fox files

Most speech, hateful or not, is protected by the Constitution. To pretend otherwise is foolhardy.

America is awash in ugly, hateful speech. White nationalists march defiantly, and their slogans are echoed in murderous rampages. Government officials revel in disparaging the very people they patrol. Many people argue that the president’s rhetoric encourages this grotesque and shameful state of affairs even as he nominally condemns it. This has all led to more discussion about free speech and its limits.

What speech should be protected by the First Amendment is now open to debate. Americans can, and should argue about what the law ought to be. That’s what a free peoples do. But while we’re all entitled to our own opinions, we’re not entitled to our own facts; even in 2019. In fact, the First Amendment is broad, robust, aggressively and consistently protected by the Supreme Court, and not subject to the many exceptions and qualifications that commentators seek to graft upon it. The majority of contemptible, bigoted speech is protected.

If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in America or listened to talking heads on the news, you’ve almost certainly encountered empty, misleading, or simply false tropes about the First Amendment. Those tired tropes are barriers to serious discussions about free speech. Any useful discussion of what the law should be must be informed by an accurate view of what the law is.

It has been pointed out for years to highlight these tropes, but with mixed success. Because hope prevails over experience, here it is again. Here are some misstatements, misconceptions, and bad arguments about the First Amendment you will encounter regularly in American media. Watch for them, and recognize how they distort the debate over speech.

“Not all speech is protected; there are exceptions to the First Amendment.”

It’s true that the First Amendment has exceptions and doesn’t protect all speech. That’s an apt rebuttal if someone says “All speech is protected by the First Amendment.” But it’s not helpful in deciding whether particular speech is outside of First Amendment protection.

First Amendment exceptions are few and well established. In a 2010 case about videos depicting animal cruelty, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the “historic and traditional categories long familiar to the bar” of speech outside First Amendment protection, including obscenity, defamation, fraud, and incitement. Each of those categories, in turn, is narrowly and carefully defined through half a century of precedent.

In that same 2010 case, the Court unambiguously refused to create new exceptions on demand. “Our decisions in [a child pornography case] and other cases cannot be taken as establishing a freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment. Maybe there are some categories of speech that have been historically unprotected, but have not yet been specifically identified or discussed as such in our case law.”

That’s why the phrase “The First Amendment is not absolute” is usually empty rhetoric and not a helpful response to the question “Can the government punish this speech?”  The relevant question is “Does this speech fall into an established exception to the First Amendment, and if not, what does that mean?”

If I’m bitten by a snake on a hike and seek medical attention, and ask the doctor if the snake is venomous, I’m not looking for the doctor to assure me that “not all snakes are venomous.” I want the doctor to use his/her medical expertise to analyze whether the snake that bit me is venomous.

“This speech isn’t protected, because you can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”

This line, though ubiquitous, is just another way to convey that “not all speech is protected by the First Amendment.” As an argument, it is just as useless and pathetic.

But the phrase is not just empty. It’s also a historically ignorant way to convey the point. It dates back to a 1919 Supreme Court decision allowing the imprisonment of Charles Schenck for urging resistance to the draft in World War I.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the “most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

This decision led to a series of cases broadly endorsing the government’s ability to suppress speech that questioned official policy. But for more than half a century Schenck has unequivocally and universally been acknowledged as bad law.

Holmes himself repented of the decision—though he continued to indulge his taste for pithy phrases with lines like “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” to justify forcible government sterilization of the handicapped.

So when you smugly drop “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” in a First Amendment debate, you’re misquoting an empty rhetorical device uttered by a career totalitarian in a long-overturned case about jailing draft protesters. This is not persuasive or helpful.

“Incitement and threats are not free speech.”

While technically true, not everything that might colloquially be called a “threat” is outside the protection of the First Amendment. Only “true threats” are unprotected—threats conveying “a serious expression of intent to an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” There’s some ambiguity about whether evaluating the seriousness of a threat is an objective question, a subjective question, or both; something the Supreme Court recently failed to resolve. But most courts impose an objective test: A threat is “true” if a reasonable person hearing it would take it as a sincere expression of intent to do harm. That doesn’t cover most hyperbole and political invective.

We’re free, moreover, to attack the law, argue that breaking it is moral, and urging our fellow citizens to break it. We can even assert that violence is justified.  Such advocacy is only unprotected when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Imminent is the key word here. Saying “Go beat up those protesters over there” probably qualifies; ugly rhetoric in general does not.

“Fighting words are not free speech.”

People in favor of restrictions on ugly speech often point to the “fighting words” doctrine—the idea, taken from the 1942 case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, that the government can punish words “which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”  This argument ignores the past 80 years of First Amendment cases, which have dramatically narrowed the doctrine to the point that many commentators question whether it still survives. At most, the doctrine allows the government to punish face-to-face insults likely to provoke an immediate violent reaction from the particular person addressed.

Furthermore, like invoking “’Fire!’ in a crowded theater,” dropping “fighting words” reveals a tin ear for history. As a Jehovah’s Witness, Walter Chaplinsky (of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire) was a member of a religious minority subject to shocking abuse and injustice in the 1930’s and ’40’s. He was preaching on a street corner when a mob assaulted him; one man tried to impale him on a pole bearing the American flag. Police officers led him away rather than arresting his attackers, provoking him to call them fascists. For that offense he was prosecuted. So when you cite the fighting-words doctrine to urge punishment of bigotry, you’re relying on a doctrine built on the subjugation of religious minorities. Mind the irony.

“Hate speech is not free speech.”  

There is an admirable growing social consensus that it’s despicable to denigrate people based on ethnicity, religion, or sexuality. But most despicable speech is protected by the First Amendment. Contrary to the popular slogan, there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment. Particular examples of hateful speech may satisfy the established tests for the true-threats or incitement exceptions, but they’re not unprotected just because they’re hateful.

“Stochastic terrorism is not free speech.”  

You may have heard the term stochastic terrorism to describe speech that, according to some advocates, whips up hatred against groups and leads unbalanced people to commit violence against them, even if it doesn’t explicitly call for violence. By definition, if stochastic terrorism doesn’t call for violence, it doesn’t fall outside the First Amendment, because it’s not intended and likely to lead to imminent lawless action. It may be morally reprehensible, but, just like hate speech, it’s protected.

“We must balance free speech with [social good].” / “There is a line between free speech and [social evil].”

It’s common, in free-speech debates, to find people arguing that America must balance free speech and safety, or free speech and the right to be free of abuse. A related rhetorical trope is “line drawing”: the idea that we must draw lines between free and abusive speech.

In point of fact, however, American courts don’t balance the benefits and harms of speech to decide whether it is protected—they look to whether that speech falls into the First Amendment exceptions noted above.

As the Supreme Court recently explained, the “First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.”

A related trope is “This isn’t free speech; it’s [x],” where x is bullying, or abuse, or some other social evil. But many social evils are protected by the First Amendment. “This isn’t free speech; it’s [x]” is empty rhetoric unless x is one of the established First Amendment exceptions.

“They do it in Europe!”

Many other countries allow substantially broader limits on free speech. That’s relevant to what the law in America should be, but it has nothing to do with what the law is.

“We talked to a professor and a litigator who said this is not protected speech.”

Commentators asserting that certain speech is outside First Amendment protections often cite professors and litigators who agree with them. This is entertaining, but it may not yield reliable information.

With the greatest respect, legal academics are notoriously bad at distinguishing between normative and descriptive statements about law.

