I Hate The TV

[lord edward coke]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH3fSUq0TBk


   who else??

[lord edward coke]

It seems to me a nightmare becomes reality
The last days of the paradise are gone for you and me
We're living in the crossfire
And we'll be killed at first
Why cannot people that we made the leaders of the world
Understand that we don't wanna fight
Understand that we are mush too young to die
Understand no one will survive
Understand that we love our life

Can I trust the meaning of the life line in my hand
Which is as long as exciting hundred years
I could be a lucky man
But I'm living in the crossfire
Of a time that starts to burn
Why cannot people that we made the leaders of the world
Understand that we don't wanna fight
Understand that we are mush too young to die
Understand no one will survive
Understand that we love our life


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fllu9WepnVU&feature=related

[lord edward coke]

America Is
   
 
  America is
America is
America is
America is
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
American dream so f-f-full of it

Look at the indians
Look at the blacks
Look at the figures
Look at the facts
Check out the facts
The facts not the lies
When you find out
Big surprise

America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
American dream so f-f-full of it

Check out the indians
Check out the blacks
Check out the figures
Check out the facts
Check out some facts
Check out the facts not the lies
When you find out
It’s a big surprise right between the eyes

America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
American dream so f-f-full of it

American dream is only a dream
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Even though my nose don’t work
I smell trouble I smell trouble
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Murder, mureder in the goverment
Say you’re sorry
Say you’re sorry
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Turn the key
Turn the lock
Nationalism
You can suck my..
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Watch the worl’s progressin’
Everywhere
Aggresion, aggresion
Aggresion, aggresion
Aggresion, aggresion

Gordon gano: vocal, guitar
Brian ritchie: bass, vocal
Victor delorenzo: drums, vocal

Recoded by dave nietzke at midwest records, milwaukee
 

[iamc]

The TV will cause the human brain to switch from the left hemisphere to the right: and thus take an individual into a dream state; moreover producing the same effect as drugs: Because the endorphins the brain produces will give the watcher a natural high; in addition this make the chronic viewer a TV addict to the boob tube [which by the way was created by the powers that be]
( great info Mr. L. E. Coke  )

[lord edward coke]

The TV will cause the human brain to switch from the left hemisphere to the right: and thus take an individual into a dream state; moreover producing the same effect as drugs: Because the endorphins the brain produces will give the watcher a natural high; in addition this make the chronic viewer a TV addict to the boob tube [which by the way was created by the powers that be]
( great info Mr. L. E. Coke  )

Check this golden oldie:

The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!

If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.



Life Is a Gift from God
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life -- physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.


Life, faculties, production--in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.



What Is Law ?
What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each of us has a natural right--from God--to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?

If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.



A Just and Enduring Government
If a nation were founded on this basis, it seems to me that order would prevail among the people, in thought as well as in deed. It seems to me that such a nation would have the most simple, easy to accept, economical, limited, nonoppressive, just, and enduring government imaginable -- whatever its political form might be.

Under such an administration, everyone would understand that he possessed all the privileges as well as all the responsibilities of his existence. No one would have any argument with government, provided that his person was respected, his labor was free, and the fruits of his labor were protected against all unjust attack. When successful, we would not have to thank the state for our success. And, conversely, when unsuccessful, we would no more think of blaming the state for our misfortune than would the farmers blame the state because of hail or frost. The state would be felt only by the invaluable blessings of safety provided by this concept of government.

It can be further stated that, thanks to the non- intervention of the state in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in a logical manner. We would not see poor families seeking literary instruction before they have bread. We would not see cities populated at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at the expense of cities. We would not see the great displacements of capital, labor, and population that are caused by legislative decisions.

The sources of our existence are made uncertain and precarious by these state-created displacements. And, furthermore, these acts burden the government with increased responsibilities.



The Complete Perversion of the Law
But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

How has this perversion of the law been accomplished? And what have been the results?

The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Let us speak of the first.



A Fatal Tendency of Mankind
Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.

But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.
all right here:  http://www.constitution.org/law/bastiat.htm

[lord edward coke]

And Of course (another oldie, I love the old stuff as it shows the progress the freemen made and convicts the slavish)

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. [This essay was written in 1869.] And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. and the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but "the people" THEN existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves. Let us see. Its language is:

We, the people of the United States (that is, the people THEN EXISTING in the United States), in order to form a more perfect union, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves AND OUR POSTERITY, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It is plain, in the first place, that this language, AS AN AGREEMENT, purports to be only what it at most really was, viz., a contract between the people then existing; and, of necessity, binding, as a contract, only upon those then existing. In the second place, the language neither expresses nor implies that they had any right or power, to bind their "posterity" to live under it. It does not say that their "posterity" will, shall, or must live under it. It only says, in effect, that their hopes and motives in adopting it were that it might prove useful to their posterity, as well as to themselves, by promoting their union, safety, tranquility, liberty, etc.

Suppose an agreement were entered into, in this form:

We, the people of Boston, agree to maintain a fort on Governor's Island, to protect ourselves and our posterity against invasion.

This agreement, as an agreement, would clearly bind nobody but the people then existing. Secondly, it would assert no right, power, or disposition, on their part, to compel their "posterity" to maintain such a fort. It would only indicate that the supposed welfare of their posterity was one of the motives that induced the original parties to enter into the agreement.

When a man says he is building a house for himself and his posterity, he does not mean to be understood as saying that he has any thought of binding them, nor is it to be inferred that he is so foolish as to imagine that he has any right or power to bind them, to live in it. So far as they are concerned, he only means to be understood as saying that his hopes and motives, in building it, are that they, or at least some of them, may find it for their happiness to live in it.

So when a man says he is planting a tree for himself and his posterity, he does not mean to be understood as saying that he has any thought of compelling them, nor is it to be inferred that he is such a simpleton as to imagine that he has any right or power to compel them, to eat the fruit. So far as they are concerned, he only means to say that his hopes and motives, in planting the tree, are that its fruit may be agreeable to them.

So it was with those who originally adopted the Constitution. Whatever may have been their personal intentions, the legal meaning of their language, so far as their "posterity" was concerned, simply was, that their hopes and motives, in entering into the agreement, were that it might prove useful and acceptable to their posterity; that it might promote their union, safety, tranquility, and welfare; and that it might tend "to secure to them the blessings of liberty." The language does not assert nor at all imply, any right, power, or disposition, on the part of the original parties to the agreement, to compel their "posterity" to live under it. If they had intended to bind their posterity to live under it, they should have said that their objective was, not "to secure to them the blessings of liberty," but to make slaves of them; for if their "posterity" are bound to live under it, they are nothing less than the slaves of their foolish, tyrannical, and dead grandfathers.

It cannot be said that the Constitution formed "the people of the United States," for all time, into a corporation. It does not speak of "the people" as a corporation, but as individuals. A corporation does not describe itself as "we," nor as "people," nor as "ourselves." Nor does a corporation, in legal language, have any "posterity." It supposes itself to have, and speaks of itself as having, perpetual existence, as a single individuality.

Moreover, no body of men, existing at any one time, have the power to create a perpetual corporation. A corporation can become practically perpetual only by the voluntary accession of new members, as the old ones die off. But for this voluntary accession of new members, the corporation necessarily dies with the death of those who originally composed it.

Legally speaking, therefore, there is, in the Constitution, nothing that professes or attempts to bind the "posterity" of those who established it.

If, then, those who established the Constitution, had no power to bind, and did not attempt to bind, their posterity, the question arises, whether their posterity have bound themselves. If they have done so, they can have done so in only one or both of these two ways, viz., by voting, and paying taxes.  -continue=

   http://www.angelfire.com/la/LAWGIVER/notreason.htm

[lord edward coke]

tompain=  Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the king of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the parliament in what he calls theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains is bestowed upon their conversion.

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is

http://www.constitution.org/tp/comsense.htm

[lord edward coke]

The author of this volume was considered one of the ablest legal minds in the United States. He studied law under William Wirt, the eminent author of the Life of Patrick Henry, and his practiced profession with great success from 1810 to 1824. After an interval of retirement, he held a high judicial position as Judge of the General Court of Virginia, from 1826 to 1841; at which time he entered Mr. Tyler's Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. On Mr. Webster's retirement, in the spring of 1843, Judge Upshur succeeded him as Secretary of State. On the 28th of February 1844, the explosion of the great gun ("Peacemaker") on board the steamer Princeton killed this eminent jurist and statesman. His reputation in private life was as spotless as his public fame was exalted and unrivaled.

This review of Judge Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States is perhaps the ablest analysis of the nature and character of the Federal Government that has ever been published. It has remained unanswered. Indeed, we are not aware that any attempt has been made to invalidate the soundness of its reasoning. As a law writer, Judge Story has been regarded as one of the ablest of his school, which was that of the straightest type of "Federalists" of the elder Adams's party. His commentaries are a good deal marred with the peculiar partisan doctrines of that school of politicians; indeed, they may be looked upon as a plea for the severe political principles which ruled the administration of President John Adams. The Alien and Sedition Laws, which have long since passed into a by-word of reproach, will still find abundant support in Judge Story's Commentaries. He perpetually insisted on construing the Constitution from the standpoint of that small and defeated party in the Federal Convention which wanted to form a government on the model of the English monarchy in everything but the name. This party was powerful in respectability and talents, but weak or few in numbers — and after it was so signally defeated in the Constitutional Convention, it still held on to its monarchical principles, and sought to invest the new government with kingly powers, notwithstanding the Constitution had been constructed upon principles entirely opposite to its doctrine. In a letter of U. S. Senator John Langdon, of New Hampshire to Samuel Ringgold, of the date of October 10th, 1800, he says: "Mr. Adams certainly expressed himself that he hoped, or expected to see the day when Mr. Taylor, and his friend, Mr. Giles, would be convinced that the people of America would never be happy without a hereditary Chief Magistrate and Senate or at least for life." Mr. Rose, a Senator from Pennsylvania, and a friend of the Adams party, left the table of Mr. Hollines, of Philadelphia, when "the Constitution of the United States" was given as a toast. John Wood, the historian of the time, speaking of the principles of the Federalists, says: "They bestowed unbounded panegyrics upon Alexander Hamilton, because this gentleman acted the part of Prime Minister to the President. They thought the administration and the government ought to be confounded and identified; that the administration was the government, and the government the administration; and that the people ought to bow in tame submission to its whim and caprice." Writing of Mr. Adams, Jefferson says: "Mr. Adams had originally been a Republican. The glare of royalty and nobility, during his mission in England, had made him believe their fascination to be a necessary ingredient in government. His book on the American Constitution had made known his political bias. He was taken up by the monarchical Federalists in his absence, and was by them, made to believe that the general disposition of our citizens was favorable to monarchy."

At a dinner given by Mr. Jefferson, when he was a member of Washington's Cabinet, he declares that, "after dinner, Mr. Adams said: 'Purge the British Constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would be the most perfect Constitution ever devised by the wit of man.' Hamilton replied: 'Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become then an impracticable government. As it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government that ever existed.'" Mr. Jefferson adds: "Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption." The Federalists having a majority in Congress, passed an act to continue in force during the administration of Mr. Adams, declaring that "if any person should write or publish, or cause to be published, any libel against the Government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or against the President, he shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years." A great many editors, and other gentlemen, were imprisoned under this act. Even to ridicule the President was pronounced by the corrupt partisan judges a violation of the law. Men were beaten almost to death for neglecting to pull off their hats when the President was passing, and every man who did not instantly prostrate himself before the ensigns of Federal royalty, was denounced as the enemy of his country. The following letter, addressed to President John Adams by the merchants of Boston, shows to what lengths that party had dragged the public mind in the direction of monarchy:

"We, the subscribers, inhabitants and citizens of Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, deeply impressed with the alarming situation of our country, and convinced of the necessity of uniting with firmness at this interesting crisis, beg leave to express to you, the Chief Magistrate and supreme ruler over the United States, our fullest approbation of all the measures, external and internal, you have pleased to adopt, under direction of divine authority. We beg leave also to express the high and elevated opinion we entertain of your talents, your virtue, your wisdom and your prudence; and our fixed resolution to support, at the risk of our lives and fortunes, such measures as you may determine upon to be necessary for promoting and securing the honor and happiness of America."

Any one can see that men who could address the President after this fashion, had a great deal less respect for the restraints and limitations of a written Constitution, than for the will and force of individual power. That was the drift of a certain portion of public opinion in America at that time. But the tyrannical excesses of that party soon brought it into such odium, that it was driven from power by the election of Mr. Jefferson to the Presidency. Though defeated, its partisans never ceased to labor to drag the Constitution away from its Democratic foundations, by giving the Constitution a construction utterly antagonistic to the intentions of the Convention which framed and of the States which adopted it. The great vice of the Federalists consisted in desiring to clothe the Federal Government with almost monarchical powers; whereas the States had carefully and resolutely reserved the great mass of political power to themselves. The powers which they delegated to the Federal Government were few, and were general in their character. Those which they reserved embraced their original and inalienable sovereignty, which no State imagined it was surrendering when it, adopted the Constitution. Mr. Madison dwelt with great force upon the fact that "a delegated is not a surrendered power." The States surrendered no powers to the Federal Government. They only delegated them. The powers of the States are original. Those of the Federal Government are only derived and secondary; and they were delegated, not for the purpose of aggrandizing the Federal Government, but for the sole purpose of protecting the rights and sovereignty of "the several States." The Federal Government was formed by the States for their own benefit. The Federal Government is simply an agency, commissioned by the "several States" for their own convenience and safety. In the Convention of Virginia, Patrick Henry said: "Liberty, sir, is the primary object. Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings — give us that precious jewel, and you may take away everything else." And, with an eloquence more powerful than that which shook the throne of Macedon, he demonstrated that the battles of the Revolution were fought, not to make "a great and mighty empire," but "for liberty." It was for liberty — for the liberty of the people of the "several States" that the Federal Government was established. Not for the kingly grandeur and power of government, but for the happiness, safety and liberty of "the people of the several States." Nothing could possibly be stronger than the determination pervading the mind of the Federal Convention to sacrifice no iota of the essential sovereignty of the States in the formation of the general Union. This feeling was most happily expressed by Chief Justice Ellsworth, of Connecticut, in, the Convention that framed our Constitution, in the following words:

"I want domestic happiness as well as general security. A General Government will never grant me this, as it cannot know my wants, nor relieve my distress. My State is only as one out of thirteen. Can they, the General Government, gratify my wishes? My happiness depends as much on the existence of my State Government as a new-born infant depends upon its mother for nourishment."

In the Convention of Massachusetts, Fisher Ames said:

"A consolidation of the States would subvert the new Constitution, and against which this article is our best security. Too much provision cannot be made against consolidation. The State Governments represent the wishes and feelings, and local interests of the people. They are the safeguard and ornament of the Constitution; they will protract the period of our liberties; they will afford a shelter against the abuse of power, and will be the natural avengers of our violated rights."

Such were the views and sentiments of the men who framed and who adopted the Federal Constitution. But Judge Story belonged to another school of politicians, and his Commentaries upon the Constitution were written in the interests of the Consolidationists, who have ever insisted on giving that instrument an interpretation in harmony with their wishes and ideas. This review of Judge Upshur, however, does not leave a single point of the Federalistic heresy unanswered. It will ever stand as a text-book of the true theory of our government. We are confident that no book has ever appeared in this country which so thoroughly meets the demands of the present hour. With this book in his hand, the Democratic statesman or orator is armed at every point against the sophistries of the foes of State sovereignty and self-government. There is no vital point which it does not discuss and settle upon the basis of invulnerable truth.

http://www.constitution.org/ups/upshur.htm

[lord edward coke]

http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/maine/anclaw/index.html         way  back.

[lord edward coke]

               http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFxVlGR6g8A&feature=related

[iks83]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWICZB_v1ig

[lord edward coke]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWICZB_v1ig

   

A Chapter from
The Secret Freedom Fighter
by Jefferson Mack
Paladin Press, 1986


A Good Citizen in a Bad Country
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 bastard 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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7chyetTCHSE

[lord edward coke]

   No fooling the children of the revolution+  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iahYQy_3tM8&feature=related

http://ggth.typepad.com/tng/

[heavyhebrew]

First, thanks for the reprint of some Paladin Press stuff. I miss those guys.

I am a very bad citizen then, Lord Edward Coke.
Very naughty. And in the eyes of those who covet good citizens, I am pure, unadulterated evil.
I look out for my family and friends and treat the government, local and on up, as nuisances at best. I love browbeating them by simply stating that they are functionaries, bureaucrats at the best of times. Tyrants, at the worst. Every time I have to deal with them, I openly mock them then make sure that anytime that I get to move thru any of their office spaces that I pull any plugs I can get access to, push all the buttons on the elevator when I leave, drops truth dvds on desks and put stickers on signs and observe for more opportunity for hijinks.

Now pardon me, I have to go to the dog park and turn on the EMF generator to set off some car alarms. IR also works. Now if I could figure a way out to remotely trigger garage doors by area of effect.

[lord edward coke]

First, thanks for the reprint of some Paladin Press stuff. I miss those guys.

