I got an idea from Liberranter about requesting to be on the Southern Poverty Law Center's patriot watch list. Here is the request I sent them:
I was just wondering if I could be on your "Meet the Patriots" watch list. I'm not really a leader of anything, and I haven't done anything infamous or dastardly, but I do harbor a lot of those so-called anti-government sentiments. I hope for the dissolution of the IRS, CIA, FBI, DHS, as well as the Departments of Education, Energy, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs. I'm also not so impressed with Treasury and Defense, so those could go too, but at least the DoD could change it's name back to Department of War, right? That would make more sense. Or maybe Department of Offense would be more fitting. The State Department can stick around because someone has to be the official greeter for visiting dignitaries. I mean, I'm not totally unreasonable.
And another thing that's ticking me off is that Janet Napolitano sounds like a dude, but Tim Geithner comes off like a sissy. Obama, make Tim eat some meat once in a while! Toughen that guy up.
Here's another thing that might make me worthy of a watch list. I don't care about global warming, or climate change as they're calling it now. It's probably a big lie, but even if it isn't, the morons who are freaking out about it are just using it as another reason to regulate and control everything. Like Al Gore gives a rip about carbon emissions? Please!
Which leads me to another thing. I hate the UN. It would be great if the UN was just a collection of worthless money wasting blowhards, but they're worse than worthless, they're detrimental to civilization. They must think people are stupid, because they constantly send out "peace keeping" forces, but these "peace keepers" are riding around in tanks. And remember that one time when they helped the Hutus kill a bunch of Tutsis? Jerks.
And what about the Federal Reserve? I don't have time to explain how much I hate that whole corporatist swindle.
I could go on about things the government does that suck, but you'd be bored, I'm sure. If you want a more complete list, let me know. If it would help, I can try to organize a militia or something, but don't bother sending infiltrators. I can sniff those suckers out pretty easy.
Thanks a million and let me know what you think.
Sic Semper Tyrannis,
Isaac Stanfield
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Do The Collapse
"Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy -- where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending; where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit."
Barack Obama
A person's last resort tends to be their most powerful god. A lifelong agnostic, hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, just might become less skeptical and try praying, just this once. So what happens when a nation's (or the world, but whatever) economy begins a downward spiral? Where do people turn? Barack Obama turns to government.* Only government can break this cycle (never mind that government intervention created the cycle in the first place). Only government is big enough, and powerful enough. Only government can raise taxes, redistribute wealth, regulate, legislate, and rescue industries in a way that would fix whatever problems ail us. In fact, one of the few moments of outright honesty since Obama's campaign started getting national attention came with an admission of that concept. The monopoly on violence government claims ensures the continuation of various attempts at rescuing the common folks from all manner of horrible and uncomfortable states of being. The federal government, being the largest and best armed, is the boss government, all others submitting to it.
If Obama (and Bush, and Cheney, and Romney, and all the rest of them) turns to government to cure our national ills, where do we turn? How do we display our faith? Who do we trust with the most important aspects of our civilization? Of course we don't trust our children to the government, that would be foolish. No, we raise our own children. Except for the 180 days a year of six (not including homework) hour days spent in government run schools, for thirteen of the first 17 or 18 years of their lives. Certainly not our homes, which belong to us, and are a sacred sanctuary from the world. Except government instructs us on how and where we are permitted to build (building permit, get it?), what materials we can use, how much we have to pay to keep it (property taxes), and the various agencies that can demand inspections and remove our children on the slightest whim, not mention the TV and radio—controlled by the government via regulation of radio and airwaves, among other methods—that are omnipresent within our homes. OK, fine, but not our personal safety. We can take care of ourselves! Except for guns, because the federal government needs to make sure that only safe people own guns, for our own safety. And knives. Some knives we can't have. And metal plates of a certain thickness. But other than that, it's just the taxes that are distributed (redistributed? Shock!) to the military for our national security. And to the intelligence agencies. And to the programs to connect the military, intelligence agencies, state police, and local police, for our own safety. Other than that, no way do we let the feds control our personal safety. I could go on about every aspect of modern life, but hopefully you get the point. I covered life, liberty, and property, so that should suffice.
