Monday, February 22, 2010

Tyrants, Torturers, and Taxmen: Pillars of "Civilization"

Not a scene from a movie: Stormtroopers assault a legitimate, lawful business in Las Vegas at the behest of the criminal terror syndicate called the Internal Revenue Service.













Maxwell Smart (referring to various implements of torture): Are you sure KAOS has all these devices?

CONTROL scientist Carlson: Oh, yes -- it's standard equipment for terrorist organizations.

Max: Well, where did you get these?

Carlson: From the Bureau of Internal Revenue.




"More tax is collected by fear and intimidation than by the law. People are afraid of the IRS."


Given its source -- former IRS District Chief David Patnoe -- that indictment of the Regime's most notorious secret police organ could be considered a confession. What he describes can only be called state terrorism.


The IRS is an agency that uses the threat of lethal violence to terrorize people into surrendering their legitimately earned wealth. In their unguarded moments, officials of that dreaded terror syndicate admit that they are at war with the public they supposedly serve.



"The language of war and the culture of conflict are the only means to prepare us for what is expected of us," recalled former IRS revenue officer Richard Yancey in his invaluable memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector. "How else could they [the commissars whom Yancey and his fellow cadres in the agency] demand what was expected of us? You can't take [the] life savings [of income tax victims], their car, their paycheck, the roof over their head and the heads of their children, without dehumanizing them, without casting yourself in a role that by necessity makes them the enemy."



One of Yancey's supervisors considered taxpayers to be, at best, fodder for the firing squad. That official, Yancey recalls, ended a profanity-infused tirade by describing taxpayers unable to surrender every dime demanded by agents of federal extortion as "Deadbeats ... if it were up to me, I'd line 'em all up against a wall and shoot them."



Yancey's supervisor obviously shared the late Joseph Stack's view that "violence is the only answer" -- whether that violence is implicit or overt.


Perhaps that official will receive one of the sixty Remington Model 870 pump-action shotguns ordered by the Treasury Department for the IRS's
Criminal Investigation Division (in this case, the name refers to investigations conducted by, rather than of, criminals).



Interestingly, each of those shotguns has a barrel fourteen inches long, much shorter than the "illegally" modified shotguns sold by
Randy Weaver to an undercover ATF agent who carefully entrapped Weaver in the hope of forcing him to become an informant for that detestable outfit.



When Weaver -- displaying admirable character -- refused to become a
stukach, the same Regime that entrapped him laid siege to his family, murdering his wife and only son. Weaver had never had any trouble with the "law" prior to his encounter with a street-level thug employed by the ATF -- an agency that could be considered the clumsier, more overtly thuggish sibling of the IRS. Despite the fact that he had done no harm to anybody, Randy Weaver and his family like the "deadbeats" denigrated by Yancey's IRS supervisor, were seen as suitable targets for extermination.


The term "deadbeats," of course, is properly applied to people who refuse to carry out legitimate contractual obligations by making timely payments. Since nobody has the moral right to claim the property of another through force, there is nothing legitimate about the supposed "obligations" the IRS enforces through terrorism.


Those who cannot or will not pay what the IRS demands are not deadbeats in any sense. They are "criminals" in exactly the same sense that the term could be applied to escaped slaves in the antebellum South, or those who abetted their escape in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act.


Those who refuse to pay taxes are making a prudential calculation with which I do not agree, but one that neither harms nor threatens me in any way. The same cannot be said of the means used by the IRS to enforce the spurious enactments its functionaries call the "law" -- a usage that illustrates that not even the language is safe from the violence employed by that abhorrent agency.



The outpouring of statist sanctimony following Joseph Stack's despairing murder-suicide attack against the IRS was predictable -- and as malodorous -- as the consequences of drinking untreated water in Mexico. The effects of that onslaught are most unpleasant in the immediate vicinity of the main emunctory orifice, which in the present case is the fraudulent outfit called the Southern Poverty Law Center.



"This morning's attack by Joseph Andrew Stack against an IRS building in Austin, Tex., is a reminder again of how extreme hatred of government can morph into violence," oozed SPLC commissarina Heidi Berich.



Neither she nor anyone else at the SPLC deigned to prescribe the proper attitude toward a government that can ruin a man's career and financial prospects through a small change in the vast and all-but-inscrutable tax code. Nor has the SPLC or other self-anointed arbiters of acceptable political attitudes evinced concern over the hatred toward tax victims that can be found suppurating from the IRS, or the violence that frequently results from it.



