I was delighted this morning to see a video on LewRockwell.com in which it was revealed that high-school students do not know what countries border on the United States, or how many states there are in what we think of, somewhat dubiously, as “the Union.” Decay and hopelessness warm a curmudgeon’s heart.

Regarding Mexico (which, for readers under thirty, borders on the US) I have noticed that many Americans seem to think that it is a land of machismo and oppression of women. This view is lovingly held by feminists, who really ought to find something better to do with their time. I like to think the worst of people and countries, and certainly it is the way to bet, but occasionally even a curmudgeon must submit to the predations of truth. The truth is that machismo is well on its way out. And good riddance, since it really was obnoxious.

The news yesterday was that the Partido de Acción Nacional, one of Mexico’s three main political parties, has nominated Josefina Vásquez Mota, decidedly a woman, as its presidential candidate. The US has yet to try such a dangerous course. I note that in Latin America, a region thought to be rotten with male chauvinism, Argentina has had a female chief executive (twice, Isabel Peron and Christina Fernadez Kirchner), Chile once (Michelle Bachelet), Brazil currently (Dilma Rousseff), and Costa Rica currently (Laura Chinchilla). So have England, Germany, the Philippines, India and, for God’s sake, Pakistan.

Now, it would be unreasonable to expect people who do not know where Mexico is to know much of social conditions in that country. (Over the years I have noticed that readers of this patch of the internet know much more of the world than the boobitry at large, so I will direct this column at those of the puzzled who want to unpuzzle themselves.) By way of preliminary enlightenment, not all Mexicans sleep beneath tall cactuses while a burro waits patiently nearby. Most do, yes, but not all. There is a thriving market in plastic cactuses, to give people a place to sleep. And to answer a characteristically idiotic question I once received, “Does Mexico, you know, like have paved roads?” Yes. Cars run on them.

But machismo. Both my stepdaughter Natalia, and my wife Violeta, report that when they are in the US, feminists try to extract from them tales of harrowing mistreatmen in Mexico. They find this annoying and insulting.

I asked Natalia, Do you encounter discrimination in university, or for that matter anywhere else? “No.” I asked Violeta the same question. “No.” Thirty years ago, the answer would have been otherwise. This isn’t thirty years ago. You can find residual prejudice and dimwitted roostery among the very poor, but you need to hurry.

I live in Jocotepec, a comparatively backward farming community (berries). Too many of the girls here get married at fourteen, to swains of sixteen, after which neither goes anywhere in life because they immediately have a baby. This is unfortunate, though changing, but it doesn’t involve discrimination against the girls. It’s just stupid.

When machismo flourished, women might have ten children. The husband measured his manhood by the number of his unrequested gifts to posterity, as if copulation were a rare and extraordinary talent. This has changed sharply. Google on “Mexican birth rate.” It has dropped like a prom dress.

I know quite a few women, not from rich families, who have six to ten siblings, but only two children of their own. If asked why, they give the usual answers common in much of the world. You can raise two well or ten badly. With two kids, you can have a nice house, but with ten you stay poor. If a man ever had a baby, he wouldn’t ask why women don’t want to have ten of them. Violeta attributes much of the drop to women’s lib. Today a woman can say, No, uh-uh, done that twice, enough. Among the large and growing middle class, they don’t have to say it. Almost everywhere, the best contraceptive is a good paycheck.

Sometimes it is a good idea to have a bit of perspective. Many countries exist which live up to the feminists’ horror stories of mistreatment. Mexico just isn’t one of them. Many Moslem countries engage in the genital mutilaton of women. The idea would never occur to anyone here. In many Moslem countries, girls aren’t allowed to go to school. In Mexico, they are required to. In various countries, women have to wear black bags and cannot drive or even go out unchaperoned. Not a trace of this exists in Mexico.

Observably where I live, girls pour into the universities and then into the professions. They are not doing it by fighting courageously to overcome opposition from evil men. None I know reports any opposition at all. Natalia had a 97% average in high school and blew away the entrance exam, so the university gave her a 70% scholarship. If this is discrimination against girls, I’m a ham sandwich.