If I ask 10 physics professors what will happen if I drop my pencil and why, they will all say: “It will fall, because of gravity.” There is very little risk that they will say “Well, maybe it will fall or maybe it won’t” because they think gravity is unfair. But if I put 10 law or political-science professors on TV and ask them whether particular speech is protected by the First Amendment, there is a substantial chance that some of them will give responses based on what they think the law ought to be, not based on what it is.

Similarly, litigators are trained advocates. Our job is making confident, firm assertions about the law in service of our clients, even when the law is murky. It’s a hard habit to break, and some litigators will act as advocates and not experts when asked about free-speech issues.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore professors or litigators when they talk about the First Amendment. It means you should approach their pronouncements with appropriate skepticism, and look carefully for signs that they are offering an argument and not a description.

“This speech may be protected right now, but the law is always changing.”

People arguing that particular speech should not be protected often concede that the law does not currently support them, but that it could change at any time. It’s true, on a facile level, that the Supreme Court changes its interpretation of the Constitution. We’ve seen astounding, society-altering changes in our lifetimes. For instance, it took only 17 years for the Supreme Court to go from saying that the government can criminalize same-sex relationships to saying that it cannot.

But such changes don’t come out of the blue. The Supreme Court’s initial decision on same-sex relationships was bitterly divided 5–4; the case overturning it was angrily divided 6–3. The potential for change was clear. Similarly, the Court’s First Amendment decisions on campaign-finance limitations and mandatory union dues have featured 5–4 splits and passionate rhetoric. The Court’s stance on those issues could easily change with a new justice or two.

It’s time to stop using the ‘fire in a crowded theater’ quote

Many free-speech issues that are controversial both politically and culturally, by contrast, are utterly banal legally, and the Court has offered no signs of change. For instance, over the past generation, the Court has issued a series of unanimous or near-unanimous decisions affirming that hateful and offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment.

The observation “The law changes all of the time” is then, like the observation “Not all speech is protected by the First Amendment”—a truism that is of no use in evaluating whether specific speech is protected or likely to become unprotected.

It’s great that Americans have strong opinions about free speech and the First Amendment. Engaged citizens make a stronger society. But good citizenship also requires a basic grasp of civics. Commentators and talking heads have an obligation to inform and not mislead Americans on what their rights are, while citizens should train themselves to separate wishes about the law from accurate descriptions OF it. Our national discussion of hateful speech is deadly serious and calls for a serious approach; not empty rhetoric.

So the next time someone tells you that you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, tell him or her why they’re not helping matters.

Democrats are pissed and I’m gonna’ tell ya’ why that is.

Left-leaning news sites like MSNBC, CNN, and others have spent the past two years on an embarrassing wild goose chase.  Yes, the Russiagate “scandal”.

Even with“Mueller Time” emblazoned on thousands of coffee cups all around America, Astonishingly, it still wasn’t enough to keep Russiagate from falling flat on its face when all other, more grounded issues of note withered away into the shadowlands.  With, that said…

It would be a mistake to think that Russiagate had anything to do with the Democratic Party.  According to today’s guest, Caitlin Johnstone, Russiagate instead had precisely everything to do with… Drumroll please… The War Party.

Surprised? I know… probably not.

But the full and, nonetheless, absurd and shocking story is still worth a gander. Even if it’s bound to raise that blood pressure a couple of ticks.

Press on oh dear reader.  Read on.

How Does Congress Get So Rich?

Everyone knows that the liberals in Congress give themselves the best of everything, but I bet you didn’t know that also includes a little-known income strategy that beats Social Security by 800%.

Oh wait. I’m veering off-topic here………I didn’t mean to anger you more with Congressional and House leaders and representatives.

So back to my point…………

The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria

Former MSNBC host Krystal Ball slammed her ex-employer’s relentless promotion of the Russiagate conspiracy theory following the embarrassing spectacle of Robert Mueller’s hearing before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday.

“After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?” The Hill’s Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer’s “fevered speculations” about an “Infowars conspiracy theory” and the way it hosted people like Jonathan “maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s” Chait and “conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch” in search of rating bumps.

“This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up,” Ball argued.

“Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, oh………I don’t know……. a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers’ movement, whether we’re going to war with Iran? I’m just spitballing here. I actually heard some pundit on Chris Hayes last night opine that independent women in middle America were going to be swayed by what Mueller said yesterday. Are you kidding me? This is almost as bonkers and lacking in factual basis as that time Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders is not pro-women because that was what her feelings told her. Rocah, by the way, a political prosecutor with no political background, is only opining at MSNBC because of her role in leading viewers to believe that any day now SDNY is going to bring down Trump and his entire family.”

Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn’t “on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R”, saying they’re really just in it for the money.

But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump’s loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn’t have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries.

Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn’t serve the Democratic Party, but she’s incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks.

Consider the way the Syrian province of Idlib is being reported on right now, to pick one of many possible examples. Al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib is the final stronghold of the extremist militant groups that the US and its allies flooded Syria within a premeditated campaign to effect regime change, and Syria and its allies are fighting to recapture the region. They are using methods that are identical to those commonly used by the US and its allies, yet the bombing campaigns of the US-centralized empire receive virtually no critical coverage while western mainstream outlets like CNN and the BBC are churning out brazenly propagandistic pieces about the evils of the Assad coalition’s airstrikes.

“Civilians are dying in Idlib, just as they died in their thousands in recent US UK airstrikes in e.g. Raqqa and Mosul,” political analyst Charles Shoebridge observed on Twitter today. “The difference is that when it’s (often unverified) claims that Russia or Syria are doing the killing, US UK media make it front-page news.”

This marked discrepancy is due to the fact that western mass media outlets serve not a political party, nor even money, but the power structures of the western empire. This is the real reason why Russia hysteria has been mainlined into mainstream consciousness day in and day out for three years. Not for ratings, not to hurt Trump, not to help the Democrats, but because Russia is viewed as a disobedient geopolitical adversary by the US-centralized power alliance. That’s all it’s ever been.

There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn’t advance the agendas of either of America’s two mainstream parties, and it doesn’t advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don’t like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow, and Trump supporters don’t like acknowledging that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they’ve had marked for destruction since the fall of the Soviet Union.

In a very interesting new Grayzone interview packed full of ideas that you’ll never hear voiced on western mass media, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke openly about the various ways that Russia, China, and other nations who’ve resisted absorption into the blob of the US power alliance have been working toward the creation of a multipolar world. Ryabkov said other nations have been watching the way the dominance of the US dollar has been used to economically terrorize noncompliant nations into subservience by way of sanctions and other manipulations, with Washington expecting that the dollar and the US financial system will remain “the cardiovascular system of the whole organism.”

“That will not be the case,” Ryabkov said. “People will bypass, in literal terms. And people will find ways how to defend themselves, how to protect themselves, how to guarantee themselves against any emergencies if someone comes up at the White House or whatever, at the Treasury, at the State, and says ‘Hey guys, now we should stop what is going on in Country X, and let’s squeeze them out.’ And this country sits on the dollar. So they will be done the moment those ideas will be pronounced. So China, Russia and others, we create alternatives that we will most probably continue using not just national currencies, but baskets of currencies, currencies of third countries, other modern barter schemes.”

“We will use ways that will diminish the role of the dollar and US banking system with all these risks of assets and transactions being arrested, being stopped,” Ryabkov concluded.

That, right there, is the real reason you’re being sold Russia hysteria today.