What would we do without the federal government? What would happen if every person and every corporation stopped paying the extortion fee we call income tax? The federal government would collapse, right?** (Assuming they would run out of money, which they wouldn't because the Federal Reserve can print or "create" as much as it want, whenever it wants, without asking you, which it does on a regular basis.) And then what? Would the interstate highways crumble to dust due to neglect? Would communication break down and isolate us from distant populations? Maybe mobs would rampage through the streets, looting and pillaging, and warlords would conquer your neighborhood. There would be no food in the stores, because everyone knows that only the federal government can authorize food in the stores. Can you imagine the chaos if government appendages like the Department of Education ceased to exist? Who would educate the children? And the local favorite, the Department of Energy, what would we do then? Get the candles! Man the bicycle-driven generators! To assume that all of this flows from the federal government, or is in some way bestowed on us or allowed by it, is to assume that people aren't capable of doing these things themselves. That would be the same people who do it everyday, themselves, right now. Do power plant operators need a government agent to stand behind them everyday and convince them not to push the self-destruct button? Do they need the federal government at any point in their education, training, or career to be able to do what they do? Does any occupation? Dispelling the myth that we need federal agencies to guide every aspect of our lives only requires a little logic. So here it comes.
Pretend you somehow overcame the licensing and regulatory hurdles and you now own a dairy farm. What is your goal? To make money. How do you make money? People give it to you. Why do they give you money? Because you give them dairy products. So far so good. Everyone is happy. But wait, how can we be sure your milk isn't poisoned? Because we all know that people who are just out to make money are soulless vampires hellbent on ravaging the general population. We learned that in college. But that doesn't account for the fact that a dairy farmer can't make money if all of his customers are sick or dead. Even if a small percentage of people get violently ill from his products, people will hear about it, and then he's in big trouble. It's in the farmer's best interest to put out the best product he can, and for the best price he can afford. If slick marketing gets him a better price, good for him. So where does federal regulation need to come in? At what point do we need federal agents enforcing price controls? If one farmer can sell milk for $1 a gallon, fine. If we're so stupid that we pay $10 a gallon for a different brand, that's our problem. I don't see how it's the federales business what goes on with milk.
How about the aforementioned energy production? Would energy companies wantonly dump waste into rivers if not for government saving the day? Again, it doesn't make sense for a company that needs to make money to kill or harm those who will give it money. Only when government comes in and sets guidelines (and who can doubt that federal regulators are always experts in their fields and have only the best interest of the people in mind?) for who can do what and when that the minimum guidelines are met, absolving companies of any liability beyond that. Apply this to the banking industry, clothing, cars, computers, books, TV, all manner of agriculture, medicine, pharmaceuticals, money, etc, and you might begin to see that the federal government has its boundless nose where it doesn't belong in every situation.
Economically, the situation is simple. If Uncle Sam has to rob—I mean tax—Peter to pay Paul, that seems simple enough. But when he goes to pay Paul, there isn't enough. Uncle Sam had to take his cut, so now Paul is short. But look! There's James, rob—I mean tax—him too! It becomes an untenable situation because more than one person has to be robbed—I mean taxed—to pay just one person. Soon Uncle Sam will run out of persons to rob—I mean tax—with no shortage of people to pay. The numbers don't add up. The moral of this story is that whenever government invests in something, it isn't really an investment. Opportunity cost kicks in, and whatever opportunity Peter had to invest his money is now lost. Maybe he would have invested in Paul's enterprise, or helped James buy a new fishing boat in return for a percentage of the profit. But now he can't, because his capital is gone. He ended up "investing" involuntarily in Uncle Sam, who will use his cut to buy himself better guns with which to rob everyone else and fortify his position as the baddest bandit in the land. So every time something is heavily controlled and regulated (a redundancy, sure, but some people might be slow on the uptake) by the government, we can be sure that there were many more opportunities lost than there were created. I know what you're asking now, so I'll get to that.
"What about things that are just so important that the government has to do them?" you may be asking. "All of those national labs are working on such important stuff, we can't just leave it to chance." If these projects were so important, wouldn't they be undertaken by someone anyway? If there is an opportunity to profit from innovation, wouldn't someone take it on? If profit were the goal, wouldn't these projects be done on a budget and in as short of period of time as possible? History says yes. No one forced Rockefeller to revolutionize the petroleum industry. No one had to regulate Henry Ford into developing a faster way to build a cheaper car. No one legislated the light bulb into existence. And if there is no use for these government mandated projects, perhaps the harsh truth is that they aren't needed at all.
If you find yourself thinking that the most important things should be done under the direction of the most corrupt and inefficient entity known to human kind, then maybe you should think about it a little longer. And if you find yourself thinking that the most important aspects of modern life can only be saved by government, maybe you should examine who and what you put your faith in, and who you look to for salvation when it really matters.
