We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Chuck Kuffner claims I agree with the case made by We The People. I neither agree nor disagree, although I am inclined towards disagreement. The issues of law are far too arcane for me to state a position. I realize Kuffner has an FAQ against the tax protestor case in general, but I am likewise not in a position to judge their validity or whether they are equally as political a statement as We The People’s. Just because a lawyer wrote up opinions does not mean it is the only set of opinions on the matter or even that it is correct.
My stand is quite simple. Whether or not Bob Schulz has a legal leg to stand on, I find him a courageous individual committed to the cause of liberty. Unlike the al Qaeda hunger strike wimps at Gitmo, Schulz and Croteau went nearly all the way on a Ghandian protest:
July 20, 2001
BOB EATS THIS DAY. We The People have been heard.
High level DOJ and U.S. Congressional officials formally committed the U.S. government, in writing, this afternoon, to answer the People’s Income Tax charges.
Schulz & Croteau have first food in three weeks. Schulz heads home on Saturday.
Remonstrance hearing to be held on Capitol Hill. Rep. Henry Hyde (IL), former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is expected to preside.
Whether his case is frivolous or not, officials responded to the hunger strike and agreed to a hearing.
Those government officials are liars and dishonourable men. Their word is of no value and is meaningless. Their promises are as solid as a treaty by the Great White Father with the American Indians. That is the judgement I do make and will stand by.
It is independant of whether his case has any validity. They gave their word to hear it. I want people to know what sort of “men” we are governed by.
They reneged. They lied. End of story.
Harry Browne’s LibertyWire recently posted a letter from Rob Kampia, the Executive Director of the DC based Marijuana Policy Project (mpp@mpp.org) that many of you will find interesting.
Here’s the text from Rob Kampia’s letter:
On Tuesday of this week, three more members of Congress added their names to H.R. 2592, the Ron Paul / Barney Frank medical marijuana bill currently pending in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill now has 29 congressional sponsors.
These new House members are signing on to the bill largely because people on the Marijuana Policy Project’s e-mail list have used http://www.mpp.org/usa to fax 7,483 letters to their U.S. House members in support of this bill.
Thanks to the American Liberty Foundation, I am being permitted here to reach out to you, too.
Would you please visit http://www.mpp.org/usa to fax a personalized, pre-written letter asking your three members of Congress to pass the medical marijuana bill? This Web page provides a list of the 89 U.S. House members and 4 U.S. senators who have taken at least one positive action in support of medical marijuana.
If enacted, H.R. 2592 would allow states to determine their own medical marijuana policies without federal interference. Our goal is to persuade dozens of additional House members to co-sponsor H.R. 2592 and — at the same time — we are trying to persuade one U.S. senator to introduce a companion bill in the Senate.
The need for this legislation has never been greater. Medical marijuana is now legal in eight states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington — yet the DEA has conducted raids on a series of medical marijuana distribution centers in California since October.
In response to the October raid, a U.S. Justice Department spokesperson said, “The recent enforcement is indicative that we have not lost our priorities in other areas since Sept. 11.” This is an outrageous statement, and it’s time for us to fight back.
Please visit http://www.mpp.org/usa right away to add your voice to our campaign to stop the federal government’s war on medical marijuana patients and — really — the federal government’s war on states’ rights.
As a fellow libertarian, I can tell you there is nothing in H.R. 2592 that you won’t like. After all, the bill is good enough for Congressman Ron Paul to sponsor!
To further escalate the campaign to change federal policy, we are running a full-page ad in The New York Times today! It lists Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs, a host of other celebrities and opinion leaders, various health and medical organizations, and more than 300 state legislators who are calling upon President Bush to change the federal policy. (See http://www.CompassionateAccess.org )
Would you please visit http://www.mpp.org/usa today? Thank you in advance for your help.
For those of you who are relative newcomers to the scene, Ron Paul is a Libertarian in Republican clothing. In 1988 he ran as the Libertarian Presidential candidate. I worked with he and his committee on a number of occasions and even wrote his domestic and international Space policy. I also sat and briefed him before he spoke in front of a crowd at an International Space Development Conference in Denver in May 1988, the first time a Presidential candidate had ever done so.
In other words, Ron Paul is solid and if he introduced the bill, I’ll take it as given it is at least born libertarian.
I don’t think I need to say much. Just read the story.
Yes, this is indeed the 21st Century.
How could I pass on such a friendly challenge?
