Joe Stack's Act of Desperation

Now that the man is dead by his own hand, and a bystander also, the MSM, blogs and pundits are by-and-large spinning the desperate actions of a desperate man in order to further their particular agendas. According to some, he was a delusional tea-partier, and according to others, a dangerous maniac. I don't believe he was either.

When I heard Glenn Beck using quotes from Stack's suicide note, inferring that all political ideas are either right or left, I though about another desperate act back in 1938, when Herschel Grynszpan assassinated the National Socialist official, Ernst von Rath. Grynszpan's act of desperation was precipitated by the deportation of his parents, Polish-Jewish nationals, by the National Socialist government. There are many differences between the two incidents, but the sense of desperation that emanated from each man's story was the same. Both had seen their lives made into a living hell by the actions of tyrannical bureaucrats.

The IRS operates as a kind of revenue Gestapo, using police powers they technically do not have to raid homes and businesses, seize property, and destroy lives of citizens, who are assumed to be guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent. Instead of trial by jury with an impartial judge, citizens are held accountable to a tax-code that even government experts admit is incomprehensible and contradictory. They must answer to the IRS in office procedures called audits, and are judged by their accusers--agents and accountants--working for the IRS. (My former mother-in-law once told me that "there is nothing quite like an audit to make you hate your government").
The IRS creates impossible situations for ordinary citizens every day of the year and at the same time ignores the tax evasion of Executive Department "czars" and Congress-critters. We find ourselves once again, just as in the National Socialist regime, with a government of men and not law. The injustice of it should be enough to make the blood of every American citizen boil.

Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, Joe Stack was caught in the impossible catch-22 that is the United States Tax Code. Like millions of us, he recognized the injustice of it. And tragically, horribly, he thought there was no way out but to end his life and destroy the life of a bystander.
Although I do not condone such violence, I can imagine the sense of desparation that created these circumstances for this ordinary citizen. His suicide manifesto is not the writing of an insane person. Rather it tells the story of careless, faceless bureaucrats who stole the livelihoods of skilled technical contractors via the stroke of a legislative pen.

And that should be sobering to all of us, who are also bystanders--no more innocent than anyone who works for the IRS--to the pain of our fellow citizens who have been robbed of work, home and family by a rogue government agency operating outside the framework of the United States Constitution. The founding generation understood that taxation without representation--taxation to pay for the wars and frivoloties of a privileged class--was theft. In the Declaration of Independence the listing of the Crimes of the King includes their experience of the domestic terror visited upon them when they refused to cooperate in the theft of their livelihoods.

Many of the bloggers and pundits of the MSM will undoubted spin for us the tale of Joe Stack, the anti-government, homegrown terrorist. But the IRS that is committing acts of terror against American citizens every day of the year. It is no accident that the letters I.R.S. are the most feared three letters in the Amercian vocabulary.

As bystanders, we are not and cannot be innocent. Rather, we must acknowlege the terror perpetrated against us by our own government. And we must choose how we will respond. If we do not choose, we bear the responsibility of knowing that evil was being perpetrated against our countrymen and we did nothing to stop it.

What must we do? We have no right to initiate force against anyone. But we do have the the right to respond to force initiated against our persons and our property by disciplined and peaceful means. It is our responsibility to loudly and consistently withdraw our sanction from a government that violates our rights on a daily basis. There are many ways to begin to do so. One is by reading the Articles of Freedom and signing the pledge to stand with a goodly number of Americans in support of our natural right to life, liberty and property.
On April 15, Tea Parties around the country will be sponsoring rallies outside local IRS offices. We need to be there to let our government and its odious agencies know that we recognize their illegal acts against us and our fellow citizens. Also on April 15, many of us will participate in a National Strike during which we: Don't Buy. Don't Comply. Ask why.

We must not let our liberty be taken from us while we stand idly by and watch our neighbors bleed.

You Must Agree . . .

Some of my conversations with certain friends have become annoying because at the point where I say, "Look, I disagree with you on the very premises you are asserting", they respond by saying, "But you have to research this thoroughly." And when I respond, "I have looked into it enough to satisfy myself that these premises are false," they then respond, "Well, you haven't researched it enough!" Often they then begin explaining very loudly what the premises are again, although I already know what they are, as if I am dense and if it can just be explained loudly enough and slowly enough, I will have to agree. This makes me very impatient because I have a life to live outside of entertaining ab endless supply of pet crackpot theories.

The current crackpot theory that has become a series of annoying stand-offs is the cherished myth among some patriots that a group of some private individuals incoporated the United States without the knowledge of the government of the people, and that this legal maneuver renders us subjects to Corp USA rather than citizens whose rights are protected by the Constitution. They tend to assert a great deal of case law that may or may not be related to what they are saying.