*Just for clarity, government means that entity which claims control over the population of a certain geographical area. I've dispensed with the notion that "the people" are the government, because that doesn't really seem to be the case, with ample evidence available on the web. It's a whole different topic, so just go with it.
**To make it easy, I'm not going into how tenaciously the federal parasites would hang on to their hosts, and what means they would use to keep their power.
In order to give credit where credit is due, I should note that Do the Collapse is the name of an album by Guided By Voices.
Barack Obama
A person's last resort tends to be their most powerful god. A lifelong agnostic, hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, just might become less skeptical and try praying, just this once. So what happens when a nation's (or the world, but whatever) economy begins a downward spiral? Where do people turn? Barack Obama turns to government.* Only government can break this cycle (never mind that government intervention created the cycle in the first place). Only government is big enough, and powerful enough. Only government can raise taxes, redistribute wealth, regulate, legislate, and rescue industries in a way that would fix whatever problems ail us. In fact, one of the few moments of outright honesty since Obama's campaign started getting national attention came with an admission of that concept. The monopoly on violence government claims ensures the continuation of various attempts at rescuing the common folks from all manner of horrible and uncomfortable states of being. The federal government, being the largest and best armed, is the boss government, all others submitting to it.
If Obama (and Bush, and Cheney, and Romney, and all the rest of them) turns to government to cure our national ills, where do we turn? How do we display our faith? Who do we trust with the most important aspects of our civilization? Of course we don't trust our children to the government, that would be foolish. No, we raise our own children. Except for the 180 days a year of six (not including homework) hour days spent in government run schools, for thirteen of the first 17 or 18 years of their lives. Certainly not our homes, which belong to us, and are a sacred sanctuary from the world. Except government instructs us on how and where we are permitted to build (building permit, get it?), what materials we can use, how much we have to pay to keep it (property taxes), and the various agencies that can demand inspections and remove our children on the slightest whim, not mention the TV and radio—controlled by the government via regulation of radio and airwaves, among other methods—that are omnipresent within our homes. OK, fine, but not our personal safety. We can take care of ourselves! Except for guns, because the federal government needs to make sure that only safe people own guns, for our own safety. And knives. Some knives we can't have. And metal plates of a certain thickness. But other than that, it's just the taxes that are distributed (redistributed? Shock!) to the military for our national security. And to the intelligence agencies. And to the programs to connect the military, intelligence agencies, state police, and local police, for our own safety. Other than that, no way do we let the feds control our personal safety. I could go on about every aspect of modern life, but hopefully you get the point. I covered life, liberty, and property, so that should suffice.
What would we do without the federal government? What would happen if every person and every corporation stopped paying the extortion fee we call income tax? The federal government would collapse, right?** (Assuming they would run out of money, which they wouldn't because the Federal Reserve can print or "create" as much as it want, whenever it wants, without asking you, which it does on a regular basis.) And then what? Would the interstate highways crumble to dust due to neglect? Would communication break down and isolate us from distant populations? Maybe mobs would rampage through the streets, looting and pillaging, and warlords would conquer your neighborhood. There would be no food in the stores, because everyone knows that only the federal government can authorize food in the stores. Can you imagine the chaos if government appendages like the Department of Education ceased to exist? Who would educate the children? And the local favorite, the Department of Energy, what would we do then? Get the candles! Man the bicycle-driven generators! To assume that all of this flows from the federal government, or is in some way bestowed on us or allowed by it, is to assume that people aren't capable of doing these things themselves. That would be the same people who do it everyday, themselves, right now. Do power plant operators need a government agent to stand behind them everyday and convince them not to push the self-destruct button? Do they need the federal government at any point in their education, training, or career to be able to do what they do? Does any occupation? Dispelling the myth that we need federal agencies to guide every aspect of our lives only requires a little logic. So here it comes.
Pretend you somehow overcame the licensing and regulatory hurdles and you now own a dairy farm. What is your goal? To make money. How do you make money? People give it to you. Why do they give you money? Because you give them dairy products. So far so good. Everyone is happy. But wait, how can we be sure your milk isn't poisoned? Because we all know that people who are just out to make money are soulless vampires hellbent on ravaging the general population. We learned that in college. But that doesn't account for the fact that a dairy farmer can't make money if all of his customers are sick or dead. Even if a small percentage of people get violently ill from his products, people will hear about it, and then he's in big trouble. It's in the farmer's best interest to put out the best product he can, and for the best price he can afford. If slick marketing gets him a better price, good for him. So where does federal regulation need to come in? At what point do we need federal agents enforcing price controls? If one farmer can sell milk for $1 a gallon, fine. If we're so stupid that we pay $10 a gallon for a different brand, that's our problem. I don't see how it's the federales business what goes on with milk.