And it isn’t just on the matter of financial systems in which the unabsorbed powers are uniting against the imperial blob. Russia and China just carried out their first joint air patrol on Tuesday, drawing a hostile response from imperial vassals Japan and South Korea.

“Russian and Chinese bombers on ‘first’ joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region. The China-Russia alliance has become a reality and will last for long-time,” reads a post by one Russian Twitter commentator in response to the news.

The emergence of this alliance, which the Chinese government has warned Washington is ‘not vulnerable to interference’, has been something the west has feared for a long time. A Pentagon white paper published this past May titled “Russian Strategic Intentions” mentions the word “China” 108 times. Some noteworthy excerpts:

• “The world system and American influence in it would be completely upended if Moscow and Beijing aligned more closely.”
• “The allies’ goal should be deterrence. At the same time, the US should bilaterally engage Russia to peel them away from China’s orbit.”
• “He also encourages the development of the US’s ‘capability to effectively foster distrust and unease between the Russia Federation and China.’”
• “Along with Beijing, Moscow seeks a multipolar world in which US hegemony comes to an end. As Alexander Lukin recently pointed out, the ‘common ideal of a multipolar world [has] played a significant role in the rapprochement between Russia and China.’”
• “Russia and China were explicitly mentioned in the 2018 National Defense Strategy as the great powers with which the US competes with the pair. Both Russia and China have come a long way since the 1990s, and the ‘friendship’ that emerged in the immediate post-Tiananmen period and continued to grow over the years now today appears to be one of the strongest bilateral alliances on the planet.”
• “Together, Russia’s tentacles on its former Soviet neighbors and Moscow’s strategic alliance with Beijing in pursuit of a multipolar world (in which the US is no longer the global hegemon) form the two main pillars upon which Putin’s grand strategy rests. All other aspects of its foreign policy behavior can be traced back to this dual-pronged grand strategy.”

I think you get the picture. From the Pentagon’s point of view, US hegemony good; Russia-China alliance very, very bad. Analysts like the white paper’s authors, and even The New York Times editorial board, have urged the drivers of US foreign policy to attempt to lure Moscow away from Beijing, the latter rightly perceived as the greater long-term threat to US dominance due to China’s surging economic power. But diplomacy has clearly been ruled out toward this end, with only a steadily escalating campaign to shove Russia off the world stage now deemed acceptable.

This is all happening because after the USSR fell and America emerged as the undisputed ruler of a unipolar world, it was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy, any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An “attack” on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.

This is why we’ve seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as “enemies” as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack.

This “if you’re not obeying us you’re attacking us” mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian “attack” on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government.

It’s got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans.

Surprised? No you’re not. You knew it deep down inside all along but just refused to face it.

In 2019’s America…

The President tries to devalue the dollar over Twitter. Congress tries to ban bitcoin whilst also deeming it “unstoppable”. And the Federal Reserve cuts rates and compares bitcoin to gold. Toto. Meet Oz.

Furthermore, if you listen to the mainstream media, Putin is probably behind all of it.

The Political Risk of Bitcoin

When bitcoin was sub-$500, I was told time and again by peers that they would not invest because bitcoin was… simply…politically far too risky.

Years and thousands of dollars later, of course, the tune has changed.

Slightly. And many regulators are much more sympathetic to innovation and the bits. But the issue at hand is, and has always been, the same.

With Congressman Sherman calling for an outright ban of bitcoin and cryptocurrency to “nip it in the bud”.

Will America ban bitcoin?

To answer that question, there is long-time bitcoiner, Akin Fernandez (AKA, @BeautyOn) Not only will America NOT ban bitcoin, says Fernandez. It can’t.

Why America Can’t Regulate Bitcoin

Hearings on Bitcoin and its derivatives are being held in the USA on a regular basis, and invariably the expert witnesses fail to properly describe the actual processes going on. If they used the correct language and excluded all analogies, the only possible conclusion would be that America cannot regulate Bitcoin under its current legal system.

The Constitution guarantees the inalienable rights of American citizens, and therefore Bitcoin is a protected form of publishing. The only way Bitcoin can be made regulable is if the Constitution is changed; and that does not mean adding a new Amendment, it means removing the First Amendment entirely.

Inevitably the anti-Bitcoin protagonists will face a robust and ultimately successful legal challenge that will remove the possibility of any sort of “Bit License” or interference from the CTFC, FinCEN or any other agency. It will also remove any possibility of interference at the State level. The consequence of adhering to the basic law of the United States will cause America to become the center of all Bitcoin business for the entire world.

I’ll explain why this is the case.

Some say that Bitcoin is money. Others say that it is not money. It doesn’t matter. What does matter are three things; that Bitcoin is. The Bitcoin network does what it is meant to do completely reliably, and what the true nature of the Bitcoin network and the messages in it are.

Bitcoin is a distributed ledger system, maintained by a network of peers that monitors and regulates which entries are allocated to what Bitcoin addresses. This is done entirely by transmitting messages that are text, between the computers in the network (known as “nodes”), where cryptographic procedures are executed on these messages in text to verify their authenticity and the identity of the sender and recipient of the message and their position in the public ledger. The messages sent between nodes in the Bitcoin network are human readable, and printable. There is no point in any Bitcoin transaction that Bitcoin ceases to be text. It is all text, all the time.

Bitcoin can be printed out onto sheets of paper. This output can take different forms, like machine readable QR Codes, or it can be printed out in the letters A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9. This means they can be read by a human being, just like “Huckleberry Finn”.

At the time of the creation of the United States of America, the Founding Fathers of that new country in their deep wisdom and distaste for tyranny, haunted by the memory of the absence of a free press in the countries from which they escaped, wrote into the basic law of that then young federation of free states, an explicit and unambiguous freedom, the “Freedom of the Press”. This amendment was first because of its central importance to a free society. The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans have the power to exercise their right to publish and distribute anything they like, without restriction or prior restraint.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This single line, forever precludes any law that restricts Bitcoin in any way.

In 1995, the US Government had on the statute books, laws that restrict the export of encryption software products from America without a license. These goods are classified as “munitions”. The first versions of the breakthrough Public Key Encryption software “Pretty Good Privacy”or “PGP”, written by Philip Zimmerman had already escaped the USA via Bulletin Board Systems from the moment it was first distributed, but all copies of PGP outside of the United States were “illegal”. In order to fix the problem of all copies of PGP outside of America being encumbered by this perception, an ingenious plan was put into motion, using the first Amendment as the means of making it happen legally.

The source code for PGP was printed out.

The original print out of the PGP source code. It’s as simple as that. Once the source code for PGP was printed in book form, it instantly and more importantly, unambiguously, fell under the protection of the First Amendment. As a binary, the US government ridiculously tries to assert that immaterial software is a device, and not text (software or “binaries” is text that can be run ondevices). Clearly the idea that software is a device is patently absurd, but rather than waste money arguing this point in court, printing out PGP removed all doubt that a First Amendment act was taking place.

The printed source code was shipped to another country, perfectly legally and beyond challenge, and then transferred to a machine by OCR (Optical Character Recognition, a software tool that can turn a printed page into a text file, removing the need for a person to manually type out a printed page), resulting in a PGP executable that was legally exported from the United States.

The direct analogy to Bitcoin should be vividly clear to you now. PGP and Bitcoin are both:

1. Pieces of software that can be rendered as printed text on paper
2. Software that generates unique blocks of human readable text
3. Designed to generate text that is 100% covered by the First Amendment

The purpose of PGP is to absolutely verify the identity of the sender of a message and ensure that the message was not read or changed in transit. The purpose of Bitcoin is to absolutely verify the ability of the owner a cryptographic key (which is a block of text) that can unlock a ledger entry in the global Bitcoin network. Both of these pieces of software are messaging systems and services that absolutely fall under the First Amendment in every aspect, from the source code used to generate the software clients that do the message signing to the text the compiled clients generate, send, receive and process.

