to own a handgun and that a shopping mall's owner shouldn't have final say over what happens in his own mall. Constitutional double-standards?
And look at how Ashcroft bullies bookstores and banks by demanding that they hand him records of what their customers/clients purchase or deposit, respectively, because of his presumption of guilt over these businesses' patrons. An Arab-American chemist can be put on the FBI's "watch list" if he buys books about explosives.
Liberals complain now, but the truth is that the administration of Bill Clinton -- the same president who claimed his own privacy was infringed upon -- planned to implement this policy of spying on book purchases in the year 2000. The only nationally-famous person who publicly denounced this was non-liberal reporter John Stossel. Leftists thanked him by launching a smear campaign against him for his other disturbingly-accurate stories.
Plus, the Clinton administration proposed spying on bank records as early as 1999, ostensibly to catch drug traffickers. Only the free-market magazine "Reason" objected (just as it now protests Ashcroft).
So liberal activists shriek at the Bush administration for spying on bank records and book purchases, while they were conspicuously silent when the Clinton administration asked Congress to approve these very measures.
Plus, whatever Ashcroft's faults, it was Janet Reno, attorney general for the Clinton administration, who ordered the kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez, with a gun pointing in the boy's face, and it was she who let FBI agents run so wild in fighting the Branch Davidian cultists in Waco, Texas, that agents ran over Davidians with an army tank.
So why don't liberal Democrats scorn Reno as much as they do Ashcroft? Party label.
I do oppose the unpatriotic Patriot Act. But the hypocrisy of some of its liberal opponents deserves attention, too.
Stuart K. Hayashi graduated from Hawaii Pacific University as an Entrepreneurial Studies major in May 2003, and he is the former president of the Reason Club of Honolulu, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either organization. He is the founder of a news Web log, "The Fiftieth Star," at: http://50thstar.blogspot.com to be unofficially centered around activities at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His older editorials can be seen at: http://reason_club.tripod.com/stuart_editorials.html and he can be reached at: mailto:radical_individualist@hotmail.com
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?6bcc4376-ccf1-4b7c-b604-01b783071869
AMERICAN PROPERTY RIGHTS THREATENED..
Who owns your property: You or the government?.
Socialism Threatens Property Rights In America.!
By Gordon Bishop on 10/28/03
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More and more I get the feeling that New Jersey’s judges and politicians are moving toward the mind-set of socialists and communists.
The issue is property rights.
Who owns your property: You or your government?
Of course, you do. Our Constitution says so. This is America. Not the communist People’s Republic of China, or Cuba, or the old Soviet Union. We are a free and independent nation.
No longer.
In more and more court decisions, judges are willing to confiscate your property under the “eminent domain” rule that permits the taking of property for such public uses as transportation corridors (highways, rail lines, bridges, etc.).
When government seizes your property under “eminent domain,” government must pay you the fair market value of your property.
Well, it always doesn’t work that way.
Take the recent land-use case in North Brunswick. Local officials decided to usurp a property owner’s rights by condemning his 104-acre farm for “open space.”
That’s right – open space!
What’s happening is that local officials believe they can now condemn property for open space. In the case of New Brunswick, local officials believed it was in the public interest to condemn a farmer’s property so the township could have some ball fields and walking trails on it.
The farmer already had plans to sell his land to U.S. Home Corp. of Houston to build 400 homes for senior citizens.
Yes, our deserving “seasoned” citizens who need housing as our population becomes grayer and grayer.
Too bad, you old folks! Ball fields and trails have a higher prirority in North Brunswick than the quality of life of our seniors.
State Superior Court Judge James Hurley, a Democrat, ruled that North Brunswick could use its right of “eminent domain” to purchase the land and preserve it.
So much for farmer Edwin Otken and his dream of a decent seniors community to serve New Jersey’s aging population.
North Brunswick has agreed to buy the large tract of farmland for its “appraised value” of $6 million. The farmer says U.S. Home Corp. has offered several million dollars more.
This is not an issue over money, although the farmer and U.S. Home Corp. are certainly getting the royal shaft from a handful of local officials and a liberal judge.
Liberalism in America in recent years has come to represent the principles of socialism, Marxism and, yes, even Communism, where the state assumes all power over the people.
Today’s liberal politcal system is about more and more Big Government, and less and less Freedom for the working taxpayers. Government forgets that without the working taxpayers there can be no government, large or small.
How does a little, old farmer fight the massive and intimitating government bureaucracies and their liberal, anti-constitutional collaborators – the judicial system itself.
Forget about our elected politicians. Most major decisions today are made by the courts – not Congress. Nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and nine Justices on the Supreme Courts of our states. They have become the absolute rulers of our destiny.
Our sacred U.S. Constitution has become fair game for liberals rewriting American history with each socialist-Marxist (and even Communist) decision.
We may soon have to change our beloved national identity to AMERIKA!
If our national Constitution does not prevail, we, the working taxpayers, will find ourselves in the same situation as Cuba, China and the former Soviet Union.
Is this what we really want from those we elect to public office, who, in turn, appoint our judges, who, in turn, pervert and subvert our Constitution?
Wake up, America, before all of our Freedoms are gone, and forgotten!
Click here to send feedback to the author
Gordon Bishop is a national award-winning author, historian and syndicated columnist.
Copyright © 2002-2003 Gordon Bishop.
LINK: http://www.americandaily.com/item/3225
an incredible word..
doomed..
must be the night..
have a great time ben..
Mr.Ed..
Maybe it is time to start a new one..
Wise..having had a little experience..