How about the aforementioned energy production? Would energy companies wantonly dump waste into rivers if not for government saving the day? Again, it doesn't make sense for a company that needs to make money to kill or harm those who will give it money. Only when government comes in and sets guidelines (and who can doubt that federal regulators are always experts in their fields and have only the best interest of the people in mind?) for who can do what and when that the minimum guidelines are met, absolving companies of any liability beyond that. Apply this to the banking industry, clothing, cars, computers, books, TV, all manner of agriculture, medicine, pharmaceuticals, money, etc, and you might begin to see that the federal government has its boundless nose where it doesn't belong in every situation.
Economically, the situation is simple. If Uncle Sam has to rob—I mean tax—Peter to pay Paul, that seems simple enough. But when he goes to pay Paul, there isn't enough. Uncle Sam had to take his cut, so now Paul is short. But look! There's James, rob—I mean tax—him too! It becomes an untenable situation because more than one person has to be robbed—I mean taxed—to pay just one person. Soon Uncle Sam will run out of persons to rob—I mean tax—with no shortage of people to pay. The numbers don't add up. The moral of this story is that whenever government invests in something, it isn't really an investment. Opportunity cost kicks in, and whatever opportunity Peter had to invest his money is now lost. Maybe he would have invested in Paul's enterprise, or helped James buy a new fishing boat in return for a percentage of the profit. But now he can't, because his capital is gone. He ended up "investing" involuntarily in Uncle Sam, who will use his cut to buy himself better guns with which to rob everyone else and fortify his position as the baddest bandit in the land. So every time something is heavily controlled and regulated (a redundancy, sure, but some people might be slow on the uptake) by the government, we can be sure that there were many more opportunities lost than there were created. I know what you're asking now, so I'll get to that.
"What about things that are just so important that the government has to do them?" you may be asking. "All of those national labs are working on such important stuff, we can't just leave it to chance." If these projects were so important, wouldn't they be undertaken by someone anyway? If there is an opportunity to profit from innovation, wouldn't someone take it on? If profit were the goal, wouldn't these projects be done on a budget and in as short of period of time as possible? History says yes. No one forced Rockefeller to revolutionize the petroleum industry. No one had to regulate Henry Ford into developing a faster way to build a cheaper car. No one legislated the light bulb into existence. And if there is no use for these government mandated projects, perhaps the harsh truth is that they aren't needed at all.
If you find yourself thinking that the most important things should be done under the direction of the most corrupt and inefficient entity known to human kind, then maybe you should think about it a little longer. And if you find yourself thinking that the most important aspects of modern life can only be saved by government, maybe you should examine who and what you put your faith in, and who you look to for salvation when it really matters.
*Just for clarity, government means that entity which claims control over the population of a certain geographical area. I've dispensed with the notion that "the people" are the government, because that doesn't really seem to be the case, with ample evidence available on the web. It's a whole different topic, so just go with it.
**To make it easy, I'm not going into how tenaciously the federal parasites would hang on to their hosts, and what means they would use to keep their power.
In order to give credit where credit is due, I should note that Do the Collapse is the name of an album by Guided By Voices.
Monday, May 10, 2010
The Emporer's New Clothes
I heard an astonished fake-news reporter on the radio the other day—this was the day the stock market was losing a billion points or something (suckers!) and cops in Greece were whacking people with sticks (perhaps they had just returned from a training session in the US)—commenting that the dirty little secret in the whole mess was that "the world has no money, and the emperor has no clothes." Take heart and join the club, Court Stenographer, we already knew that.
So as I was laughing at this poor sap who had lived his whole life without realizing that Wall Street and it's companion wretched hive of scum and villainy, Washington, DC, were absolutely not real and also totally fake, I started to think about this whole naked emperor scenario. Of course everyone knows the story (if you don't, please immediately chastise your parents—if you know at least one—for not caring about you and depriving you of useful fables during your obviously intellectually and culturally impoverished childhood). The emperor is afraid of looking foolish and low class, and the high class people of the court are afraid of falling out of favor with the emperor. The regular folks are somehow intimidated into pretending to see what the high class types saw, probably due to the effects of some variation of the corporatist system of bribery, extortion, and general corruption which was no doubt ravaging the economy of this allegorical empire, and which is also now extant in every corner of the actual world we live in. But anyway, in a high school English class way, who is supposed to be what? Is it generally assumed that the emperor is a stand in for real world royal types, and the peasantry is supposed to be us, the everyday people who can recognize the nonsense of the royalty* but don't? Is the little boy who has the courage (or total lack of awareness of appropriate public behavior) supposed to be those who are willing to "speak truth to power?" (as the smart folks are saying these days.)