Bitcoin is text. Bitcoin is speech. It cannot be regulated in a free country like the USA with guaranteed inalienable rights and a First Amendment that explicitly excludes the act of publishing from government oversight.

Bitcoin and PGP generate messages that are initiated by their users. Each of the messages that are generated by these two pieces of software are unique. The only bodies of law that could possibly be invoked regarding their output and source code are Copyright and Patent law respectively. The Bitcoin source is not copyrighted and the core idea of it is not Patented, and in any case, none of this has anything to do with the nature of Bitcoin messages, or your right to publish. Typewriters can include Patented methods in their construction, and those Patents have no bearing on your First Amendment right to publish what you create with Patented tools.

Copyright gives the generator of these texts privileges under the law imposing fines on someone copying your message without your permission, but Copyright law has nothing to do with exporting, regulating or imposing a tax on the messages themselves, and of course, forbidding the copying of your Bitcoin payment message rather negates the purpose of using Bitcoin.

Taking all of this into account, if any legislator, regulator, three or six letter US agency or other bureaucrat dares to try and regulate Bitcoin, they will be on a hiding to nothing. A legal challenge will be mounted, and will have to be mounted, because if the State can legislate against a single piece of software that generates messages, a legal precedent will be created allowing the US government to regulate all software no matter what it does.

Bitcoin’s operation is fundamentally no different to what all email, text messaging and internet connected software does; relay messages. The only difference is in the software that tracks how the messages of the sender and recipient relate to each other. Email is no different to Bitcoin, save for the fact that a record of the sender and recipient and content of your email is not stored in a public ledger one against the other. We know it’s stored in a private database, but that’s another story. Wink wink.

Here is another example of case law proving that this reasoning is correct.

In Bernstein v. US Department of Justiceit was established that code is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. This absolutely and unambiguously applies to Bitcoin, with eerie parallels to KYC/AML in Bitcoin. The unconstitutional ITAR requirements are exactly the same as asking Bitcoin traders to register as “Money Transmitters” and seek licenses before they can be paid to transmit text to the Bitcoin network for publication on the public ledger. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Bernstein’s favour, and ruled that software was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. It is clear to see that Bitcoin falls squarely into the category of protected speech, there is no way around any of this, and the US courts must come to the same conclusion for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is protected speech, and the case law says so explicitly.

The position that Bitcoin is money is fundamentally wrong, and systems like it have existed for many years without gaining the attention of any three letter agencies. Take for example FarmVille, the massively popular farm simulation game on Facebook. This hugely popular game is no different to Bitcoin in nature. Farm Buck sexist in a closed system, just as Bitcoin does. The only difference is the size of the space where the messages are being sent, and in the case of Farm Bucks, the number of users and transactions (messages sent) was large. FarmVille had 83,760,000 monthly active users and not a single one was subjected to KYC/AML to exchange fiat for Farm Bucks or Farm Cash. Why not? What happened to that money? Why weren’t Fin CEN or SEC all over that game as they are on ICOs? No one can explain this adequately. This example is very useful as a tool to pull back the curtain on the people who assert that Bitcoin is a money and is fundamentally different to a money kept in a game. All the rationales they use (mostly in the form of run-on sentences) to explain the difference are inaccurate, and never address the fundamental processes; if they did, they would have no choice but to conclude that Bitcoin is no more subject to regulation than Farm Bucks or PGP are.

Clearly, allowing legislation to touch Bitcoin means that any software of any kind will suddenly be liable to arbitrary and unconstitutional restriction. It will set a precedent that will be devastating to all software development in the USA, and software is the means by which everything is run, communicated, exchanged and ordered in modern society. In fact, it is impossible to run a modern society without software.

Twitter for example, could find itself being regulated; it transmits messages that are no different in nature to the messages that Bitcoin transmits; the only difference being the publicly maintained ledger and application of the messages. In fact, twitter could turn itself into a Bitcoin company quite easily by adding a few fields to its message JSON schema to include a Bitcoin address for each of its users, adding a page to its client and running its own Bitcoin server pool. Would that extra text suddenly transform Twitter into a bank? Would that suddenly change the nature of each Tweet that is sent on their network, and cause them to be “Money Transmitters”? How is having a Bitcoin address integrated into your Twitter account different to making a promise by hand on Twitter to your followers or in a direct message?

Essentially, Bitcoin allows you to make written contracts with people without knowing them or signing paper; the network and software takes care of identifying and fulfilling the promise, all with cryptographically signed pieces of text. What the people calling for “Bit Licenses” are asserting is that because Bitcoin right now has a particular use, it should be exempted from the basic law of the United States of America. That is completely insane, and will have unintended consequences that would be absolutely disastrous for the American economy since almost everything today is mediated by or touches software.

On the other hand, if Bitcoin is left to flourish and the market allowed to define the services, means of setting the value and resolving disputes, Bitcoin as an ecosystem will be extremely robust and widespread, just like the Internet is today, after having grown for twenty years without any regulation or oversight from the State.

Furthermore, as I have said previously, the country that does not enact Bitcoin legislation will become the starting and endpoints of all Bitcoin transactions globally by first mover advantage. All other jurisdictions will see Bitcoin passing through them untaxed, and there will be nothing they can do about it, as Bitcoin is an unassailable peer to peer network.

We have seen a similar phenomenon with the legal position of encryption in France. SSL was regulated in France until Dominique Strauss-Khan removed the restrictions. They knew that “French e-commerce” would take place inside “le pays Roosbeef” if it were not possible to secure French websites with SSL on demand without friction. American Bitcoin businesses (since the endpoints will be in their jurisdiction) will be taxed on their profits, and this will be a percentage of the trillions of global transactions made on the network for every conceivable and inconceivable purpose.

The same is true for any other country. The United States looks set to cripple itself by enacting “Bit Licenses” and declaring by fiat that Bitcoin is a currency, or a commodity or legal tender. As I describe above, Bitcoin is none of those things by nature, and the myriad number of applications it can be put to is only just being discovered. Our project Azteco is but one of them, with the potential to reach the billions of unbanked people in the world, and provide them with an easy way to access internet e-commerce, world-wide, with a system that makes payment fraud impossible. The potential benefit to the unbanked and the websites that sell goods on-line and the jurisdictions where those websites operate is without precedent. Only a fool would do something that could harm the advent of this transformation, or shun this new technology and the business building on it.

No legislature will be able to keep up with the advances in software that are taking place; there are too many developers and efficient tools in the wild all over the world, all with equal access to the market. The best the State can possibly hope for is to tax new businesses that use the new tools as they emerge, and encourage entrepreneurs to incorporate in their jurisdictions. If America wants to drive away Bitcoin developers, exchanges and new businesses, by all means, do so and take the consequences. There are many other places in the world where fast internet pipes have been laid and where the government is not so backward. Skype was founded in Estonia, not Silicon Valley, and this is for a reason. All the big Bitcoin exchanges are outside of the USA. There is a reason for that. No one wanting to start a Bitcoin business is planning to move to New York from anywhere, because they know that their business models will immediately come under attack.