In 1997 congressional testimony,
Houston IRS agent Jennifer Long explained that the agency teaches its agents to use "tactics -- which appear nowhere in the IRS manual ... to extract unfairly assessed taxes from taxpayers, literally ruining families, lives, and businesses -- all unnecessarily and sometimes illegally."


"The IRS will often pursue a taxpayer who is viewed to be vulnerable," testified Long. "To the IRS, vulnerability can be based on a perception that the taxpayer has limited formal education, has suffered a personal tragedy, is having a financial crisis, or may not necessarily have a solid grasp of their legal rights. Please understand, many agents are encouraged by management to pursue tax assessments that have no basis in tax law from individuals who simply can't fight back. However, it that taxpayer does object or complain, every effort will be made by the IRS to run up their tax assessment, despite their financial resources and force them to capitulate to IRS demands."


In many cases, Long continued, "IRS Management can determine that a particular taxpayer is simply someone `to get.'... Management will go about fabricating evidence against that taxpayer to demonstrate that he, or she, owes [sic] more taxes than was originally claimed."


"In certain instances, the IRS Management has even employed its authority [sic -- the IRS exercises power, not authority] to intimidate the actual taxpayers into fabricating evidence against its own IRS employees," Long disclosed. This is done to retaliate against any IRS agent who objects to the agency's illegal and immoral tactics. Sometimes the threats are mingled with offers of reduced or vacated tax judgments or even cash awards to those willing to perjure themselves.


Those disclosures, remember, were made by an active duty employee of the IRS. To her considerable credit, Long eschewed the long-established practice of other defectors from crime syndicates by declining to concealing her identity. Not surprisingly, Long's genuinely patriotic act of public truth-telling provoked severe and undisguised retaliation from the agency's ruling oligarchy.



A year prior to Long's testimony, a videotaped training lecture by an IRS agent for the Arkansas-Oklahoma district was leaked to the public. In that record (described and documented in James Bovard's 2000 book Feeling your Pain) the instructor is seen catechizing the trainees about the supposed virtues of arrogant, sadistic cruelty:



"Make them cry. We don't give points around here for being good scouts. The word is `enforced.' If that's not tattooed on your forehead, or somewhere else, then you need to get it. Enforcement. Seizure and sales. That's our mind-set.... You're not out there to take any prisoners. Prisoners are like an installment agreement. They [prisoners] have to be fed and clothed and housed. All that stuff. They're expensive. We're not here to do that. If you've got an assessment, enforce collection until they come to their knees."



The SPLC and its allies, who play to prurient interests by diligently documenting and publicizing vituperative utterances by repulsive but obscure and powerless Klansmen and neo-Nazis, have never bestirred themselves to object to violent rhetoric of this kind issuing from the tax-devouring pie-hole of someone who actually carries out such terroristic threats against helpless people. (It's worth remembering that many of those professional racists are federal assets paid with funds extorted from the taxpayers by the IRS.)



In his memoir, Yancey recalls a similar training session in which he and other future revenue agents were told by the instructor that the IRS had no use for "those who anguished over each closure, as if their decisions meant life or death for the taxpayer."



One trainee, in whom the light of human decency had yet to be extinguished, objected that the decision to confiscate a tax victim's money and property very often are matters of life and death. Oh, pish, retorted the supervisor: The IRS's mission has nothing at all to do with "doing the right thing for the taxpayer"; your mission is that of "protecting the government's interest."



"But what if the government's interest is wrong?" persisted the trainee.



"Our interest is never wrong or right," rejoined the supervisor in a reply worthy of his kindred spirits in the service of other totalitarian enforcement organs. "It just is."



From that perspective, the State -- like Jehovah Himself -- is a self-existing, morally autonomous entity, and its consecrated agents are likewise above accountability to any power under heaven.



Former IRS Revenue Officer David Patnoe offers a parallel account to that of Yancey. In his congressional testimony, Patnoe -- who became a representative of tax victims before the IRS's Collection Division in California -- described, in detail, the "outright illegal and highly behavior of IRS officials he encountered in his new profession.


In one case, an IRS functionary placed an illegal levy on $21,000 on an account belonging to one of his customers, a small businessman who owed no taxes but paid $7,000 in what can only be described as ransom in the hope of appeasing the IRS.


"I informed the Revenue Officer that ... her actions were not just abusive, but blatantly illegal," Patnoe recalled. "The Revenue Officer responded with one word: `AND?'"