Fools..not realizing they haven't had enough experience.
There is Tranquility in Ignorance..
But Servitude is its Partner..
America’s Caesar..
A book by Gregg Durand
America is no longer the land of the free.
In Senate Report 93-549, the U.S. Congress made the astonishing admission that, since at least 9 March 1933, the American people have lived under a state of national emergency (martial law)..
Instead of a federal Government of delegated and limited powers, what now operates from Washington, D.C. is a centralized military despotism which claims ultimate sovereignty over its citizens and rules them by statute in all cases whatsoever..
Beginning with the usurpations of Abraham Lincoln, this book explains how the so-called emergency powers of the President of the United States developed over a period of seven decades and finally culminated in the virtual supplanting of the Constitution by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal democracy..
The author draws heavily from a wealth of rare political literature from the past two centuries, as well as long-forgotten Government documents to paint an unsettling picture of American history and to show why nothing ever seems to change in Washington, no matter which political party is in power..
hawaii..sounds like fun..
here's another one..
http://www.barrettrifles.com/rifles_82A1.html
OB..one more for the road..
the NSA can have my private key when they pry it from my cold, dead neurons..
if we have to kill 12 people to save 1 human life it will have been worth it..
banning assault weapons to fight crime is as stupid as banning condoms to prevent rape..
virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed..
not because they are the law..
but because reasonable people would do that anyway..
if you obey a law simply because it is the law..
that's a pretty likely sign that it shouldn't be a law..
the ultimate result of shielding men from the results of folly is to fill the world with fools..
the U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now..
if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put Clinton there?.
it's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong..
the welfare state reduces a citizen to a client..
subordinates them to a bureaucrat.
and subjects them to rules that are anti- work, anti-family, anti-opportunity and anti-property... humans forced to suffer under such anti-human rules naturally develop pathologies..
the evening news is the natural result of the welfare state..
Unknown
When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs..
When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent..
When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun..
Now they've come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all..
Tim Freeman tsf@cs.cmu.edu
people who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence..
they're begging for rule by brute force..
when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right..'
guns ended that..
and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work..
L. Neil Smith, _The Probability Broach_
does anyone know?.
what time it is..
one can not be told..
if it is not known..
nice pics!!
this board goes..
for the gusto..
it is just a program phil..
part of the plan..
propagated..
since childhood..
the question is..
what are we going to do about it?.
thg..cut and paste..
a travesty happening before our eyes..
need one say more?.
the mission .. is before us ..
the common man does not have time..
to count the ways..
good post my friend..
Keep in mind that it is all a fraud..
For years, many have criticized me for referring to the United States as being Communist..
I agree that such is only a word and is only good if such is defined..
As I have stated in my book The Red Amendment and other writings I have done, the only true litmus test to determine if a country is communist is the Communist Manifesto..
I suppose if people want to believe what they hear on the TV by the Elite owned media (emphasis on that) on what a Communist is, that is their business; although I highly advise that they not take the Elite’s or their minion’s word for it..
In accordance with what I have established (call it my opinion if you would like), recently another researcher sent me the below information..
After reading the info you will further see that you are being lied to..
While reading the following, keep in mind that no citizen of one of the United States of America was controlled by acts of Congress before the so-called Civil War (and implementation of the 14th Amendment); and further keep in mind that the United States of America is NOT a nation internally; it is only such ‘externally’ in regard to the US Constitution (some internal affairs also, but this does not negate that each state is a country and nation of which carries to each a nationality, see US Style Manual (1984), Chap 5.23)..
Note that I have edited out some dialogue that is not relevant in proving the point made. Also, James did not want his full name published or address given due to being busy with other matters.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would have imagined that my thoughts on this assembly have been made clear...so in review...
The ONLY legislative power ordained, established or granted by the Constitution for the United States of America is vested in a in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. This approximates the representative body referred to in the Articles of Confederation as "the United States in Congress assembled." THIS authority to make law is limited by enumeration but the "Penumbra Clause" (as well as the Commerce Clause) has been greatly tested to circumvent constitutional prohibitions up to and extending to granting police power to the state.
There is NOTHING in the Constitution for the United States of America that says that any politician associated with this body actually represents the people or anything other than their own interests. The lawmaking power itself is not vested exclusively in this body and law may be made by a party having jurisdiction in Court. THAT IS TO SAY that, arguably, an Act of Congress or the Constitution for the United States of America is not law until such time as it is affirmed upon the record in the one supreme Court or tribunal created by the congress ...the Senators are supposed to be chosen by the legislative bodies of the individual state territories and the Representatives are selected by the people of the states to the ratio of one to every thirty thousand free persons. This is no longer the case and both senators and representatives are elected by popular vote regardless of the intent of the Constitution for the United States of America or the PEOPLE that wrote it.
THUS we have senate representatives and a token body of congressmen in the house where an assembly of eight thousand and five hundred public officials should sit. The congress is no longer a constitutional institution but a supreme soviet.
Supreme Soviet noun 1936: the highest legislative body of a nation (as Russia or the former Soviet Union)
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
IN KEEPING with my developing policy of refusing to recognize corporate entities as gods pursuant to the first article of amendment I cannot perceive of this cabal of fattened publicans as anything but a conspiracy against the Constitution for the United States of America.
For the record, neither the legitimate legislature nor the rump congress can make law that cannot be made and all Acts of Congress are written manifestations of law that already existed.
James
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Congress is the Supreme Soviet. Well, isn’t that SPECIAL.