For those of you who are frightened of a free market in Bitcoin, rest assured, all the laws that currently exist to do with fraud, theft, misrepresentation and everything else, continue apply to all people and corporations who use Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not make laws or your personal or corporate obligations moot. When you deal with a company, you retain access to the law and recourse to it. When someone makes a promise to sell you goods with Bitcoin, that promise is not nullified because you are paying with Bitcoin. Good Bitcoin businesses will build dispute resolution systems the way that eBay and Amazon have, so that you never have to go to court to obtain justice if there is a problem.

Online, reputation is everything, and bad reputations can destroy your credibility and customer base overnight. This is a far more powerful incentive to behave correctly and fulfill promises, which most people do by default in any case, rather than some arbitrary and absurd bit License or licensing”.

All the “Bit Licenses” in the world could not stop MTGox from having a software problem, and no law can bring back the money lost either directly or through the disruption the event caused by the software error. Once again, entrepreneurs powered by the Internet make life easier and better, not laws and regulations. Regulation does not make software correct; developers do.

I have one recommendation for anyone advocating that there should be a “Bit License”. Don’t waste everyone’s time, money and resources proposing this anti-American idea. The EFF has better things to do with their time than teach the PGP “Munitions Case” lesson all over again. If it goes to court, your side will lose, and as a consequence, America will lose its head start as all Bitcoin entrepreneurs flee the USA for environments that will allow them to innovate, grow and prosper.

And what can the business people who want a “Bit License” forced on the software industry say? That they don’t trust themselves? That’s patently absurd. That they do not trust their competitors? If it’s the case that their competitors are not good actors, then the good actors have a market advantage, and remember; a license cannot protect the public from fraud or provide any guarantee of any kind, it can only distort the market.

What these “Bit License” advocates actually want is a guaranteed market advantage. They are Crony Capitalists. They want to prevent the emergence of a “Golden BB” entrepreneur that might destroy their business, they want to slow down and stifle innovation, so that they can become the entrenched and unassailable gatekeepers. They want to bar new entrants to the market. It simply will not work. And it’s un-American.

The American legislature must let the American dream flourish and extend its power to Bitcoin, or it will be compelled to obey the law, and this has started to happen. Two judges in the USA have now found that Bitcoin is not money, and have thrown out “Money Laundering” charges against two men:

U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh B. Scott ruled in a money laundering case in Buffalo, N.Y. that bitcoin is more like a commodity and is not a form of currency, according to a local news report.

He recommended the money laundering charge be dropped against the defendant since bitcoin isn’t money.

In another money laundering case last year, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler stated it is very clear, even to someone with limited knowledge in the area, that bitcoin has a long way to go before it is the equivalent of money.

Bitcoin is not money. KYC/AML should not apply to it at all. The Hugh B. Scott ruling is highly significant, because it directly contradicts the idea of Bit Licence. And lest there be any doubt, all of this, including legal remedies for breach of promise, applies to “ICOs”, which are also nothing more than text stored in a database. The fact that they are called, “Initial Coin Offerings” is irrelevant to the underlying processes, and it is not illegal to parrot the language and terms of finance, which are not trademarked or copyrighted. The Hollywood Stock Exchange wasn’t deceptive because it called itself a “Stock Exchange”. Opponents of Bitcoin and ICOs have no good arguments, and the threadbare pretexts for regulation they’re able to synthesize are as flimsy as fiat.

So what have we learned here? Trust mankind and the self-regulated free market as the only true means of advancing civilization in the right direction.

Very interesting theory on Trump’s success.

The mayor of Livermore California explains Trump’s popularity and success. This is perhaps the best explanation for Trump’s popularity.

Marshall Kamena is a registered Democrat and was elected mayor of Livermore, CA.. He ran on the democratic ticket as he knew a Bay Area city would never vote for a Republican. He is as conservative as they come. He wrote the following:

Trump’s ‘Lack of Decorum, Dignity, and Statesmanship’ By Marshall Kamena, Mayor of Livermore, CA.

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #nevertrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”

Here’s my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.

Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?

And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.

I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks.

I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.

Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ’60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the

universities – ’till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ‘s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was vulgar-talking.. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”

That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.

It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ‘s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking.. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”

That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.

It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, instead of going after “the fake media” — and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet

Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri — Trump isolated CNN.. He made it personal.

Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”… Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. They need to respond.

This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.

The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

So, to my friends on the Left — and the #nevertrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do.

These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

So, say anything you want about this president – I get it – he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights for America!

Her name is Haley Leach.

She’s an attractive 29-year-old from Colorado who has a legal pistol permit to carry concealed. But as far as the state of New York is concerned, she’s a felon.

That’s because this law-abiding citizen, who has a license to carry a gun legally in Colorado, intended to fly out of New York State. When she tried to declare her gun at the Southwest Airlines counter in an Albany, NY airport, she was arrested for violating New York’s handgun laws.

And it’s all because she tried to do the right thing.

That’s because Haley, who is definitely NOT one of the criminals gun laws are meant to STOP, didn’t know.

Legal gun owners are NOT the problem when it comes to violence in this country. But too many lawyers, prosecutors, and District Attorneys in this country go after legal gun owners, and then pat themselves on the back, believing they’ve done something to stop crime.

That upsets me to no end, but getting mad doesn’t keep anybody out of jail. If you want to stay out of jail and KEEP your CCW rights, you’ve got to be smarter than the sneaky anti-gunners trying to trick you into becoming a “criminal.”

Here are three tricks anti-gun states and their prosecutors use to target legal concealed carry.

1. Beware Of Airports

The TSA has very specific rules for transporting firearms. You have to keep the gun locked up.  It has to have one of those “steal me” tags on it declaring that it’s a firearm. You have to put your hand over your heart and recite, “I’m not a bad person because I’m a gun owner” the whole time you’re in the airport.

(Okay, I made that last one up.)

But did you know that you can follow all these rules to the letter and STILL get arrested?

That’s what happened to Georgia resident Patricia Jordan, who flew legally with her handgun (obeying all the TSA’s rules) into New York.

When she tried to check her gun for the flight back home, she was told to “wait”, and then they arrested her for having the gun in New York State.

When it comes to your gun rights, AIRPORTS ARE A TRAP.

They’re like a mini police-state where you are searched, interrogated, and treated like you’re guilty until you prove yourself innocent.

If you try to take a gun through an airport, make sure you understand the letter of the law both in the state you’re leaving and in the state you’re traveling to.

2. Catching You “Transporting”

If you own guns, sooner or later you’re going to have to transport them (like when you move). There are laws affecting that sort of thing, too believe it or not. Unfortunately, Dustin Reininger didn’t know that when, a few years ago, he was arrested in New Jersey.

Reininger was moving from Maine to Texas. His guns were legal in Maine. They were legal in Texas. But they were supposedly, suddenly, magically ILLEGAL in the state he was simply PASSING THROUGH to get where he was going. When he made the mistake of spending the night to rest in the state, he was arrested.

Even though the state’s gun laws are meant to prevent crime, not merely punish legal, good, law-abiding citizens and gun owners passing through the state, New Jersey’s prosecutors didn’t care. That means you not only have to know the gun laws in the state you leave and the state you’re going to when you transport firearms, but you also have to know the laws all along your travel route.

(Are you getting the picture yet?)

3. Looking For Dead CCW Holders

Another story out of gun-hating New York involves a man who successfully fought off a home invasion. Ronald Stolarczyk, who is 64 years old, used a pistol in self-defense when he fatally shot a pair of home invaders who were going through his stuff.  Unfortunately for him, the gun he used belonged to his father legally. In New York, you’re not allowed to inherit your dad’s handgun if you don’t have a permit specifically registered to that gun by serial number.