I can’t produce statistics on women in the professions in Mexico. Anecdotes, yes. My immigrations lawyer is female, as is the other one commonly used by expats. In eight years, I and my family have been to four dentists, three of them women; two ophthmalogists, men; two dermatologists, women; two optometrists, one a woman; a cardiologist, a man; a neurolgist, a woman; an oral surgeon, a man; a male doctor and a female pharmacist. Again, anecdotal, but hardly representing an exclusion of women from medicine, which is a profession of high status. Machismo is a difficult thing to maintain in the presence of large numbesr of female professionals.

As far as I can tell, Mexican women have thus far avoided the hostile, often Lesbian-driven feminism of the American sort, in which women look for slights as a barnyard hen pecks after bugs. I hear some of it on the radio, coming out of the University of Guadalajara. Maybe it will take hold. There is plenty of it among expat gringas here. Yet a female Mexican dentist seems to regard herself as a dentist and a woman, not as a gender warrioress constantly on patrol.

A little attention to a neighbor, please. Yes, Mexico has paved roads, and no, doctors don’t cure disease by sacricing chickens, and kids have smartphones and steal music like everybody else and have rock bands and no, girls aren’t enslaved or imprisoned or kept in academic benightedness. Just ain’t so.

Click to enlarge

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity.  The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity.  The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using “software to hide encrypted data in digital photos” or other media.  In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone “overly concerned about privacy” or attempting to “shield the screen from view of others” should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.

Logging into an account associated with a residential internet service provider (such as Comcast or AOL), an activity that could simply indicate that you are on a trip, is also considered a suspicious activity.  Viewing any content related to “military tactics” including manuals or “revolutionary literature” is also considered a potential indicator of terrorist activity.  This would mean that viewing a number of websites, including the one you are on right now, could be construed by a hapless employee as an highly suspicious activity potentially linking you to terrorism.

The “Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities” contained in the flyer are not to be construed alone as a sign of terrorist activity and the document notes that “just because someone’s speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.”  However, many of the activities described in the document are basic practices of any individual concerned with security or privacy online.  The use of PGP, VPNs, Tor or any of the many other technologies for anonymity and privacy online are directly targeted by the flyer, which is distributed to businesses in an effort to promote the reporting of these activities.

Via Popehat, this is probably the most hilariously absurd regulation I’ve ever seen.

John Stossel called Florida Dept. of Revenue and was told, “A vending machine operator that does not place the notice on the machine presumably is not in compliance with the other requirements such as registration and payment of the tax.”

So why not just make it a notice of tax paid? Or registration . . . er . . . registered?

Even if we accept that incredibly stupid justification at face value, think about enforcement, here. This isn’t a requirement that you post some bar or serial code for some state inspector to verify from time to time. It’s directed at the casual consumer. But if a vending machine is in violation of the notice requirement, there’s no notice to notify the consumer that the machine is in violation. And there’s no number posted for the consumer to call. The only way this serves any purpose whatsoever is if you have a consumer who sees the notice on a compliant machine, then goes to the effort of writing it down and keeping it on his person at all times, in case he happens upon a non-compliant machine. But then to report it, the consumer would have to find some way of identifying the non-compliant machine. Location, I guess. A serial number. Then what? Does the state then send out an inspector to verify?

And assuming all that happens, you then have a vending machine owner fined for nothing more than not complying with a law requiring the owner to post a notice about the requirement to post a notice. And “teacher, you forgot to collect the homework” guy gets a cash reward.

All to protect consumers! Or something! Who cares!

America’s longest economic recession since WWII, ended in June of 2009. The recession’s end means that our economy has allegedly been in recovery mode since July of 2009, more than two and a half years.

If we are in recovery, why have American’s incomes dropped more during the recovery than they did in the recession? The facts are clear.

Personal incomes fell during the recession by 3.2%.

During the recovery (since July 2009), personal incomes have fallen an additional 6.7%.

Those numbers were posted in a report by Sentier Research using numbers provided by the U.S. Census. (The RED line is the Household Income Index)

The Obama administration has been touting the “recovery” of the American economy and yet this recent data seems to demonstrate that the average household is still waiting for some of the benefits seen in the stock market.