I am a very bad citizen then, Lord Edward Coke.
Very naughty. And in the eyes of those who covet good citizens, I am pure, unadulterated evil.
I look out for my family and friends and treat the government, local and on up, as nuisances at best. I love browbeating them by simply stating that they are functionaries, bureaucrats at the best of times. Tyrants, at the worst. Every time I have to deal with them, I openly mock them then make sure that anytime that I get to move thru any of their office spaces that I pull any plugs I can get access to, push all the buttons on the elevator when I leave, drops truth dvds on desks and put stickers on signs and observe for more opportunity for hijinks.

Now pardon me, I have to go to the dog park and turn on the EMF generator to set off some car alarms. IR also works. Now if I could figure a way out to remotely trigger garage doors by area of effect.

  FUNNY!!!  Everybody has a few un-used padlocks and combination locks that are useful on GUMMIT controlled access gates ect.  Also old keys that fit in municipal/police/county building door locks are inserted and broken off flush, with or without the superglue. (with or without the key     Either way it's drill the lock out time.)

The ol paladin press came after my Favorite LOOMPANICS UNLIMITED. ( prefer old school and I think they still have some old articles floating around the WEB). If more Patriots invested in Browns Lawsuit cookbook, We wouldn't have any concern over the local up to state bureaucRATS! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9MX8rMZ97I

gas tax nationwide:    http://www.gasbuddy.com/tax_info.aspx

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/index.html                Found em!!!

[heavyhebrew]

I have also learned that bike locks on motorcycle cop bikes work wonders.

But lately I have been enjoying the wonderful fun of playing EW spectrum pranks. Man, I am probably the only guy in Seattle without a tv looking forward the most for the digital switch. It is going to be even easier to hijack a signal now.

Oh and now that the weather is warming up, time for guirella theatre were we like to go downtown, pop the digital projector up with a portable stereo system and play Endgame in a nice little corporate art area during the lunch hour.
This year we will videotape the people who come up to talk to us, always good for a laugh. "Hey man, you need to get a job!" "I do have a job, waking up your tired ass to the truth about how you are getting royally screwed over by your boss's bosses bosses."
The most fun are the ones so deep in the sleep that they get violently agitated by the very idea of protest. And then there are the cops...

Anywho... if anyone is curious were my mindset comes from it is from the always fun Paladin Press: http://www.paladin-press.com/

Only two things in this world to take seriously: sex and rock n roll. All the rest is bullshit.

[lord edward coke]

   Heard some commotion in the alley bhind myhouse...............opened the rear door.

lucky i had my camera ready..............now on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwgth4qKn8I&feature=related


I am gonna move.

[jimwill]

Oh and now that the weather is warming up, time for guirella theatre were we like to go downtown, pop the digital projector up with a portable stereo system and play Endgame in a nice little corporate art area during the lunch hour.

Only two things in this world to take seriously: sex and rock n roll. All the rest is bullshit.

Pick the right day and you should be able to project Endgame into the clouds - cover a wider audience! 
(Of course the sheep probably wouldn't see it - too busy counting their change and watching that they don't step on a cop's toes!)

[lord edward coke]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtXQ31F1A-k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUiTQvT0W_0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxRj-ejoJaM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAnSyQA_fT4&feature=related

I'm a professional and I just don't talk about these things.
Lots of things are not fit for the public. This has nothing
to do with democracy. It has to do with common sense. 
—GRATION H. YASETEVITCH, 1978
(explaining why he did not want
to be interviewed for this book)


To hope that the power that is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me to be a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the USSR and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them they work devotedly for the USSR in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the USSR. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science it seems most probable that they will serve the purpose of whatever group has the power. —CARL ROGERS, 1961         
 


    Sid Gottlieb was one of many CIA officials who tried to find a way to assassinate Fidel Castro. Castro survived, of course, and his victory over the Agency in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs put the Agency in the headlines for the first time, in a very unfavorable light. Among the fiasco's many consequences was Gottlieb's loss of the research part of the CIA's behavior-control programs. Still, he and the others kept trying to kill Castro.
    In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy reportedly vowed to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces. In the end, he settled for firing Allen Dulles and his top deputies. To head the Agency, which lost none of its power, Kennedy brought in John McCone, a defense contractor and former head of the Atomic Energy Commission. With no operational background, McCone had a different notion than Dulles of how to manage the CIA, particularly in the scientific area. "McCone never felt akin to the covert way of doing things," recalls Ray Cline, whom the new Director made his Deputy for Intelligence. McCone apparently believed that science should be in the hands of the scientists, not the clandestine operators, and he brought in a fellow Californian, an aerospace "whiz kid" named Albert "Bud" Wheelon to head a new Agency Directorate for Science and Technology.
    Before then, the Technical Services Staff (TSS), although located in the Clandestine Services, had been the Agency's largest scientific component. McCone decided to strip TSS of its main research functions—including the behavioral one—and let it concentrate solely on providing operational support. In 1962 he approved a reorganization of TSS that brought in Seymour Russell, a tough covert operator, as the new chief. "The idea was to get a close interface with operations," recalls an ex-CIA man. Experienced TSS technicians remained as deputies to the incoming field men, and the highest deputyship in all TSS went to Sid Gottlieb, who became number-two man under Russell. For Gottlieb, this was another significant promotion helped along by his old friend Richard Helms, whom McCone had elevated to be head of the Clandestine Services.
    In his new job, Gottlieb kept control of MKULTRA. Yet, in order to comply with McCone's command on research programs, Gottlieb had to preside over the partial dismantling of his own program. The loss was not as difficult as it might have been, because, after 10 years of exploring the frontiers of the mind, Gottlieb had a clear idea of what worked and what did not in the behavioral field. Those areas that still were in the research stage tended to be extremely esoteric and technical, and Gottlieb must have known that if the Science Directorate scored any breakthroughs, he would be brought back into the picture immediately to apply the advances to covert operations.
    "Sid was not the kind of bureaucrat who wanted to hold on to everything at all costs," recalls an admiring colleague. Gottlieb carefully pruned the MKULTRA lists, turning over to the Science Directorate the exotic subjects that showed no short-term operational promise and keeping for himself those psychological, chemical, and biological programs that had already passed the research stage. As previously stated, he moved John Gittinger and the personality-assessment staff out of the Human Ecology Society and kept them under TSS control in their own proprietary company.
    While Gottlieb was effecting these changes, his programs were coming under attack from another quarter. In 1963 the CIA Inspector General did the study that led to the suspension of unwitting drug testing in the San Francisco and New York safehouses. This was a blow to Gottlieb, who clearly intended to hold on to this kind of research. At the same time, the Inspector General also recommended that Agency officials draft a new charter for the whole MKULTRA program, which still was exempt from most internal CIA controls. He found that many of the MKULTRA subprojects were of "insufficient sensitivity" to justify bypassing the Agency's normal procedures for approving and storing records of highly classified programs. Richard Helms, still the protector of unfettered behavioral research, responded by agreeing that there should be a new charter—on the condition that it be almost the same as the old one. "The basic reasons for requesting waiver of standardized administrative controls over these sensitive activities are as valid today as they were in April, 1953," Helms wrote. Helms agreed to such changes as having the CIA Director briefed on the programs twice a year, but he kept the approval process within his control and made sure that all the files would be retained inside TSS. And as government officials so often do when they do not wish to alter anything of substance, he proposed a new name for the activity. In June 1964 MKULTRA became MKSEARCH. [1]
    Gottlieb acknowledged that security did not require transferring all the surviving MKULTRA subprojects over to MKSEARCH. He moved 18 subprojects back into regular Agency funding channels, including ones dealing with the sneezing powders, stink bombs, and other "harassment substances." TSS officials had encouraged the development of these as a way to make a target physically uncomfortable and hence to cause short-range changes in his behavior.
    Other MKULTRA subprojects dealt with ways to maximize stress on whole societies. Just as Gittinger's Personality Assessment System provided a psychological road map for exploiting an individual's weaknesses, CIA "destabilization" plans provided guidelines for destroying the internal integrity of target countries like Castro's Cuba or Allende's Chile. Control— whether of individuals or nations—has been the Agency's main business, and TSS officials supplied tools for the "macro" as well as the "micro" attacks.
    For example, under MKULTRA Subproject #143, the Agency gave Dr. Edward Bennett of the University of Houston about $20,000 a year to develop bacteria to sabotage petroleum products. Bennett found a substance that, when added to oil, fouled or destroyed any engine into which it was poured. CIA operators used exactly this kind of product in 1967 when they sent a sabotage team made up of Cuban exiles into France to pollute a shipment of lubricants bound for Cuba. The idea was that the tainted oil would "grind out motors and cause breakdowns," says an Agency man directly involved. This operation, which succeeded, was part of a worldwide CIA effort that lasted through the 1960s into the 1970s to destroy the Cuban economy. [2] Agency officials reasoned, at least in the first years, that it would be easier to overthrow Castro if Cubans could be made unhappy with their standard of living. "We wanted to keep bread out of the stores so people were hungry," says the CIA man who was assigned to anti-Castro operations. "We wanted to keep rationing in effect and keep leather out, so people got only one pair of shoes every 18 months."

[lord edward coke]

You wonder how Moses stuck it out, but for 40 years he
kept on telling them that they were free men -that they
were responsible for themselves. "Ye are not murmuring
against me," he told them, ''but against the God of Abra-
ham."

But slaves are passive. They submit. They obey. And they
expect to be fed.

They wanted Moses to be their king so they could hold
him responsible and blame him for everything, but Moses
turned them down and kept on insisting that they were free,
responsible for themselves ; that there was no pagan god to
control them and be responsible for them, and that no man
could rule another man.

But the children of Israel kept on murmuring, drifting
back into idolatry and sneaking every chance to worship
their pagan gods.

Finally Moses, as a last resort, reduced the teachings of
Abraham to a written code of moral laws. They are known
as the Ten Commandments and they stand today as the first
and greatest document of individual freedom in the known
history of man.

Each of the Ten Commandments is addressed to the in-
dividual, as a self -controlling person responsible for his own
thoughts, words and acts. And each of them recognizes lib-
erty and freedom as inherent in the nature of man.

The FIRST commandment tells the individual to re-
ject pagan gods and recognize his own worth as a
human being, subject to no power but that of the
Creator and Judge'.

The SECOND tells the individual to form no image
of abstract Rightness but to direct his reverence to-
ward the Divine in Truth.

The THIRD tells the individual not to speak frivo-
lously of the Creator and Judge. Knowledge of fun-
damental truth -cause and effect -is of first im-
portance and should be taken very seriously.

The FOURTH tells the individual to devote some
time (one day out of seven) to reflection on the eter-
nal verities.

The FIFTH recognizes the family as the primary
human relationship, and establishes the parent's au-
thority over the child as the only authority which a
child should accept for his own profit.

The SIXTH stresses the sanctity of human life, the
individual's right to live, a right that must not be
violated by any other person.

The SEVENTH establishes the principle of contract,
the inviolability of promises given by persons to each
other and the double sanctity of the marriage con-
tract which is the basis of the family.

The EIGHTH recognizes the individual's right of
ownership of property.

The NINTH recognizes free speech : the individual's
control over his own utterances and his responsi-
bility for their truth.

The TENTH emphasizes again the right of owner-
ship. Not even in thought should a person violate the
property rights of another.

The Decalogue of Moses is one of the most amazing state-
ments of truth that has ever been written - but it was too
revolutionary to find acceptance in the pagan world of the
time and the ancient Israelites wanted a king rather than a
code of personal conduct.

This is how our system of government was scripturally based. 

 http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.swf

[lord edward coke]

America Is
   
 
  America is
America is
America is
America is
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
American dream so f-f-full of it

Look at the indians
Look at the blacks
Look at the figures
Look at the facts
Check out the facts
The facts not the lies
When you find out
Big surprise

America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
American dream so f-f-full of it

Check out the indians
Check out the blacks
Check out the figures
Check out the facts
Check out some facts
Check out the facts not the lies
When you find out
It’s a big surprise right between the eyes

America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
America is the home of the hypocrite
American dream so f-f-full of it

American dream is only a dream
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Even though my nose don’t work
I smell trouble I smell trouble
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Murder, mureder in the goverment
Say you’re sorry
Say you’re sorry
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Turn the key
Turn the lock
Nationalism
You can suck my..
No desperation limit
New desperation level
Watch the worl’s progressin’
Everywhere
Aggresion, aggresion
Aggresion, aggresion
Aggresion, aggresion

Gordon gano: vocal, guitar
Brian ritchie: bass, vocal
Victor delorenzo: drums, vocal

Recoded by dave nietzke at midwest records, milwaukee
 

about time someone put this on youtube!!!  only 253 veiws 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Fn5a9WLj8&feature=related

[lord edward coke]

The History of Freedom in Christianity

By John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
When Constantine the Great carried the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople, he set up in the marketplace of the new capital a porphyry pillar, which had come by raft and rail from Egypt, and of which a strange tale is told. In a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems of the Roman State, which were guarded by the virgins in the temple of Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched. On the summit, he raised a statue of Apollo, representing himself, and enclosing a fragment of the Cross; and he crowned it with a diadem of rays consisting of the nails employed at the Crucifixion, which his mother was believed to have found at Jerusalem.
The pillar still stands, the most significant monument that exists of the converted empire; for the notion that the nails which had pierced the body of Christ became a fit ornament for a heathen idol as soon as it was called by the name of a living emperor, indicates the position designed for Christianity in the imperial structure of Constantine. Diocletian's attempt to transform the Roman government into a despotism of the Eastern type had brought on the last and most serious persecution of the Christians; and Constantine, in adopting their faith intended neither to abandon his predecessor's scheme of policy, nor to renounce the fascinations of arbitrary authority, but to strengthen his throne with the support of a religion which had astonished the world by its power of resistance; and to obtain that support absolutely and without a drawback he fixed the seat of his government in the East, with a patriarch of his own creation.

Nobody warned him that by promoting the Christian religion he was tying one of his hands, and surrendering the prerogative of the Caesars. As the acknowledged author of the liberty and superiority of the Church, he was appealed to as the guardian of her unity. He admitted the obligation; he accepted the trust; and the divisions that prevailed among the Christians supplied his successors with many opportunities of extending that protectorate, and preventing any reduction of the claims or of the resources of imperialism.

Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church. According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the emperors the entire plenitude of its authority, and, therefore, the emperor's pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law. Even in the fervent age of its conversion the empire employed its refined civilization, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the reasonableness and subtlety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of the Jewish, the pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience--a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital clement, Which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression, had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilization, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire of the West.

In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings, did not preside [at] their councils; they were sometimes elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in obedience to the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities is the remote germ of parliamentary government. The action of the state was confined to narrow limits; but, besides his position as head of the state, the king was surrounded by a body of followers attached to him by personal or political ties. In these his immediate dependants, disobedience or resistance to orders was no more tolerated than in a wife, a child, or a soldier; and a man was expected to murder his own father if his chieftain required it. Thus these Teutonic communities admitted an independence of government that threatened to dissolve society; and a dependence on persons that was dangerous to freedom. It was a system very favourable to corporations, but offering no security to individuals. The state was not likely to oppress its subjects; and was not able to protect them.

The first effect of the great Teutonic migration into the regions civilized by Rome was to throw back Europe many centuries, to a condition scarcely more advanced than that from which the institutions of Solon had rescued Athens. Whilst the Greeks preserved the literature, the arts, and the science of antiquity, and all the sacred monuments of early Christianity with a complete ness of which the rended fragments that have come down to us give no commensurate idea, and even the peasants of Bulgaria knew the New Testament by heart, Western Europe lay under the grasp of masters the ablest of whom could not write their names. The faculty of exact reasoning, of accurate observation, became extinct for 500 years, and even the sciences most needful to society, medicine and geometry, fell into decay, until the teachers of the West went to school at the feet of Arabian masters. To bring order put of chaotic ruin, to rear a new civilization and blend hostile and unequal races into a nation, the thing wanted was not liberty but force. And for centuries all progress is attached to the action of men like Clovis, Charlemagne, and William the Norman, who were resolute and peremptory, and prompt to be obeyed.

The spirit of immemorial paganism which had saturated ancient society could not be exorcised except by the combined influence of Church and State; and the universal sense that their union was necessary created the Byzantine despotism. The divines of the empire who could not fancy Christianity flourishing beyond its borders, insisted that the State is not in the Church, but the Church in the State. This doctrine had scarcely been uttered when the rapid collapse of the Western empire opened a wider horizon; and Salvianus, a priest at Marseilles, proclaimed that the social virtues, which were decaying amid the civilized Romans, existed in greater purity and promise among the pagan invaders. They were converted with ease and rapidity; and their conversion was generally brought about by their kings.

Christianity, which in earlier times had addressed itself to the masses, and relied on the principle of liberty, now made its appeal to the rulers, and threw its mighty influence into the scale of authority. The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier, than their newly founded states. The clergy supplied the means of conducting the new governments, and were made exempt from taxation, from the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, and of the political administrator. They taught that power ought to be conferred by election; and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework of the parliamentary system of Spain, which is, by a long interval, the oldest in the world. But the monarchy of the Goths in Spain, as well as that of the Saxons in England, in both of which the nobles and the prelates surrounded the throne with the semblance of free institutions, passed away; and the people that prospered and overshadowed the rest were the Franks, who had no native nobility, whose law of succession to the Crown became for 1,000 years the fixed object of an unchanging superstition, and under whom the feudal system was developed to excess.

Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the state. Every baron, said the French maxim, is sovereign in his own domain. The nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies of local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force was brought upon the scene which proved for a time superior alike to the vassal and his lord.

In the days of the Conquest, when the Normans destroyed the liberties of England, the rude institutions which had come with the Saxons, the Goths, and the Franks from the forests of Germany were suffering decay, and the new element of popular government afterwards supplied by the rise of towns and the formation of a middle class, was not yet active. The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision when the progress of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church, by subjecting the prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the Kings which was peculiar to the Teutonic state.

To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the Kings whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her states general and England her parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of Divine Right. A disposition existed to regard the crown as an estate descending under the law of real property in the family that possessed it. But the authority of religion, and especially of the papacy, was thrown to the side that denied the indefeasible title of kings. In France what was afterwards called the Gallican theory maintained that the reigning house was above the law, and that the sceptre was not to pass away from it as long as there should be princes of the royal blood of St. Lewis. But in other countries the oath of fidelity itself attested that it was conditional, and should be kept only during good behaviour; and it was in conformity with the public law to which all monarchs were held subject, that King John was declared a rebel against the barons; and that the men who raised Edward III to the throne from which they had deposed his father, invoked the maxim Vox populi Vox Dei.

And this doctrine of the Divine Right of the people to raise up and pull down princes, after obtaining the sanctions of religion, was made to stand on broader grounds, and was strong enough to resist both Church and King. In the struggle between the house of Bruce and the house of Plantagenet for the possession of Scotland and Ireland, the English claim was backed by the censures of Rome. But the Irish and the Scots refused it; and the address in which the Scottish parliament informed the Pope of their resolution shows how firmly the popular doctrine had taken root. Speaking of Robert Bruce, they say: "Divine Providence, the laws and customs of the country, which we will defend till death, and the choice of the people, have made him our King. If he should ever betray his principles, and consent that we should be subjects of the English king, then we shall treat him as an enemy, as the subverter of our rights and his own, and shall elect another in his place. We care not for glory or for wealth, but for that liberty which no true man will give up but with his life." This estimate of royalty was natural among men accustomed to see those whom they most respected in constant strife with their rulers. Gregory VII had begun the disparagement of civil authorities, by saying that they are the work of the devil; and already in his time both parties were driven to acknowledge the sovereignty of the people, and appealed to it as the immediate source of power.

Two centuries later this political theory had gained both in definiteness and force among the Guelphs, who were the Church party, and among the Ghibellines, or Imperialists. Here are the sentiments of the most celebrated of all the Guelphic writers:--"A King who is unfaithful to his duty forfeits his claim to obedience. It is not rebellion to depose him, for he is himself a rebel whom the nation has a right to put down. But it is better to abridge his power, that he may be unable to abuse it. For this purpose, the whole nation ought to have a share in governing itself, the constitution ought to combine a limited and elective monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an admixture of democracy as shall admit all classes to office, by popular election. No government has a right to levy taxes beyond the limit determined by the people. Al political authority is derived from popular suffrage, and all laws must be made by the people or their representatives. There is no security for us as long as we depend on the will of another man." This language, which contains the earliest exposition of the Whig theory of the revolution, is taken from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom Lord Bacon says that he had the largest heart of the school divines. And it is worth while to observe that he wrote at the very moment when Simon de Montfort summoned the Commons; and that the politics of the Neapolitan friar are centuries in advance of the English statesman's.

The ablest writer of the Ghibelline party was Marsilius of Padua. "Laws," he said, "derive their authority from the nation, and are invalid without its assent. As the whole is greater than any part, it is wrong that any part should legislate for the whole; and as men are equal, it is wrong that one should be bound by laws made by another. But in obeying laws to which all men have agreed, all men, in reality, govern themselves. The Monarch, who is instituted by the legislature, to execute its will, ought to be armed with a force sufficient to coerce individuals, but not sufficient to control the majority of the people. He is responsible to the nation, and subject to The law; and the nation that appoints him, and assigns him his duties, has to see that he obeys the constitution, and has to dismiss him if he breaks it. The rights of citizens are independent of the faith they profess; and no man may be punished for his religion." This writer, who saw in some respects farther than Locke or Montesquieu, who, in regard to the sovereignty of the nation, representative government, the superiority of the legislature over the executive, and the liberty of conscience, had so firm a grasp of the principles that were to sway the modern world, lived in the reign of Edward II, 550 years ago.

It is significant that these two writers should agree on so many of the fundamental points which have been, ever since, the topic of controversy; for they belonged to hostile schools, and one of them would have thought the other worthy of death. St. Thomas would have made the papacy control all Christian governments. Marsilius would have had the clergy submit to the law of-the land; and would have put them under restrictions both as to property and numbers. As the great debate went on, many things gradually made themselves clear, and grew into settled convictions. For these were not only the thoughts of prophetic minds that surpassed the level of contemporaries: there was some prospect that they would master the practical world. The ancient reign of the barons was seriously threatened. The opening of the East by the Crusades had imparted a great stimulus to industry. A stream set in from the country to the towns; and there was no room for the government of towns in the feudal machinery. When men found a way of earning a livelihood without depending for it on the good will of the class that owned the land, the landowner lost much of his importance, and it began to pass to the possessors of moveable wealth. The townspeople not only made themselves free from the control of prelates and barons, but endeavoured to obtain for their own class and interest the command of the state.

The fourteenth century was filled with the tumult of this struggle between democracy and chivalry. The Italian towns, foremost in intelligence and civilization, led the way with democratic constitutions of an ideal and generally impracticable type. The Swiss cast off the yoke of Austria. Two long chains of free cities arose, along the valley of the Rhine, and across the heart of Germany. The citizens of Paris got possession of the King, reformed the state, and began their tremendous career of experiments to govern France. But the most healthy and vigorous growth of municipal liberties was in Belgium, of all countries on the continent, that which has been, from immemorial ages the most stubborn in its fidelity to the principle of self government. So vast were the resources concentrated in the Flemish towns, so wide spread was the movement of democracy, that it was long doubtful whether the new interest would not prevail, and whether the ascendency of the military aristocracy would not pass over to the wealth and intelligence of the men that lived by trade. But Rienzi, Marcel, Artevelde, and the other champions of the unripe democracy of those days, lived and died in vain. The upheaval of the middle class had disclosed the need, the passions, the aspirations of the suffering poor below; ferocious insurrections in France and England caused a reaction that retarded for centuries the readjustment of power, and the red spectre of social revolution arose in the track of democracy. The armed citizens of Ghent were crushed by the French chivalry; and monarchy alone reaped the fruit of the change that was going on in the position of classes, and stirred the minds of men.

Looking back over the space of 1,000 years, which we call the Middle Ages to get an estimate of the work they had done, if not towards perfection in their institutions, at least towards attaining the knowledge of political truth, this is what we found--Representative government, which was unknown to the ancients, was almost universal. The methods of election were crude; but the principle that no tax was lawful that was not granted by the class that paid it; that is, that taxation was inseparable from representation, was recognized, not as the privilege of certain countries, but as the right of all. Not a prince in the world, said Philip de Commines, can levy a penny without the consent of the people. Slavery was almost everywhere extinct; and absolute power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery. The right of insurrection was not only admitted but defined, as a duty sanctified by religion. Even the principles of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the method of the Income Tax, were already known. The issue of ancient politics was an absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce of the middle ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by the representation of powerful classes, by privileged associations, and by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man.

As regards the realization in practice of what was seen to be good, there was almost everything to do. But the great problems of principle had been solved; and we come to the question: How did the sixteenth century husband the treasure which the Middle Ages had stored up2 The most visible sign of the times was the decline of the religious influence that had reigned so long. Sixty years passed after the invention of printing, and 30,000 books had issued from European presses, before anybody undertook to print the Greek Testament. In the days when every state made the unity of faith its first care, it came to be thought that the rights of men, and the duties of neighbours and of rulers towards them varied according to their religion; and society did not acknowledge the same obligations to a Turk or a Jew, a pagan or a heretic, Or a devil worshipper, as to an orthodox Christian. As the ascendency of religion grew weaker, this privilege of treating its enemies on exceptional principles was claimed by the state for its own benefit; and the idea that the ends of government justify the means employed, was worked into system by Machiavelli. He was an acute politician, sincerely anxious that the obstacles to the intelligent government of Italy should be swept away. It appeared to him that the most vexatious obstacle to intellect is conscience and that the vigorous use of statecraft necessary for the success of difficult schemes would never be made if governments allowed themselves to be hampered by the precepts of the copy-book.

His audacious doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age, by men whose personal character otherwise stood high. They saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from private, because no government can turn the other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the difference, or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation's acts there is than the judgment which heaven pronounces in this world by success.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. Rut it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. Charles V offered 5,000 crowns for the murder of an enemy. Ferdinand I and Ferdinand II, Henry III and Lewis XIII, each caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism.

The clergy who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom during the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery, were associated now with the interest of royalty. Attempts had been made to reform the Church; on the Constitutional model, they had failed; but they had united the hierarchy and the crown against the system of divided power as against a common enemy. Strong kings were able to bring the spirituality under subjection in France and Spain, in Sicily and in England. The absolute monarchy of France was built up in the two following centuries by twelve political cardinals. The Kings of Spain obtained the same effect almost at a single stroke, by reviving and appropriating to their own use the tribunal of the Inquisition, which had been growing obsolete, but now served to arm them with terrors which effectually made them despotic. One generation beheld the change all over Europe, from the anarchy of the days of the Roses to the passionate submission, the gratified acquiescence in tyranny that marks the reign of Henry VIII and the kings of his time.

The tide was running fast when the Reformation began at Wittenberg, and it was to be expected that Luther's influence would stem the flood of absolutism. For he was confronted everywhere by the compact alliance of the Church with the State; and great part of his country was governed by hostile potentates who were prelates of the court of Rome. He had, indeed, more to fear from temporal than from spiritual foes. The leading German bishops wished that the Protestant demands should be conceded; and the Pope himself vainly urged on the Emperor a conciliatory policy. But Charles V had outlawed Luther, and attempted to waylay him; and the dukes of Bavaria were active in beheading and burning his disciples;whilst the democracy of the towns generally took his side. But the dread of revolution was the deepest of his political sentiments; and the gloss by which the Guelphic divines had got over the passive obedience of the apostolic age, was characteristic of that mediaeval method of interpretation which he rejected. He swerved for a moment in his later years; but the substance of his political teaching was eminently conservative; the Lutheran states became the stronghold of rigid immobility; and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation. For the Swiss Reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing up their cause with politics. Zurich and Geneva were republics, and the spirit of their governments influenced both Zwingli and Calvin.

Zwingli indeed did not shrink from the mediaeval doctrine that evil magistrates must be cashiered; but he was killed too early to act either deeply or permanently on the political character of Protestantism. Calvin, although a republican, judged that the people are unfit to govern themselves, and declared the popular assembly an abuse that ought to be abolished. He desired an aristocracy of the elect, armed with the means of punishing not only crime but vice and error. For he thought that the severity of the mediaeval laws was insufficient for the need of the times; and he favoured the most irresistible weapon which the inquisitorial procedure put into the hand of the government, the right of subjecting prisoners to intolerable torture, not because they were guilty, but because their guilt could not be proved. His teaching, though not calculated to promote popular institutions, was so adverse to the authority of the surrounding monarchs, that he softened down the expression of his political views in the French edition of his Institutes.

The direct political influence of the Reformation effected less than has been supposed. Most states were strong enough to control it. Some, by intense exertion, shut out the pouring flood. Others, with consummate skill, diverted it to their own uses. The Polish government alone at that time, left it to its course. Scotland was the only kingdom in which the Reformation triumphed over the resistance of the state; and Ireland was the only instance where it failed, in spite of government support. But in almost every other case, both the princes that spread their canvas to the gale, and those that faced it, employed the zeal, the alarm, the passions it aroused as instruments for the increase of power. Nations eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed to preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church and State asunder, and to prevent the confusion of their powers, which had been the work of ages, was renounced in the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was of ten the instrument, but policy was the motive.

Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians. When the King of France undertook to kill all the Protestants, he was obliged to do it by his own agents. It was nowhere the spontaneous act of the population; and in many towns, and in entire provinces, the magistrates refused to obey. The motive of the court was so far from mere fanaticism that the Queen immediately challenged Elizabeth to do the like to the English Catholics. Francis I and Henry II sent nearly a hundred Huguenots to the stake; but they were cordial and assiduous promoters of the Protestant religion in Germany. Sir Nicholas Bacon was one of the ministers who suppressed the mass in England. Yet when the Huguenot refugees came over he liked them so little that he reminded Parliament of the summary way in which Henry V at Agincourt dealt with the Frenchmen who fell into his hands. John Knox thought that every Catholic in Scotland ought to be put to death; and no man ever had disciples of a sterner or more relentless temper. But his counsel was not followed.

All through the religious conflict, policy kept the upper hand. When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached, and Bellarmine lectured; but Machiavelli reigned. Before the close of the century three events occurred which mark the beginning of a momentous change. The massacre of St. Bartholomew convinced the bulk of Calvinists of the lawfulness of rebellion against tyrants, and they became advocates of that doctrine in which the Bishop of Winchester had led the way, and which Knox and Buchanan had received, through their master at straight from the mediaeval schools. Adopted out of aversion to the King of France, it was soon put 111 practice against the King of Spain. The revolted Netherlands, by a solemn act, deposed Philip II, and made themselves independent under the Prince of Orange, who had been, and continued to be styled, his Lieutenant. Their example was important, not only because subjects of one religion deposed a monarch of another, for that had been seen in Scotland, but because moreover it put a republic in the place of a monarchy, and forced the public law of Europe to recognise the accomplished revolution. At The same time, the French Catholics, rising against Henry III, who was the most contemptible of tyrants, and against his heir, Henry of Navarre, who, as a Protestant, repelled the majority of the nation, fought for the same principles with sword and pen.

Many shelves might be filled with the books which came out in their defence during half a century; and they include the most comprehensive treatises on laws ever written. Nearly all are vitiated by the defect which disfigured political literature in the Middle Ages. That literature, as I have tried to show, is extremely remarkable, and its services in aiding human progress are very great. But from the death of St. Bernard until the appearance of Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," there was hardly a writer who did not make his politics subservient to the interest of either Pope or King. And those who came after the Reformation were always thinking of laws as they might affect Catholics or Protestants. Knox thundered against what he called the "Monstrous Regiment of Women," because the Queen went to Mass; and Mariana praised the assassin of Henry III because the king was in league with Huguenots. For the belief that it is right to murder tyrants, first taught among Christians, I believe, by John of Salisbury, the most distinguished English writer of the twelfth century, and confirmed by Roger Bacon, the most celebrated Englishman of the thirteenth, had acquired about this time a fatal significance. Nobody sincerely thought of politics as a law for the just and the unjust, or tried to find out a set of principles that should hold good alike under all changes of religion. Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" stands almost alone among the works I am speaking of , and is still read with admiration by every thoughtful man, as the earliest and one of the finest prose classics in our language. But though few of the others have survived, they contributed to hand down masculine notions of limited authority and conditional obedience from the epoch of theory to generations of free men. Even the coarse violence of Buchanan and Boucher was a link in the chain of tradition that connects the Hildebrandine controversy with the Long Parliament, and St. Thomas with Edmund Burke.

That men should understand that governments do not exist by divine right, and that arbitrary government is the violation of divine right, was no doubt the medicine suited to the malady under which Europe languished. But although the knowledge of this truth might become an element of salutary destruction, it could give little aid to progress and reform. Resistance to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a legal government in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing; but it is better still that the offender should live for repentance and reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics between good and evil, and make states worthy to last, were not yet found. The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least demoralised by party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for a cause. In a passage almost literally taken from St. Thomas, he describes our subordination tinder the law of nature, to which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains it not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of universal reason, through which God enlightens the consciences of men. Upon this foundation Grotius drew the lines of real political science. In gathering the materials of International law, he had to go beyond national treaties and denominational interests, for a principle embracing all mankind. The principles of law must stand, he said, even if we suppose that there is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that they must be found independently of Revelation. From that time it became possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience, so that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace together, under the sanctions of a common law. Grotius himself used his discovery to little purpose, as he deprived it of immediate effect by admitting that the right to reign may be enjoyed as a freehold, subject to no conditions.

When Cumberland and Pufendorf unfolded the true significance of his doctrine, every settled authority, every triumphant interest recoiled aghast. None were willing to surrender advantages won by force or skill, because they might be in contradiction, not with the Ten Commandments, but with an unknown code, which Grotius himself had not attempted to draw up, and touching which no two philosophers agreed. It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and Hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side. Year after year, the assemblies that represented the self government of provinces and of privileged classes, all over the Continent, met for the last time and passed away, to the satisfaction of the people, who had learned to venerate the throne as the constructor of their unity, the promoter of prosperity and power, the defender of orthodoxy and the employer of talent.