REMEMBER: “The Communists are further reproached with doing away with countries and nationalities”—Communist Manifesto, 1848; and “The COMMunists are the Capitalists (COMMercialists) and the Capitalists (COMMercialists) are the COMMunists”—Tony Brown
ALSO, keep in mind that it is all a fraud.
Regards, LB Bork
Standoff brewing over land rights in Michigan..
http://lylebarkley.blogspot.com
Is not Cooperative Federalism great!.
Note: The term Cooperative Federalism is just the United States Government’s way of saying Socialism/Communism.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
Middle American News - www.manews.org
September 2003
Congressional Spending
Here's just a few of the projects that the policy genuises in Congress decided to spend tax money on during fiscal 2003:
$725,000 for the "Please Touch" Museum in Philadelphia
$700,000 for the Silver Ring Thing Program in Sewickley, Pennsylvania
$50,000 for the Philadelphia Foundation's Sports and Entertainment Career Expo
$800,000 for the Davenport, Iowa, Music History Museum
$250,000 for Communications, Inc., to implement the National Preschool Anger Management Project in Iowa (Nothing worse than angry toddlers!)
$300,000 for Iowa State University's Kitchen Design Project (How would kitchens ever get designed without federal cash?)
$1,700,000 for West Liberty State College in West Virginia to link dormitories to the Internet
$50,000 for Wisconsin's Flambeau School District to create a national parks virtual reality education program
$50,000 for the Nevada Women's Fund in Reno (Women in Reno are apparently underfunded.)
$750,000 for the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
$350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio
$90,000 for the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas
$400,000 for the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum
$202,5000 for the National Peanut Festival Agriculture Arena in Dothan, Alabama
$1,620,000 to develop facilities for the Methane Biogases Capture and Reuse Initiative in Toledo, Ohio
$90,000 for improvements at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles
$2,000,000 for the Open World Leadership Center, whose past programs included flying Russian political and community leaders to the U.S. to attend the Festival Flea Market in Florida
$4,000,000 for the International Fertilizer Development Center in Alabama
$2,750,000 for U.N programs called "U.N. Fund for Technical Cooperation in Human Rights," and the "U.N. Development Fund for Women" (Men apparently develop all by themselves, without U.N. help.)
$500,000 for the International Coffee Organization, comprising countries that import and export coffee, dedicated to "Improving conditions in the world coffee economy."
Best and Worst
The Tax Foundation ranks states according to their state and local tax burdens. The ten best and worst states are as follows:
The Ten Tax Friendliest States:
Alaska, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, South Dakota, Nevada, Florida, Oregon
The Ten Most Burdensome States:
Maine, New York, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Utah, Ohio, Vermont, Connecticut
Ed..That figure popped up a couple of times..
in researching other topics..
just stuck in my head..
do you have a more accurate figure?
Your post has much truth to it with regards to knowing and caring enough to actually do something about it..
The way I see it..
The more we know about our Dejure position, the better able we will be to defend that position in a Defacto court..
This is where I see the war of..
"We the slaves vs. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA..
Right now the lights are on but nobody is home in the Republic..
The forgotten meaning of America..
Put the Independence back in Independence Day..
By Michael S. Berliner
America's cities and towns will soon fill with parades, fireworks, and barbecues..
They will be celebrating the Fourth of July, the 227th birthday of America..
But one hopes that .. on this second post September 11 Independence Day .. the speeches will contain fewer bromides and more attention to exactly what is being celebrated..
The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but America's leaders and intellectuals have been trying to move us further and further away from the meaning of Independence Day, away from the philosophy that created this country..
What we hear from politicians, intellectuals, and the media is that independence is passé, that we've reached a new age of interdependence..
We hear demands for mandatory volunteering to serve others, for sacrifice to the nation..
We hear demands from trust-busters that successful companies be punished for being greedy and not serving society..
But this is not the message of America..
It is the direct opposite of why America became a beacon of hope for the truly oppressed throughout the world..
They have come here to escape poverty and dictatorship; they have come here to live their own lives, where they aren't owned by the state, the community, or the tribe..
Independence Day is a critically important title..
It signifies the fundamental meaning of this nation, not just of the holiday..
The American Revolution remains unique in human history.. a revolution .. and a nation .. founded on a moral principle, the principle of individual rights..
Jefferson at Philadelphia, and Washington at Valley Forge, pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor..
For what?
Not for mere separation from England, not .. like most rebels .. for the freedom to set up their own tyranny..
In fact, Britain's tyranny over the colonists was mild compared to what most current governments do to their citizens..
Jefferson and Washington fought a war for the principle of independence, meaning the moral right of an individual to live his own life as he sees fit..
Independence was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence as the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..
What are these rights?
The right to life means that every individual has a right to his own independent life, that one's life belongs to oneself, not to others to use as they see fit..
The right to liberty means the right to freedom of action, to act on one's own judgment, the right not to have a gun pointed at one's head and be forced to do what someone else commands..
And the right to the pursuit of happiness means that an individual may properly pursue his own happiness, e.g., his own career, friends, hobbies, and not exist as a mere tool to serve the goals of others..
The Founding Fathers did not proclaim a right to the attainment of happiness, knowing full well that such a policy would carry with it the obligation of others to make one happy and result in the enslavement of all to all..
The Declaration of Independence was a declaration against servitude, not just servitude to the Crown but servitude to anyone..
(That some signers still owned slaves does not negate the fact that they established the philosophy that doomed slavery..)
Political independence is not a primary..
It rests on a more fundamental type of independence.. the independence of the human mind..