That single, contemptuous syllable -- like so many other lawless actions undertaken by IRS functionaries -- offers an echo of Vladimir Lenin's 1920 definition of "scientific dictatorship": "Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules." (Emphasis added.)


In the days that have passed since Joseph Stack made the tragic and unsupportable decision to end his life in an act of aggressive violence (taking the life of another man, a father and grandfather, in the process), the organs of approved opinion have barraged the public with potted platitudes denouncing Stack's lawless behavior.


During that same period, the Regime served by the IRS killed at least dozens -- more likely scores, or even hundreds -- of innocent people in an illegal war of aggression against a distant, impoverished land.


The branch of the central government wittily called the department of "Justice" announced that its lengthy investigation of the Bush Regime's torture policies would result in no criminal, civil, or professional penalties against the apparatchiks who had devised "legal" rationales for those crimes.


The official report of that investigation revealed that one of the architects of the torture state, John C. Yoo, was committed to the principle that it is a suitable and proper use of presidential "authority" to order the wanton slaughter of civilians, if mass murder comports with his "tactical" judgment.


All of this provided the coda to a week that began -- as if by way of depraved overture -- with former Vice President Dick Cheney smugly confessing to the crime of abetting torture during his reign.


Yet we are ordered to believe, or at least pretend to believe, that all of this was eclipsed by Joseph Stack's self-destructive act of criminal violence.


The unduly revered Oliver Wendell Holmes, a belligerent statist (albeit one more akin to Maistre and Mussolini, rather than Marx and Lenin), memorably described taxes as the price we're compelled to pay for "civilization."


After all, absent the key confiscatory role played by the tax collector, how could torturers and other agents of state-sanctified violence perform their vital civilizing functions?


Civilization is built on the foundation of peaceful cooperation, rather than official coercion. It won't be restored through cathartic but morally unsound and strategically counter-productive acts of retaliatory aggressive violence.



The least we can do -- perhaps all we can do -- is exercise the liberty to call things by their proper names
(e.g., "taxpayers" are more properly called "tax victims"; one doesn't "owe" taxes, but has them "extorted" from him), and use whatever peaceful means are at our disposal to cultivate contemptuous disrespect for anyone employed by the Regime's apparatus of wealth confiscation.


Each gesture of this sort, taken individually, seems as evanescent as a snowflake. But an avalanche begins as nothing more than a particularly large gathering of individual snowflakes that somehow found their way to the high ground.



Be sure to tune in each weeknight (6:00-7:00 Mountain Time) for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.



















Dum spiro, pugno!



















37 comments:

SA said...

Been through it. I ended up being robbed by remote control. The last agent I had contact with called to apologize and stated that everybody in his office knew I didn't owe them any money, but that I had become a "cause". I promised him if I ever laid eyes on him I would kill him. He tried to intimidate me with the felony I had just committed. I encouraged him to do so. Because if he showed up in court to testify, I would lay eyes on him.

I heard from the IRS one more time when they asked me to come if for an audit. I told them to go fuck themselves and file their charges. Not many people know this but if you are accused of a tax crime you stand guilty and must prove your innocence. I told them there would never be another passing of any communication between myself and them without a permanent record of everything "you lying sonsofbitches say". I never heard from them again.

kirk said...

The tax code is for control primarily with revenue being secondary. As with all things governmental, CONTROL is the operative word.

Anonymous said...

And I will keep on doing what I am doing in order to cut the ground from under those who want an opportunity to be considered equal with us in the things they boast about. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.

- 2 Cor. 11:12-15

Bryan said...

I was reading this article on Salon this morning which was linked from LewRockwell.com: http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2010/02/19/joe_stack_tax_problem_2

Some of the comments are both sad and frightening. In a supposedly free country, one would think that the subjects of rights and justice would be very important, but we are obviously sorely lacking in even a basic understanding in these areas.

Sean said...

I take it you have a beef about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I believe it has gone on for far too long and we need to get out, now. The premise for the war was to punish the 9/11 terrorists and their backers. Having since accomplished that, it is past time to move on, or finish it. What is your position?

William N. Grigg said...

Sean, my position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the following:

They should never have been fought; the troops who are engaged in them have no justification to be there and should be brought home immediately; the criminals responsible for them should be put on trial for crimes against the Constitution and subject to civil judgments on behalf of families who lost loved ones as a result of them.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. In the period between August 1998 and September 2001, the Taliban was actively trying to get rid of Osama, who was an unwelcome guest.