The Bourbons, who had snatched the crown from a rebellious democracy, the Stuarts, who had come in as usurpers, set up the doctrine that states are formed by the valeur, the policy and the appropriate marriages of the royal family; that the king is consequently anterior to the people, that he is its maker rather than its handiwork, and reigns independently of consent. Theology followed up divine right with Passive obedience. In the golden age of religious science, Archbishop Ussher, the most learned of Anglican prelates, and Bossuet, the ablest of the French, declared that resistance to kings is a crime, and that they may lawfully employ compulsion against the faith of their subjects. The philosophers heartily supported the divines. Bacon fixed his hopes of all human progress on the strong hand of kings. Descartes advised them to crush all those who might be able to resist their power. Hobbes taught that authority is always in the right. Pascal considered it absurd to reform laws, or to set up an ideal justice against actual force. Even Spinoza, who was a republican and a Jew, assigned to the state the absolute control of religion.

Monarchy exerted a charm over the imagination, so unlike the unceremonious spirit of the Middle Ages that, on learning the execution of Charles I, men died of the shock; and the same thing occurred at the death of Lewis XVI and of the Duke of Enghien. The classic land of absolute monarchy was France. Richelieu held that it would be impossible to keep the people down if they were suffered to be well off. The Chancellor affirmed that France could not be governed without the right of arbitrary arrest and exile; and that in case of danger to the state it may be well that 100 innocent men should perish. The Minister of Finance called it sedition to demand that the crown should keep faith. One who lived on intimate terms with Lewis XIV says that even the slightest disobedience to the royal will is a crime to be punished with death. Lewis employed these precepts to their fullest extent. He candidly avows that kings are no more bound by the terms of a treaty than by the words of a compliment; and that there is nothing in the possession of their subjects which they may not lawfully take from them. In obedience to this principle, when Marshal Vauban, appalled by the misery of the people, proposed that all existing imposts should be repealed, for a single tax, that would be less onerous, the King took his advice, but retained all the old taxes, whilst he imposed the new. With half the present population, he maintained an army of 450,000 men; nearly twice as large as that which the late Emperor Napoleon assembled to attack Germany. Meanwhile the people starved on grass. France, said Fénelon, is one enormous hospital. French historians believe that in a single generation six millions of people died of want. It would be easy to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Lewis XIV; but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater suffering or greater wrong; and the admiration with which he inspired the most illustrious men of his time denotes the lowest depth to which the turpitude of absolutism has ever degraded the conscience of Europe.

The Republics of that day were, for the most part, so governed as to reconcile men with the less opprobrious vices of Monarchy. Poland was a state made up of centrifugal forces. What the nobles called liberty was the right of each of them to veto the acts of the Diet, and to persecute the peasants on his estates--rights which they refused to surrender up to the time of the partition, and thus verified the warning of a preacher spoken long ago: "You will perish, not by invasion or war, but by your infernal liberties." Venice suffered from the opposite evil of excessive concentration. It was the most sagacious of governments, and would rarely have made mistakes if it had not imputed to others motives as wise as its own, and had taken account of passions and follies of which it had little cognizance. But the supreme power of the nobility had passed to a committee, from the committee to a Council of Ten, from the Ten to three Inquisitors of State; and in this intensely centralized form it became, about the year 1600, a frightful despotism. I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison. As late as a century ago, Venetian senators of honourable and even religious lives employed assassins for the public good with no more compunction than Philip II or Charles IX.

The Swiss Cantons, especially Geneva, profoundly influenced opinion in the days preceding the French Revolution, but they had had no part in the earlier movement to inaugurate the reign of law. That honour belongs to the Netherlands alone among the Commonwealths. They earned it, not by their form of government which was defective and precarious, for the Orange party perpetually plotted against it, and slew the two most eminent of the Republican statesmen, and William III himself intrigued for English aid to set the crown upon his head; but by the freedom of the press, which made Holland the vantage ground from which, in the darkest hour of oppression, the victims of the oppressors obtained the ear of Europe.

The ordinance of Lewis XIV that every French Protestant should immediately renounce his religion went out in the year in which James II became king. The Protestant refugees did what their ancestors had done a century before. They asserted the deposing power of subjects over rulers who had broken the original contract between them; and all the powers, excepting France, countenanced their argument, and sent forth William of Orange on that expedition which was the faint dawn of a brighter day.

It is to this unexampled combination of things on the Continent, more than to her own energy, that England owes her deliverance. The efforts made by the Scots, by the Irish, and at last by the Long Parliament to get rid of the misrule of the Stuarts had been foiled, not by the resistance of Monarchy, but by the helplessness of the Republic. State and Church were swept away; new institutions were raised up under the ablest ruler that had ever sprung from a revolution; and England, seething with the toil of political thought, had produced at least two writers who in many directions saw as far and as clearly as we do now. But Cromwell's constitution was rolled up like a scroll; Harrington and Lilbume were laughed at for a time and forgotten, the country confessed the failure of its striving, disavowed its aims, and flung itself with enthusiasm, and without any effective stipulations, at the feet of a worthless king.

If the people of England had accomplished no more than this, to relieve mankind from the pervading pressure of unlimited monarchy, they would have done more harm than good. By the fanatical treachery with which, violating the parliament and the law, they contrived the death of King Charles, by the ribaldry of the Latin pamphlet with which Milton justified the act before the world, by persuading Europe that the Republicans were hostile alike to liberty and to authority, and did not believe in themselves, they gave strength and reason to the current of Royalism which at the Restoration, overwhelmed their work. If there had been nothing to make up for this defect of certainty and of constancy in politics England would have gone the way of other nations.

At that time there was some truth in the old joke which describes the English dislike of speculation by saying that all our philosophy consists of a short catechism in two questions: "What is mind? No matter.--What is matter? Never mind." The only accepted appeal was to tradition. Patriots were in the habit of saying that they took their stand upon the ancient ways, and would not have the laws of England changed. To enforce their argument they invented a story that the constitution had come from Troy, and that the Romans had allowed it to subsist untouched. Such fables did not avail against Strafford; and the oracle of precedent sometimes gave responses adverse to the popular cause. In the sovereign question of Religion this was decisive; for the practice of the sixteenth century, as well as of the fifteenth, testified in favour of intolerance. By royal command, the nation had passed four times in one generation from one faith to another, with a facility that made a fatal impression on Laud. In a country that had proscribed every religion in tum, and had submitted to such a variety of penal measures against Lollard and Arian, against Augsburg and Rome, it seemed there could be no danger in cropping the ears of a Puritan.

But an age of stronger conviction had arrived; and men resolved to abandon the ancient ways that led to the scaffold and the rack, and to make the wisdom of their ancestors and the statutes of the land bow before an unwritten law. Religous liberty had been the dream of great Christian writers in the age of Constantine and Valentinian, a dream never wholly realised in the empire, and rudely dispelled when the barbarians found that it exceeded the resources of their art to govern civilized populations of another religion, and unity of worship was imposed by laws of blood and by theories more cruel than the laws. But from St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose down to Erasmus and More, each age heard the protest of earnest men in behalf of the liberty of conscience, and the peaceful days before the Reformation were full of promise that it would prevail.

In the commotion that followed, men were glad to get tolerated themselves by way of privilege and compromise, and willingly renounced the wider application of the principle. Socinus was the first who, on the ground that Church and State ought to be separated, required universal toleration. But Socinus disarmed his own theory, for he was a strict advocate of Passive obedience.

The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century. Many years before the names of Milton and Taylor, of Baxter and Locke were made illustrious by Their partial condemnation of intolerance, there were men among the Independent congregations who grasped with vigour and sincerity the principle that it is only by abridging the authority of states that the liberty of churches can be assured. That great political idea, sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity, more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years. The cause of religion, even under the unregenerate influence of worldly passion, had as much to do as any clear notions of policy in making this country the foremost of the free. It had been the deepest current in the movement of 1641, and it remained the strongest motive that survived the reaction of 1660.

The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay, constantly represented the statesmen of the Revolution as the legitimate ancestors of modern liberty. It is humiliating to trace a political lineage to Algernon Sidney, who was the paid agent of the French king; to Lord Russell, who opposed religious toleration at least as much as absolute monarchy; to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood shed by the perjury of Titus Gates; to Halifax, who insisted that the plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough, who sent his comrades to perish on an expedition which he had betrayed to the French; to Locke, whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time of Charles II to that of George I he never knew a politician who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts, threw back the cause of progress for a century.

When the purport of the secret treaty became suspected, by which Lewis XIV pledged himself to support Charles II with an army for the destruction of parliament, if Charles would overthrow the Anglican Church, it was found necessary to make concession to the popular alarm. It was proposed that whenever James should succeed, great part of the royal prerogative and patronage should be transferred to parliament. At the same time, the disabilities of Nonconformists and Catholics would have been removed. If the Limitation Bill, which Halifax supported with signal ability, had passed, the Monarchical constitution would have advanced, in the seventeenth century, farther than it was destined to do until the second quarter of the nineteenth. But the enemies of James, guided by the Prince of Orange, preferred a Protestant king who should be nearly absolute, to a constitutional king who should be a Catholic. The scheme failed. Tames succeeded to a power which, in more cautious hands, would have been practically uncontrolled; and the storm that cast him down gathered beyond the sea.

By arresting the preponderance of France, the Revolution of 1688 struck the first real blow at Continental despotism. At home it relieved Dissent, purified justice, developed the national energies and resources, and ultimately, by the Act of Settlement, placed the crown in the gift of the people. But it neither introduced nor determined any important principle, and, that both parties might be able to work together, it left untouched the fundamental question between Whig and Tory. For the divine right of kings it established, in the words of Defoe, the divine right of freeholders; and their domination extended for seventy years, under the authority of John Locke, the philosopher of government by the gentry. Even Hume did not enlarge the bounds of his ideas; and his narrow materialistic belief in the connection between liberty and property captivated even the bolder mind of Fox.

By his idea that the powers of government ought to be divided according to their nature, and not according to the division of classes, which Montesquieu took up and developed with consummate talent, Locke is the originator of the long reign of English institutions in foreign lands. And his doctrine of resistance, or, as he finally termed it, the appeal to heaven, ruled the judgment of Chatham at a moment of solemn transition in the history of the world. Our parliamentary system, managed by the great revolution families, was a contrivance by which electors were compelled, and legislators were induced, to vote against their convictions; and the intimidation of the constituencies was rewarded by the corruption of their representatives. About the year 1770 things had been brought back, by indirect ways, nearly to the condition which the Revolution had been designed to remedy for ever. Europe seemed incapable of becoming the home of free states. It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to heaven for the acts of the state, ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden away in Latin folios, burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. Whether the British legislature had a constitutional right to tax a subject colony was hard to say, by the letter of the law. The general presumption was immense on the side of authority; and the world believed that the will of the constituted ruler ought to be supreme, and not the will of the subject people. Very few bold writers went as far as to say that lawful power may be resisted in cases of extreme necessity. But the colonizers of America, who had gone forth not in search of gain, but to escape from laws under which other Englishmen were content to live, were so sensitive even to appearances that the Blue Laws of Connecticut forbade men to walk to church within ten feet of their wives. And the proposed tax, of only £12,000 a year, might have been easily borne. But the reasons why Edward I and his Council were not allowed to tax England, were reasons why George III and his Parliament should not tax America. The dispute involved a principle, namely, the right of controlling government. Furthermore, it involved the conclusion that the parliament brought together by a derisive election, had no just right over the unrepresented nation; and it called on the people of England to take back its power. Our best statesmen saw that whatever might be the law, the rights of the nation were at stake. Chatham, in speeches better remembered than any that have been delivered in parliament, exhorted America to be firm. Lord Camden, the late Chancellor, said: "Taxation and representation are inseparably united. God hath joined them. No British parliament can separate them."

From the elements of that crisis Burke built up the noblest political philosophy in the world. "I do not know the method," said he, "of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.--The natural rights of mankind are indeed sacred things, and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it.--Only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate." In this way, just a hundred years ago, the opportune reticence, the politic hesitancy of European statesmanship, was at last broken down; and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control. The Americans placed it at the foundation of their new government. They did more: for having subjected all civil authorities to the popular will, they surrounded the popular will with restrictions that the British legislature would not endure.

During the revolution in France the example of England which had been held up so long, could not for a moment compete with the influence of a country whose institutions were so wisely framed to protect freedom even against the perils of democracy. When Louis Philippe became King, he assured the old Republican, Lafayette, that what he had seen in the United States had convinced him that no government can be so good as a Republic. There was a time in the presidency of Monroe, about 55 years ago, which men still speak of as the era of good feeling, when most of the incongruities that had come down from the Stuarts had been reformed, and the motives of later divisions were yet inactive. The causes of old world trouble, popular ignorance, pauperism, the glaring contrast between rich and poor, religious strife, public debts, standing armies and war, were almost unknown. No other age or country had solved so successfully the problems that attend the growth of free societies, and time was to bring no further progress.

But I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves, the only known forms of Liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy, have made their way over the world. It would have been interesting to trace the reaction of America on the Monarchies that achieved its independence; to see how the sudden rise of political economy suggested the idea of applying the methods of science to the art of govem ment; how Lewis XVI, after confessing that despotism was useless, even to make men happy by compulsion, appealed to the nation to do what was beyond his skill, and thereby resigned his sceptre to the middle class, and the intelligent men of France, shuddering at the awful recollections of their own experience, struggled to shut out the past, that they might deliver their children from the prince of this world, and rescue the living from the clutch of the dead; until the finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away, because the passion for equality made vain the hope of freedom.

And I should have wished to show you that the same deliberate rejection of the moral code which smoothed the paths of absolute monarchy and of oligarchy, signalised the advent of the democratic claim to unlimited power,--that one of its leading champions avowed the design of corrupting the moral sense of men, in order to destroy the influence of religion, and a famous apostle of enlightenment and toleration, wished that the last king might be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. I would have tried to explain the connection between the doctrine of Adam Smith, that labour is the original source of all wealth and the conclusion that the producers of wealth virtually compose the nation, by which Sieyes subverted historic France; and to show that Rousseau's definition of the social compact as a voluntary association of equal partners conducted Marat, by short and unavoidable stages, to declare that the poorer classes were absolved, by the law of self preservation from the conditions of a contract which awarded to them misery and death; that they were at war with society, and had a right to all they could get by exterminating the rich; and that their inflexible theory of equality, the chief legacy of the Revolution, together with the avowed inadequacy of economic science to grapple with the problems of the Poor revived the idea of renovating society on the principle of self sacrifice, which had been the generous aspiration of the Essenes and the early Christians, of Fathers, and Canonists, and Friars, of Erasmus the most celebrated precursor of the Reformation, of Sir Thomas More, its most illustrious victim, and of Fenelon, the most popular of bishops, but which, during the forty years of its revival has been associated with envy and hatred, and bloodshed, and is now the most dangerous enemy lurking in our path.

Last, and most of all, having told so much of the unwisdom of our ancestors, having exposed the sterility of the convulsion that burned what they adored, and made the sins of the Republic mount up as high as those of the monarchy, having shown that Legitimacy, which repudiated the Revolution, and Imperialism, which crowned it, were but disguises of the same clement of violence and wrong, I should have wished, in order that my address might not break off without a meaning or a moral, to relate by whom, and in what connection the true law of the formation of free states was recognised, and how that discovery, closely akin to those which, under the names of development, evolution, and continuity have given a new and deeper method to other sciences, solved the ancient problem between stability and change, and determined the authority of tradition on the progress of thought; how that theory, which Sir James Mackintosh expressed by saying that Constitutions are not made, but grow, the theory that custom and the national qualities of the governed, and not the will of the government, are the makers of the law, and therefore that the nation, which is the source of its own organic institutions should be charged with the perpetual custody of their integrity, and with the duty of bringing the form into harmony with the spirit, was made, by the singular co-operation of the purest Conservative intellect with red-handed revolution, of Niebuhr with Mazzini, to yield the idea of Nationality, which, far more than the idea of Liberality, has governed the movement of the present age.

I do not like to conclude without inviting attention to the impressive fact that so much of the hard fighting, the thinking, the enduring that has contributed to the deliverance of man from the power of man, has been the work of our countrymen, and of their descendants in other lands. We have had to contend, as much as any people, against monarchs of strong will and of resources secured by their foreign possession, against men of rare capacity, against whole dynasties of born tyrants. And yet that proud prerogative stands out on the background of our history. Within a generation of the Conquest, the Normans were compelled to recognise, in some grudging measure, the claims of the English people. When the struggle between Church and State extended to England, our Churchmen learned to associate themselves with the popular cause; and, with few exceptions, neither the hierarchical spirit of the foreign divines, nor the monarchical bias peculiar to the French, characterized the writers of the English school. The Civil Law, transmitted from the degenerate Empire to be the common prop of absolute power, was excluded from England. The Canon Law was restrained; and this country never admitted the Inquisition, nor fully accepted the use of torture, which invested Continental royalty with so many terrors. At the end of the Middle Ages foreign writers acknowledged our superiority, and pointed to these causes. After that, our gentry maintained the means of local self government such as no other country possessed. Divisions in religion forced toleration. The confusion of the common law taught the people that their best safeguard was the independence and the integrity of the judges.

