The Programmers Stone
# Carlo M. Cipolla at Mental Soup - The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - entertaining. [picks]
# Don Nash at LewRockwell.com - Ten Questions and Answers: An interview with Karen Kwiatkowski - Mr. Nash, of Unknown News fame, interviews this retired USAF Lt. Colonel, turned essayist. [lew]
Q. How would you describe current American foreign policy?
Imperial socialism. Imperial because we want it for everyone, or at least those that have some perceived economic or strategic value to us, and we are willing to use our standing army to enforce our wishes and create dependencies. Socialism applies, I think, because we are practicing it at home, and preaching it as our vassal's salvation as well.
George W. Bush says we are spreading freedom and democracy, but in reality we are spreading secular statism, economic centralism, and martial law and, for convenience I guess, we call it freedom and democracy.
# Jim Davies at Strike the Root - The Suppression of Dissent - a report on the complete end of the rule of law in American courts. How the judge in Irwin Schiff's trial denied him justice by refusing to allow him to defend himself in any way. Kent Dawson. I hereby revoke your membership in the human race. Hereafter, anyone who sees you may morally squash you like the bug you are. [root]
# Anthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com - The Dead Ends of Technicalitarianism - why Irwin Schiff's approach to avoiding income tax is bass ackwards. The gummint doesn't care about its own laws. Never did. Never will. It is a criminal enterprise, supported by theft and murder. Always was. Always will be. [clairefiles]
Drawing on the technicalities of law as the chief tactic of fighting the state has its severe limitations and drawbacks, however. Instead of helping to expose the naked emperor or the man behind the curtain, it can lead us to grant undeserved legitimacy to the state. To obsess over the income tax as a supposed violation of statutory law is to give far too much credence to statutory law. The reason income tax is wrong is that it's theft, not because some legislator back in 1913 failed to dot his i's and cross his t's. Moreover, if enough Americans began calling the IRS's alleged bluff, and stopped filing, the state would simply make the income tax "official" and "properly ratified" in any ways it had presumably failed to do so.
...
The state is not about laws on pieces of paper. It is about looting and violence. Its principal methods of funding are theft and counterfeiting, its regular modus operandi is extortion and its most conspicuous projects are assault and murder. Ultimately, finding a technicality that saves Americans from income taxation will prove as effective as finding one that saves foreigners from incoming U.S. missiles. (Can you imagine an Iraqi screaming at the bombing of Baghdad that since the war had not been declared properly, the explosions cannot legally hurt him?) A loophole might save you money in the short term, but it will likely do you no good if the IRS has it in for you, and it will certainly do little in the long term to help in the eternal clash with the state.
Instead of searching for the magic loophole that will swallow up the state and all its oppression, we should devote our time to learning about how the state actually works, its historical and modern relationships with the private and semi-private sectors, and the effects of its domestic and foreign interventions. We should not fool ourselves. The state does not steal our incomes because we have overlooked a confusing regulation or fail to know our case law. The reason we have an income tax is because the politicians in power want an income tax, and have bamboozled the public into believing that taxation is acceptable in the first place. The tax code is confusing and contradictory for all sorts of historical and operational reasons, but it certainly does not contain the final key to our freedom from taxation.
# Alan Carter - The Programmers Stone - very interesting. An attempt to teach people to be better programmers, but with some insights into human psychology in general. Haven't read it yet. Stolid posted this summary at the ClaireFiles forums. [clairefiles]
# Isracast - The Car That Makes Its Own Fuel - put aluminum or magnesium in steam and you get oxidized (rusted) metal and hydrogen. Burn the hydrogen, and you can make a car go. Refueling becomes refilling the water tank and deoxidizing the metal. Very interesting. Being commercialized by Engineuity, an Israeli company. Note that this is in no way free energy. It will require energy to deoxidize the metal. But it is an interesting battery. [root]