Now I have very little training in the subtleties of case law, but my education as a scientist has trained me to look for problems in the logic of an argument as well as in the evidence presented. And when someone makes the statement "But you have to research this topic, whatever it is, to my satisfaction before you can disagree with me on it," I recognize that we have moved from any well-constructed presentation of facts and/or theory to a desperate attempt at coercion. In other words, this is another way to to force the argument to continue beyond reason; to hammer away at it until the other party can be pushed to concede by sheer exhaustion.

In my work as a scientist, I did not consider it my obligation to research and refute every crackpot theory that someone with no background in the particular discipline can dream up. Such distractions from the work at hand would have been a waste of my time, because in order to actually convince such a person of the problems with the idea, I would have had to give them an education in the basic science of the discipline and any related ones as well. And most of the time, the person would have simply refused to listen, or would refuse to accept the basic laws and scientific principles, leaving us no place from which to build agreement based on knowledge.

For example, there are those people out there who are desperate to convince the world that they have discovered the secret to a perpetual motion machine. And they can and will argue ad infinitum that such machines have been invented, but have been supressed by "establishment science" because the advance would destroy their monopoloy on "big oil" or whatever. The point that if such a thing were possible it would not only overturn all of Newtonian physics, as well as the laws of thermodynamics, but would also be impossible to hide is impossible to get across to such a person. And he will run kicking and screaming from any demonstration of the validity of these rock-solid scientific principles or claim that he is being snowed by "book learning." And yet, those who advance such arguments have never been able to produce the machine itself or explain how it would work to bring something out of nothing. It is always out there "somewhere", hidden by some persecuted genius, an amorphous claim without any real physical or theoretical evidence.

Such a claim is based on faith rather than reason. There is no way to have a rational argument about an object of someone else's non-rational faith. It is as futile as entertaining an argument about whether the head of a pin will hold 10 or 20 dancing angels. And if the weary recipient of such an argument says, "I have examined the evidence to my satisfaction and I do not agree that there are angels dancing on the head of the pin," she will be treated to the loud assertion that if she would only research it properly, she would would change her mind and "believe" in angels. But belief is not predicated on evidence, and requires no research.

With respect to any such argument, I really don't have to do very much research at all to dismiss the claim. All I have to do is suss out the the premises upon which the claim is built. In the case of the perpetual motion machine, one premise is that the large-scale universe does not operate by Newtonian mechanics. And since Newton's three laws of motion are scientific laws--that is they have been not only demonstrated over and over by observation, but mathematically supported--the premise is false. If the arguer wants to continue to believe this false premise, he must do so without the help of science or reason. And if he desperately tries to force such an argument, that only indicates the non-rational nature of the claim.

So to with the argument about the claim that a private corporation has taken over the United States, although the argument here does not hearken back to scientific law, but rather legal principles. I do not have to be a lawyer to know that the Constitution of the United States is the Charter that any legislation, statute, or ordinance must not violate. Further, the Constitution itself is a guarantee of the natural rights of individuals declared to be unalienable in the Declaration of Independence.

The premise of the "Corp USA" claim is that it would be lawful to secretly enslave the entire population of the country, so that by filing a birth certificate or obtaining a driver's license, one is automatically subject to a corporate contract that he must then go to court to become free. The premise is false, because it would be a violation of the natural rights of the individual, as well as a violation of the Constitution of the United States to so enslave an individual or subject him to an unknowing contract. In a word, such action would be unlawful. Therefore, even if a group of people actually formed a conspiracy to turn the United States into a private corporation, and even if all the t's were crossed and the i's dotted, and the papers were filed, they would be null and void. And even if the courts were in on the conspiracy, the proper action of the people of the United States would be to impeach the courts, not to plead with them.

I do not need to waste any time reading pages and pages of arguments about case law or precendent in order to satisfy myself that the claim is false because I disagree with the basic premise. Thus the proper answer to the assertion that I need to do any research at all, is:
"I don't have to do anything. I am a free human being with a life to live. And if that is your only argument, you are wasting my time and yours."

February Roadtrip: Roundtrip Alamogordo

NEARLY WORDLESS SPECIAL

It has been a record winter here in central New Mexico for snow and cold. El Nino has prepared us for a mild fire season this coming spring and summer. But in the meantime, a three day weekend, and a visit by Sheriff Richard Mack to Alamogordo's 2nd Amendment Task Force made it impossible to resist an overnight road trip to the warm southern part of the state.

Accompanying me and the Engineering Geek south were my business partner, the Professional Revolutionary, and Flat Ryan, who had arrived by mail from Atlanta. Flat Ryan is here to learn the geography and culture of New Mexico for a few months in order to teach his three-dimensional avatar upon his return to Geogia. He appears in two of the pictures below.