All these explanations lie on the surface, and are as visible as the protecting ocean; but they can only be successive effects of a constant cause which must lie in the same native qualities of perseverance, moderation, individuality, and the manly sense of duty, which give to the English race its supremacy in the stern art of labour, which has enabled it to thrive as no other can on inhospitable shores, and which, although no great people has less of the bloodthirsty craving for glory, and an army of 50,000 English soldiers has never been seen in battle, caused Napoleon to exclaim, as he rode away from Waterloo: "It has always been the same since Crecy."

Therefore, if there is reason for pride in the past, there is more for hope in the time to come. Our advantages increase, while other nations fear their neighbours, or covet their neighbours' goods. Anomalies and defects there are, fewer and less intolerable, if not less flagrant than of old.

But I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that heaven's light illuminates, that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you have accompanied me over the dreary and heartbreaking course by which men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AZBQEvhYc&feature=related

http://www.acton.org/

[lord edward coke]

Police vs. Bookstore in Privacy Rights Case
Privacy Foundation researcher
http://www.privacyfoundation.org/
http://www.privacyfoundation.org/resources/bookstore.asp


When an individual’s right to privacy collides with the pursuit of law enforcement, what should yield?

That question was the centerpiece of a unique panel at the Denver Press Club on Dec. 12, where discussion focused on a controversial case involving a suspected criminal’s alleged purchase of drug cookbooks from the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver. The case has generated national attention, and is expected to land in the Colorado Supreme Court sometime next year – and perhaps even the U.S. Supreme Court.

The facts of the case are as follows. In March, police in suburban Denver busted a methamphetamine lab in a mobile home. Within the mobile home, the police found two books: The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories by "Jack B. Nimble" and Advanced Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic and Amphetamine Manufacture by "Uncle Fester." Outside in the trash the cops found a shipping envelope containing an invoice number from the Tattered Cover.

Believing that the invoice number was connected to the purchase of the books, and therefore would lead to a key suspect among several people who inhabited the mobile home, the police were granted a search warrant to track down the invoice at the Tattered Cover. Bookstore owner Joyce Meskis refused to cooperate, saying that protecting her customers’ privacy is paramount.

Speaking to an audience of about 40 people, the panel at the press club included Meskis, her attorney, law enforcement personnel involved in the case, a local judge, and a representative of the Privacy Foundation, which co-sponsored the event spearheaded by the Colorado Bar Association.

Meskis told the gathering that that she refused to release the invoice records to police because it would set a disturbing precedent that she felt would violate First Amendment rights. Police countered that the invoice was a key piece of evidence to track down the purchaser of the drug cookbooks, and would help them pursue their criminal case.

Most on the panel agreed that there need to be crystal clear guidelines for the police to obtain search warrants, particularly when the evidence sought relates to reading material. A member of the audience said she supported the right of bookstores and vendors on the Internet to sell and distribute provocative materials, without fear of action by law enforcement.

- Justin Rickard researched this article for the Privacy Foundation.


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPUlwE3hQ_0

[lord edward coke]

During Patrick Henry's famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, he said the following:
"Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst and to provide for it."

Later in his historic speech Henry said, "Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, Sir, we shall not fight our battles alone.

There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone. It is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable. And let it come! I repeat it, Sir, let it come!"


Of course, Henry ended his stirring speech with the immortal words, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

(The complete text of Patrick Henry's immortal address on March 23, 1775, is found in my giant compilation of great, historic documents called THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS, which may be ordered exclusively at http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/products.html )


Many people today (including the vast majority of my Christian brethren) are doing exactly what Patrick Henry said many were doing 234 years ago: they prefer to "shut [their] eyes against a painful truth." Just as in 1775, many today, "having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not."
Serious students of history, however, cannot mistake the similarities between the British Crown in 1775 and the federal government in Washington, D.C., today.
In fact, I would argue that federal usurpations of State sovereignty, personal liberty, and constitutional government are far more egregious today than at any time during the reign of old King George III.
Were America's Founding Fathers alive today, they would have waged another war for independence years ago. Compared to the violations of liberty by the federal government in 2009, the abridgements of liberty committed by the Crown in 1775 were miniscule.
We should all hang our heads in shame that we have not already exerted our right and responsibility as free people to "throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for [our] future security" (Declaration of Independence, Paragraph 2). Were we as righteous as our forebears, we would have already done so.


If we were writing a Declaration of Independence today, in which we would "let Facts be submitted to a candid world," the examples of federal abuse of power would be so multitudinous it would be difficult to contain them to a single document. The question is not, "Has the current federal government become tyrannical?" The question is, "How long will the States continue to tolerate it?"

For example, within the last couple of months, the States of Montana and Tennessee have each passed their own "Firearms Freedom Act." Briefly stated, the bills provide that any firearms or ammunition that are manufactured, sold, and kept within the State are not subject to federal law or federal regulation.
Clearly, Montana and Tennessee have the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution on their side.

Of course, the Constitution doesn't matter to the federal government. On July 16 of this year, BATFE Assistant Director Carson Carroll sent an "Open Letter" to all firearms dealers within the States of Tennessee and Montana, telling them in no uncertain terms, "Federal law supersedes the [Tennessee or Montana] Act, and all provisions of the Gun Control Act and the National Firearms Act, and their corresponding regulations, continue to apply."

You see folks, in the minds of the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., there is no such thing as constitutional government. There is no such thing as State autonomy.
There is no such thing as balance of power. To the miscreants in Washington, D.C., there is only federal authority. To them, these States United are merely colony-subjects, who must bow to an omnipotent, ubiquitous federal power that knows no limits and no boundaries.

I hope and pray that the Tennessee and Montana governors, State legislatures, and State supreme courts will tell Mr. Carroll "where to go," and will defend their State sovereignties "to the end." And by the same token, I hope and pray that dozens more states will put teeth to their State Sovereignty resolutions and follow the examples of Montana and Tennessee.

Add to the continual usurpations of State sovereignty the fact that both the Republican and Democratic parties in Washington, D.C., have allowed our once-great free enterprise system to become a giant socialist economy, and the outlook only gets bleaker.
This is why Republicans in D.C. have no moral credibility in opposing President Barack Obama's Marxist-style universal health care proposals. Under George W. Bush, the Republican Party expanded socialism in America like no administration in recent history.
Now they are going to oppose the Democrat version of socialism? What a joke!
The only difference between the economic policies of the Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., is Democrats want to tax-and-spend America into socialism for the benefit of the Welfare State, while Republicans want to borrow-and-spend America into socialism for the benefit of the Warfare State.
Neither party wants to confine Washington, D.C., to the prescribed limits of the U.S. Constitution. And neither party in Washington, D.C., is willing to recognize the constitutional authority and autonomy of the States United.

Given the fact that both parties are hell-bent on destroying constitutional government, dismantling State sovereignty, and trampling individual liberties, it seems painfully obvious to me that a war for State independence is inevitable.

Just exactly what that means is unknown at this point, but all of the elements and ingredients that existed in 1775 exist today. In fact, in view of the battle currently taking place between Nashville/Helena and Washington, D.C., the war has--for all intents and purposes--already begun.

And unlike many of my Christian brethren who want to "shut [their] eyes against a painful truth," I say with Patrick Henry, "Let it come! I repeat it, Sir, let it come!"

[wvoutlaw2002]

Kill your television!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yan77UKYcg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRAIm73okFQ

[America2]

Over the last couple of weeks, thanks to advice from a close one, with the exception of a football game or 2 per week and "Monk" on Fri nights(the last episode is next Fri), I pretty much have that tv OFF - I agree, NOT watching the tube has COMPLETELY changed my life! Instead, doing other stuff like reading, house chores, among other productive things.

Wow - just a HUGE weight off of your shoulders!

[lord edward coke]

Kill your television!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yan77UKYcg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRAIm73okFQ

Hang 'Em High!
Instead of spelling disaster, the financial collapse offers a
unique opportunity to fix all of America's ills.
By Israel Shamir
11-2-9

Seven years after 9/11, we wi
tness another, greater and even more enjoyable collapse, that of the American financial pyramid. It took some twenty years in building; its collapse took only a few weeks. Let us cut the hypocritical crap: this was a wonderful show, no ifs, ands or buts. The US stock markets boomed when they bombed Baghdad and Belgrade, they prospered when they robbed Moscow and squeezed sweat from Beijing. When they had it good, they had plenty of money for invading Iraq, threatening Iran and strangling Palestine. In short, when it was good for them, it was bad for us. Let them have a taste of their own medicine!

"They" are not the Americans, and "we" are not the rest of the planet. "They" are a small sliver of the American population, the get-rich-quick crowd from the East Side of Manhattan and similar places. The last twenty years witnessed a great shift of money upwards, to a smaller and smaller pack of greedy beasts. While the majority of Americans lost the ability to send their children to universities, these fat cats bought themselves villas in Florida and houses in Tel Aviv. Worse, they spent their billions buying up the media in order to subvert American democracy and send American soldiers to fight wars in far-away places. A big part of the stolen money was siphoned off to Israel, where apartment prices went through the roof and are still rising.

They had it good; they were proud that the financial charts of the US and of the world were drawn up in a small room by Henry Paulson of the Treasury, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, by Maurice Greenberg of A.I.G. They built their world surrounded by Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Marc Rich, Michael Milken, Andrew Fastow, George Soros, et al. Their exciting new world of Lexus and Nexus was glorified by Tom Friedman of the New York Times. They gave the Nobel Prize in Economics to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, proud board directors of the now infamous Long Term Capital Management hedge fund that was bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the tune of $3.6 billion. President Bush rewarded them for their unaccountability by releasing them from the burden of taxation. Let them pay now for all the fun they had.

They took your real dollars and turned it into funny money -- "unredeemable, non-interest-bearing promissory notes of the Fed, that are not backed by anything other than the confidence of the credulous", in the words of one Internet wit. The ruination of the American working class and even its middle class is unavoidable The fears about the Large Hadron Collider creating a big black hole in place of Earth were based on this sinking feeling that the incredible riches of the US are disappearing into their own black hole.

This is not the first confidence trick in US history: Jay Gould and Joseph Seligman caused the 'Black Friday' stock market crash in the late 19thcentury, while Jacob Schiff caused the notorious 'Black Thursday' panic that led to a nationwide economic depression<http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Hang.htm#_ftn1>[1]. Seligman was also the mover behind the Panama affair, a stock market swindle that became proverbial in France. The swindle was set up by two Jews of German origin, Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Herz who bribed parliamentarians. While Reinach was working on the right wing, the 'Republicans' of his day, Herz was working on the 'Democrats'. Wikipedia quotes Hannah Arendt, who wrote that the middlemen between the business sector and the state were almost exclusively Jews. This warm embrace between the state and the business sector was a recipe for disaster.

Obviously things have changed since then, and now the Mammonites are of various persuasions, even of Christian Science, like Hank Paulson, whose net worth is estimated at $700 million and whose career at Goldman Sachs (Chairman 1998-2006) made him the obvious choice for the position of secretary of the treasury. Only their devotion to the god of Greed remained constant. In the world of ideal capitalism ("market economy") they so glorified, they would have paid a price. In Glen David Gold's vastly entertaining novel Carter Beats the Devil, their spiritual ancestor was tarred and feathered by strong-willed Connecticut folk circa 1670, for he had bought a whole boatload of imported products with the criminal intent of getting rich quick by cornering the market and ripping off his fellow men. Nowadays such a criminal would get a medal from the neo-liberal Milton Friedman Fund, a citation from JINSA and be taught as a positive example by the Harvard Business School.

Now they intend to use their control over the government in order to shift their losses onto ordinary Americans. Whether this act is called 'nationalisation' or 'privatisation' or 'bailout', the bottom line is that many Americans will find themselves poor, and all Americans will have a huge tax burden to bear. But the perpetrators of the pyramid will get off scot-free; they will retire to their castles and to their sure and protected investments as they have always done before.

The Americans were played for suckers; they were cleaned out as easily as were the unsophisticated <http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/pdf/jarvis.pdf>Albanians a few years ago. Even worse: the Albanians took out their guns and pursued the robbers; the Americans take it all lying down. But the device was the same.

The Americans are entitled to know who robbed them and their children: these are the men who became so ostentatiously rich during last two decades. They should pay the price of their crime. And if the government, the President, the Congress and Senate, the Democrats and the Republicans are reluctant to enforce it, the ordinary Americans may do as their Connecticut Yankee ancestors did: apply tar and feathers liberally. If this does not help, hang the bastards on the lamp posts.

This is exactly the time to remember why America's Founding Fathers enshrined the people's right to own and bear arms in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Thank God the ADL did not cancel it yet. These arms are not for robbers: they are given to enforce justice when all other means fail. Aux armes, to arms, as the French said when giving this treatment to their tricksters. America has a great tradition of instant direct justice enforcement, this Hang'em High call of the Westerns. Heed it now!

Let US soldiers come back from unneeded wars and remote bases all over the world: their real enemy is in their own country. In the ringing, still relevant words of Lenin, let us turn the imperial war into a civil one, against the greedy bastards. Instead of charging taxpayers, turn the US into a billionaire-free zone! The billionaires, these greediest rats, gained most from the Great Pyramid; pauperise them. Nullify their bank accounts. The disappearance of trillions of dollars from their electronic bank accounts will drive the value of the greenback up; your salary will become real money again!

If we assume that more than half of all billionaires are proud members of the Israel Lobby, it will also solve the Middle Eastern problem. To be on the safe side, confiscate all the assets of the Pyramid-builders: of Paulson and Bernanke, of Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs executives, and of President Bush who allowed it all to happen. Peace will come to Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq; Americans will again become proud of their country. Such mass confiscation will restore democracy in the US: the next candidates for the Presidency will not go hat in hand to AIPAC to declare their fealty. The defeat of Greed will turn people back to God; the eliminated ballast will allow for national medical care, social security and free education for all. Instead of being a disaster, the financial collapse offers a unique opportunity to fix all America's ills. Do not miss it!

Speaking for the wide world outside America, I'll tell you this: do not throw good money after bad. Reject the seductive purring from Washington. Consider your funds in the US already lost. If you can still get something, good; but do not waste money and efforts to regain what is gone. There is a most valuable asset you may get for the lost ones; that is your freedom and independence. An undermined dollar means your economy will be safe. The Pyramid collapse will set you free!

[1] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, University of Chicago Pres, Chicago 1993, p 73
Hang 'Em High!

[America2]

FYI - did you know that just about every tv channel out there has execs that are CFR agents? Even ESPN(you know, that silly 24/7 sports network) is runned by CFR folks.

Yah - the elite has been very subtle, even very clever in terms of distracting the masses.

[lord edward coke]

Over the last couple of weeks, thanks to advice from a close one, with the exception of a football game or 2 per week and "Monk" on Fri nights(the last episode is next Fri), I pretty much have that tv OFF - I agree, NOT watching the tube has COMPLETELY changed my life! Instead, doing other stuff like reading, house chores, among other productive things.

Wow - just a HUGE weight off of your shoulders!

You Bet!!! KILL the idiot BOX.  

The thanksgiving hoax

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving's real meaning.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies filled," but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.

But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, "instead of famine now God gave them plenty," Bradford wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." Thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

What happened?

After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop." They began to question their form of economic organization.

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called "The Starving Time," the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.

Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was "plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure." He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, "we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now."

Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful. They were in the same situation as Ethiopians are today, and for the same reasons. But after free markets were established, the resulting abundance was so dramatic that the annual Thanksgiving celebrations became common throughout the colonies, and in 1863, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.

Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.


http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mayflower.asp

[lord edward coke]

A nation can survive it's fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.


-- Cicero


THE STRANGER

A few months before I was born, my dad met a stranger who was new to our
small town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting
newcomer, and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was
quickly accepted and was around to welcome me into the world a few months
later.

As I grew up I never questioned his place in our family. Mom taught me to
love the Word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it. But the stranger was
our storyteller. He could weave the most fascinating  tales.  Adventures,
mysteries, and comedies were daily conversations. He could
hold our whole family spellbound for hours each evening. He was like a
friend to  the whole family. He took Dad, Bill, and me to our first major
league baseball  game. He was always encouraging us to see the movies and
he even made arrangements to introduce us to several movie stars.

The stranger was an  incessant talker. Dad didn't seem to mind, but
sometimes Mom would quietly get  up - while the rest of us were enthralled
with one of his stories of faraway  places - go to her room, read her
Bible, and pray. I wonder now if she ever  prayed that the stranger would
leave. You see, my dad ruled our household with  certain moral convictions.
But this stranger never felt an obligation to honor them. Profanity, for
example, was not allowed in our house-not from us, from our friends, or
adults. Our longtime visitor, however, used occasional four letter words
that burned my ears and made Dad squirm. To my knowledge the stranger was
never confronted.