Jeff Anderson of The Weekly Standard drilled deeper into the Sentier report and found even more information that might be cause for concern in the White House.

The income drop was steeper for those under 25 years of age (their incomes were down 9.5 percent), for those between 25 and 34 years of age (down 9.8 percent), for black Americans (down 9.4 percent), for families with three or more children (down 9.5 percent), and for families headed by part-time workers (down 11.5 percent).

Young people and African Americans were two of the strongest voting blocks for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. Seeing that both of those groups are being hit harder than the rest of the population represents an opportunity for the GOP and a challenge for Obama.

You can read the rest of Jeffery Anderson’s analysis in the Weekly Standard HERE.

In earlier articles I tried to highlight the problems that we are faced with in this day and age not only in America but also throughout the world. Wherever you look, the United States is poised for war with some country. We are poised for war against Syria, Iran, China, Pakistan, Russia and possibly even Yemen. If the implications of this ideology, gunboat diplomacy, does not make you so mad that you want to chew nails and spit tacks then there is nothing I can say or do to help you. You have my prayers and fondest hopes for a prosperous New Year.

If you suspect something is wrong, but aren’t sure just what it might be, let me give you some sites to go and investigate for yourself, what is about to befall our world and in particular, our country. This is just a small sampling of the sites on the web that are helping, not only Americans, but people around the world to try to wake up before it is too late:

1.) www.infowars.com

2.) www.dollarcollapse.com

3.) www.theeconomiccollapseblog.com

4.) www.drudgereport.com

5.) www.sgtreport.com

6.) www.shtfplan.com

7.) www.zerohedge.com

8.) www.corbettreport.com

9.) http://dont-tread-on.me

10.) www.theinternationalforecaster.com

Now, if you can’t find a place to start with ten top-notch resources like those above you are in bigger trouble than you realize. You may not agree with everything on all of these sites, and you may not agree with all of what is on any one site. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that any one of these sites has more factual, hard-hitting news than all the mainstream media sites put together.

Now I will make a bold leap forward. If you are here at the http://dont-tread-on.me  site you probably know or feel that something is not quite right. Perhaps you can’t quantify it. Perhaps, you know in you mind or feel it in your gut that something bad is about to happen. If you do, then I address the following decisions to you.

Every American will need to make decisions in 2012. Some Americans will make a decision to ignore the problems of world and the world will make all the decisions for them, but the decisions will be made. What decisions? Simple, those that will affect the lives of everyone in this country and may affect others around the world:

1.) If there is a major financial collapse, i.e. the Euro, the dollar, credit default swaps, another Lehman/Bear Stearns type collapse do you have the hard money resources to provide for your family for the duration of the emergency?

2.) If the United States suffers from the initial stages of hyperinflation, do you have the resources to provide for the needs of your family, i.e. food, water, shelter, hygiene, medical care, clothing and safety?

3.) If the United States goes to war with Iran, and the war remains a conventional war, if the Straits of Hormuz are blocked, will you be able to handle $200-300/barrel oil prices?

4.) If the above war turns into a nuclear conflagration involving the U.S., Russia and/or China are you living in an area that is a low risk zone for nuclear or biological attack?

5.) If the world commodity prices skyrocket due to any of the above scenarios do you have enough fresh water and food on hand to feed your family for an extended period of time, i.e. 3 months, 6 months, 1 year?

6.) If the U.S. dollar collapses for whatever reason, and the cities become literal war zones because “transfer” payments (welfare, medicaid, food stamps, etc.) cease or are worthless, will you be able to protect and defend your home and family from looters?

7.) In Number 6 above, will you be able to feed your family until the violence ends?

8.) In the event that the United States Government declares a national emergency because of one of the above scenarios, or catastrophic natural calamity or because of a “terror” event that has taken place, will you be willing to let your family go to a relocation center/F.E.M.A. center for their own good?

9.) If you are a member of the armed forces and are directed to round-up certain potentially dangerous individuals and take them to a detention facility, will you do it?

10.) If you are a member of the armed forces and are directed to go from house to house to collect guns and other “dangerous” weapons, will you obey the order?