In other words, Stolarczyk is staring down the barrel of felony possession of an illegal handgun all because he shot two home invaders.

The authorities in New York regularly comb through the CCW rolls, looking for CCW holders who have passed away. Then, they target the dead gun owner’s family members to make sure the handguns involved are accounted for. As nuts as all these dirty tricks sound, they’re perfectly legal in states that have these gun-hating laws.

If you want to stay ahead of sneaky tactics like this, while preserving your right to carry and move freely around this nation, you’ve got to know the laws. More importantly, you’ve got to understand what those laws mean to YOU.

This isn’t easy to do, but there IS information out there that will help,

and if you are responsible enough to carry, then you need to be just as responsible and more by staying ahead of these government RATS and

educating yourself. There are PLENTY of GOOD organizations out there availing to help you.

Get yourself educated and equipped so that sneaky gun-grabbing prosecutors can’t target YOU for legal destruction.

It’s a shame that law-abiding gun owners are treated in this country’s state legal systems as potential threats. Guilt before innocence.

Unfortunately, that’s the sad reality of the so-called justice system and carrying concealed today.

Prepare. Train. Survive.

A national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America took place in Atlanta last weekend. If you listen to the audio alone, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s an episode of South Park. (It was hilariously terrifying.)

The beauty of free speech is that we all have the opportunity to listen in and see how people relate with one another in their natural habitats. 

How to Love Socialism 

As someone who values individual sovereignty, there’s a part of me that sympathizes with socialism, but in a way that most socialists hate.

I don’t have a problem with socialism per se. Or even democratic socialism.  The main grievance I have with any political structure is bigness. 

Some form of “democratic socialism,” after all, MIGHT be a great fit for a small community of 300 people who share the same values… goals… and lifestyles.

The nitty-gritty. So here’s what it comes down to:

If it is voluntary, it is A-OK. 

If you want to live in an “ecosexual” community that battles climate change by humping moss… you do you. Why would I stop you?

If it is mandated by law… by force… at the point of a gun… 

That’s where I start to quiver in paranoid fear at the potential implications.  As we all should.

When Socialism Works  (ugh)

As for the former, the voluntary form of socialism, there is, indeed, precedent.  Take, for example, the Bruderhof community of Christians in the UK.  While the UK’s Mirror, in typical mainstream media fashion, paints the small community as “bizarre” and “radical”, The truth is it’s the exact opposite of bizarre and radical.  It’s safe, predictable, disciplined, and… well… boring.

“Imagine,” says Sara Wallis, “a place where there is no debt, crime or homelessness. No one worries about money, mortgages or unemployment.”

In a normal day, the families get up at 6am, eat breakfast together at 6:15, then it’s school and work for everyone from 7:30am to 5pm, with a 2-hour communal lunch break.  At school, the kids study in the morning, but then “it’s like summer camp” in the afternoon.  There are obvious trade-offs however. To be a part of the community, the individual is forced to sacrifice quite a bit of his or her own autonomy.

“It’s a community,” says Wallis, “where you are not always allowed to make decisions about your life, where families can be asked to move house if it’s deemed better for the greater good and where a traditional uniform from a bygone era is worn.”

Their work is not centered just around maintaining the community, however, says Wallis: “The community collectively raises tens of thousands of pounds for charity.” A socialist’s wet dream, right? Wrong.

There’s a problem with this type of socialism.  It requires three things absent in our modern day’s idea of the socialist utopia…

1] Personal responsibility and self-ownership

2] Abdication of autonomy.and free choice (rather than “restrictions for thee and none for me”)

3] Adherence to a clearly defined set of values (i.e., a loss of ambiguity and moral relativity)

As a voluntary option, however, where one can leave at any time, there’s no reason why someone couldn’t live a perfectly happy life in that particular case and form of “socialism.”

The Problem With “Big Socialism”

The problem with “Big Socialism,” apart from the aforementioned necessary use of force, coercion, violence, and all that stuff that makes society suck, the advocate for “Big Socialism” wants a fantasyland wherein we can all be (but especially he) shielded from our own weak spots and negligence.  Rather than strengthening ourselves in the necessary fire of maturation, civilization is seen as a feather bed, a given, a constant.  And the only problem with civilization is not a matter of contribution, but that it has been doled out unfairly.  It’s not “open opportunity” for growth that economists mistakenly worry themselves with. It’s the lack of an open reward system. It’s worse than a fairytale. (At least a fairytale has a moral.) And it leads to insanity, such as that which can be experienced if viewing the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America video as I’ve done, which is but a microcosm of Big Socialism…

Wherein, you’ll notice, every individual believes the most important thing isn’t to live in harmony with others based on clearly-defined principles and values, (something social justice and socialist crowds in general severely lack, yet act as if they don’t) but to demand that others conform to an ever-shifting and highly ambiguous landscape of “sensitivities”. Nobody is willing to sacrifice their discomfort for the “greater good,” and yet everyone expects everyone else to.

If that’s all Big Socialism has to offer, then NO THANK YOU dear Democratic Socialists of America.

We’ll be fine without you.

I’ve Never Seen James Altucher Like THIS Before.

What James said on camera would absolutely shock you.

While Miley Cyrus says she’s not having a kid until “climate change is stopped,” David Benatar says you would be better off if you were never born at all.

Don’t take it personally. It’s not just you. Benatar means every human who exists and everyone who has ever existed. Ever.

A self-proclaimed “anti-natalist” philosopher and author of Better Never to Have Been, Benatar believes life is so unbelievably horrific that the only compassionate thing humans could do would be to stop having kids…Until no human exists ever again.

Damn the climate, says Benatar, it’s life itself that’s the problem.

And Benatar isn’t alone.

In fact, he’s the voice of a dying paradigm.

The Nihilistic Roots of Modernity

Without getting too deep in the weeds, at the root of Benetar’s argument is that life is *clearly* cosmically meaningless.

We exist, he says, in an indifferent universe, and are subject to indifferent, and blind, forces.

In the absence of cosmic meaning, he writes, there’s “something circular about arguing that the purpose of humanity’s existence is that individual humans should help one another.” Bleak, indeed. Alas, we must admit.

Despite the obvious inherent weakness, futility, dismality, ugliness, and distastefulness of Benatar’s take on life, living, and the nature of reality,

there’s something so completely right-on about it.

Not because he’s correct, because he’s not. But because he has bravely and fully embodied the absolute spirit of our age.

Benatar deserves respect mostly because he refuses to, unlike the many other anti-natalists, hide his nihilism behind a thin veneer of virtue.

Despite the gloominess, his honesty is a breath of fresh air.

He makes no claim his anti-natalist position is about anything except his dismal outlook on life. He’s simply taken our materialist paradigm, with even more religious fervor than a Westboro Baptist, to its logical conclusion: Something far worse than fire and brimstone… an abysmal void of eternal nothingness for all.

More than the climate, it’s this same dark wet blanket of modernity that, I suspect, has led Miley Cyrus to announce her refusal to have children “until climate change has stopped”. After all, hate to break it to you, Miley: Climate change will never stop. That’s what the climate does. It changes.

Furthermore, if it were truly about climate, that is, if it were truly about not contributing to human-created climate degradation, it appears that years of flying all over the world to massive venues with massive burning lights and blaring sound systems to dance half-naked in front of massive throngs of people who burn massive amounts of gas to get there and drink massive amounts of alcohol out of massive amounts of plastic [Catching breath] might be more harmful to the environment than if, say, Miley retired and lived a quiet life at home with a kid.