My Dad was a teetotaler who didn't permit alcohol in  his home - not even
for cooking. But the stranger felt like we needed exposure  and enlightened
us to other ways of life. He offered us beer and other alcoholic beverages
often.  He made cigarettes look tasty, cigars manly, and pipes
distinguished.

He talked freely (too much too freely) about  sex. His comments were
sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing. I know
now that my early concepts of the man/woman relationship were influenced by
the stranger.

As I look back, I believe it was the  grace of God that the stranger did
not influence us more. Time after time he  opposed the values of my
parents, yet he was seldom rebuked and never asked to  leave.

More than thirty years have passed since the stranger moved in with the
young family on Morningside Drive. But if I were to walk into my parents'
den today, you would still see him sitting over in a corner, waiting  for
someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw
his pictures.

His  name? . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .

We always just called him .  . . TV.

[attietewd]

Hey, that guy was a friend of my family too.  I threw him out about two months ago.  He wore out his welcome...finally

[lord edward coke]

Hey, that guy was a friend of my family too.  I threw him out about two months ago.  He wore out his welcome...finally

A hypnotic,drug to put the sheeple to sleep.

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/acountry.htm

[lord edward coke]

Why no one of us has, or ever will, have our Constitutional legal stances admitted nor recognized in any USDC. This is perhaps the most definitive listing of prior equity contracts existing before the formal US Constitution, which when coupled with myriad subsequent additions-extensions of said equity-maritime contracts shows that any attempt to cause justice to occur within the US Judicial system is absolutely hopeless, other than the rare but purposefully planned-permitted "wins" that are nothing more than mindscrew to convince the unthinking that justice does still exists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klwWcp9eiPw&feature=related

AMERICA'S SUBJECTION TO BRITAIN, IN A NUTSHELL


The below Compilation of facts were taken from my research papers and excerpts of my email responses to others. I am trying to cut down on the size of the information and my commentary, to let the facts speak for themselves. I am using old email since the facts remain the same, along with questions possessed to me.

To help in researching the below facts I have broken them into differnt topics. You can do a text search of the following topics, or do a word search, using your word processor.

1. WHEN CONTRACTS OVERRULE DECLARED RIGHTS.
2. ARE OUR PERCEPTIONS CORRECT OF OUR HISTORY AND FORE FATHERS?
3. FACTS OF THE KINGS MIND SET CONCERNING HIS CHARTERS.
4. WHERE THE PRESENT DAY TAXES COME FROM.
5. THE FEDERAL RESERVE SISTER OF THE EXCHEQUER.
6. THE KING RULES BY VAGUE STATUTES.
7. LAW OF MORTMAIN.
8. THE 1787 CONSTITUTION WAS ABROGATED BY THE 14TH AMENDMENT.


1. WHEN CONTRACTS OVERRULE DECLARED RIGHTS.

"The reason I guess no one has looked at the issue of the U.S. still being subject to Britain except for the Informer and myself up until now, can only be, as a rule no one looks beyond what is a settled fact/belief or foregone conclusion. In other words Independence from Britain was as settled in the minds of Americans as God Almighty sitting on the throne and His Son seated at His Right Hand."
http://www.civil-liberties.com/books/index.html

[Joe(WI)]

I H8 TV, can I bash too?

[Brocke]

Let me intorduce Todd Alcott with an on topic video poem about TV

Television is a drug (LOOK AT ME!)

http://vimeo.com/10857606

From a poem by Todd Alcott


Do you know how to make a shirt?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QbWbwj7-OE

Todd Alcott doesn't know how to make a shirt, or any "thing" for that matter. As an American, he has become disassociated from his own possessions. Why you ask? All because of the almighty dollar.

[attietewd]

Well I was listening to that video and lo and behold, I heard the very same propaganda that I hear coming from the new agers...what is that you say?  Yeah, money is bad, profit is bad, we are ruining the earth, it used to be sacred, holy..... we all used to have a trade (he forgot to mention the part about before government started regulating everything) and don't forget the "something bad is going to happen" part.  You know, the big sacrifice. It's conditioning.  The same conditioning the elite have been doing, just packaged different.  But it's the same old message....WE ARE THE ENEMY.  I'm not buying it.  Starts out sounding legit, then very subtle goes screwy.  First of all the only ones that are destroying the planet are the ones that have the money to exploit it...like BP maybe??? 

[lord edward coke]

I H8 TV, can I bash too?

ALL R WELCOMED!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_relationships_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States#Presidents_related_to_British_royalty


I have always seen list's of famous Masons. To just look at the name means very little. When you date and place those names in the proper time line and placement of power you begin to see the deception and vastness of this power elite. What will shock you even more is to learn who the powers are behind the Freemasons. Notice the death's of non Masonic presidents or those who lost favor, and the shuffling of the vice presidents to get them in the position of takeover before the presidents were killed or removed. Note also the number of presidential running mates who lost the race for presidency were Masons also. A win win situation regardless of the outcome of the election. The Mason's have controlled this country from the beginning. Another interesting fact to consider is that of the 37 Presidents of the United States before Jimmy Carter, at least 18 or 21 (depending on which source you believe) were close relatives. That comes to somewhere between 48.6 percent and 56.7 percent-far to much to be coincidence, as any conspiritologist (or mathematician) would tell you. Of the 224 ancestors in the family tree of 21 Presidents, we find 13 Roosevelt's, 16 Coolidge's, and 14 Tyler's. Another source manages to relate 60 percent of the Presidents and link most of them to the super-rich Astor family. This data does not include genealogies of the five most recent President. Psychologist G. William Domhoff claims that a large part of America's Ruling elite, just like that of Europe, are related by marriage. (Everything is Under Control. Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups by Robert Anton Wilson pg 39-40)

This is not intended to defame this country's forefathers. See Secret Societies All I am doing here is listing the facts. I will list other authors articles for you to refer to as corroboration. These names were compiled from the Masons own list of famous names posted on there websites. (See Links Below), along with other reputable sources. The names used in this document have been used from that list along with a brief summary of who they were,(*Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition.) and the role they played in our history.
Keep in mind, you can not be a Christian and a practicing Mason, its an oxymoron. There are those who would write history in a form to hide its true meaning and agenda's. Rewriting U.S. History So it has been from the beginning.  (The Masons write most of American History, for example the Mason's own Encyclopedia Britannica). The red dates are confirmed Mason Power years over this country as far as the Presidency, or Vice Presidency is concerned. This Page will be updated often. Please revisit.

Legend: (A) American; (AI) American Independent; (D) Democrat. (F) Federalist. (DR) Democrat-Republican. (Ind) Independent. (IR) Independent -Republican (NR) National Republican. (P) People's; (Pr) Progressive; (R) Republican. (S) Socialist; (SR) States Rights (W) Whig. (U) Union.

(S.C.J) Supreme Court Judge

I will let the facts speak for themselves.

As a Mason goes through the 32 degrees of the Scottish rite, he ends up giving worship to every Egyptian pagan god, the gods of Persia, gods of India, Greek gods, Babylonian gods, and others.  As you come to the 17th degree, the Masons claim that they will give you the password that will give him entrance at the judgment day to the Masonic deity, the great architect of the universe.  It is very interesting that this secret password is "Abaddon".

Revelation 9:11 They had a king over them, the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon"  The 'angel' of the Abyss (Hell) is really the chief demon whose name is Abaddon.  Masons claim then, that the deity they worship is Abaddon!

Abaddon and Apollyon both mean Destroyer. See: Destruction of the Trade Centers: Occult Symbolism Indicates Enemies Within Our Own Government

 

 "The world is governed by people far different from those imagined by the public."
 Benjamin Disraeli, Victorian-era Prime Minister of Britain,

Mat 21:42] Jesus said to them, "Did you never read in the scriptures: 'The stone that the builders (aka Freemasons) rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes'?
[Mat 21:43] Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.

"The great strength of our Order lies in its concealment; let it never appear in any place in its own name, but always concealed by another name, and another occupation. None is fitter than the lower degrees of Freemasonry; the public is accustomed to it, expects little from it, and therefore takes little notice of it. Next to this, the form of a learned or literary society is best suited to our purpose, and had Freemasonry not existed, this cover would have been employed; and it may be much more than a cover, it may be a powerful engine in our hands... A Literary Society is the most proper form for the introduction of our Order into any state where we are yet strangers." (as quoted in John Robinson's "Proofs of a Conspiracy" 1798, re- printed by Western Islands, Boston, 1967, p. 112)

1534 Church of Jesu. ( aka Society of Jesus, Jesuits the power behind Freemasonry) Also headquarters of the Knights of Malta.

Founded in 1534 by Ignatius Loyola founder of the Illuminati, to combat the reformation and propagate the faith. (Reformation being salvation thru grace instead of the Catholic Church.) The Jesuit General, and the other high Jesuit Generals, they are sorcerers. They are LUCIFERIAN, and they worship what they would call Lucifer. They do not believe in Satan. They believe in Lucifer. This society is the power behind the Presidents, and the rest of the world.. The Jesuits obviously wrote the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion, because they have carried out every protocol in that little handbook. They have carried everything out. The Black Pope

1590's - Sir Francis Bacon, beginning in the early 1590's, began the detailed plans by which North America would be colonized.  He was the supreme adept in the Rosicrucian Society, and established the super secret Knights of the Helmet [Ibid., p. 123-129], a society established along the lines of Rosicrucianism.  And, finally, Bacon was responsible for the modern birth of Freemasonry, as detailed by Masonic author, George V. Tudhope, in his book, Bacon Masonry , ISBN 1-56459-108-5, reprinted by Kessinger's Publishing. Thus, we can see that the occult activities of our original occult Forefathers mentioned above was merely the outworking of an occult plan originally conceived "thousands of years before Columbus ever sailed"!  Our Masonic forefathers were merely following the details of the occult plan as envisioned specifically by Sir Francis Bacon in the 1590's, operating according to the vision provided him by his Guiding Spirit. Masonic Forefathers

1733 - In the United States, the first Masonic circles began to appear in 1733; by the time of the American Revolution, nearly 150 lodges existed throughout the colonies.

1761 - James Otis, born in Mass. Known for his famous challenge to the British -imposed writs of assistance- general search warrants designed to enforce more strictly the trade and navigation laws in North America. At this time he also reportedly coined the euphonious, oft-quoted phrase, " Taxation without representation is tyranny." He was chosen as speaker of the house in 1766. Confirmed Mason.

1764 - Samuel Adams, born in Boston. A major propagandist, opposing British officials and policies, as well as British taxation in the colonies. In 1773 he participated in the planning of the Boston Tea Party. Adams also signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Served as delegate to the Continental Congress until 1781, and became governor of Massachusetts from 1794-97. Confirmed Mason and Illuminatist.

Other Parts of the World England. 1765-1795 Edmund Burke, born Dublin Ireland. Entered the House of Commons in 1765. As a member of Parliament he became known as a Political thinker and important in the history of political theory. Confirmed Mason.

1773 It’s just like Freemasonry. The lower Freemasons have no idea that the High Shriner Freemasons are working for the Jesuit General. They think that they’re just doing works and being good people. But the bottom line is that the high-level Freemasons are subject, also, to the Jesuit General because the Jesuit General, with Fredrick the Great, wrote the High Degrees, the last 8 Degrees, of the Scottish Rite Freemasonry when Fredrick protected them when they were suppressed by the Pope in 1773.So, you have the alignment with the Jesuit Order and the most powerful Freemason they had in the craft, Fredrick the Great, during their suppression. That is an irrefutable conclusion. And then, when you see the Napoleonic Wars, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars carried out by Freemasonry, everything Napoleon did, and the Jacobins, whatever they did, completely benefited the Jesuit Order. The Black Pope

1775 - Joseph Warren, born Roxbury, Mass. Solder and leader in the American Revolution who sent Paul Revere and William Dawes to Lexington and Concord on their famous ride to warn local patriots that British troops were being sent against them. Helped draft a group of protests to Parliament known as the "Suffolk Resolves. "Confirmed Mason. In December 1769 Warren, received commission for the Earl of Dalhousie, Grand Master of Masons in Scotland, appointing him Provincial Grand Master of Masons in Boston and within 100 miles of the same. The commission was dated May 30,1769. When the Earl of Dumfries succeeded Dalhousie as Grand Master of Scotland he issued another appointment to Warren, dated March 7,1772, constituting Warren "Grand Master of Masons for the Continent of America," thus extending his original limits.

1775 - Paul Revere, born in Boston. Hero of the American Revolution whose dramatic horseback ride on the night of April 18, warning Boston-area residents that the British were coming. Confirmed Mason. GRAND MASTER GRAND LODGE OF MASSACHUSETTS A.F. & A.M. 1795 - 1797

1776 - John Hancock, born in Mass. Wrote and the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, and served nine terms as the Governor of Mass. Confirmed Mason.

1776 - Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston. Was one of the diplomats chosen to negotiate peace with Great Britain, and who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, one of the 56 who signed this document, and was instrumental in achieving the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Was also a Mason. Franklin was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania and published the first Masonic book in America. Was also a member of Sir Francis Dashwood's Hell Fire Club, along with the Collins family of Satanists. Both Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were members of this purely Satanic group who practiced satanic sexual occult rituals. (The Illuminati Bloodlines, Fritz Springmeier)

 

"Remains of ten bodies at Ben Franklin's home"

Workmen have dug up the remains of ten bodies hidden beneath the former London home of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of American Independence.

The remains of four adults and six children were discovered during the 31.9 million restoration of Franklin's home at 36 Craven Street, close to Trafalgar Square. Researchers believe that there could be more bodies buried beneath the basement kitchens.

Initial estimates are that the bones are about 200 years old and were buried at the time Franklin was living in the house, which was his home from 1757 to 1762, and from 1764 to 1775. Most of the bones show signs of having been dissected, sawn or cut. One skull has been drilled with several holes. Paul Knapman, the Westminster coroner, said yesterday: "One cannot totally discount the possibility of a crime. There is still a possibility that I may have to hold an inquest." Ten Bodies Found Under Ben Franklin's Home

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/ten_bodies.htm

[lord edward coke]

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/index.html              


[/quote]

An Interview with Mike Hoy,
Founder and President of Loompanics Unlimited
Regarding
What is Going On Here Anyway?


Q: What is “Loompanics Unlimited?”

Loompanics Unlimited is a publishing and bookselling company specializing in odd, unusual, controversial, and wild-ass books, with an emphasis on questioning authority. We have been in business for 28 years now. We are a small business, bringing out about 15 of our own titles a year, and offering approximately 150 new titles per year from other publishers. Our current Catalog with Supplements contains more than 600 titles.
Q: Why is your Catalog dedicated to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the tendency towards universal entropy – in short, over time, chaos will prevail. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…” (Yeats). Within society, Loompanics favors more entropy, i.e., less government laws and other social restrictions – increased anarchy. Within our own bodies, Loompanics favors less entropy, i.e., less degeneration and death. So the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at once a friend indeed, and a worthy adversary. America needs to loosen up.

Q: Many of your books deal with violence and criminal activity. Aren't you harming society by making available information on how to manufacture illegal drugs, or offering how-to-do-it violence manuals?

Of course not. Nothing harms “society” more than censorship and dogmatism. I believe that people are mature enough to be allowed to find out anything they want to know about anything they want to know about, and that any attempt to suppress the free transmission of ideas and information will cause much more harm than freedom ever could. Mostly, the “harm” of freedom is to institutions and ideologies that don't want us to be able to find stuff out. The “harm” from publishing, say, Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture (now in its 6th edition) is nothing compared to the harm of having the DEA be our only source of information about drugs, or the harm of throwing people in prison for talking about drugs in a way that they don't like.

Q: So you think it would be harmless for a fourth grader to get hold of a copy of Secrets of Meth? How can you say that?

In the first place, I do not sell to fourth graders, but for the sake of argument, let's say that I did sell a copy of Secrets of Meth to a 9-year-old – what could the “harm” possibly be? Here is a brief excerpt from that book: “Another way of doing the electric cell method of turning the propenylbenzene into phenylacetone is given in the Journal of Organic Chemistry article, Volume 49. If, at the conclusion of passing current through the reaction mixture, a little 1% solution of sulfuric acid is added and stirred for an hour, the product of the cell in 98% yield of the same glycol by the formic acid and peroxide method.” That is from page 72.

Now, I submit that if we had a fourth grader who could actually understand that passage, what we ought to do is give that kid a state-of-the-art laboratory and get the hell out of his way. A guy like that might discover a cure for cancer, or something. A phenom like that ought to be encouraged to study chemistry. And furthermore, the passage demonstrates that a goodly part of any illegal drug manufacture book is going to rely heavily on mainstream chemistry – because life itself is chemistry.

Q: The “Drugs” Section in your current Catalog contains more than 70 titles. Are you encouraging people to use drugs?