I remember my mother telling me a story from her childhood. There was a woman just up the block, a sad case no one spoke of very much: a Morphine addict. The family kept her at home, got prescription “medication” from the local pharmacist… and tried to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible.
I imagine her life was pretty much a waste. I have no way of knowing the when of this. It was in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, some years before well intentioned people tried to “put an end” to such misery.
Some 60 years of drug prohibition later, I was a young Libertarian activist appearing on radio talk shows. Good intentions had resulted in a human disaster beyond the imagination of those unwittingly responsible for it. The percentage of the population using hard drugs hadn’t even changed. But the total population had grown and with drug users concentrated in ghettos it seemed as if drug use was an epidemic.
I made the comparison to the interviewer of that woman’s life sixty years ago versus what it would now be like for her.
She’d have left home and cut all ties with the famiily after having lost her job and alienated all her friends by begging and stealing money for her expensive criminalized habit. She’d be living in total squalor in an inner city squat with her pimp boyfriend. He’d be beating her for not turning enough tricks and they’d both be robbing houses, shoplifting and commiting other petty crimes to feed their habits. Their pusher would get it all. They’d have to dive for cover when the pusher’s gang fought gun battles in the ‘hood to protect a valuable territory against rival gangs. The local cops would be on the take from the gangs. Wholesalers and importers upstream would take care of the bigger payoffs to the DEA, the Coast Guard and governments of third world countries.
The couple would be re-using dirty needles and shooting up heroin of uncertain quality and random cut. Overdose, poisoning, hepatitis, violence, withdrawals on bad days… they’d be lucky to live to be thirty.
Little needs changed to update the description by twenty more years. In 2002 the couple are probably HIV positive; and the heroin importers are financing terrorist networks and buying nukes.
Yeah, the prohibition of hard drugs sure did improve the world…
Harry Browne has a new item online at Worldnet Daily. It’s an interesting take on why the loss of Enron’s employee pension money can be laid at the IRS’s door. The income tax laws are the reason employee pensions are handled inside companies rather than by the employees themselves.
I’d never looked at it this way before, but he’s right.
The We The People Foundation held their own hearing as the US Federal Government broke its word to do so. They claim testimony taken under oath shows the entire income tax system to be unconstitutional.
Decide for yourself. The hearing webcast is available here.
Monday’s Belfast Telegraph headline read Church Facing Priests Crisis. As it was not immediately obvious to me what a priests crisis might be, and because the free copy had been shoved in my bag at Eason’s along with my magazine purchases, I spent a few minutes to actually read it.
It seems the Church in Ulster is not attracting many young men to the life of celebacy. Of course, rather than look at itself, the Church blames it on people like us:
“I also think this is a symptom of the culture of liberalism and individualism we live in today. People are not so keen now on life-long commitment, whether that be the priesthood or marriage.”
Perhaps if they went back to the old ways: the way things were before Rome tried to use Henry to enforce their will on the Irish Church and got used by him instead. Priests would marry, have great big Irish families and all would be well.
I’ll bet this pronouncement did more to up the popularity of individualism in Ulster than all the pub chatter I’ve done in 15 years.
I’d have written this article sooner, but I carry the weight of being a day job scientist and engineer, so I had to actually read the damn thing before I dared to stick my neck out. Gotta keep my street cred intact y’know.
My initial impression after reading the paper is positive. Science, along with Nature are among the most prestigious journals, so right off the bat you know it’s to be taken seriously. Secondly, I know of the technique they used (more later) so it’s not quite so out of the blue as the failed Pons/Fleischman technique.
I’m going to remain cautious until the replications start rolling in. I do not expect it will take many days before that occurs as the published experimental technique does not require any terribly specialized equipment(1). I imagine grad students around the world already are madly digging gear out of closets and throwing their own test beds together. They will want their lab among the first to say Aye or Nay. I would not be surprised to hear the first tentative reports within a few days.
I must admit it was a complete surprise. I’ve been in bull sessions about cold fusion over the last decade or so and cavitation has been one of the ideas that came up again and again. I remember standing around in a conference hallway in 1995 in a circle with 3 or 4 others while Dr. Robert Forward talked about it. As the years have rolled on I assumed people had tried the idea and it hadn’t worked.
I’m sure there will be a lot of hype if replications pour in. But here’s my reality check for you. A few excess neutrons coming out of a beaker is a very, very long way from an economical power generating plant. Even if it works, it could be decades or never before it amounts to anything.
I’ll be watching this one very closely.
(1) Well… I admit the neutron source might be a bit dicey to get hold of.
