A Geek With Guns

Last week I gave my predictions for France, most of which were pulled from the book Pictures of a Socialistic Future [PDF]. Pictures of a Socialistic Future was a took written at the end of the 1800s that property predicted many things that would happen in socialist countries. One of the predictions was the socialist state would face a massive exodus of people and would implement laws preventing unapproved departures from the country. Such laws have been implemented in many socialist countries and are put into place to keep wealth and labor in the country by force. Guess what? The United States is officially announcing plans to implement such laws:

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again.

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At a news conference this morning, Sens. Schumer and Bob Casey, D-Pa., will unveil the “Ex-PATRIOT” – “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy” – Act to respond directly to Saverin’s move, which they dub a “scheme” that would “help him duck up to $67 million in taxes.”

The senators will call Saverin’s move an “outrage” and will outline their plan to re-impose taxes on expatriates like Saverin even after they flee the United States and take up residence in a foreign country. Their proposal would also impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship.

The process of preventing people from leaving the United States has been underway for a while. Earlier this year legislation was announced that would prevent those who owe taxes from leaving the country. Now the state is moving to make laws that will make it legal for the state to plunder a great deal of your wealth if you decide to renounce your citizenship. Ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t get much more blatant than this.

You are not a citizen, you are not a free individual, you are a slave according to the state. In their eyes they own you, you are their property. Honestly, if you have any wealth whatsoever get the fuck out of this country now. The ship is sinking and the state is looking to transfer any and all wealth from the people to its cronies and agents before there is no wealth left to take. Eugene Richter warned us what socialism would bring in Pictures of a Socialistic Future and nobody felt it was worth heading his warning. Right now the state is targeting the wealthy because they have the most to take but you can rest assured that laws preventing the departure from the United States will only expand.

Also, the the Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy Act? EX-PATRIOT Act? Really? Really?! Who the fuck is paid to come up with these acronyms?

I hat tip to Snarky Bytes for this revealing story.

Not wanting to be outdone, our neighbors to the north are looking to bring more tyranny upon its people:

A proposed private members’ bill would make it a crime for protesters to wear a mask or disguise while participating in a riot or unlawful assembly, and this week the Harper government put its weight behind the legislation.

The Conservative majority on a House of Commons committee that’s examining the bill took matters a step further Thursday by doubling the proposed maximum prison term to 10 years from five.

Government MPs passed the amendment over the objections of the NDP opposition, who argue the bill is a sham because wearing a mask to commit a crime is already an offence under the Criminal Code.

So it’s going to be illegal to wear a mask while participating in a riot or “unlawful assembly?” Isn’t participating in a riot already illegal? What the hell is an “unlawful assembly?”

What is the point of laws like this other than to expand the police state? I can think of none as these laws simple make acts that are already illegal more, uhh, illegaler I guess. Whether somebody is wearing a mask while participating in a riot should be irrelevant, the only things that are relevant are whether or not they hurt anybody or damaged property. Masks aren’t enchanted items that give +2 to melee or +2 to smashing shit and thus are not relevant regarding any crimes.

Oh well, this does demonstrate that the police state is expanding everywhere, not just in the United States of America.

No words strike as much fear into many peoples’ hearts as “We’re with the government, we’re hear to help.” For example and innocent man had the state “help” him perform “repairs” to his property:

Two years ago today, Joe Del Rio was awakened to find city officials at the door of his lifelong home in East Austin, demanding entry. Before it was over, the Police Department’s SWAT team and the Fire Department had been deployed, and Del Rio said he was detained and questioned for about 10 hours because of what officials called a multilevel bunker-like space under the house with suspicious and unusual materials.

After the city billed Del Rio in April for about $90,000 in repairs it said were critical to make the home on Canterbury Street safe, Del Rio sued the City of Austin last week for what his lawyers say was a heavy-handed and unconstitutional seizure of his property without compensation.

Let me get this straight, a SWAT team stormed this man’s property, detained and questioned the man, and performed “repairs.” I wonder what kind of repairs were performed:

Del Rio also said officials concreted in the basement, fenced and locked the perimeter of the home and removed utility meters, making the house, in its current state, uninhabitable. The suit says that at the time of the seizure, Travis Central Appraisal District records put the house’s reasonable fair market value at upward of $172,000.