If the Bush administration really had evidence that Osama pulled the trigger on 9-11, and wanted to punish him, it should have acted on the Taliban junta's quite reasonable request to be shown that evidence. That never happened, and now we're mired in two intractable and needless wars as a result, and plans are being drawn up for even more.

Have You Had Enough Yet said...

"Those who refuse to pay taxes are making a prudential calculation with which I do not agree. . . ."

Hmm. Why do you not agree with such prudential calculations, Will?

I understand that not everyone is in a position to get out of the system yet, but at some point you either have to get out or stop complaining. You aren't going to slay Leviathan by feeding it.

When I realized (finally) what my participation in the system really meant, ie., government-funded/encouraged abortions, wars of unjust and unconstitutional agression, the use of statutory "law" to render us all slaves, etc., I realized that I could not continue to participate and render my approval by continuing to render a portion of my earnings, especially since such renderings are voluntary, according to the IRS.

I know a lot of people who stopped volunteering, by one method or another. They are all heroes in my book, no question about it. I highly approve of their prudential calculations!

Anonymous said...

Will, Joe Stack did what he did because he no longer felt he had anything to lose. Whether that was true or not could certainly be open for debate but that was the state he was in at the time.

As we briefly discussed yesterday, I consider the government's various enforcers to be nothing more than state sponsored terrorists. Criminals employed by the state to inflict violence and intimidation on all of us to enrichen themselves and their leviathon masters. Many of these enforcers, the ones still clinging to a shred of humanity, are profoundly ashamed of the tasks they perform at their masters' bidding but they know they will be killed or otherwise destroyed should they attempt to oppose these criminal activities.

people may reject Joe Stack's actions but they serve as a very important illustration. The acts of officially sanctioned theft, intimidation, and murder will only end when a sufficient percentage of the population also believes they no longer have anything left to lose.

jk

William N. Grigg said...

I know a lot of people who stopped volunteering, by one method or another. They are all heroes in my book, no question about it. I highly approve of their prudential calculations!

I don't disagree with your assessment of those actions and of the people who took them.

My disagreement over "prudential calculations" applies to my case alone, which is the only one over which I have any authority.

My calculus necessarily reflects the fact that I'm the father of six young children and husband to a wife who is an invalid. Those facts are tactically consequential. Call it "prudence," "forbearance," "timidity," or what you will, my chosen approach is not that of outright non-compliance with the IRS.

As to the matter of feeding Leviathan: In a fiat money economy, Leviathan is already gorging itself on our wealth even without the IRS's assistance. This will be the case unless and until the entire system is brought down.

liberranter said...

When it comes income taxes and the federal tax code, there is one class of "professionals" almost as loathsome, amoral, and disgusting as IRS agents: Certified Public Accountants. With one exception that I (and many of you) know of, these creatures are the rankest of opportunists, masquerading as "professionals" who claim that they can navigate their way through an unnavigable tax code (imagine a lawyer trying to practice law under a legal system where the law changes constantly on a legislature's or judiciary's whim), but who in most cases are just as clueless and incompetent as the hapless taxpayers they purportedly "represent."*

I do not make this blanket pronouncement carelessly or lightly, for I am the son of CPA who has been practicing this avocation for over 50 years. Perhaps it is because of my proximity to the profession and my first-hand observations of what these "professionals" actually do between the months of January and April each year and the truly nauseating contortions they will put their clients through (usually, in my experience and from observation, because they are too lazy, too uninformed, or too careless to furnish their clients with useful and practical advice that would save them tax aggravation over the course of the business or fiscal year) that I feel the need to put them in their proper place.

Worse than their incompetence or their duplicity is their political hypocrisy, especially among those in the profession who dare to call themselves "fiscal conservatives." After all, if they were truly "fiscal conservatives", they would be applying what financial management and accounting skills they actually have (in most cases this means "few to none") to either corporate accounting or financial planning and advising rather than enabling a state-engineered system of plunder and waste. But the fact is that most of them THRIVE on the existence of the perverse and dysfunctional federal tax code and the presence of its criminal IRS enforcers. Without the tax code, that impenetrable jumble of pseudo-legal nonsense behind which they hide and of which they claim to be scholars, most would be unemployed and completely unemployable. Most CPAs, once one peels away the veneer of fedspeak, demonstrate an abysmal lack of legal or financial acumen and an even more abysmal understanding of fundamental economics. The simple truth is that without the tax code, the only bases upon which public accounting exists, most CPAs would be out of a job, forced to demonstrate actual professional ability in the private sector fields of corporate accounting and/or financial management. Given their utter lack of ability, most would fail miserably at either of these. Hence the average CPA's strident defense of the status quo when cornered.