11.) If because of the military’s refusal to arrest civilians or collect firearms, the U.S. government uses police and military from other nations to enforce the law, will you, as someone who has sworn to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, stand idley by and do nothing?

12.) If the forces, designated by the U.S. Government, show up at your door to take you and/or your family to a detention facility, will you go peaceably with them?

13.) If the forces, designated by the U.S. Government, show up at your door to collect your firearms, will you give them up?

14.) Knowing that there is only one candidate running for the office of President of the United States, in either the Democrat or Republican parties that promises to restore the Constituion, will you get off your butt and vote for him? (Yes, Ron Paul!)

15.) If it were possible, would you be willing to change your lifestyle in order to protect your family from any or all of the scenarios above?

Do I have all the answers for you? No, you know better than that.

I have tried in my other articles to give a strategy to use or adapt to your needs, to help you make some of those decisions possible. Ultimately, no one person can change the world, not even the President of the United States of America. It will take all of us working together to get tangible results. But the only person that can answer these questions for you is yourself. Only you know what you are willing to do when faced with the above situations. Notice, I did say willing and not capable and that is for a reason. I have seen people, who in the face of danger or certain death, do things that defied logical thinking or rational thought. That is called courage. Whether male or female, having a set of cahones to give you the courage to make that impossible split second decision in 2012 will be a necessity.

I believe that 2012 for America, will be in the course of human history, that split second that will take courage to make those almost impossible decisions. Start thinking about them. Formulate your strategy and even your response. Set you mind to the task and be prepared to follow your heart, even when it defies logic or rational thought. You never know what one person is capable of until you try. Happy New Year!

The Look Like America bill, originally H.R. 1533, seemed a perfectly ordinary piece of feel-good legislation when proposed by Barack Osama Obama. “Our diversity is our strength,” he said. “We must increase the representation of minorites in our institutions to reflect our diverse population and ensure the fairness for which America stands.” Congress passed the bill without reading it. It was the sort of thing one passed. Besides, there was no money involved, and the bill was not obviously anti-Semitic.

Not obviously. But then one of the obscure policy shops that abound in Washington, the Committee for Ethnic Piety, filed suit against Harvard for noncompiance. The proximate cause was an article in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper, about a course called Math 55, the hardest math course at the univrsity and thus, Harvard liked to think, in America. The students in Math 55, reported the Crimson, were 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, and 100 prcent male. The class didn’t, said the Committee for Ethnic Piety, look like America.

It certainly didn’t.

Harvard, ever sensitive to questions of justice, which it conflated with federal funding, agreed to make the class Look Like America. The administration asserted that only through inadvertence had it failed to notice the clear racism, sexism, and continent-ism occurring under its nose. It established a committee of reform, which set to work.

The first and most ticklish hurdle was The Jewish Question. Jews were two percent of the American population. At 45 percent in Math 55, they were over-represented by a factor of over twenty. The injustice was undeniable. Two percent of a class of twenty-five meant that Math 55 should contain half a Jew. It would then look like America. The Jewish students would have to go.

As news of the proposed ethnographic hecatomb spread across the country, alarm erupted among the prejudiced. Over seven hundred departments of engineering across the country protested. They could see where Looking Like America was going. Math departments, Silicon Valley, the National Institutes of Health—all reeked of injustice, meaning Koreans, Jews, Indianss, and Chinese, and were conscious of sin. They didn’t Look Like America. They Looked Like Math 55. In the Bay area, the proportion of geniuses from India in computing was alarmingly high. Some laboratories Looked Like the Punjab. These malefactors knew well that the coming of justice would gut their enterprises.

Desperate to maintain their positions of racial and patriarchal privilege, they pointed out that the Jewish kids, like all the students in Math 55, had 800 math Boards and had done things like independently develop tensor calculus by the age of three. The view from the Gulch was expressed off-the-record by Dr. Gud Soma Darjeeling, president of Santa Clara Neurocomputing, which employed seventy PhDs in solid-state physics, including three Anglos. “Look, the US is in intellectual collapse. The average American university wouldn’t qualify as a high-school in Japan. It’s crazy. The whole world know it’s crazy. But take out the Kims, Khans, Nguyens, Wangs, and Cohens, and what’s left is Albania in 1750.”