It is the ability of a human being to think for himself and guide his own life that makes political independence possible and necessary..
The government as envisaged by the Founding Fathers existed to protect the freedom to think and to act on one's thinking..
If human beings were unable to reason, to think for themselves, there would be no autonomy or independence for a government to protect..
It is this independence that defines the American Revolution and the American spirit..
To the Founding Fathers, there was no authority higher than the individual mind, not King George, not God, not society..
Reason, wrote Ethan Allen, is the only oracle of man, and Thomas Jefferson advised us to fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God..
That is the meaning of independence.. trust in your own judgment, in reason; do not sacrifice your mind to the state, the church, the race, the nation, or your neighbors..
Independence is the foundation of America..
Independence is what should be celebrated on Independence Day..
That is the legacy our Founding Fathers left us..
It is a legacy we should keep, not because it is a legacy, but because it is right and just..
It has made America the freest and most prosperous country in history..
http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=OMEX&read=2633
But until then .. all we get is..
A Good Citizen in a Bad Country..
A Chapter from
The Secret Freedom Fighter
by Jefferson Mack
Paladin Press, 1986
The thing a leader who wants to deny you freedom loves most is a good citizen..
A good citizen obeys the law-every law..
A good citizen works hard-at whatever job the government tells him he is supposed to work at..
A good citizen pays his taxes-even if he doesn't have enough left over to feed his kids..
A good citizen never complains-no matter how a stupid or crude government official treats him..
A good citizen obeys the rules-all the rules..
Give a tyrant enough good citizens and he will rule forever, fat and happy while the good citizens sweat and suffer and die to make sure the tyrant keeps the good life.
Tyrants and their lackeys spend a great deal of time and effort trying to convince the people they rule that a moral person must be a good citizen. Back in the Dark Ages they called it the "Divine Right of Kings." Nowadays it's called patriotic duty, or civic responsibility, or given a dozen other different names, but it all adds up to the argument that any decent, honorable person must put the interests of all the people-that really means the interest of the man in charge--above his own personal interests.
Bad Citizens Have More Fun Because They Are More Free.
A true democracy is supposed to have free citizens, not good citizens. So, the day you wake up and find You don't have all the freedom you deserve, the first thing you have to do is stop being a good citizen. If you can't be a free citizen, then you want to be a bad citizen.
Any tyrant who's got a country full of bad citizens has got a problem. A tyrant has got all sorts of ways of dealing with a rebel, a criminal, a jungle fighter, an insurgent, or a political activist. They stand out, easily identified, almost as if they had signs hung around their chests. You find those kinds of people in jails, dark alleys, cellars, forests, and jungles. But a bad citizen-how do you tell him from a good citizen? A bad citizen isn't a bad person. He wants to keep feeding his kids, so he'll keep going to work at the factory, or planting the potato crop, or milking the cows.
What a bad citizen won't do is help the government make his life miserable. He avoids making it easy for the people in power. He continually tries to maximize the freedom he has, even if he has to break or ignore a few laws once in a while.
A bad citizen files his income tax return but cheats. A bad citizen sees a crime against the state, but he doesn't report it.
A bad citizen turns the heat up when the government says he should turn it down. A bad citizen loses his census form, or fills it out wrong. A bad citizen flushes too much paper down the john in a public building. A bad citizen that's got a government job takes all his sick leave, goofs off every chance he gets, and hauls paper clips home for the kids to play with.
A bad citizen doesn't spend all his time trying to make the work of the government more difficult, but he doesn't sacrifice his own pleasures or happiness voluntarily just because the government tells him his sacrifices are in the common good.
Too many bad citizens make government almost impossible.
That's one big reason why the Soviet Union doesn't work very well. Too many Soviet citizens have realized they are never going to get a fair share out of the government, and they have stopped being good citizens. They look out for themselves rather than the good of the state.
A smart bad citizen won't let himself get caught being bad. He won't brag to his friends and neighbors about what a bad citizen he is. He won't tell the local commissar how proud he is of being a bad citizen. He won't even tell his kids he enjoys being a bad citizen. He wants it kept a secret.
In a free democratic society, we don't have much use for bad citizens. They endanger Our highways, litter our public parks, embarrass our womenfolk, and make us mad. A free society is supposed to be made up of good citizens who take their share of the burdens of taxes and social duties and get their share of the benefits of living free.
That's a true free and democratic society, the kind the people who wrote our constitution wanted to give us. In every other kind of society, good citizens are suckers. They never get back what they put into it. So, if the government is interfering with your freedom to do whatever you want to do with your time and money, don't be a sucker. Learn to be a bad citizen.
The more bad citizens there are, the harder it is going to be for the people who stole freedom to stay in power. The tyrant's problem is that he is always outnumbered. He can get the guns and the thugs to use them. He can build concentration camps and forced labor camps. He'll have spies and prison gulags. But he can't put everybody in jail. He has to have people to till the fields, drive the trucks, work in the factories, and staff his bureaucracy. So he has got to convince most of the people that life isn't all that bad and that there is hope of a better future.
He will go after the visible troublemakers, the guys who run around telling good citizens they ought to throw the bums out, or the ones who fight him from the hills. Those kinds of people are in a small minority, so they are easy to find and kill or cart off to camps. With no newspapers to tell the truth about the tyrant, with nobody daring to talk out loud, the ####### will count on the good citizen to continue to act like the good citizen.
Good Citizens Make Tyrants Possible.