If I've offended any active practitioners of the CPA "profession" who happen to be reading this, well, too bad. I think most, if they had even a scintilla of personal honesty and integrity (a stretch, I admit), would admit that the profession serves a genuinely and indefensibly evil system and that far from providing a real service totheir clients, their main purpose is to enforce the dysfunctional, illegal, and immoral tax code that so many of them so hypocritically claim to abhor. In the end, they all have a choice: either stand up for liberty and law and start looking for ways to put their skills to work in the productive private sector, or go down with the sinking ship that they are institutionally enabling. There is NO middle ground or third choice!

liberranter said...

Brief post-script to my previous posting:

(*Anyone who thinks that CPAs, like lawyers, actually "represent" their clients in an IRS audit or that they are required to maintain attorney-style client confidentiality privileges had better think again - and DO NOT for a minute think that the confidentiality privilege between CPA and client included in the IRS Restructuring Act of 1998 make any difference! If cornered or sufficiently pressured by an aggressive IRS agent or threatened with having their license suspended for "representing" a client for whom the IRS has a particularly raging hard-on, most CPAs will instantly capitulate and all but force their clients to do the IRS's bidding, whether it's legally justified or not.)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this piece. I've been thinking about this a lot since the Stack affair.

I got caught by the IRS several years ago. They didn't even contact me, they went straight to my employer's payroll department and left me not enough of my paycheck to live on.

I was very fortunate. I was no longer married, my kids were grown and gone, and the IRS's actions just spurred me to do something I'd wanted to do all along - which was to bug the hell out. I've nothing but fellow-feeling for anyone not in that happy position. Nobody's got the right to tell anyone else the "right" thing to do about these thugs.

Love your blog, Mr. Grigg.

liberranter said...

Looks like the IRS itself got "punked" by some South Florida jail inmates:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/02/20/v-fullstory/1491783/south-florida-jail-scams-turn.html

I wonder how these criminal thugs (the IRS, not the jail inmates) are going to "extract" repayment from people with no money?

Have You Had Enough Yet said...

"My disagreement over 'prudential calculations' applies to my case alone, which is the only one over which I have any authority."

Will, that's what I was hoping for, that your disagreement was not blanket but particular. As mentioned, it's totally understandable that not all of us can slip the chains, at least not yet.

I imagine that you have enough allowable deductions that you pay nothing into the beast at the end of the day, anyway.

It was only after I had quit the system, some 15 years ago, that I learned about how the currency system really works, that it's the printing press, not the taxes, that funds the Beast. The taxes are about controlling inflation and behavior, not paying for unlawful, unconstitutional programs.

Nevertheless, in spite of the inherent hardships involved, it's good to be as far away from the system as possible as early in the game as possible (but I still haven't figured out how to work and acquire necessities without the use of federal reserve notes).

I do believe a day is coming soon when Americans, well, everyone on the planet, really, will have a hard decision to make in regards to staying in or getting out of Leviathan's system, when the use of it's money will mean a microchip implant and total, silent submission. I hope that day is very far off, but the signs are not encouraging.

Jake Hambone said...

Love the Waffen-SS recruiting poster redux! I used to work in an establishment selling adult beverages and had to have a license to do so. A few years back the states version of the IRS suspended my liquor license and said I owed some insane amount of back taxes. Luckily I got through to a czarina on the telephone and pleaded my case. I told her I had W-2 forms going back 20 years and could dispute the case. I told her she must have mixed me up with someone else as I didn't make squat and could prove it. Somehow it was my lucky day and she made the corrections on their computer. Sometimes I wonder if these agencies are 'phishin' for people that will cower and give up and just pay so they don't have the hassle.

Anonymous said...

I didn't file for over ten years and finally they caught up with me. I hired an accountant to determine the real damages - it was significantly less than the amount the IRS came up with. I paid it off, via a loan, and am still in debt today because of it. I weighed my options beforehand and figured due to being newly married it was not prudent to tell the IRS to stick it. Since then I file every year and pay their shakedown fee. Regardless I hate the bastards and the whole rotten demonic system they help to support. I laugh inside because their system is in its death throes and will self destruct without any help from me. All Empires fail - history has proven this. That is my story such as it is.

Anonymous said...

Worse is better, Comrade. Worse is better.

I know a guy who had all the materials used in his business disallowed a deductions. That was around 18 years ago. 18 years and two bankruptcies latter, he has his life back, owns nothing, and has no prospects.