The lead attorney for CEP, Patricia Mikoyan-Gurevich, wasn’t having it.

“Ability doesn’t exist, and occurs equally in all groups, and anyway justice is more important than patriarchal-racist abstractions. Sexism is clear at Harvard. When an entire class is male, it isn’t by accident.”

With this, no one was in disagreement.

Asians were as problematic as Jews. If a Jewish pppulation of two percent required half a Jew in a class of twenty-five, then a six percent population of Aisans required an Asian-and-a-half. Various solutions were proposed. Perhaps a short, light-weight Gujarati would do, or maybe a prodigy of ten from Mumbai. Otherwise, admitting three Asians every two years might serve.

The paucity of females in Math 55 was easier to address. Harvard had already established that there was no difference in mathematical ability by firing a president who thought there might be. Since ability didn’t exist and was found equally in everyone, the sxual balance was quickly rendered equitable by eliminating entrance requirements.

Harvard then set about the intricate matter of making the class thirteen percent black, sixteen percent Hispanic, a tenth of a percent Iroquois, and so on.

Meanwhile, CEP turned its attention to the lush pastures of music. The New York Philharmonic, being in New York, was discovered to consist disportionately of Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and so on. It Looked Like New York, which wouldn’t do. The American Association of the Musically Hopeless, consisting of the deaf, tone-deaf, mutes, and amputees, filed suit on grounds that their membership was not represented at all. (They carefully overlooked the fact that they were over-represented among rock bands.) This brought up an important juridical question: Since most Americans could not play an instrument, should not the orchestra reflect this?

Thirteen years after the passage of the Look Like America bill, the United States ranked in international measures of mathematics just behind the Central African Republic, the New York Phil couldn’t play Happy Birthday, and racial and sexual justice flourished. Yet the vexed problem of Math 55 had not been entirely solved. Progress had been made, yes. The class looked almost like America, counting on its fingers and showing no trace of patriarchalism, which in any event it couldn’t spell. However, CEP’s Committee on Oppressed and Marginalized Indigenous Peoples of Color noted that the class contained no student from oppressed peoples of the Amazon rain forest. CEP regarded national boundaries as essentially phallic, since they were longer than they were wide, and thus beneath notice.

Harvard, distraught at finding yet another instance of its institutional racism, cast about for a suitable indigene.
After a laborious search the university discovered Wunxputl, a member of the Tloxyproctyl tribe of the Amazon Basin, consisting of twelve people who lived on yams and the flesh of the Three-Toed Sloth. Wunxputl was at Wellesley, where he served in a minor administrative position that had no responsibilities. He had been brought there seven years earlier by the anthropology department, so it could atone for White Guilt. It didn’t matter that Wellesley was guilty of nothing. The atonement was a pleasant form of narcissism, allowing the faculty to congratulate themselves on their moral purity.

Harvard arranged with Wellesley to borrow Wunxputl for three minutes every seven years, which it had calculated would satisfy the demands of ethnic proportionality. Justice, at last, had been achieved.

There’s been plenty of talk (and a ton of posts here on Techdirt) discussing both SOPA (originally E-PARASITE) and PROTECT IP (aka PIPA), but it seemed like it would be useful to create a single, “definitive” post to highlight why both of these bills are extremely problematic and won’t do much (if anything) to deal with the issues they’re supposed to deal with, but will have massive unintended consequences. I also think it’s important to highlight how PIPA is almost as bad as SOPA. Tragically, because SOPA was so bad, some in the entertainment industry have seen it as an opportunity to present PIPA as a “compromise.” It is not. Both bills have tremendous problems, and they start with the fact that neither bill will help deal with the actual issues being raised.