Indeed.

This anti-natalist sentiment runs deeper than just worrying about the climate. And it’s something I’ve noticed while aging through my own Boomer years as I’ve witnessed Millenial ‘peers’ if you will, during that time.

One example from a decade ago:

When asked what he was most surprised about in his two years (yes, two) of college biology classes, a friend told me, simply: “It’s taken all of the magic out of life.” Imagine! That’s all it takes. Two years of professors droning on about intestines, neurons, and microbiomes.

Two years of college and, boom, a 22 year-old knows enough about the world and the nature of reality to cast it off as ultimately meaningless.

Such is the all-pervasive arrogance of the Old Guard. If you want to be in the club, you have to have it all figured out: “The universe is lifeless, cold, and meaningless. Only a fool would argue otherwise.” And, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake has learned the hard way, suggests in academic circles, that the nature of reality might have some bits of mystery left in it and you’ll find yourself kicked out of said club.

At the same time, however, a new paradigm is peeking through.

Several of the greatest minds in the 20th century, after all, believed what quantum physics (the most successful and advanced theory ever) is suggesting would blow the materialist, nihilistic, anti-life, mechanistic worldview out of the water.

Einstein included. Consciousness, they said, is not what we think it is, and the nature of reality is far more mysterious than we’ve been led to believe. (more on that another time, possibly.)

Until then, however, there’s a much easier way to argue against the anti-natalist hordes who look down on those who wish to raise a family.

For that, I bring up Kevin Baldeosingh to rap about why baby strikes won’t save the planet, and why we should keep celebrating life.

Why Baby Strikes Won’t Save the Planet

If you’re worried about climate change, you shouldn’t have children. Ever. That’s the new argument that many young Americans are buying into.

The issue gained prominence in February when Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez raised it on Instagram, and it was back in the news earlier this month when pop singer Miley Cyrus suggested she wouldn’t be having children until climate change was stopped.

Birth Strikes Over Climate Change

“We’ve been doing the same thing to the earth that we do to women. We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it’s exhausted. It can’t produce,” Cyrus told ELLE. “We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child.”

Even some members of the British royal family got into the act, with Prince Harry revealing this week that he and wife Meghan won’t be having more than two children in order to reduce climate change.

For many birth strikers, the claim is that each new human being adds to the carbon load of the planet. In fact, nearly one-third of Americans say climate change should be a consideration when planning a family.

Economist Tyler Cowen, however, has presented a contrary argument that having more children is the best way to ensure that the human species will be able to deal with a climate crisis if and when one occurs because more people means more innovators who will develop new technologies to mitigate such challenges.

Although the no-children-less-carbon argument may seem novel, the lobby is in line with a decades-old demographic trend. Long before this new justification for reducing family size, fertility levels had already been falling in all developed nations while remaining relatively high in poor countries.

In the 1950s, American women had an average of four children; this has gone down to two. In other developed nations, the rate has also similarly declined over the past half-century—in France from 2.7 to 1.9, in Japan from 2.2 to 1.3, and most notably in China from 5.5 to 1.8.

On the face of it, the population control position seems perfectly logical: Since households have limited resources, the more children you have, the less is available for each child. Therefore, if poor people want to ensure that their children grow up to be better off than them, they should have smaller families. This is the key premise on which the family planning movement has been based since the early 20th century. People who do not want to have children view them as an expenditure item and hence often feel virtuous about the resources they save by not having any. That virtue signaling is a key component of the BirthStrike lobby, but, of course, this position is based on the false premise of a fixed economic pie.

Are Children Liabilities?

In any case, this view of children as a liability is very much a modern one. Before the Industrial Revolution, and even nowadays in agriculture-based societies, a large family was considered a benefit. The reason was quite simple: Children provided labor and hence more resources for the household. The early years during which the children were not productive were more than compensated for as they grew up.

This attitude persisted even after the Industrial Revolution began since a large family meant that some children could be spared from the farm to go work in the factories, where wages were higher and the work less back-breaking. Notably, by the end of the 19th century, many families started opting to send their children to school instead of work, with child labor laws belatedly catching up with this new social trend. This was because parents saw how, in a society where manufacturing and services were paying better, education was a benefit for their children.

In large part because of this change from agriculture to manufacturing, the very concept of a large family started to change. In pre-modern times, a family of eight children was considered normal, with anything above 10 being considered large (but in a good way). By the mid-20th century in developed countries, having more than five children was thought to be a large family, hence the Brady Bunch. Nowadays, four is considered plenty.

So while economic factors do have a strong effect on birth rates, the effects are expressed in a counter-intuitive way since people who can afford to have more children tend to have fewer offspring than people who cannot provide as much. Economists have explained this by viewing children as a consumption good. A consumption good is anything that provides satisfaction to the user (what the late Gary Becker, who pioneered the application of economic tools to social interactions, called “psychic income”). To maximize this satisfaction, wealthy parents have to invest more in their children to ensure their equivalent or greater success as adults, therefore, they have fewer children in order to trade off quality in favor of quantity.

The economist Bryan Caplan, however, disagrees (reluctantly) with Becker’s argument. In his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Caplan instead attributes the decline in family size to changes in values, self-imposed rules, and foresight. Caplan argues that marriage and religion are key factors affecting family size, and both are less influential institutions than they used to be. With respect to rules, he notes that parenting has become more onerous because parents feel they must devote more time and resources to their children, which makes a large family undesirable. And I think I MAY, SOMEWHAT agree with that too.

Lastly, Caplan argues that people today apply narrow foresight in making child-bearing decisions, weighing short-run pleasure against a few years of negative consequences, whereas true foresight means optimizing positive and negatives over our expected lifespan. “Infancy is a passing phase, but children last a lifetime,” he notes. “Costs fall: the older kids get, the easier they are to care for. Once your kids become teenagers, you’ll rarely feel like you need a moment to yourself. You’ll have to pressure them to spend time with you.” (as do currently I)

Doomsday Logic

However, the birth strikers believe they have true foresight. If their premise is correct, then both they and their children will be worse off over their lifetimes. But had people in the past adhered to this doomsday logic, nearly everyone in every part of the world would have remained childless. In ancient times, most parents correctly expected four of their 10 children to die before the age of five, and they did not expect the surviving ones to be materially better off than them. Such experiences naturally created a pessimistic view of life and, as policy analyst Marian L. Tupy noted in a recent article, “Most civilizations have separately conjured up some form of eschatology or that part of theology which is concerned with ‘death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.’”

In the 20th century, every generation in the western hemisphere feared the prospect of world war, global food shortages, health-sapping pollution, and nuclear Armageddon. Not only did none of these disasters occur, but every new generation also had more wealth, health, and security than the previous one. History thus suggests that doomsayers should have a bit more humility about their dire prophecies.

Most significantly, to the extent that any such doomsdays were ever likely, they were prevented by human ingenuity in tandem with the universal desire for freedom. History thus suggests that doomsayers should have a bit more humility about their dire prophecies.

Perhaps more importantly, young pessimists should also be cautious about predicting their own future state of mind. Since human beings are notably poor at this, it is more useful to observe other people’s experiences and assume that you are more likely to be like them than a noble exception.

And Caplan observes, “Regret is abnormal for people who have kids, and normal for people who missed their chance.” This selfish reason also gels with the climate activists’ altruistic goals since, if Cowen is correct, every well-off person in a developed nation who chooses to not have a child may well be lowering humanity’s chances of dealing effectively with climate change.