We took the 40 east to Moriarty, and then drove south through Estancia to Willard, where we cut southeast through Cedarvale to Corona.

Shortly after leaving Willard, we encountered a windfarm perched on the northeastern edge of the magnificent Chupadera Mesa. Below the very space-age looking electricity-generating windmills, was an old fashioned windmill used to pump water for cattle.

In the lobby of the Flickinger Theatre in

Alamogordo, Sheriff Richard Mack poses

with Flat Ryan before giving his speech on

"The County Sheriff: America's Last Hope"

based on his book by the same title.

Sheriff Mack, of Graham County, Arizona,

was one of two plantiffs for the Printz-Mack

vs. the United States SCOTUS decision

that reaffirmed that the County Sheriff is

the highest officer in his county, and has the

responsibility to protect his people against coercion by federal agents of any kind.

After the event, we went to a Patriot Alliance Reception sponsored by Alamagordo 2ATF, the Lea County Tea

Party Patriots, and our own New Mexico Patriot Alliance.

It was very nice down south, with temperatures in the 50's and 60's during the day, with a gentle southeastern breeze.

Allof my long sleeved clothes seemed suddenly too warm, and I put the winter coat in the trunk, using only a hoodie at night. Wonderful!

align="left">But Sierra Blanca had more snow on it than I had ever seen, reminding us that this very cold, wet winter is not yet complete. So we stopped near Oscura to take pictures near an old railroad trestle that spanned one of the Three Rivers.

Spectacular!

After stopping in Carrizozo for a cold Cherry Cider,

we cut across Chupadera Mesa on NM 55, instead

of going around it through Corona and Cedervale.

We stopped in Claunch, where the Library doubles as

the Post Office, and then took Flat Ryan on a short

tour of the Gran Quivera site of the Salinas

Missions National Monument. Here he is,

posing in front of a pair of manos and matates,

used by the native women for grinding maize.

From GQ through Mountainair, and then the last leg of the trip home, along the Manzano Mountains. Here, we stopped near Toreon to get a rare picture of the entirel Estancia Basin covered with snow. In the distance (middle right), blow-out dunes outline the form of a beach berm, formed when Glacial Lake Estancia filled this basin up to 7000 years b.p.



Years ago, I worked on the Glacial Lake Estancia project, identifying microfossils--ostracods--that grew in that lake. By looking at the relative numbers of various species, we could tell when the lake was rising and when it was receding.



The snow in the picture, beautiful as it is, indicated to us that we had returned to the frozen north! Thank goodness, no more snow is predicted until later in the week.

The Value of a Life

In a free-wheeling discussion with a friend the other day, I was broadsided by a comment that did not seem to fit with his libertarian views. The subject had wandered around to the controversy about the Tebow ad during the Super Bowl. And he asked me what I thought about very late term abortions.

I said that I had real moral issues with that, because I could not imagine a situation in which delivery could not be attempted, with the hopes of saving the life of both mother and child. And I had looked but found no information that contradicted my conclusions. I pointed out that I had developed severe pre-eclampsia late in my pregnancy with the Boychick, a condition that required induction of labor in order to save my life and that of the Boychick. Fortunately for me, it was not a difficult decision because the delivery would be less of a risk for me than continuing the pregnacy would have been, and we were so close to term, the Boychick and I, that delivery was not likely to be risky for him either. As it turned out, with the help of modern medicine, we came through the delivery fine, both of us and the neonatal team that was standing by filed out of the room without making any interventions. That said, I told my friend, I would not have wanted a government official interfering with such a potentially life-altering decision. I would not want some bureaucrat to require me to undergo an induction of labor. However, I would expect that doctors would be rightly reluctant to perform late-term abortions.

With this as a jumping off point, my friend commented that he wondered if a murder should be prosecuted if no one cared about the death of the person who had been killed. After all, he said, the dead person would be dead, and if no one was left to be devasted, then it was if the life of the person was unimportant.

I was speechless. One can know a person reasonably well and still be surprised.

I probed. I asked, then does that mean if the parents of a six-month infant murder him, and there is no one else to be outraged, does this mean it is not murder? He said he would have moral concerns about such an action, but that it should not be illegal since no one was injured by the action except the child--who would now be dead.

Immediately, images of concentration camps and gas chambers began to roll across my mind's eye. My argument was that certainly someone has been harmed, and that is the person whose life had been taken unjustly. My friend argued that people die all the time.

Of course, we are mortal, I argued, but there is a difference between dying of disease or accident, and the purposeful taking of a life. Certainly, the person who is murdered values his life. And as we were speaking, I realized that my friend had wandered into a collectivist view of the value of a life. His value of liberty was not completely based on the principle of individual rights. Because if his values were firmly rooted there, he would realize immediately that the value of a life is not based on how useful to society, or how precious that person is to another. The value of a life is the ultimate value to person himself.