That main issue, we’re told over and over again, is “piracy” and specifically “rogue” websites. And, let’s be clear: infringement is a problem. But the question is what kind of problem is it? Much of the evidence suggests that it’s not an enforcement problem and it’s not a legal problem. Decades of evidence from around the globe all show the same thing: making copyright law or enforcement stricter does not work. It does not decrease infringement at all — and, quite frequently, leads to more infringement. That’s because the reason that there’s infringement in the first place is that consumers are being under-served. Historically, infringement has never been about “free,” but about indicating where the business models have not kept up with the technology.

Thus, the real issue is that this is a business model problem. As we’ve seen over and over and over again, those who embrace what the internet enables, have found themselves to be much better off than they were before. They’re able to build up larger fanbases, and to rely on various new platforms and services to make more money.

And, as we’ve seen with near perfect consistency, the best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful. This doesn’t mean just offering any old service — and it certainly doesn’t mean trying to limit what users can do with those services. And, most importantly, it doesn’t mean treating consumers like they were criminals and “pirates.” It means constantly improving the consumer experience. When that consumer experience is great, then people switch in droves. You can, absolutely, compete with free, and many do so. If more were able to without restriction, infringement would decrease. If you look at the two largest contributors to holding back “piracy” lately, it’s been Netflix and Spotify. Those two services alone have been orders of magnitude more successful in decreasing infringement than any new copyright law. Because they compete by being more convenient and a better experience than infringement.

Finally, even if you disagree with all of that, and believe that the problem is enforcement, SOPA and PIPA, won’t be effective in dealing with that. The internet always has a way of routing around “damage” no matter how hard people try to stop it, and the approach put forth by these bills is a joke. It’s hard to find anyone with technology skills who thinks that they will be effective. Every “blockade” has an easy path around it, and the supposed “anti-circumvention” rule in SOPA will never deal with the more obvious paths around things like DNS blocking (use a different DNS or a perfectly legal foreign VPN system). The private right of action efforts are also mistargeted. They’re based on the premise that infringement is done for monetary reasons. It’s amusing that just a few years ago, these same industries insisted that music and movie fans never wanted to pay anything any more, but now they’re claiming that these same people are paying for cyberlockers all the time? That’s simply not credible. And if there’s so much money to be made, the studios and labels would be opening their own cyberlockers. Either way, we’ve watched this game of Whac-a-mole for over a decade. It doesn’t work. Every site that is shut down leads to half a dozen new ones that spring up. This is not how you tackle a problem: by making the same mistake made over and over again in the past.

So… SOPA & PIPA don’t attack the real problem, do nothing to build up the services that do solve the problem, and won’t work from a technological standpoint. And that’s just if we look at the what these bills are supposed to do.

The real fear is the massive collateral damage these bills will have to jobs, the economy and innovation.

Read the rest at this link.

You Can’t Do That! (Without a License)

by Charles Stone, Jr., canam@m…

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE

Number 255, January 18, 2004

http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/tle255-20040118-06.html

The land of the free and the home of the brave, eh? That’s what they say, but try to do any one of hundreds of things without a government license and you’ll find out just how unfree we really are.

Want to cut someone’s hair, trim someone’s nails, build a house, fill somebody’s teeth, practice law, treat a cold, spray for bugs, bury a corpse, watch somebody’s kids or give a massage? You need the government’s permission. In some places if you want to sell flowers or cars or homes or decorate somebody’s interior, you must be licensed by the government. Want to haul folks from place to place for a fee, fit someone for a pair of glasses or use your expertise in the classroom to help educate future generations? Not without the validation of some government hack.

If you ask them, they’ll tell you “it’s for your protection” or “it’s the only way we can be sure the people doing these things are competent.” Nonsense, on both counts.

One hundred years of increasing bureaucracy and generations of children brought up in government schools make it seem that way though. How can it be possible for any type of profession to insure the competence of its members without government regulations? Actually, it’s easy once you get through the layers of bombast and bafflegab slathered around by the regulators.

In the state of Florida, for example, home inspectors are required to be licensed by the state but there are no real tests for competence or any method of punishing those whose incompetence may cost their clients money or indeed their very homes. Yet there are several private accreditation groups that do lay out stringent requirements for membership. That is the answer.

It’s not necessary to involve the government at all. You simply make it in the best interest of the inspectors to become part of one of the accrediting organizations and convince the home-buying public to only use accredited inspectors and the problem is solved.