I'm encouraging people to think about drugs. There is more absolute horseshit and just plain lies being put out about “drugs” than any other subject. “Just say no” makes exactly as much sense as “Just say yes.” My position is “Just say know.” Drugs have been demonized in this country to provide an excuse to trample on our civil liberties and make us so scared and dumb that we cannot think. The fact of the matter is that we humans (and many other species, too!) have been getting high on one substance or another ever since we first stood up on our hind legs. Esteemed scientists such as Dr. Ronald K. Siegel have postulated that the desire for intoxication is actually a fourth drive, as unstoppable as hunger, thirst, and sex. I think that drugs are a positive force in our society, and it is evil to prohibit our access to them.

To give only one example, just think of the economic miracle that would result from the legalization of cannabis – not just “hemp” or “medical marijuana” but pot for getting high, too. It's already one of the most lucrative cash crops in the USA – why not recognize that fact, and all of us benefit from it? It's an ideal crop for small farmers. Why should someone have his life destroyed by being sent to prison for helping people? Just so some lifelong parasitic pigs can continue to slurp at the public trough? That's not enough reason for me. Legalize it all, and let people be.

Q: You have a number of anarchist books in your Catalog. Are you an anarchist?

Pretty much so, although I am too much of an anarchist to be an anarchist – I have found that the organized anarchists have too many rules and too many leaders for me. I am so much of an anarchist that I have gone beyond anarchy – I am agnostic about anarchism. I guess I would call myself a political solipsist. I don't much know how “society should be organized,” but I want everybody to be able to live the way they want. I would like to see everyone create his own reality. I think that any large institution not just government is likely to be dangerous to individuals. That is where I part company with the “Libertarians” – they actually seem to think that large corporations are rivals of the government. My view is that they have become interchangeable with the government. In fact, corporations now wield even more power than governments – look at what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, for Chrissakes. The U.S. Government is serving the “oil” and “defense” “industries.”

Q: So, if a person can't trust the government, and can't trust private corporations, what do you think people should do in order to be more free?

Well, I don't have a one-size-fits-all platform that I want everybody to all cluster-f**k together on. I just want people to give their heads a good spring cleaning, and start looking for things they can do to help themselves. I sell a lot of books on things like starting up little businesses, making money on the side, breaking free of the work/consumer economy. What might be swell for one person might not be a good idea at all for another. But if your mind is closed to the possibility of doing anything except traditional work, you will not be able to recognize an opportunity, even if it bites you on the ass.

I sell books on increasing your intelligence, both by raising your “I.Q.” and by expanding the boundaries of your thinking. Books such as How to Start Your Own Country, or The Last Frontiers on Earth might sound “crazy,” but they get you thinking about questions such as “What is sovereignty?” and “How far off the beaten path can someone actually go?”

Plus, it is just plain fun to think about the possibility, the overlooked alternative – and freedom should be fun, above all else. If it ain't fun, then it ain't really freedom.

Q: What is the Loompanics logo? Is that some kind of space ship or something?

Yes, what that is, is it's an orbiting space colony of the type proposed by Gerard K. O'Neil in his 1976 book The High Frontier. I was very impressed by the idea that a relatively small group of people could get off this planet and out by themselves, and literally have their own world. Unfortunately for just about everybody, the idea has been co-opted by the government, in order to militarize outer space (“Star Wars”) and right now it doesn't look like we, the people, are ever going to be able to live like that. But I like the idea, so I have kept it as the company logo.

Q: The Loompanics Catalog and Supplements contain features and articles as well as book write-ups.

Uh-huh, I always like to have a couple features that reflect the Catalog's general orientation: individual freedom. Over the years, I have collected the best of these articles into four anthologies: Loompanics' Greatest Hits, Loompanics' Golden Records, Loompanics Unlimited Live! In Las Vegas, and Loompanics Unlimited Conquers the Universe. There's some really good writing in there.

Q: What do you look for in a book to publish or sell?

What I really like to see is for someone who knows what he's talking about to take a subject that is little-known, or even abhorrent, and then write a straightforward how-to-do-it book about it. Books such as The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving, Methods of Disguise, Making Crime Pay, Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead, If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive…, How to Start Your Own Country, Did Jesus Exist?, Practical LSD Manufacture, Combat Knife Throwing, The $51 Fantasy, etc., etc. I love this sort of thing, and I always have, and I always will.

I like challenging books, funny books, exciting books, crazy books. Sometimes reporters have asked me “What kind of people would buy books like these, Mike?” I always answer people like me. When I am putting together the Catalog, or a Supplement, I always imagine what books I would like to see for sale, what books I would buy, and I look for those kinds of books. Useful books, outrageous books, beyond-the-pale books, over-the-top books. How to Build Your Own Log Home for Less Than $15,000, Stealth Juror, Home Workshop Professional Lock Tools, How to Make Driver's Licenses and Other ID on Your Home Computer, They Were White and They Were Slaves, Everything You Know is Wrong, How to Be an Ass-Whipping Boxer, Guns Save Lives, etc., etc. I literally cannot get enough of this stuff.

Q: How do you get your manuscripts? Do people just send them in, or what?

Well, by now, as little-known as we are, Loompanics is well-known enough that we do get a lot of manuscripts that just come in over the transom. But I will also think of ideas for books I'd like to see, and then look for an author to write the book. I am very proud to be the publisher of writers like Ace Backwords, eddie the wire, Jon Fisher, Claire Wolfe, John Q. Newman, Uncle Fester, and many others whose first books were published by Loompanics. These are all intelligent writers, with great senses of humor, who have a lot to say that is important, and I think it says a lot for my company that we are their publishers.

And sometimes one of our regular authors will refer another author to us. Sometimes, other small press publishers will refer an author to us who has a project that isn't quite right for them. And we run listings in Writer's Market, and other standard references soliciting authors. Lots of times, our customers will become authors. When I was first getting Loompanics going, and was operating it out of my basement, eddie the wire (before he was “eddie the wire”) would stop over to the house to buy books, and we would shoot the shit, and he looked over all my lock picking titles (which were from other publishers), and told me that he could write better stuff. So, I said go ahead – make my day, and thus was born The Complete Guide to Lock Picking. We get our manuscripts wherever we can.

Q: Where do you get your customers? None of your books will ever be available on the paperback rack at Safeway.

Well, like our authors, we get our customers wherever we can. We have advertised in magazines such as High Times, Reason, The Nation, and other alternative periodicals. We have also advertised in mainstream intellectual mags like Harper's, The Atlantic, even Popular Science. The Wall Street Journal has always refused to allow us to advertise, which demonstrates a large lack of faith on their part in the self-correcting mechanism of the free market. Sometimes we will set up at shows and conventions, such as anarchist book fairs, the Northwest Book Fair in Seattle, the American Library Association's convention, gun shows, survival shows, libertarian conventions, comix conventions, and even the big ABA convention a couple of times. And we mail Samplers and Supplements to bookbuyer lists of other small publishers, and magazine subscribers. Wherever we think there might be literate people who like unusual books, we will try to let them know about us.

I also do newspaper and magazine and radio interviews, and we set them up for our authors, too. I've even been on TV a few times, as have some of our authors. I enjoy talking about freedom of the press and why it is so necessary. Sometimes, I will get an interviewer who wants to do a hatchet job on Loompanics, and portray us as a bunch of Communist child molesters, or something. A couple months ago, I did an NPR interview in which the host (Bob somebody) became so disoriented with my mocking of the “War on Terrorism” that he cut me off in the middle of a sentence, sneering, “Worst of luck!”

When you're in business at the level we're at, there is really no such thing as bad publicity. I'm not looking for people who are afraid to question what their television sets tell them. If I wasn't pissing off assholes like that NPR guy, I wouldn't have much to offer anyone with brains.

Q: Do you think there is such a thing as an evil book? Wouldn't society be better off is some books were just plain not allowed to be printed?

Well, I guess you could say that some books are “evil” – that is, evil in their intent. Myself, I think books encouraging people to be superstitious, books urging people to not think, could be considered “evil” – most religious tracts, for example. But I don't see how “society” would be “better off” by banning such tomes. The best thing you can do to superstitious ignorance is to shine the light on it.

Q: But what about books which openly incite violence, books encouraging people to break laws, and even giving detailed instructions on exactly how to do it?

Sometimes violence needs to be incited. Most laws are stupid and deserve to be broken. Besides, how could police officers be trained, without knowledge of how laws are broken? People who call for censorship never call for the government to be censored. But what is “the government” but a bunch of people? Cops who have a detailed knowledge of criminal techniques might not always be cops. How can you erase information from their brains when they revert to being civilians?

The mass media like to play up the fact that Timothy McVeigh was associated with “militia groups” (although he did not belong to a single such group). What they are less fond of telling us is that McVeigh was trained in the use of explosives by the United States military. One of the most violent publications I have ever seen is US Army Field Manual 21-150 (Combatives) – an illustrated bible of ways of killing people. It is used to train infantry soldiers. How many ex-infantrymen are walking around right now who have read, and practiced the techniques of, that book? Obviously, information is not “evil” – only acts of people are evil.

Q: But why make it easy for people who want to harm others to obtain information on how to do it?

Why make it difficult for honest people to find out anything they want to know about anything they want to know about? It isn't information that harms anybody – it is action. You could make a similar case against just about anything – knives, for example. Now, there is something that actually can be used to hurt somebody, and it isn't theoretical, either. There are thousands of known instances where knives have been used to rob, harm, and even kill people. And knives are for sale everywhere! In literally every town in America, anybody can walk in and buy as many knives as they want, with no questions asked. But I am not aware of anybody who wants to outlaw knives.

However, there are people who think publishers should be jailed, or sued, for publishing books about knives. As far as I can figure, censors, whatever their stated rationales, are people who fear knowledge. That's what it is. They don't want people to know. But anybody who would be put in charge of banning books would themselves have to know what was in the books, or how else could they determine that a book is “bad?” Censors think they should be allowed to read the very books they want to imprison us for reading!

I don't want anybody telling me that I can't read something. Nobody but me has the right to decide that for me.

Q: So would-be censors are trying to manipulate people via their fear of the unknown?

Exactly. And the less you know, the more susceptible you are to manipulation via your ignorance. That's what all “leaders” do. It's how they try to make themselves seem necessary – they're going to protect you from some vague menace, and the vaguer the menace, the more ignorant you have to be to fall for their line. They don't want you to have facts at your command, or to know how to think.

Just look at the dazzling array of vague menaces the mass media tries to scare us with every single day. “Terrorists,” “Satanists,” “Pedophiles,” “Drug Dealers,” and so on. Whenever, say, some f**ked up kid shoots a few people at a school, it is blared on every channel for days, weeks, months, even years afterwards, creating the false impression that “it can happen anywhere.” The fact is, that insofar as school shootings are concerned, they have hardly ever happened anywhere. A kid actually has a better chance of being struck by lightning on the playground than to be shot by another student.

They want you to be afraid. They don't want you to be calm and sensible, and efficacious, and in charge of yourself. They want you to come running to them. And their “solutions” are never more freedom. It's always less freedom, more surveillance, more rules, more laws, more cops, more “teachers,” and more snitches. Most high schools now have surveillance cameras in them, on the pretense that they are “protecting” the kids from being shot. Actually, no school shooting has ever been solved by surveillance cameras. Those cameras are there to catch the kids breaking petty rules, such as sneaking a joint, or something equally harmless. And to train the kids to get used to always being spied on.

That's what compulsory schooling is really all about. John Taylor Gatto makes it clear in his book Dumbing Us Down that the hidden curriculum of public schools is to turn us into docile state/corporate worker bees. One of the most brilliant of their deceptions is the false equation of schooling with education. They are not the same thing at all. Schooling means going to school – period. Education means learning – and most real learning takes place outside of school. I mean, just think of anything you know how to do. Anything. Riding a bicycle, for instance. You know how to ride a bike, don't you? How did you learn that? Did you go to a taxpayer-financed, chain-link-fence-surrounded, surveillance-camera-infested government building, sit in your assigned seat afraid to say a word unless a tax-consuming bureaucrat gave you permission, and then suck up to him so he will give you a good “grade?” No. You just went out and did it, that's how you learned to ride a bike. And it is the same with just about everything. School is the worst way to try to learn anything.

Q: So the less we know, the easier we are to manipulate?

The less we know, and the less we are able to find things out, and the less we want to find things out. The best thing for them is to get us so we do not want to think for ourselves. Then we will fall for their phony baloney. Look at how they try to scare us about “drugs,” for instance. They never admit the positive side of drugs, the real reasons why people take them. They always find some case of a person who can't handle some substance, and then try to pretend that every case of a person taking that drug will have that negative result.

For example, consider methamphetamine. Now there is a drug that has been thoroughly demonized. Most people think meth is just plain “bad,” but like any other drug, it can be, and is, used without harm by lots of people. The US military gives methamphetamine to its pilots to help them stay awake while they are carpet-bombing Third World civilians. But you don't see whoever the current “Drug Czar” is trumpeting that fact. They will always pick out some pathetic junkie who got strung out on meth, and then claim that it is the fault of the drug. And unless we keep meth super-outlawed, and even consider imprisoning people who write about meth, then your kids are going to wind up like that junkie.

What faulty reasoning! That is like pointing to a wino lying drunk in the gutter and saying, “Look what an evil substance wine is. We must protect our children from the menace of wine! Let's have the death penalty for wine traffickers! Anyone who would write, publish, read or possess a book of winemaking recipes should go to prison for years! If that's what it takes to protect our kids from wine, then I'm in favor of it.”

Look how stupid that is. I don't think anyone but the most maniacal prohibitionist would actually say that about wine, but the fact is, it's the same for every other “drug.” Some people can't handle various drugs, but that's no reason to make them generally illegal for everyone. Some people can't drive cars without causing harm, but cars should be generally available. Same with guns, or anything else. General prohibition is stupid, and can only be maintained by increasing stupidity.

You can only maintain general prohibition by demonizing the prohibited item. If it were illegal to wear blue socks, then you would have a “Blue Socks Czar” who would be foghorning away about the Menace of Blue Socks, and this could only be gotten away with if you have a population so dumbed down and afraid that they could believe this shit. And people would be encouraged to give anonymous tips to the pigs about “Blue Socks Dealers,” and then when the cops break into somebody's house and assassinate them, the media will report “another Blue Socks related death.”

We are living in a truly insane society, and it is a task just to try to keep your head clear. You really can't believe anything “They” say.

Q: So that is why you think freedom of the press is so important.

Yes, it is. Freedom of expression is what makes all our other freedoms possible.

Q. So you don't go much for censorship?

You might say that. How can individuals make intelligent decisions, unless we have access to information and ideas? Attempts to control access to information, no matter who does it, are anti-life. My theory is, that the urge to censor is based on fear – fear of the human mind. What possible reason is there to forbid anyone to read a book? If the book is false, the best thing is to get it out there and expose it. If the book is true, the best thing is to get it out there and expose it. When has prohibiting thinking ever helped anything?

Q. You have a broader concept of “censorship” than just the government passing laws.

Yes, I do. Government censorship at least is right out there in the open, where everyone can see that it is censorship, and exactly what is being censored. It is much easier to fight it, if it can be seen. According to an article on AlterNet, (“Personal Voices: The End of Academic Freedom?” by Beshara Doumani), as I write this, there is a bill in the US Senate (it already passed the House: House Resolution 3077) that “ would rob our society of the open exchange of ideas on college campuses.” The bill includes a provision “to establish an advisory board to monitor campus international studies centers in order to ensure that they advance the national interest. …the target is clearly the nation's 17 centers for Middle East studies. …[Its] aim is to defend the foreign policy of this administration by stifling critical and informed discussion on U.S. campuses.”

Doumani continues: “Campus Watch and other hawkish, pro-Israeli right-wing organizations have launched campaigns to pressure and discredit professors judged to be un-American for questioning U.S. policy in the Middle East. Some organizations openly recruit students to inform on their teachers. Students and faculty connected academically or culturally to Muslim and Middle Eastern countries have been especially targeted. Some have been subjected to hate mail blitzes and their institutions pressured to short-circuit their careers. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., announced his intent last April to introduce legislation cutting federal funding to institutions of higher learning where students or faculty criticize Israel, labeling such criticism – regardless of its content or basis in fact – as Anti-Semitic.”

Notice here that we have all three forms of censorship joining forces to deprive us of facts and points of view which are contrary to the current regime (and any future regimes, where the law is concerned). First, you have the proposed law, which would not actually throw anybody in jail, but would “cut funding” to any institution which allowed such talk. Government funding is one of the best forms of sneaky censorship – first the Feds tax away money from localities, so that then local institutions need to be “helped” by Federal funds; then all sorts of social engineering strings are attached to the funding (which was taxed away from the locals to begin with).

Then, second, we see here private censorship: non-government groups trying to silence people with opposing points of view, in the hope that this will, third, lead to the worst form of censorship of all: self censorship. Any prof who doesn't want his career chopped off had better keep his mouth shut about criticizing the government. So “censorship” doesn't necessarily have to only take the form of the government passing a law that you will go to prison if you say such-and-such. The sneakier censorship is, the harder it is to fight (or even to recognize).