Nazi Germany wasn't filled with people who wanted to throw Jews into bonfires, make slaves of Eastern Europeans, or rule the world from Berlin. Nazi Germany was filled with good citizens, and Hitler did everything he could to make all those good citizens think they were better off with him in charge, even if they did have to give up a few freedoms.
Hitler was more frightened that all those good citizens might stop being good citizens than he was of the Allied armies. He catered to them, he entertained them, he promised them better things. The Germans kept being good citizens right up to the bitter end.
Poland, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, Chile, Iran, and Iraq are filled with good citizens, all of them hoping that they will help things get better by being good citizens. Only things keep getting worse. The good citizen works harder but gets less to eat, has less fun, enjoys life less, and has less hope for a better future.
The only time things get better is when a whole lot of people start acting like bad citizens. In Russia, farmers started cutting off the time they spent in the collective fields so they could spend more time working small private patches where they got to keep or sell what they grew. Now those private farm patches are the only thing preventing mass starvation.
In Poland a lot of good citizens got fed up and walked off the job in support of a strike organized by an illegal union, and for the first time in years, a bit of freedom started to creep in. The government is still trying to stamp it out but is running scared.
Bad Citizens Have Kept The United States Free.
Back in 1917, a majority in the United States decided they knew what was best for everyone and passed the Eighteenth Amendment, taking away the freedom of a man to relax with a beer after an honest day's work. Hundreds of thousands in this great country suddenly turned into bad citizens. They didn't organize into a "let's bring back the booze" political party. They didn't stage massive sit-ins that interrupted the lives of a lot of other people. They didn't start blowing up police stations. All they did was to keep on drinking. And a lot of other bad citizens were more than willing to step in and smuggle, or distill, or brew the booze and sell it for a profit.
It took till 1933, but the social manipulators and the dogooders finally gave up, agreed to throw out. the Great Experiment, and tens of thousands of people went back to being good citizens.
In the Sixties, black people in the South got fed up with sitting in the back of the bus, getting chased away from the voting polls, and being turned away from the best restaurants and hotels, no matter how much money they had to pay the bills. So they started acting like bad citizens. Now a black man can go into any public facility he wants.
Those kinds of things keep happening all over this country. Richard Nixon gave us the fifty five mile-an-hour speed limit, which is absurd on most of the major highways in the United States, especially those in the West. No politicians since then have had the guts to undo the damage as yet because the insurance companies keep throwing them money to keep us driving at a snail's pace so they can maximize their profits.
Have you tried driving a fixed fifty-five along our highways? The great American game these days is to see how fast you can drive over the double nickel without getting caught.
A whole industry has gotten rich selling us radar detectors to give us a chance against the modern technology of the highway patrol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, other federal enforcement agencies, and every state and local police department spend millions each year to try to stamp out the use of recreational drugs. Yet every year, the price of the drugs goes down, while availability goes up. Anybody who wants to smoke pot, can-anyplace in the United States.
Other freedoms are under constant attack from one side or another. Take the issue Of gun control. The people without this totalitarian Principle keep telling us that the majority of Americans want some kind of gun control. So what! No majority in a free country has the right to take away the freedoms of any minority. That's what freedom is all about and owning a gun is a good way to help make sure nobody starts interfering with your personal freedom. As long as the people who understand and believe that principle insist on keeping their guns, we are going to be able to keep them.
Bad Citizens Get Good Laws.
After years of steadily spiraling upward, our taxes are finally starting to come down. That's not because it's what Congress and the president really want. They have no choice.
Americans used to be pretty good taxpayers, until things got out of hand. One day we woke up and realized that the fat cat friends of Congress had all been given special privileges and were paying less than their fair share.
So a whole lot of good taxpayers turned into bad citizens. They started to figure every angle, both legal and illegal, to bring down their own taxes. We are now a nation of tax-evaders. Every increase in the tax structure is matched or exceeded by losses as more ordinary middle-class citizens figure out ways to cheat on their taxes. The government's only choice is to try and convince us by lowering tax rates that things are fair once again. It's another example of bad citizens making good government.
Now you might not personally approve of all of the above examples. Neither do I. I think drugs are stupid. But each example goes to show just how much we are a nation of bad citizens. That's why we have as much freedom as we do.
That's why in recent years, this country has been moving in the direction of more freedom, not less. The politicians are finally beginning to understand that you can't take an American's freedom away and make it stick.
One thing to remember, though, is that being a bad citizen really only works when you do it for your own personal advantage. Trying to make somebody else's life miserable because you think the government is making your life miserable isn't what you want to do. Take the following example.
Anybody who loves freedom has got to agree that the current attempts at achieving racial percentages in our schools by busing small children across town is an insanity that free people should not permit to happen. The only problem is that a lot of parents have gone about protesting the wrong way. They have taken it out on some little black kid that agreed to ride a bus across town to go to a school that used to be white. If a free citizen wants to let his kids spend a couple of hours a day riding across town so he can be a minority in school instead of a majority, that's his right.
The only parents with a legitimate complaint are the ones who don't want their kids to be bused when there is a perfectly good school within walking distance. What a free citizen does in such a situation is keep his kid home, insisting that the child either goes to the closest school or he doesn't go at all. Then the TV news will be showing film clips of the social engineers going into homes and tearing children away from their parents to take them across town. Once the parents of the children who are being bused stop letting their kids get on the bus, that idiotic idea will come to a quick end.
It's not just our country where the willingness to be a bad citizen helps ensure a reasonable degree of personal freedom ...
Bad Citizens Can Be Free In An Unfree Country.