Maybe. When this yahoo started practically sobbing about the stock market drop—which I assume he was worried about because his stupid pension and/or 401(k) is wrapped up in it—I started thinking that the emperor was us. We're the ones using phony fiat dollars everyday, pretending they're so valuable. We're the ones who have been duped by the cunning weavers into this whole program of trading valuable capital (labor, time, ingenuity, etc) for Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs). The weavers, by the way, would be the Federal Reserve System and the nefarious banks behind it, whichever those might be, and good luck finding out. We are also the ones who insist that the peasantry recognize our fine fabric as something other than the auto-delusional farce that it is (see how that works out? Because FRNs are made of a fabric/paper material. See?). Remember that one time when Iran said they wanted to stop using FRNs as the default currency for trading oil? And remember when the US started threatening Iran right after that? "See my fine clothes, wretched villain! Glory in the majesty of my extravagant finery!" We're the emperor, because he was so easily duped in his pride, arrogance, and ignorance, and because we persist in forcing our non-existent non-money on the world. True, they wanted it while the illusion held, but now that the intrinsic value of the dollar is being noticed, the masters of the system are reluctant to let go. Don't you hate being the emperor? I hate being the emperor. I think the emperor should have executed the weavers and tossed their bodies into the ocean for the crabs to eat, or at least shooed them away with a stern look. That seems to be the only sensible thing to do.
By the way, Ron Paul is the young boy in the crowd who dared to proclaim the nakedness of the emperor. Who else?
*I'm including elected officials here because let's face it, they really are. Don't try to argue against this.
So as I was laughing at this poor sap who had lived his whole life without realizing that Wall Street and it's companion wretched hive of scum and villainy, Washington, DC, were absolutely not real and also totally fake, I started to think about this whole naked emperor scenario. Of course everyone knows the story (if you don't, please immediately chastise your parents—if you know at least one—for not caring about you and depriving you of useful fables during your obviously intellectually and culturally impoverished childhood). The emperor is afraid of looking foolish and low class, and the high class people of the court are afraid of falling out of favor with the emperor. The regular folks are somehow intimidated into pretending to see what the high class types saw, probably due to the effects of some variation of the corporatist system of bribery, extortion, and general corruption which was no doubt ravaging the economy of this allegorical empire, and which is also now extant in every corner of the actual world we live in. But anyway, in a high school English class way, who is supposed to be what? Is it generally assumed that the emperor is a stand in for real world royal types, and the peasantry is supposed to be us, the everyday people who can recognize the nonsense of the royalty* but don't? Is the little boy who has the courage (or total lack of awareness of appropriate public behavior) supposed to be those who are willing to "speak truth to power?" (as the smart folks are saying these days.)
Maybe. When this yahoo started practically sobbing about the stock market drop—which I assume he was worried about because his stupid pension and/or 401(k) is wrapped up in it—I started thinking that the emperor was us. We're the ones using phony fiat dollars everyday, pretending they're so valuable. We're the ones who have been duped by the cunning weavers into this whole program of trading valuable capital (labor, time, ingenuity, etc) for Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs). The weavers, by the way, would be the Federal Reserve System and the nefarious banks behind it, whichever those might be, and good luck finding out. We are also the ones who insist that the peasantry recognize our fine fabric as something other than the auto-delusional farce that it is (see how that works out? Because FRNs are made of a fabric/paper material. See?). Remember that one time when Iran said they wanted to stop using FRNs as the default currency for trading oil? And remember when the US started threatening Iran right after that? "See my fine clothes, wretched villain! Glory in the majesty of my extravagant finery!" We're the emperor, because he was so easily duped in his pride, arrogance, and ignorance, and because we persist in forcing our non-existent non-money on the world. True, they wanted it while the illusion held, but now that the intrinsic value of the dollar is being noticed, the masters of the system are reluctant to let go. Don't you hate being the emperor? I hate being the emperor. I think the emperor should have executed the weavers and tossed their bodies into the ocean for the crabs to eat, or at least shooed them away with a stern look. That seems to be the only sensible thing to do.
By the way, Ron Paul is the young boy in the crowd who dared to proclaim the nakedness of the emperor. Who else?
*I'm including elected officials here because let's face it, they really are. Don't try to argue against this.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
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