Before you choose to birth strike for the uncertain good of the planet therefore, it might be wise to consider these almost-certain truths.

Ciao

One of the latest mass shooting took place only 20 minutes from where I’ve traveled many times.

A friend was on his way to meet a date at a bar on the Oregon District (where the shooting happened), but, in a blank moment of “highway hypnosis,” he missed his exit and showed up 5 minutes “late”… just after the shooting.  And this was, of course, less than 24 hours from another shooting on the other side of the country.

Awful. Disgraceful. Disgusting. Sickening.

Yes. All of the above.

But quick jumps to scapegoating and knee-jerk reactions for the government to “do something,” of which are already emerging from all corners of the political and pundit class, are, and always have been, wrongheaded.

A Tale of Two Shooters 

The Dayton shooter, as reported by Heavy.com, “was a self-described ‘leftist,’ who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, ‘I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.’”

On the other end of the spectrum, the El Paso shooter was a Trump supporter who praised veterans, the wall, Christianity, and made fun of vegetarians for being “hipsters”.

Now, what’s important about the tweets and descriptions above is not that they are of any substance by themselves, nor are they very helpful predictors of potential mass shooters. (Even self-proclaimed satanists rarely ever shoot up public places.)

What’s important is how they’re being used now, predictably (though awkwardly), on both sides, as political vehicles; examples that the “other” is evil, and “we” are the innocent angels.  (Yet, by nature of playing that game, they’re both wrong.)

As Paul Rosenberg of Freeman’s Perspective has written in the past:

Politics, as it exists today, never wastes a chance to make the beautiful ugly, and, even moreso, the ugly even uglier. 

He said:

“Let’s be honest about something we see nonstop but seldom appreciate: Politics makes life ugly. Politics turns people you disagree with into twisted, cartoon images of what they really are, and it pushes you into degrading and hating them. In short, it’s vile, corrosive, and hate-filled.” At no time has this been more apparent than in the past 48 hours.  And the endgame for both sides is always the same: the long arm of the law grows another finger.

Politics is Poison

You wouldn’t think it by the current hysteria, but violent crime in America today is sitting near an all-time low.  Although we saw a minor uptick in 2015, over the past quarter-century, crime has been on the downslope. 

Furthermore, for perspective, the eternal Neil deGrasse Tyson, who, perhaps, recently fired his publicist, wrote:

And yet, if you spend 5 minutes on Twitter, Facebook, or listening to the pundits, you’ll emerge convinced a new civil war is on the horizon. 

Already, mainstream pundits are demanding “domestic terrorism laws” in America. Meanwhile, we’re having flashbacks of the Patriot Act.

You know, that thing that passed in the name of “security,” which ultimately made us less safe… eroded our civil liberties… expanded domestic spying programs… and militarized the police beyond anything we’ve ever seen, or would ever be appropriate.

We all MUST refuse to let the legacy media, once again, bully us with fear.

Americans Should be Very Skeptical Of Calls For New Terrorism Laws

Although Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded, MUCH THOUGHT needs to be given to these situations still.

The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

All the usual US gun control debates have of course reignited, which is understandable ONLY to those NOT in the know. Alongside this debate, however, we are seeing another, far more pernicious agenda being raised that I would like to address here.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, notorious liar and propagandist Malcolm Nance claimed that existing laws aren’t sufficient for prosecuting the El Paso shooter, because there are no laws designating his act of mass murder as “domestic terrorism”.

“I think that Congress needs to take up right away a series of domestic terrorism laws,” Nance said. “It’d be very simple: just match them to the words ‘international terrorism’, so that a member of al-Qaeda and a member of a white nationalist terrorist cell or a militia that thinks they’re going to carry out international acts of terrorism are equal all the way around. Right now there are no laws called ‘domestic terrorism law’. They can get you for firearms, they get you for hate crimes, but you are not treated as a terrorist. This act in El Paso was clearly by all definitions a terrorist attack in the United States, but of course by the nature of the person being white and American he can’t be treated like a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda. He can’t even be detained, he can only be treated as a murderer.”

(The accused, for the record, is in fact under arrest currently, and prosecutors say that they are treating it as a domestic terrorism case for which they are seeking the death penalty. This is in Texas; he’ll be dead before the next Fast & Furious movie. Nance’s notion that prosecutors’ hands are somehow tied here is silly.)

“But he’s a murderer with a political intent who is spreading an ideology,” Nance continued. “So Congress should take that up immediately. And let’s see if the White House won’t sign that legislation. That would be very revealing.”

In other words, shove the legislation through and call anyone who opposes it a Nazi lover.

Political commentary is flooded with the word “terrorism” today. People are demanding that the El Paso shooter in particular and white supremacists in general be labeled terrorists by the narrative-making commentariat, and you know what? I totally get it. The push since 9/11 to tar Muslims as “terrorists” has been extremely obnoxious and fueled by hate and bigotry, so it makes sense for progressive-minded people to push for the egalitarian usage of that term. But before doing so, please reflect on what lessons we learned from the post-9/11 “Islamic terrorism” scare, although Islamic global ‘spread’ IS in fact, VERY REAL!

“Years of misguided alarmism over ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to ‘white nationalist terrorism’ is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes, tweeted independent journalist Michael Tracey in response to the chatter.

“I am telling you now that the government will use the violence that Trump himself has rallied as an excuse for more militarization, more surveillance, more violations of civil liberties — and a lot of people are going to welcome these things because they are afraid, tweeted Truthout‘s Kelly Hayes. “I’m not guessing or being creative here.

This is about having a sense of history and a sense of how these systems function in the present. I would love to be wrong. I would celebrate being wrong. But I’m not.”

Indeed, it is an established fact that the US government will use the narrative about the need to fight terrorism to advance pre-existing agendas. The first draft of the massive USA Patriot Act was introduced a week after the 9/11 attacks, far too fast for anyone to have gathered the necessary information from all the relevant government bodies about what changes were necessary and typed out the hundreds of pages of the bill. Legislators later admitted that they didn’t even have time to read through the densely worded bill before passing it the next month, so to believe that it could have been written in a week would be childish.

In 2011 then-Congressman Ron Paul told Politico that “the Patriot Act was written many, many years before 9/11,” adding that the attacks simply provided “an opportunity for some people to do what they wanted to do.” Paul was serving in Congress when the Patriot Act was passed. The Act has since been used to erode human rights at home and abroad by destroying Fourth Amendment protections and legalizing Orwellian surveillance, and it’s safe to assume that the opaque and unaccountable government agencies who were greatly empowered by it had already wanted this to happen.

I have no easy answers for America’s mass shooting epidemic, and as an Australian I see the gun control debate as outside my sovereign territory. I will simply suggest, as I so often do, that if Americans really want to address the problem, then the best place to start is to do the first ever honest and in-depth study on the effects of domestic propaganda on the American mind; particularly war propaganda.

There are only so many times a certain type of mind can be told violence-glorifying lies before it snaps; if anyone researches mass shootings in the light of the constant psychological abuse that Americans suffer at the hands of their mass media, I guarantee they’ll find a connection. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth because of their proximity to the most strategically crucial part of the empire; it’s not a coincidence that they’re also by far the most prone to mass shootings.

One thing I can tell you won’t fix your problems, America, and that’s listening to the propagandists who want you to hand over even more control to a government that has already begun floating high-altitude surveillance balloons over your country without your permission.

Don’t let them bully you with fear and DON’T allow them to manipulate you like a puppeteer either.