These people do what they want, when they want. It's a crap shoot. You could be next.

I suspect that within the next 2-5 years we may see more desperate people giving bureaucrats the "Stack" treatment.

I'm convinced that's why so many lifelong legislators are retiring. They understand that it's mathematically impossible for federal debt obligations to ever be repaid. They're hoping that the sheeple will forget about them when the fit hits the shan.

Robert said...

Dear Mr.Grigg,
I admire you and the Waffen-SS, what should I do?

William N. Grigg said...

I admire you and the Waffen-SS, what should I do?

Well, if that's a sincere description of your sentiments, you should start by making up your mind.:-)

jon said...

call things by their proper names! the battle-cry of both lysander spooner and (probably) confucius.

jdogg said...

So you're saying that all we can do is resort to harsh language?

William N. Grigg said...

So you're saying that all we can do is resort to harsh language?

I'm saying that a good place to begin is by reclaiming the language.

I do not discourage more active resistance to the IRS (Stack's suicide bombing was an act of nihilistic despair, not one of active resistance), or disparage those who choose that route, but have to acknowledge candidly that I'm not pursuing that course for reasons explained above.

kirk said...

The first principle of freedom is ECONOMIC FREEDOM. IF another party, who has done nothing, can take all or part of your earnings, for whatever reason, YOU ARE THEIR SLAVE, regardless of the semantics used to describe this situation.

From the above, slavery is alive and well in the U. S. I guess the rule is as always: what is a crime for the citizen is good business for govt to be participating in.

LAND OF THE FREE...

R.S. Ladwig said...

I am still wondering why that building didn't collapse from the fires like the 3 in NY on 9/11...isn't that what happens when steel structured building catch fire?

Crotalus said...

I left a comment at the SPLC about how the IRS has decided that we're enemies, to be pillaged when compliant, and exterminated when we resist. I also asked why the SPLC didn't monitor them as a hate group. My, but it was dumped quickly!

Can you give examples of what you would call active resistance?

Anonymous said...

At least with the IRS, as loathsome as they are, you have the opportunity to have taxes based on actual earned income.

There is one other cretin in leviathan's bag of tricks that not all of us have had the unfortunate consequence of fighting off. One with all the power of the IRS, but one which can assign a 'speculative income' to you based on past earnings.

And worse, it exploits children in the process - it is the unconstitutional family courts. Lose your job and they 'impute' what your income should be based on previous work. And they can garnish wages, lien property and have you jailed based on said speculation.

For the past six years I have had a combined income tax/c$ of 70% of taken before I put a roof over my head or food on the table for my kids and myself. Joe Stack is a hero in my book, if for nothing else than striking back and leaving nothing but ashes in his wake. As far as the poor gov't employee - he chose his fate for himself and his family, too bad there weren't dozens more that died with him.

In Male Fide
Sic Semper Tyrannis

QB said...

Hey Will! Love the radio show and listen to it via USB stick in the car radio on the way to work all the time.

Have you ever heard of Max Igan? Was wondering what you thoughts were of him. Your two shows make up for most of what I listen to in the car. (with the exception of a little Boston and Phil Collins thrown in for good measure)

William N. Grigg said...

Can you give examples of what you would call active resistance?

In using that expression I'm referring to deliberate refusal to surrender taxes to the IRS employing, among other things, the kind of tactics used by our country's founding Tax Rebels.

QB, I'd never heard of Max Igan before -- thanks for the tip. And thanks for the kind words about the radio show, and for your good taste in classic album-oriented rock. :-)

liberranter said...

As far as the poor gov't employee - he chose his fate for himself and his family...

Concur, SST, one hundred percent with this part of your statement (as far as "too bad there weren't dozens more that died with him" goes, well, I just can't bring myself to actively WISH death on anyone, however deserving of it they might be).

Far from being an "innocent victim" who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Vernon Hunter was a willing employee of an organization that he knew is dedicated to wholesale theft, as well as strategic murder and destruction of property. It is, IMNSHO, impossible that any adult human being of sound mind and anything above a room-temperature IQ would not know that working for such an organization as the IRS entailed the enabling of criminal and unconstitutional acts and that aiding and abetting said acts would at some point put a target on one's back. The same thing applies to anyone on active duty in the armed forces who is serving in a hostile fire zone or as part of an occupation force: It does not matter that you, personally have never gratuitously killed or maimed anyone or destroyed private property in the course of your official duties. The mere fact that you wear the uniform and are clearly affiliated with an organization that does so (and does so with brazen impunity) conveys the message that you condone your employer's crimes and that you will yourself commit them without question when ordered to do so. While Vernon Hunter might not have been an IRS field agent responsible for initiating the confiscation of money and assets that impoverished and ruined innocent American citizens and that destroyed countless lives, while he might not have been a gun-toting member of an IRS SWAT team, whatever job he did ENABLED those white-collar criminals and their armed gangster-thug enforcers to commit those crimes against the people. For this Hunter should have expected no less than to be put in harm's way.