The April issue of Aeroplane reports an XF-90 was found on Frenchman Flat. It was used during the nuclear testing series there in the early 1950’s and apparently was just forgotten. Not that surprising I guess. One wouldn’t expect a lot of hikers wandering about one the most heavily A-bombed spots on Earth.
It has been recovered and is being decontaminated (after 50 years in the desert I suspect that means hosing the dust off it) and will be displayed at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio. I would imagine it needs “a little work” done on it as well.
Here’s a USAF picture of one of the two of them back when they were new. That makes it 50/50 this is the same plane:
I’m going to read more deeply, but the allegations in the Evidence Eliminator link posted below leave me thinking extreme paranoia on the part of Evidence Eliminator:
In considering the exceptionally defamatory content, (the article delivers a propaganda payload of 16 lies) and the conduct of WIRED.COM we have to ask readers to consider the question of whether or not WIRED.COM, LYCOS and/or their trademark holders Carnegie Mellon University (who allegedly have CIA connections) were involved in sending the emails as part of a deliberate covert action to defame and discredit Robin Hood Software Ltd. and Evidence Eliminator™.
Firstly let me state that I know CMU SCS (School of Computer Science) as well as anyone. I was a CMU undergraduate and graduate student, a founding employee of Compuguard, CMU’s first hight tech spin off company, worked for years in the Robotics Institute and then in the Music Lab for several more years. Just to establish my credentials, here is my web page at my old home.
Lycos, like most of the new high tech companies in Pittsburgh is a spinoff from CMU. It was one of the very first web indexers, if not the first. It was done by students.
Lycos went commercial and moved off the campus. Since the work was done with university resources, the university took some stock. CMU is quite a good place for entrepreneurs. Perhaps because for many years the President was a business school type (yes, CMU also has a top business school), the university policies both encourage entrepreneurs and make loads of dosh for the Alma Mater.
We (and I still strongly identify myself with CMU SCS) were always very good at getting DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funding because we were successfully churning out some of the most advanced work in the world, year after year. CMU (and myself) were on the internet before it was the Internet. I would go so far as to say CMU SCS (along with MIT and Stanford) created the whole ethos of the internet, an ethos which has survived a growth from 20 machines in 1973 to hundreds of millions today.
CMU has been a central clearing house for computer security for ages; formally so with the founding of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) within the freestanding Software Engineering Institute in the 80’s, around the time of the Morris Internet Worm. CERT tracks software vulnerability reports and patterns of computer breakins. Any SysAdmin who isn’t aware of them doesn’t know his job.
Now as to the allegation. Does CMU SCS have “ties” to NSA? Probably, but only in the sense it has “ties” to any of it’s Industrial Affiliates, or anyone else from whom the researchers can extract money. CMU is a private university and a very businesslike place as far as money is concerned. As far as lifestyle and research, SCS runs almost like a libertarian anarchy but based on our “reasonable person” principle. The place would drive an experienced cat-herder mad.
Next, Lycos has been a freestanding company for some years. That means it has outgrown the university roots. Although I have not been in Pittsburgh in nearly 10 years, I would bet they are in the industrial park on the Monongahela River where the mile long Johns & Laughlin Steel Mill stood when I was a kid. CMU and the City of Pittsburgh and I think the University of Pittsburgh jointly developed it into a high tech industrial park. It’s a couple miles from the campus at any rate.
Now down to the meat of it. If CMU SCS grads ran tests against Evidence Eliminator and found it wanting, I know which party I would believe. In any case, I’ll be contacting the department to get “our” side of the story.
If you are really worried about keeping your machine clean, you had better just discard your Microsoft products altogether, and you had better be prepared to switch to Linux and (at this point in history) to learn a great deal about security and forensics.
If you’re too lazy or too busy to do it yourself, I’m available on the subject for £70/hr and up.
According to Wired the media industry has spent massive amounts of money in its’ attempts to buy the government:
Also, in the 2000 election cycle , the entertainment industry handed Democrats a whopping $24.2 million in contributions compared to $13.3 million to Republicans, according to opensecrets.org.
No wonder they were so loath to give Libertarian Presidential Candidate Harry Browne coverage during the 2000 election campaign. They just didn’t want to waste any of their Demopublican investment.
Dave Tepper suggests ideas for a blogger drinking game. I’m not sure we need a game at Samizdata HQ. We take our drinking as dead seriously as 1930’s Hollywood newspapermen.
I’m sure Perry can atest to the similarity between the state of his bar after the Samizdatistas went home and an African field after the locusts have gone.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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