Unscrupulous people are still free to call themselves home inspectors and foolish home-buyers are still free to use these fly-by-nights but they do so at their own risk. Isn’t that the way it should be? You provide proof of your qualifications and the consumer looks them over and makes what should be an informed decision. What could be simpler and more in line with the free enterprise system.

That’s why the Liberal/Democrat/socialist/statists hate the idea. It takes government out of the loop and leaves them no portal through which to enter the lives of others. It does away with the dependency that they must foster in order to gain control.

Independent people need no nanny watching over them. They are capable of handling their own affairs or if things get too complex, of finding the proper professionals to aid them. That makes them much harder to control.

The reasons that this is not the way of things in the America of today are numerous and disparate. In some cases it is pure paternalism on the part of government. The belief that only the government can be wise and powerful enough to look after the interests of the masses. In others it is tradition. “It’s always been that way.” In still others it is the hijacking of the police powers of government by those within a profession to minimize competition. There are even case in which the government is used to stop competition just because some group has enough political clout to have restrictive regulations implemented.

The unions do their part to keep the market un-free as well. They see competition as anti-worker because you have to perform to compete. Union people don’t want to have to perform. They prefer to extort advancement from employers and use the spoils to keep their members in line. It’s a lot easier to move up through the ranks of a career by seniority than it is by merit. That, for example, is why the teacher’s unions are so adamantly against merit pay plans.

Businesses also use the licensing power of government to keep competitors off their backs. If you have a business that is doing marginally well with a minimum of effort and risk on your part and you see that there are other folks who might be thinking about competing with you, what is easier and cheaper? Invest in expanding your business or make changes that will make it run more efficiently, or get your friendly local politician to set up some regulations that make it difficult or impossible for new people to play in your yard? For a lot of people the latter seems preferable.

But what about activities that may involve human life or health, shouldn’t government be involved there? Not necessarily. Take prescription medications for example. How do you keep people from misusing or abusing possibly dangerous drugs? The simple answer is; you don’t. The doctor or the pharmacist should be responsible for informing you of the proper dosage and methods of administering medications, if you are too stupid or incompetent to follow their instructions or you are purchasing drugs for other than their intended use and you harm yourself, tough! Your ignorance should not be my problem.

One of the great, under-appreciated scams in America is the licensing of the electronic media. The Federal Communications Commission has massive power to control the transmission of information and since it is made up of political appointees, the possibility of corruption, either monetary or political, is always present. Politicos on both sides of the aisle think that somehow their dogma should be freely disseminated while that of their opponents should be restricted for the good of the people. That’s why we are saddled with such goofy ideas as “broadcasting in the public interest” and the horribly misnamed “fairness doctrine.”

The former is an anachronistic holdover from the early days of broadcasting when it was thought that there would only be two or three broadcasters in any given area, the latter is an attempt to force all broadcasters to air all sides of every issue or more accurately, no sides of any issue. Both cases serve only to prevent the free circulation of information among people.

In a perfect world, government would restrict itself to dealing with those activities in which one person can cause harm to another through force or fraud. Everything else would be left to the individual or private enterprise. It’s not likely to happen though because government derives much of its power from the ability to restrict the activities of its citizens. They’re never going to give that up.

It makes you wonder how we got along for the first century of this nation’s existence when there weren’t vast offices filled with bureaucrats and assorted functionaries whose only job was to create jobs for themselves. Could we actually have been expected to solve most of our own problems by ourselves, without governmental nannies to hold our hands (and pick our pockets)? But, by golly we did so and along the way we built the greatest nation in the history of the world. Too bad we are too venal and self-absorbed to keep it.

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Got comments? Email me, punk!

The advent and sporadic success of the usuryfree community currency movement, with its emphasis on restoring and re-building the spirit of local communities is timely indeed, as it offers a worthy alternative at a time when our orthodox, economic system of debt-money is in embarrassing disrepute and fast decline.

The usuryfree community currency movement must be regarded as a testament to the reality of the possibility of usuryfree living – the ultimate experience of peace, prosperity and abundance for all who choose to participate.