I guess if you have an insanely twisted mind filling a basement with concrete could qualify as a repair.

It seems you need the state’s stamp of approval to do anything, including reincarnate:

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country.

I’m not sure what China is thinking with this one. They want to reduce the influence of the Dalai Lama but I’m guessing Buddism doesn’t stipulate that the state must give one permission before they can reincarnate.

Honestly this ruling is just weird, I wonder if the politicians stopped to consider how this law would be enforced before passing it.

The United States likes to declare war on everything. We have the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism. Now Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is working hard on declaring a war on climate change:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared global warming a national security threat yesterday during a speech before an environmentalist group in Washington, D.C.

“The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,” Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. “Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”

I’m sure a Global Warming Enforcement Agency is being created and drones are being deployed to bomb those who working to forward global warming. Those who deny global warming or release research demonstrating global warming as a fallacy will likely be arrested and tossed into federal prisons.

Everybody believes Romney is going to win the Republican nomination this year and I can’t disagree with that belief. Romney is the chosen candidate of the Republican Party and they want him to be the victor this election. What the media hasn’t been reporting is the fact that Ron Paul is running away with tons of delegates, news that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is taking note of:

The Republican National Committee is warning the Nevada GOP that if supporters of Ron Paul are allowed to take too many slots for the national convention, the party may opt against seating the state’s entire convention delegation.

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The RNC is concerned that the Paul campaign will game the state-level convention this weekend that selects delegates to the national convention. While Mitt Romney should be awarded 20 of the state’s 28 delegates, based on his dominating win in the state’s primary, it’s possible that Paul supporters could exploit their strength in the Nevada GOP to get named to some of those delegate slots.

The national party is apparently concerned those delegates would then ignore party rules that would bind them to vote for Romney on the first round of balloting.

Did you get that? If Ron Paul ends up winning too many seats in Nevada the RNC may simply refuse to seat the entire state during the national convention. Their excuse that the Paul delegates may refuse to play by the rules is feeble at best. If that’s a concern the RNC should refuse to seat any delegates from states that were won by Santorum since their disgruntlement over losing their candidate may cause them to not play by the rules.

Either way the RNC has made an ultimatum, send Romney delegates or we’re not going to count your state. You know what? I hope Ron Paul wins Nevada and the RNC refuses to seat the state’s delegates at the national convention. As a Ron Paul supporter this may sounds like a weird thing to hope for but such an action would, more than anything else, demonstrate the irrelevance of member input in the Republican Party. It would show that the RNC doesn’t care what the members want and will go to any lengths to ensure the RNC favored candidates receive nominations. Perhaps such an action would finally wake enough members of the Republican Party up and cause them to leave. Obviously the completely brainwashed party supporters wouldn’t leave regardless but I don’t want everybody to leave, just enough to rip the Republican Party’s teeth out and possibly create a new viable party.

At this point I really want to see the Republican Party burn. I’m not a fan of hypocrites and the Republican Party are some of the biggest hypocrites of all. They promise small government, fiscal conservativeness, and free markets but deliver huge government, major debt spending, and heavily regulated markets. At least the Democratic Party is honest when they promise government programs, regulated markets, and forced association (which they like to call integration). The Republican Party promises good and deliver evil while the Democratic Party promises evil and actually delivers evil, one point to the Democratic Party for honesty.

Unfortunately people continue to feed the Republican Party because they believe it’s less evil than the Democratic Party. Guess what? It’s not. The Republican Party is willing to disqualify delegates if those delegates don’t deliver the desired result. Why doesn’t the RNC just admit to its dictatorial aspirations and start appointing a candidate without the delegate process? At least that would be honest.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) dirty little secret is that the terrorist plots they’ve “stopped” have all been ones of their own creation. Earlier this year the FBI “stopped” a bombing attempt on the United States Capitol, which was made possible by the FBI who not only encouraged the supposed bomber but gave him the “bomb” to as well. This practice has become so common that even the New York Times is no longer able to overlook it:

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

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This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.