I lived a number of years in a country in Asia that seemed at first glance to be quite totalitarian. The country had a military dictator, every government official was appointed from the capital, there were no elected representatives, taxes and customs duties were prohibitively high, and there were laws against just about anything you could imagine doing.
It sounds like a terrible place to live. Actually life was very pleasant there. Most people had more freedom than people in a lot of countries where they think they're free.
Just about everybody in that little Asian country was a bad citizen. They didn't care what the government said they were supposed to be doing, they did what they wanted. They cheated on their taxes, bought smuggled whiskey rather than pay high duties, bribed government officials right and left, and broke every other law that got in the way of their personal enjoyment of life. The laws governing business enterprises were so complex that anybody running a business was by definition a criminal, yet the country had a thriving free-enterprise system. So many people were ignoring so many laws that the government couldn't do anything except try to enforce the few laws that most people won't break anyway. So they chased the murderers, the robbers, the political insurgents, and left the rest of the population alone.
There were a few jungle fighters in that country who claimed they were trying to bring freedom back. They were actually trying to take it away and turn the place into a communist hell. Fortunately, most people were succeeding so well at being bad citizens, they didn't have any time for revolution.They had already taken all the freedom they could get. They recognized that as bad as their military dictatorship might be on paper, it was so incompetent at enforcing its laws that it wasn't worth the effort to throw the government out.
People Deserve The Kind Of Government They Have.
It is my personal conviction that most people in the world could be free if they only wanted to be free. If the vast majority of people in Russia, Cuba, Chile, Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere stopped being good citizens tomorrow, doing whatever they thought was in their own best interest, every one of those countries would be freer societies. No government can arrest 90 percent of its population, shoot 50 percent of its work force, or hire every third citizen as a police officer.
Sadly, I know human nature well enough to be certain that isn't going to happen in most of those countries. Most people living in those countries are too frightened to take even the minimal risks involved in being a bad citizen.
So being a bad citizen probably won't get YOU much in a place like Russia or Nazi Germany. It will increase a bit the control you exercise over your own life, but things are still going to stay pretty miserable.
The Bad Citizen Will Make A Great Secret Freedom Fighter.
But let's suppose that a much smaller percentage of the citizens in any of those unfree countries were willing to take more than just the minimal risks of being a bad citizen. Let's suppose that five, or maybe even ten percent of the citizens in one of those countries secretly decided to war against the government that took their freedoms away. In Cuba, five percent of the population would make up an army of 500,000 freedom fighters. In Russia, there would be an army of 13 million people. How long could any government survive if those numbers of people, acting independently and without organization, started to commit personal acts of war against their oppressors?
Totalitarian government would become impossible.
If YOU live in a totalitarian country, learning to be a bad citizen is just the first step. It's the training camp for the secret freedom fighter. It gets you used to defying authority, ignoring orders when the boss isn't around, and looking out for yourself instead of those who took your freedom away.
More important perhaps, it gets you used to acting in secret, doing things that screw up the system, and learning to be proud of it, but without having to brag about it.
Practicing being a bad citizen gets You in the mind-set for the next step: to start taking some positive actions, still in secret, still not letting anyone know what you are doing. With that next step you'll be on your way to becoming a secret freedom fighter.
A Good Citizen in a Bad Country..
A Chapter from
The Secret Freedom Fighter
by Jefferson Mack
Paladin Press, 1986
The thing a leader who wants to deny you freedom loves most is a good citizen..
A good citizen obeys the law-every law..
A good citizen works hard-at whatever job the government tells him he is supposed to work at..
A good citizen pays his taxes-even if he doesn't have enough left over to feed his kids..
A good citizen never complains-no matter how a stupid or crude government official treats him..
A good citizen obeys the rules-all the rules..
Give a tyrant enough good citizens and he will rule forever, fat and happy while the good citizens sweat and suffer and die to make sure the tyrant keeps the good life.
Tyrants and their lackeys spend a great deal of time and effort trying to convince the people they rule that a moral person must be a good citizen. Back in the Dark Ages they called it the "Divine Right of Kings." Nowadays it's called patriotic duty, or civic responsibility, or given a dozen other different names, but it all adds up to the argument that any decent, honorable person must put the interests of all the people-that really means the interest of the man in charge--above his own personal interests.
Bad Citizens Have More Fun Because They Are More Free.
A true democracy is supposed to have free citizens, not good citizens. So, the day you wake up and find You don't have all the freedom you deserve, the first thing you have to do is stop being a good citizen. If you can't be a free citizen, then you want to be a bad citizen.
Any tyrant who's got a country full of bad citizens has got a problem. A tyrant has got all sorts of ways of dealing with a rebel, a criminal, a jungle fighter, an insurgent, or a political activist. They stand out, easily identified, almost as if they had signs hung around their chests. You find those kinds of people in jails, dark alleys, cellars, forests, and jungles. But a bad citizen-how do you tell him from a good citizen? A bad citizen isn't a bad person. He wants to keep feeding his kids, so he'll keep going to work at the factory, or planting the potato crop, or milking the cows.
What a bad citizen won't do is help the government make his life miserable. He avoids making it easy for the people in power. He continually tries to maximize the freedom he has, even if he has to break or ignore a few laws once in a while.
A bad citizen files his income tax return but cheats. A bad citizen sees a crime against the state, but he doesn't report it.
A bad citizen turns the heat up when the government says he should turn it down. A bad citizen loses his census form, or fills it out wrong. A bad citizen flushes too much paper down the john in a public building. A bad citizen that's got a government job takes all his sick leave, goofs off every chance he gets, and hauls paper clips home for the kids to play with.