I was so disturbed that I stopped the discussion when I realized that all of my attempts to elucidate the principle had not penetrated my friends mind; that to him this had become a sophist's argument--made for the sake of continuing the discussion.

For me, the inheritance of the Holocaust makes these discussions more than argument for the sake of argument. As we spoke, the biblical injunction about the responsiblity of the nearby towns to adjudicate the death of a stranger on the road kept coming to mind.
Even the taking of the life of a stranger for whom no one cares must be treated with justice.

Hit and Run Snowstorm

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY BONUS

We knew a storm was coming.

It was supposed to be mostly rain,

with snow tonight at the higher elevations.

We were expecting 3 to 5 inches.

It started snowing this morning at 8 AM.

And we got a foot.

More to come tonight.

One foot today means approximately

two feet on the back patio.

With wind blowing snow off the roof,

we now have three foot drifts

in the lee of the house.

This storm packed quite a punch.
Hours of blizzard conditions closed
the 40 between Albuquerque and
Moriarty.

The Engineering Geek left work before
the highway closed--and he got through
until the bottom of our hill. The car is there
and he is here--thanks to a neighbor.
The Boychick is with a friend who lives
close to school. Maybe he will come home tonight!

Umbrae loves the snow.

He ran, played, and dug deep

to get at sticks and grass.

Coming inside was not on his agenda.

But staying outside was not on mine!

The snowplow came around just at 5 PM.
Now there are 2-3 foot piles of snow,
all along our road.

Lily didn't mind climbing it,
but Shayna stayed on the
plowed area.

Now this is quite enough. We will probably have snow cover until mid-March this year!

January Moon, February Cross Quarter

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

The January 2010 full moon appears to be the largest of the year, because this moon is the closest to the earth. Mars, in opposition, actually passed by the moon on Friday night, although the appeture of my camera was not large enough to catch it.
















Moonset on January 30, 2010.
The moon appeared to be very large,
and the air was very clear. Here the moon
stands over the Sandia Mountain front, just before it slipped behind the mountains and under the western horizon.








Although frontal clouds had begun to come up from the south, indicating stormy weather tomorrow, the rising sun shows pink and orange on South Mountain, and lights up the houses on
Rancho Verde Hill.










February cross-quarter sunrise from the top of Los Pecos in the high meadow. On the Winter Solstice the sun rose about two fingers to the right, and as the Old Calendar spring progresses, the sunrise will appear further to the left on this picture.










One of the delights of living in the mountains is the opportunity to see the sun rise more than once on a single day. The Ground Hog's Day sunrise redux--from a lower point on the road at the lower end of the high mead0w. At the winter solstice, the sun rose straight above the road in this picture.

Although clouds were coming in, the Ground Hog saw his shadow, and by legend this means six more weeks of winter.


Although I saw the sunrise twice-- I said one blessing: ". . . who forms light and creates darkness, who makes wholeness and fashions all things." I am sure to the ancients, the progress of the sunrise appearing further and further north with each passing week must have been an entirely reassuring sight.

Articles of Freedom: The New Website

The R3volution continues . . .

I am proud to annouce that the Articles of Freedom Website has now been launched and that I had a teeny, tiny part to play in the drama! One of the two webmasters launched it from my kitchen--and in our excitement and because we were distracted--I forgot to feed him!

A sorry come-down for the Mother of the R3volution NM.

The Articles of Freedom represent the work of the Continental Congress 2009, and several versions have been distributed on the web. Each of the 15 Articles present the facts about one Constitutional violation that our servant government has used to increase its power at our expense. The We the People Foundation, over years of activism, has established a record of formal Petitions for Redress of Grievances for each of these 15 violations, and our employees in all branches of government have refused to respond to any of them. Therefore three delegates from each of 48 states-- Americans from all walks of life--met together to created a record of these violations, and moving beyond a time of petition, have issued instructions for how to redress the violations to all branches of government, federal and state. In case those instructions are not followed, and in case our servant government mistakes our intention, we have also made recomendations to the People of the United States, in their several sovereign States, for peaceful civic action to hold government accountable to the Constitution.

These civic actions can be effective if a mass movement of between 2.5% and 5% of the population engages in them together, in order to hold the government accountable. This has been the case in every place and time where the People have held their governments accountable.

If you desire liberty for yourselves and your children; and if you have been concerned about the concentration of power into the hands of venal politicians, who "have erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our peopel and eat out their substance" (Declaration of Independence), then go to the website on the widget at the top of this blog, read the Articles of Freedom and sign the pledge to take action together. And if you are a patriot--prove it by reading the Plan of Action for April 19th, 2010. And spread the word. Do your part to restore Liberty and Constitutional governance. Then you can look your children in the eye when they ask you what you did to protect their inheritance of Liberty.