There's a lesson here to be learned by anyone working for a government agency, especially a federal one, and particularly those who pack heat for the state: re-read the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights; your willingness to not only respect, but to uphold and defend them may be the thing that at some point in the future will save your life. Yes, it ultimately will mean a career change, but what's that compared to the ability to stay above ground and breathing, to look at yourself in the mirror without retching, and to sleep soundly at night?

Workingstiff said...

Grigg, This just in.

Katrina Police Lieutenant charged for covering up deaths of innocent civilians by trigger-happy LE's

At one point, the bill of information says, Lieutenant Lohman was frustrated that the cover-up story in the report, which was drafted by a police sergeant, “was not logical,” so he “personally drafted up a 17-page false report” and provided it to the sergeant to submit as the official report. Lieutenant Lohman is also described as lying in an interview he gave to the F.B.I. in May of last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/us/25orleans.html?hpw

Sans Authoritas said...

"I am still wondering why that building didn't collapse from the fires like the 3 in NY on 9/11...isn't that what happens when steel structured building catch fire?"

Bob, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw that photo. WTC 7. And you're right: that's precisely what they told us happens. They just fall straight down. Right after you see the windows blow out along the length vertical support beams. Because that's what fire does. But only to buildings in the U.S., apparently. Overseas fires can burn in undamaged steel buildings for hours and still not fall.

Lemuel Gulliver said...

Workingstiff,
Thank you for the link. One more rock to add to the thousands that are crushing us.

All,
In the days of my youth, the Book of Revelation frightened me. I never thought it would one day be a source of hope and comfort to me. But now, it is. A beacon of hope for a rain of cleansing fire to wash over the world.

How far we have come. Yesterday was another country. Yesterday was another life. Today, this is not a life. Today, this is a nightmare.

I want to wake up screaming, but I can't.

It continues. And continues. And continues. And continues. And continues.

I endorse the sentiments by a few above: Those who earn their bread from an organization which commits murder, theft, and rape, and enslaves human beings, are never innocent, and must expect to pay the price when Justice comes down like fire on their heads and Retribution like lakes of boiling suplhur.

Everyone is saying it. Even James Howard Kunstler's latest weekly blog is entitled: "Rehearsals for a Civil War?" And Paul Craig Roberts' latest essay is entitled: "The US is a Police State." Quote:

"Anyone can be next. Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat. This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts279.html

St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 6, verse 12:

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood; but against Principalities, against Powers, against the Rulers of this world's darkness; against spiritual wickedness in High Places."

Spiritual wickedness..... Filth. Rottenness. Evil. Corruption. Decay. Murder. Rape. Lies. Cruelty. Vice. Horror. Death.

I want to wake up screaming, but I can't.

Lemuel Gulliver.

Lemuel Gulliver said...

Sans Authoritas,

Like you, I was originally convinced WTC 7 was a demolition job. However, the Wikipedia article on the subject has changed my mind. In particular, it says:

"The building was constructed above a Con Edison substation that had been on the site since 1967. The substation had a caisson foundation designed to carry the weight of a future building of 25 stories containing 600,000 sq ft (55,700 m²). The final design for 7 World Trade Center was for a much larger building covering a larger footprint than originally planned when the substation was built. A system of gravity column transfer trusses and girders was located between floors 5 and 7 to transfer loads to the smaller foundation. The fifth floor functioned as a structural diaphragm, providing lateral stability and distribution of loads between the new and old caissons. Above the seventh floor, the building's structure was a typical tube-frame design, with columns in the core and on the perimeter, and lateral loads resisted by perimeter moment frames."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center

This design above Floor 7, of core and perimeter columns connected by trusses, was the same as WTC Towers 1 and 2, and is NOT - NO WAY - the same as a standard steel-frame building which is a honeycomb of steel verticals and horizontals in a cubical-box configuration. You are correct - no building of this latter type has ever collapsed due to fire.