A bad citizen doesn't spend all his time trying to make the work of the government more difficult, but he doesn't sacrifice his own pleasures or happiness voluntarily just because the government tells him his sacrifices are in the common good.
Too many bad citizens make government almost impossible.
That's one big reason why the Soviet Union doesn't work very well. Too many Soviet citizens have realized they are never going to get a fair share out of the government, and they have stopped being good citizens. They look out for themselves rather than the good of the state.
A smart bad citizen won't let himself get caught being bad. He won't brag to his friends and neighbors about what a bad citizen he is. He won't tell the local commissar how proud he is of being a bad citizen. He won't even tell his kids he enjoys being a bad citizen. He wants it kept a secret.
In a free democratic society, we don't have much use for bad citizens. They endanger Our highways, litter our public parks, embarrass our womenfolk, and make us mad. A free society is supposed to be made up of good citizens who take their share of the burdens of taxes and social duties and get their share of the benefits of living free.
That's a true free and democratic society, the kind the people who wrote our constitution wanted to give us. In every other kind of society, good citizens are suckers. They never get back what they put into it. So, if the government is interfering with your freedom to do whatever you want to do with your time and money, don't be a sucker. Learn to be a bad citizen.
The more bad citizens there are, the harder it is going to be for the people who stole freedom to stay in power. The tyrant's problem is that he is always outnumbered. He can get the guns and the thugs to use them. He can build concentration camps and forced labor camps. He'll have spies and prison gulags. But he can't put everybody in jail. He has to have people to till the fields, drive the trucks, work in the factories, and staff his bureaucracy. So he has got to convince most of the people that life isn't all that bad and that there is hope of a better future.
He will go after the visible troublemakers, the guys who run around telling good citizens they ought to throw the bums out, or the ones who fight him from the hills. Those kinds of people are in a small minority, so they are easy to find and kill or cart off to camps. With no newspapers to tell the truth about the tyrant, with nobody daring to talk out loud, the ####### will count on the good citizen to continue to act like the good citizen.
Good Citizens Make Tyrants Possible.
Nazi Germany wasn't filled with people who wanted to throw Jews into bonfires, make slaves of Eastern Europeans, or rule the world from Berlin. Nazi Germany was filled with good citizens, and Hitler did everything he could to make all those good citizens think they were better off with him in charge, even if they did have to give up a few freedoms.
Hitler was more frightened that all those good citizens might stop being good citizens than he was of the Allied armies. He catered to them, he entertained them, he promised them better things. The Germans kept being good citizens right up to the bitter end.
Poland, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, Chile, Iran, and Iraq are filled with good citizens, all of them hoping that they will help things get better by being good citizens. Only things keep getting worse. The good citizen works harder but gets less to eat, has less fun, enjoys life less, and has less hope for a better future.
The only time things get better is when a whole lot of people start acting like bad citizens. In Russia, farmers started cutting off the time they spent in the collective fields so they could spend more time working small private patches where they got to keep or sell what they grew. Now those private farm patches are the only thing preventing mass starvation.
In Poland a lot of good citizens got fed up and walked off the job in support of a strike organized by an illegal union, and for the first time in years, a bit of freedom started to creep in. The government is still trying to stamp it out but is running scared.
Bad Citizens Have Kept The United States Free.
Back in 1917, a majority in the United States decided they knew what was best for everyone and passed the Eighteenth Amendment, taking away the freedom of a man to relax with a beer after an honest day's work. Hundreds of thousands in this great country suddenly turned into bad citizens. They didn't organize into a "let's bring back the booze" political party. They didn't stage massive sit-ins that interrupted the lives of a lot of other people. They didn't start blowing up police stations. All they did was to keep on drinking. And a lot of other bad citizens were more than willing to step in and smuggle, or distill, or brew the booze and sell it for a profit.
It took till 1933, but the social manipulators and the dogooders finally gave up, agreed to throw out. the Great Experiment, and tens of thousands of people went back to being good citizens.
In the Sixties, black people in the South got fed up with sitting in the back of the bus, getting chased away from the voting polls, and being turned away from the best restaurants and hotels, no matter how much money they had to pay the bills. So they started acting like bad citizens. Now a black man can go into any public facility he wants.
Those kinds of things keep happening all over this country. Richard Nixon gave us the fifty five mile-an-hour speed limit, which is absurd on most of the major highways in the United States, especially those in the West. No politicians since then have had the guts to undo the damage as yet because the insurance companies keep throwing them money to keep us driving at a snail's pace so they can maximize their profits.
Have you tried driving a fixed fifty-five along our highways? The great American game these days is to see how fast you can drive over the double nickel without getting caught.
A whole industry has gotten rich selling us radar detectors to give us a chance against the modern technology of the highway patrol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, other federal enforcement agencies, and every state and local police department spend millions each year to try to stamp out the use of recreational drugs. Yet every year, the price of the drugs goes down, while availability goes up. Anybody who wants to smoke pot, can-anyplace in the United States.
Other freedoms are under constant attack from one side or another. Take the issue Of gun control. The people without this totalitarian Principle keep telling us that the majority of Americans want some kind of gun control. So what! No majority in a free country has the right to take away the freedoms of any minority. That's what freedom is all about and owning a gun is a good way to help make sure nobody starts interfering with your personal freedom. As long as the people who understand and believe that principle insist on keeping their guns, we are going to be able to keep them.
Bad Citizens Get Good Laws.