Why and how did the usuryfree community currency movment surface during the last quarter of the 20th Century? The usuryfree community currency movement was birthed in the early 1980’s when interest (usury) rates skyrocketed to over 20%. This modern version of “bartering and trading” was launched in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada with a usuryfree community currency known as “greendollars.”

Michael Linton designed a software program which he referred to as the LETS (Local Employment Trading System) software. The usuryfree, LETS software permitted the participants to list their “offers” and “requests” on a local database. The units of trade were called “greendollars.” One “greendollar” was equivalent in value to one Canadian dollar. Since the launch of “greendollars” countless usuryfree community currencies have been launched all over the world.

Initially, a telephone answering machine recorded all of the trades or exchanges ngeotiated by the local participants. On a weekly basis, these recorded trades/exchanges were transcribed from the telephone answering machine and recorded on the LETS software program.

On a monthly basis, each participant was mailed a copy of their statement of “greendollars.” This statement showed each of the “debits” and “credits” for all of the transactions negotiated during the month. There was a final balance also. These statements resembled the monthly statements from the commercial banks. However, there was one major difference.

The key element that distinguishes the LETS software from the software used by the orthodox, banking empire is its usuryfree element. The function of interest (usury) is eliminated within the LETS software. This simply means that no “interest” or “usury” is paid on any account with a positive balance and no “interest” or “usury” is exacted on any account with a negative balance. Economic statements, minus the function of “interest” or “usury” equals fairness with abundance and prosperity for debtors and creditors.

During the early years of the usuryfree community currency movement, many of the participating traders never understood the revolutionary implications of their circulating “greendollars” – being free of interest (usury). Over the years, the issue of the evil and immoral effects of the design flaw of usury on our orthodox, economic system of debt money has tested our conventional understanding of modern money creation as it was (is) taught by our institutions of formal education.

At issue here, is the falsehood that debtors mistakenly accept as truth. Actually, there are two elements of the common falsehood: (1) creditors (banking institutions) never lend out depositors’ funds and (2) neither do creditors create and put into curculation the interest (usury) portion of any loan or mortgage. This alone causes the forever shortage of money causing debtors to seek more loans – causing a vicious and never-ending interest (usury) spiral.

As we progress into this 21st Century, more and more debtors are awakening to determine that our orthodox, economic system of usury-based, debt money is designed to keep debtors in financial bondage to creditors for generation after generation.

Today, the idea that we-the-people (the debtors) can create and spend our own usuryfree community currency is a concept that empowers us to launch our own “economic lifeboats” now so that we will be ready when their (the bankers’) usury-based, economic Titianic goes down.

Here is an empowering thought. If instead of floating a bond and payng interest (usury) to bankers, a rural municipal council voted to implement The Innovative Proposal whereby the municipal council agrees to accept a usuryfree community currency as partial payment for property taxes – what would happen?

It is almost certain that when the first municipality dares to create and spend a usuryfree community currency, other municipalities will beat a path to their door and ask: “What are you doing and how are you doing it?”

In conclusion, the only certain method of abolishing usury forever is committed, economic action about usuryfree living at the grassroots level of society.

Whether the current “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement will recognize the power and potential of we-the-people (the debtors) creating and spending our own usuryfree community currency and embrace the usuryfree community currency movement remains to be seen – but it is probably our best hope to usher in a new age of usuryfree living.

The OWS movement, must be fully aware of the perfected strategy of “problem, re-action, solution” as it applies to advancing the agenda of their New World Order. The strategy of “problem, re-action, solution” has been (and is) masterfully integrated with the intention of sabotaging protestors that know something is wrong, but they have no real solutions to offer. After there has been re-action to the problem, the New World Order advocates will offer a solution that is perceievd to be for we-the-people, BUT in fact, it will ultimately foster and support their New World Order mission.

The usuryfree community currency movement will have to assume a leadership role and exercise the positive and beneficial elements of abolishing usury forever while modelling the reality of usuryfree living within our respective, local communities.

Indeed, there was “Life Without Usury” and there will be “UsuryFree Living” once again in this 21st Century.