In addition, to accomodate a larger building on a smaller foundation (as you read above) the column design was again modified from the standard interlocking cubes.

In addition, AFTER completion most of the building was leased by Salomon Brothers, and to accomodate their needs most of 3 floors were removed to create a 30-foot-high trading floor, and the remaining shell was strengthened with 350 tons of added steel beams. This retrofit again weakened the structure.

In addition, from the beginning, this was not a cubical building, which would have been very strong, but a trapezoidal shape, wider at the back than the front, and no corner of the building was the same angle as any other corner. And this angular outer column array was supposed to bear the load of the building, along with the inner core columns.

In addition, there were 12 large transformers on the 5th floor of WTC7, (the floor which was supposed to transfer the building load to the old substation too-small foundation,) and several very heavy emergency diesel generators at various sites on the lower levels, and a large tank of diesel fuel (24,000 gallons) in the basement.

I'm not a structural engineer, but all of the foregoing sounds to me like if there was any criminal behavior, it was in the NYC permitting process which allowed such a structure and its interior modifications to be built at all.

(Continued...)

Lemuel Gulliver said...

(Continued...)

In addition, the water mains in the southern part of Manhattan were taken out by the WTC 1 and 2 collapses, and the sprinklers in WTC7, and the fire hoses, were inoperative. Any firefighting you saw in the days following 9-11 was provided by NYC's fire boats in the harbor, which were, every last one, running 24/7 pumping water out of the Hudson River to the firefighters on scene.

In addition, there were not only fires in WTC7. The falling debris from the WTC North Tower took out a 10-story high chunk of the WTC7 building near the bottom on the south face, to a depth about 1/4 of the way through the building, further weakening the structure.

In addition, when it finally did collapse, there were no audible explosions on the lowest floors, which always precede a controlled demolition.

Now, 20 minutes BEFORE the building collapsed the BBC in London announced that it HAD collapsed. This I had found highly suspicious, until one reads that the sides of the building were visibly bulging, it was creaking and groaning, and the NYC Fire Chief had ordered all firefighters out of WTC7 some 2 hours before the final collapse, which came as no surprise to anyone on site.

Finally, the WAY the building collapsed LOOKED exactly, precisely, the way a controlled demolition looks, beginning in the middle so that the structure does not collapse outwards but falls in on itself. I was convinced controlled demolition was what it was, until I read all these facts, and realized that because of all the structural retrofits, the removal of 3 floors, the huge hole punched in the middle of the lower floors, the weight of the transformers and generators, the foundation being smaller than the final building built over it, the tanks of diesel fuel, that yes, it makes perfect sense that the center came down before the rest, and the building collapsed first from the weakened lower floors, then progressed upwards.

I for one have changed my mind on WTC7. I believe it collapsed under its own weight, and from the fires and ALSO the damage from falling debris.

Now, if you are still unconvinced, let's not digress this blog away from the topic of the IRS. Let's just agree to disagree in our beliefs about WTC7.

Sincerely,
Lemuel Gulliver.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the actions of Joe Stack; I don't know that I can agree with your assessment of "unsupportable"... His actions were certainly imprudent, and (especially given the span of time over which he contemplated his response) not very effective. I think that "not very effective", along with the acknowledgment that Stack probably endangered some innocent bystanders, is about as strong a condemnation that I can muster. As for sympathy for the employee of that egregiously evil empire known as the IRS that he did manage to take with him, I have none at all. I also fail to comprehend how knowledge that the vicious parasite accomplished reproduction is of any import whatsoever in this accounting. For the ruin of how many lives, and for how many unjust deaths, does that unlamentable scum share culpability? Where is the generous eulogy of "father", "mother", "son", "daughter", "brother", "sister", "grandfather", or "grandmother" for his unheralded victims?

Anonymous said...

I once asked someone how a man or woman could wake up one morning and spit out, "I want to work for..."X" agency, dept, ad-nauseum"? How is that disconnect possible? Just as someone chooses to buy apples over oranges they use their free will to choose whom they render their services to and in return are rewarded by their masters. This is no different than mafia foot soldiers being paid by their bosses for the extortion and theft pushed on their "clients". At least they might admit what they are rather than hiding behind all the nationalistic window dressing.

Unknown said...

The failure of the steel is due to two factors: loss of strength due to the temperature of the fire, and loss of structural integrity due to distortion of the steel from the non-uniform temperatures in the fire. This can lead to fall/ not-fall of steel buildings
----------------
Steel buildings