The FBI knows two things: nobody pays attention to the details of stories anymore and fear is the state’s most powerful weapon. Point one relates to how easy it is for the FBI to pull off their little scams. They know 90% of the population isn’t going to bother looking into the details of any story about terrorist plots stopped by the FBI. In addition that 90% won’t listen to the 10% of us who do look into the details because they think we’re crazy conspiracy theorists. Point two’s value is pretty obvious, if people are afraid they’ll submit to the state in the hopes of receiving protection from the communist muslim extremist terrorists who are bent on bring Sharia law by bombing our country.

For the FBI it’s a pretty sweet scam… until people start to notice. Eventually even the 90% who pay no attention to the details of these stories wake up and notice something is amiss. Usually this happens when some mainstream media source finally reports on it, such as the case with this New York Times article. It looks like the FBI may have to find another way of cowing the American public into obedience.

What happens when changing the labor laws to make it nearly impossible for an independent farm to function isn’t enough? If you’re the state you just start doing what you’re good at, stealing their money:

Now, Obama has the Dept. of Justice going after small farmers under the post-911 “Bank Secrecy Act” which makes it a crime to deposit less than $10,000 when you earned more than that.

“The level we deposited was what it was and it was about the same every week,” Randy Sowers told Frederick News. The Sowers own and run South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, Maryland.

Admittedly, when the Sowers earned over $10,000 in February, and learned they’d have to fill out paperwork at the bank for such large deposits, they simply rolled the deposits over to keep them below the none-of-your-fucking-business amount, rather than waste time on bureaucratic red tape aimed at flagging terrorism or other illegal activities.

“Structuring,” explains Overlawyered.com, “is the federal criminal offense of splitting up bank deposits so as to keep them under a threshold such as $10,000 above which banks have to report transactions to the government.”

While being questioned, the Sowers were finally presented with a seizure order and advised that the feds had already emptied their bank account of $70,000. The Dept. of Justice has since sued to keep $63,000 of the Sowers’ money, though they committed no crime other than maintaining their privacy.

This just goes to show that there is a law for everything. If you don’t want to fill out a ton of pointless paperwork when depositing $10,000 or more you’re committing a criminal act by making multiple smaller deposits. At this point it’s probably smarter to build your own valut to store you cash in because it certainly isn’t safe at the bank.

You also have to love the fact that the Department of Justice (DoJ) is suing the farmer to keep most of the ill-gotten money even though the farmers have committed no crime. Guilty until proven, well, guilty is the motto in this country.

The federal government hates independent farms. I understand this because large agricultural companies spend a lot of money lobbying for laws that hinder their smaller competitors. First the federal government attempted to make a rule that would require anybody driving farm equipment to obtain a commercial drivers license then they attempted to prohibit anybody under the age of 16 from working on a farm that wasn’t owned by their parents and now they’re trying to prohibit anybody under the age of 18 from doing many standard farm chores:

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

As a former member of Future Farmers of American (FFA) (it got me out of school several days a year) I would just like to state that I’d much rather have that organization do safety training than the federal government. FFA, at least when I was in it, was a well run organization that did some damn good work. The last thing I want is an organization that has been attempting to shut down independent farmers be the sole entity that deals with safety training certification.

Sadly with the power large agriculture corporations hold there is almost no hope for independent farms to continue legitimately. If you’re an independent farmer let me just say it’s probably time for you to acquaint yourself with agorism, because that will be the only way for you to continue farming.

People often believe we live in a free country where the freedom of speech is respected. It’s not true, the United States censors people all of the time but isn’t as blatant about it as some states. Instead of outright censoring political dissidence the United States uses various laws and procedures claimed to be in place for safety reasons to determine who can and can’t speak as on blogger found out:

The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”

Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.

When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.

But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.

Isn’t that a nice little scam to censor speech? First you require anybody practicing dietetics or nutrition to be licensed and then you make the act of providing nutritional “counseling” without said license illegal. Since counseling is a pretty good catch-all term that can be applied to any advocacy you can effectively prevent individuals from speaking about a topic unless they’re approved by the state.