Q. What are some other types of private censorship?

Well, the absurd expansion of corporate “intellectual property” is one frightening type. Even everyday activities, such as swinging a swing or traditional farming techniques have been commodified as “intellectual property.” The story of how a small coterie of multinational corporations came to write the charter for a new global information order is told in the book Information Feudalism, by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. The following text appeared on the copyright page of a recent ebook edition of Lewis Carroll's novel Alice in Wonderland:

COPY. No text selections can be copied from the book to the clipboard.
PRINT. No printing is permitted of this book.
LEND. This book cannot be lent or given to someone else.
GIVE. This book cannot be given to someone else.
READ ALOUD. This book cannot be read aloud.

Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865, but a corporation now tells us that we cannot “read it aloud.” This is only one example of the perversion of the concept of “intellectual property.” Look at how that recording industry group has been suing college kids for downloading songs. They pick kids whom they know do not have the monetary and legal resources to stand up to them, and get them to “settle” for a couple thou or so. And then each one of those “settlements” can be cited as a precedent every time they pull this on anyone.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice herself might have put it. I read an article the other day which revealed that independent auto repair shops (and individual car owners) are having the codes to the computer chips which run our cars (modern automobiles have 40 or so chips in them) withheld from them, so that when something goes wrong, a car owner can only have his car fixed by authorized dealerships. A guy isn't even allowed to work on his own car anymore, because the knowledge of how his car runs is the “intellectual property” of the car manufacturers. Information Feudalism covers “intellectual property” as censorship in depth.

Q. What are some other forms of private censorship?

Well, of course, there are the various “speech codes” on college campuses (see The Shadow University, by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate). This book lays bare the totalitarian mindset that udergirds speech codes, conduct codes, and “campus life” bureaucracies, through which a cadre of deans and counselors indoctrinate students and faculty in an ideology that favors group rights over individual rights, sacrificing free speech and academic freedom to spare the “sensitivities” of currently favored groups.

Another kind of private censorship is lawsuits. If you publish a book, and someone you never heard of in your life does something that happens to be in the book and harms a person, the person can sue you. Until very recently, publishers and media producers had assumed that – with a few exceptions such as libel – freedom of expression was absolute and protected from civil liability claims in the form of damage awards. Then along came an ambulance-chasing shyster looking for deep pockets (the Hit Man case), and now publishers have to worry about being sued off the face of the Earth for something a reader of one of their books might do. And it's not just books, either. The Hit Man case was cited as a precedent in a lawsuit against Oliver Stone, director of the movie Natural Born Killers, claiming that Stone was responsible for damages inflicted by someone who watched his movie. An excellent book on this type of private censorship is The First Amendment and Civil Liability by Robert M. O'Neil.

Q. Is there more?

Unfortunately, yeah, lots. One of the most widespread forms of private censorship is the forbidding of advertising. The “Libertarians” are notorious for this kind of censorship. Reason magazine for years forbade Loompanics to place any ad whatsoever – this from a publisher who claims to be devoted to “Free Minds and Free Markets” (as long as they are not too free, I guess). I remember once, shortly after they had refused one of our book ads, receiving a fund-raising letter from Reason soliciting “donations” on the grounds that they were such big-balled, two-fisted freedom fighters that they had difficulty selling ads in their magazine, and you were therefore supposed to give them something for nothing. These hypocrites refused to engage in a straight-forward honest business deal (selling us ads), instead asking for handouts (and lying about why they were doing it) – this from an outfit which opposes food stamps for poor people on the grounds that giving them something they did not earn would destroy their “incentive” to earn a living.

We used to occasionally rent the subscriber list of Liberty magazine to send its readers a sampler of our books. On these occasions, Liberty would rent their list only “on the condition that no nudity appear in the mailing piece.” Thus does the publisher of a “Libertarian” magazine protect the virgin eyes of his readers from the trauma of seeing a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman's left nipple.

Q. Why do you think that the “Libertarians” are so timid?

Well, these examples are actually more silly than they are threatening – I mean, what a bunch of f**king sissies, eh? But the fact of the matter is that no one has ever done more to discredit an ideology by espousing it than the “Libertarians.” They foghorn away about the necessity of the profit motive, but every “Libertarian” propaganda outfit is a non-profit corporation or foundation. Every one. Being themselves so incompetent that they cannot run an enterprise at a profit, they beseech the government to adopt policies forcing everybody but them to live by trade.

And since their products (books, magazines, treatises, etc.) are so worthless that they cannot support themselves by selling them, they ask the government to grant them “tax-free” status, and then ask corporations to give them “donations.” That is why they are so squeamish about accepting ads – they are afraid some corporate suckfish might be offended by actual “free minds and free markets” and shut off their handouts. And when corporations give the “Libertarians” money, the corporations are allowed to deduct these handouts as a “business expense.” Corporate donors are their real “customers” and they are scared to print anything the corporations might not like.

There has been a number of books published recently which call into question the corporate form of enterprise, especially as it is practiced by American/multinational corporations, but you won't find ads for any of them in “Libertarian” magazines. A recent piece in a “Libertarian” magazine (one devoted to “individual liberty”) warns its readers against even thinking critically about corporations and presents them with their thought-stopping mantra: “anti-corporatism.” Thus, any discussion of the true nature of corporations will be labeled by “Libertarians” as “anti-corporatism” and they will respond to the thing as if it were the label. That is, they will refuse to think about it at all.

Q. But don't these magazines have the right to exclude any content they don't approve of?

Of course, any magazine has the right to exclude any content – I am not advocating that the government pass some kind of law that every periodical be forced to carry advertising for products they don't like. What I am saying is that these “Libertarians” are full of shit. While claiming that they want “less government,” they run to the government and ask to be granted exemption from marketplace forces. Just run down the mastheads of Liberty or Reason and look at all the “editors,” “fellows,” “associates,” etc. and you will see that the majority of these “Libertarians” do not earn their livings in the private sector. The “marketplace” is the last “place” “Libertarians” want to be.

Of course, it isn't just “Libertarian” magazines who have forbidden Loompanics (and others) to advertise; the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and Soldier of Fortune are among mags that don't want their readers to know that we exist.

Going back to the anti-free-trade nature of corporations, three excellent books on this subject are: The Divine Right of Capital, by Marjorie Kelly, When Corporations Rule the World, by David C. Korten, and Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann. Check 'em out, Homes.

Q. Any more examples of private or self censorship?

Bushels and bushels, but frankly, I am getting tired and depressed by this negative subject matter, so I will just give a couple more. Going back to corporate “intellectual property,” Bev Harris' Black Box Voting reveals that the “Help America Vote Act” passed just after the 2000 election encourages states to replace government-run paper-trail vote systems with no-paper-trail computerized systems from corporate vendors. The machines (now widely in use) generate no paper trail that can be audited, and when voting machine companies have been challenged to produce audits of their votes or to disclose details of their software, they claim that this information is their “intellectual property,” citing the privacy rights that come from corporations being considered “persons” in the United States.

And one more, regarding advertising: Google recently removed all of our ads – they won't let us advertise anything. They said: “At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain 'the promotion of 'drugs,' 'fake documents,' 'firearms.'” Note that the ban is on our entire website, and not just on some particular items. Thus, Google will not even let us advertise the book How to Build Your Own Log Home for Less Than $15,000 (or anything else) on the grounds that our website contains other books they don't like. Down the memory hole with Loompanics, although in the very same email they insist: “Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web without censoring search results. Please note that the decisions we make concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we deliver.” And if you believe that, I bet they've got a bridge in Brooklyn they would like to sell you.

And just a bit more about the worst form of censorship of all: Self-censorship. This is when you (or your programmers) cause you to deliberately be unable to think sensibly on a subject: thought-stopping. Religious cults teach thought-stopping techniques to their members, so that if you try to bring up something they have been programmed not to think about, they will literally clap their hands over their ears, and shout: “Help me, Jesus! Go away, Satan!” and so on. Thought-stopping words abound in our society. I mentioned the phrase “anti-corporatism” as a “Libertarian” thought-stopper earlier. Other current examples are “Drugs,” “Children,” “Terrorist,” and lots of others. When we are fed these words, we are supposed to literally stop thinking and regurgitate our programmed positions.

Q. Whew! Can we somehow close this on a positive note?

OK, good idea. We are not helpless against this constant onslaught of censorship – it is imperative that we make a conscious effort to examine all the “news” we are spoonfed and think about things. If you stop thinking, you're finished. Above all, avoid self-censorship.

Q: One last question. Why “Loompanics?” Does that mean something?

The first booklet I ever published (in early 1974) was an index to the first four years of National Lampoon magazine. I was in awe of NatLamp as it was before the original founders sold their stakes. I still think that those issues were the single finest examples of satire and social criticism that have ever been published in America. My favorites were Henry Beard and, especially, the late Michael O'Donahue. Nothing was sacred with those guys, and that makes for good writing! I like NatLamp so much in those days that I even had a couple of small jokes published in there, something I still like to brag about whenever I get the chance (such as now).

My theory was that if I named my publishing company something that sounded like “Lampoon” that it would help the sales of the Index when I advertised it in NatLamp. Then, when I started to publish other stuff, I already had stationery, etc., printed up, and I got so I like the name (it has a nice ring to it, I think), and I just kept it for all my publishing projects, and for my bookselling Catalog, too.

I know, it's anticlimactic.

Q: For many of the people reading this interview, this will be their first introduction to Loompanics Unlimited. Is there anything special you would like to say to these people?

Yes buy the books.
 
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_9?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=loompanics+unlimited&sprefix=loompanic

[Brocke]

Why are Reality TV Shows So Popular?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAnAoM96wxE

Is "Reality" TV Written?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBT2cGwMLI

Reality is Written
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kozklMvW6zE


Susan Boyle's TV audition 'auto-tuned'

Fri Aug 27 2010
By ninemsn staff


Susan Boyle's performance of 'I Dreamed A Dream' on Britain's Got Talent that saw her become a worldwide phenomenon was auto-tuned, an insider has said.

A production team member of the show has told UK newspaper the Evening Standard that Boyle's performance, which attracted 47 million views on YouTube, was digitally altered to make it sound better.

Similar UK reality series X-Factor has come under fire in the past week over allegations it used software to tweak singers' performances.

But the insider, who was not named, told the newspaper auto-tuning on TV talent shows "was an open secret and an industry standard".

"The exact same techniques are used on Britain's Got Talent as on The X-Factor — it's the same production team," the insider said.

"This goes for everyone — even Susan Boyle's audition was smoothed out in post-production to give it the best possible sound."

Talkback Thames, which produces the series, said the performances on screen were a "fair reflection of performance given in the live theatre".

"In line with standard television practice, sound filtering technology has been used on Britain’s Got Talent on our pre-recorded shows, but this does not unfairly reflect any singer’s performance," a spokeswoman said.

Producer and judge Simon Cowell has reportedly banned auto-tuning from future seasons of the X-Factor.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/entertainment/7951916/susan-boyles-tv-audition-auto-tuned

[lord edward coke]

THE EMPIRE OF "THE CITY"
(An excerpt from the book by E.C. Knuth) 

"The City" is an international financial oligarchy and is perhaps the most arbitrary and absolute form of government in the world. This international financial oligarchy uses the allegoric "Crown" as its symbol of power and has its headquarters in the ancient City of London, an area of 677 acres; which strangely in all the vast expanse of the 443,455 acres of Metropolitan London alone is not under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police, but has its own private force of about 2,000 men, while its night population is under 9,000.

This tiny area of a little over one square mile has in it the giant Bank of England, a privately owned institution; which as is further elaborated hereinafter is not subject to regulation by the British Parliament, and is in effect a sovereign world power. Within the City are located also the Stock Exchange and many institutions of world-wide scope. The City carries on its business of local government with a fanciful display of pompous medieval ceremony and with its officers attired in grotesque ancient costumes. Its voting power is vested in secret guilds with names of long extinct crafts such as the Mercers, Grocers, Fishmongers, Skinners, Vintners, etc. All this trivial pomp and absurdity and horse-play seems to serve very well to blind the eyes of the public to the big things going on behind the scenes; for the late Vincent Cartwright Vickers, once Deputy-Lieutenant of this City, a director of the great British armament firm of Vickers, Ltd., and a director of the Bank of England from 1910 to 1919, in his "Economic Tribulation" published 1940, lays the wars of the world on the door-step of the City.

That the British people and the British Parliament have little to say in the foreign affairs of the British Empire, and that the people of the British Empire must fight when International Finance and the City blow the trumpet, appears from the paean of praise of America by Andrew Carnegie, "Triumphant Democracy," published in 1886 by that American super-industrialist and British newspaper publisher, in the following words: "My American readers may not be aware of the fact that, while in Britain an act of Parliament is necessary before works for a supply of water or a mile of railway can be constructed, six or seven men can plunge the nation into war, or, what is perhaps equally disastrous, commit it to entangling alliances without consulting Parliament at all. This is the most pernicious, palpable effect flowing from the monarchial theory, for these men do this in 'the king's Name,' who is in theory still a real monarch, although in reality only a convenient puppet, to be used by the cabinet at pleasure to suit their own needs."

Edwin J. Clapp, Professor of Economics at New York University, in his "Economic Aspects Of The War" published in 1915, developed the utterly boundless authority assumed by the "Crown" in its commands to the nations of the world through its "Order-in-Council," used without restraint and without reference to existing usage or so-called International law, by making new International Law to fit any situation, as required.

The Balance of Power is a creation of this financial oligarchy and its purposes are as follows:
(1) To divide the nations of Europe into two antagonistic camps of nearly equal military weight, so as to retain for Britain itself the power to sway a decision either way.

(2) To make the leading and potentially most dangerous military power the particular prey of British suppression and to have the second strongest power on the other side. To subsidize the "Most Favored Nations" with financial investments, and to permit them to acquire political advantages under the beneficent protection of the Sea-Power, to the disadvantage and at the expense of the nations being suppressed.

(3) To subject the continent of Europe to the "Policy of Encirclement" so as to keep the nations of the continent in poverty and ineffectiveness, and thereby prevent the growth of sufficient commercial expansion and wealth to create a rival sea-power.

(4) To retain that complete control and hegemony over all the seas of the world, which was acquired by defeating the allied fleets of its only real rivals, France and Spain, in 1805; and which is artfully and subtly called "The Freedom of the Seas."

(5) To shift this Balance of Power as required so as to be able to strike down friend or foe in the rapidly shifting scene of world power politics, in that inexorable ideology that demands that everything and anything must be sacrificed where the future welfare and expansion to the eventual destiny of the Empire are affected; that eventual destiny outlined by its proponents as the eventual control of All the lands, and All the peoples, of All the world.

The ideology of the British Empire has been outlined in the past by various British statesmen and specifically by Mr. Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield). The modern version which has been broadened to include the United States as a principal in the British Empire was outlined by Cecil Rhodes about 1895 as follows: "Establish a secret society in order to have the whole continent of South America, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan and, finally, the United States. In the end Great Britain is to establish a power so overwhelming that wars must cease and the Millenium be realized."

The secret societies of the above plan apparently came to life immediately after the death of Mr. Rhodes in the Pilgrims of Great Britain, often used by British statesmen in recent years as a public sounding board; and the Pilgrims of the United States, the latter founded in New York City on January 13, 1903, and listed in directories of secret societies with no indication or purpose. Mr. Rhodes left a fortune of about $150,000,000.00 to the Rhodes Foundation, apparently largely directed towards the eventual intent of his ideology. One admitted purpose was "in creating in American students an attachment to the country from which they originally sprang . . ." It appears that organizations such as "Union Now," subversive to the liberty and the Constitution of the United States of America, have a large sprinkling of Rhodes scholars among their staff.

The Pilgrims were founded in London July 24, 1902, four months after the death of Cecil Rhodes who had outlined an ideology of a secret society to work towards eventual British rule of all the world, and who had made particular provisions in his will designed to bring the United States among the countries "possessed by Great Britain."

Sir Harry Brittain (high-ranking member of the Pilgrims) records that he was requested to come to New York in 1915 by the Chairman of the American Pilgrims "in order to give him a hand" in welcoming Lord Reading (Rufus Isaacs). The dinner in honor of Lord Reading took place at Sherry's on October 1st, and was attended by 400 representative men prominent in the banking, commercial and political life of the United States.

The magic number of 400, once the symbol of reigning wealth and privilege, appears here in a new role. Men of millions here sway the destiny, the life or death of their fellow citizens, with an organization which is subversive to the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United States, an organization of which not one in one thousand of their fellow citizens has ever heard. The purpose of these men is completely interwoven with the dependence of their own invariably great fortunes on the operations of "The City," citadel of International Finance. Not only do these men collectively exert a planned influence of immense weight in utter secrecy, but they operate with the support of the immense funds provided by Cecil Rhodes and Andrew Carnegie.

The late Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., in the course of a speech in the United States Senate in March, 1908, asserted that fewer than one hundred men control the great business interests of the country. His statement brought forth a nation-wide storm of denunciation and ridicule, and even today any similar statement is invariably derided as "crackpot." Nevertheless, Senator LaFollette conclusively demonstrated a few days later from the Directory of Directors that through interlocking directorates actually less than one dozen men controlled the business of the country, that in the last analysis the houses of Rockefeller and Morgan were the real business kings of America. empire.htm