After years of steadily spiraling upward, our taxes are finally starting to come down. That's not because it's what Congress and the president really want. They have no choice.
Americans used to be pretty good taxpayers, until things got out of hand. One day we woke up and realized that the fat cat friends of Congress had all been given special privileges and were paying less than their fair share.
So a whole lot of good taxpayers turned into bad citizens. They started to figure every angle, both legal and illegal, to bring down their own taxes. We are now a nation of tax-evaders. Every increase in the tax structure is matched or exceeded by losses as more ordinary middle-class citizens figure out ways to cheat on their taxes. The government's only choice is to try and convince us by lowering tax rates that things are fair once again. It's another example of bad citizens making good government.
Now you might not personally approve of all of the above examples. Neither do I. I think drugs are stupid. But each example goes to show just how much we are a nation of bad citizens. That's why we have as much freedom as we do.
That's why in recent years, this country has been moving in the direction of more freedom, not less. The politicians are finally beginning to understand that you can't take an American's freedom away and make it stick.
One thing to remember, though, is that being a bad citizen really only works when you do it for your own personal advantage. Trying to make somebody else's life miserable because you think the government is making your life miserable isn't what you want to do. Take the following example.
Anybody who loves freedom has got to agree that the current attempts at achieving racial percentages in our schools by busing small children across town is an insanity that free people should not permit to happen. The only problem is that a lot of parents have gone about protesting the wrong way. They have taken it out on some little black kid that agreed to ride a bus across town to go to a school that used to be white. If a free citizen wants to let his kids spend a couple of hours a day riding across town so he can be a minority in school instead of a majority, that's his right.
The only parents with a legitimate complaint are the ones who don't want their kids to be bused when there is a perfectly good school within walking distance. What a free citizen does in such a situation is keep his kid home, insisting that the child either goes to the closest school or he doesn't go at all. Then the TV news will be showing film clips of the social engineers going into homes and tearing children away from their parents to take them across town. Once the parents of the children who are being bused stop letting their kids get on the bus, that idiotic idea will come to a quick end.
It's not just our country where the willingness to be a bad citizen helps ensure a reasonable degree of personal freedom ...
Bad Citizens Can Be Free In An Unfree Country.
I lived a number of years in a country in Asia that seemed at first glance to be quite totalitarian. The country had a military dictator, every government official was appointed from the capital, there were no elected representatives, taxes and customs duties were prohibitively high, and there were laws against just about anything you could imagine doing.
It sounds like a terrible place to live. Actually life was very pleasant there. Most people had more freedom than people in a lot of countries where they think they're free.
Just about everybody in that little Asian country was a bad citizen. They didn't care what the government said they were supposed to be doing, they did what they wanted. They cheated on their taxes, bought smuggled whiskey rather than pay high duties, bribed government officials right and left, and broke every other law that got in the way of their personal enjoyment of life. The laws governing business enterprises were so complex that anybody running a business was by definition a criminal, yet the country had a thriving free-enterprise system. So many people were ignoring so many laws that the government couldn't do anything except try to enforce the few laws that most people won't break anyway. So they chased the murderers, the robbers, the political insurgents, and left the rest of the population alone.
There were a few jungle fighters in that country who claimed they were trying to bring freedom back. They were actually trying to take it away and turn the place into a communist hell. Fortunately, most people were succeeding so well at being bad citizens, they didn't have any time for revolution.They had already taken all the freedom they could get. They recognized that as bad as their military dictatorship might be on paper, it was so incompetent at enforcing its laws that it wasn't worth the effort to throw the government out.
People Deserve The Kind Of Government They Have.
It is my personal conviction that most people in the world could be free if they only wanted to be free. If the vast majority of people in Russia, Cuba, Chile, Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere stopped being good citizens tomorrow, doing whatever they thought was in their own best interest, every one of those countries would be freer societies. No government can arrest 90 percent of its population, shoot 50 percent of its work force, or hire every third citizen as a police officer.
Sadly, I know human nature well enough to be certain that isn't going to happen in most of those countries. Most people living in those countries are too frightened to take even the minimal risks involved in being a bad citizen.
So being a bad citizen probably won't get YOU much in a place like Russia or Nazi Germany. It will increase a bit the control you exercise over your own life, but things are still going to stay pretty miserable.
The Bad Citizen Will Make A Great Secret Freedom Fighter.
But let's suppose that a much smaller percentage of the citizens in any of those unfree countries were willing to take more than just the minimal risks of being a bad citizen. Let's suppose that five, or maybe even ten percent of the citizens in one of those countries secretly decided to war against the government that took their freedoms away. In Cuba, five percent of the population would make up an army of 500,000 freedom fighters. In Russia, there would be an army of 13 million people. How long could any government survive if those numbers of people, acting independently and without organization, started to commit personal acts of war against their oppressors?
Totalitarian government would become impossible.
If YOU live in a totalitarian country, learning to be a bad citizen is just the first step. It's the training camp for the secret freedom fighter. It gets you used to defying authority, ignoring orders when the boss isn't around, and looking out for yourself instead of those who took your freedom away.
More important perhaps, it gets you used to acting in secret, doing things that screw up the system, and learning to be proud of it, but without having to brag about it.
Practicing being a bad citizen gets You in the mind-set for the next step: to start taking some positive actions, still in secret, still not letting anyone know what you are doing. With that next step you'll be on your way to becoming a secret freedom fighter.
jcardio..sounds good .. but will never go any farther..
like some boards I know..
ed..it only took three percent..
to win the american revolution..
THG..
the mission is before us..