Brief Notes on the Criminal Racket called "Government"

"Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime ... and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit – murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance."

Albert Jay Nock, from Our Enemy, the State

Support Your Local Panopticon

When Davenport, Iowa joined the roster of cities with automated red light cameras several years ago, the City Council and Police Department soothingly assured the public that the cameras were intended as a revenue-neutral safety measure.

In addition to being notoriously unreliable, red light and speed cameras undermine public safety and their use as an enforcement mechanism is patently unconstitutional. They do bring in the bucks, however, which is why they are so popular with municipal governments. (Well, that and the bribes and kickbacks offered by some contractors involved in this corrupt criminal enterprise.)

The municipal government – which is to say, the criminal clique controlling Davenport -- now enjoys a $250,000 “windfall” harvested by their traffic control cameras, and is planning to plow the profits into building a local panopticon – a “citywide wireless network allowing police to view live streaming video from their squad cars,” reports the Quad-City Times. “In addition, the department will begin recording its captured video, allowing it to [be used] as evidence to prosecute crimes.”

Thus far, one camera mounted on a high-rise overlooking a busy city street has been used “in making arrests for prostitution, public consumption of alcohol and loitering,” which aren't the kinds of violent assaults on person and property most people envision when discussing the legitimate role of police.

Here's one rendering of the "Panopticon" prison concept, as envisioned by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham...

During comments made to city Aldermen, Police Chief Mike Bladel “was careful not to reveal too much” about the “undisclosed number of portable and mobile cameras” that will be purchased with the money extorted from the public through the red light cameras.

“We really don't want to demonstrate to the public our full capabilities, but yes, it would be our goal to identify people from a long distance, and that is an achievable goal,” said Chief Bladel.

... and here's a more updated version of the Panopticon concept.


Why keep such details from the public, if Bladel and his department are there to “serve and protect” them? If the Davenport Police Department were actually carrying out the function of “peace officers,” they would want to be a conspicuous and welcome presence, rather than a furtive and hostile one. It's clear that Bladel's department has assimilated the Homeland Security mindset, in which protecting the State is the highest duty, and the people who are supposedly protected are treated as a pool of potential terrorists.

The Davenport P.D. Is “partnering” with Raytheon Company, one of the major contractors for the Homeland Security/Military Industrial Complex, to conduct a six-month trial of its panopticon system. After that, “the wireless network would have to be funded through the police department's regular budget.”

Which means, of course, that once the seed money has been consumed, the Davenport P.D. Will have to ramp up its efforts to shake down motorists in order to keep their surveillance system up and running.

Chances are they'll seek advice from their comrades in blue over in Iowa's Dallas County, where Sheriff Brian Gilbert and his Boyz, until recently, was taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars by looting interstate motorists through “asset forfeiture.” Thanks to the federal “war on drugs,” police can seize cars and cash and convict them – not their owners – of having a “nexus” of some sort to criminal activity. Using this federally approved approach to highway robbery, Gilbert's Gangstas hauled in about $1.75 million over the past four years, and probably would be still be soaking up the bucks today if they hadn't gotten a bit too greedy and sloppy.


U.S. Mint: A Den of Thieves

How often are we told that the fundamental purpose of government is to protect the innocent from those who would simply take whatever they want by force?

I'd guess this truism is recited nearly as often as the criminal syndicate called “government” does exactly the same thing – that is, taking whatever it wants by force, while threatening to kill anyone who resists.

Contemporary outrages like “asset forfeiture” and seizure of property on behalf of corporate interests through eminent domain certainly exemplify this function of government. But for sheer audacity, few contemporary crimes committed under color of government authority can compare to FDR's 1933 seizure of privately owned gold.

By executive decree, in defiance of the Constitution, law, and decency, the execrable Roosevelt simply ordered citizens to turn in their gold, at an artificially low price. The gold was removed from circulation so the Federal Reserve could have a freer hand to inflate the currency. This wasn't the wickedest thing FDR did before he took the handicapped-access ramp to hell on April 12, 1945 (Stalin, to whom FDR had handed eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference a few weeks earlier, was so bereaved by Roosevelt's death that he permitted his photograph to be published on the front page of Pravda), but it was pretty close to the top of the indictment.

To their considerable credit, some Americans refused to comply with the illegal order to turn in their money.

Shortly before Herr Roosevelt issued his confiscation decree, the U.S. Mint pressed several hundred thousand Gold Double Eagles, all of which were supposedly melted down into bars before they were released into circulation. However, over the decades a handful of the Double Eagles have been found – meaning, in all likelihood, that one of the stainless and heroic public servants in the Mint's employ made off with a small quantity of the gold and sold it on the black market.

A Philadelphia jeweler named Israel Switt somehow came into possession of 19 Double Eagles. Until recently it was believed that all of his coins had been found. However, in September of 2004, Joan Langbord, one of Switt's heirs, found ten more of his 1933 Double Eagles in a safe-deposit box.

Displaying a touching ingenuousness, Langbord contacted the U.S. Mint to have the Double Eagles authenticated. The Feds reacted in a perfectly predictable fashion: They stole the coins by having the Secret Service declare them to be “seized.”

“Langbord, along with her sons Roy and David, have filed a suit against the Mint. This is almost certainly a futile gesture, chiefly because the Feds have inexhaustible funds to fight the case (which wouldn't be true, of course, if we were still on the gold standard).

“The Mint's lawless position is that by merely claiming the coins were somehow removed from the Mint unlawfully in the 1930s, they can take the Langbords' property without proving it in a court of law," observes Langbord's attorney, Barry Berke.

This is the same U.S. Mint, recall, that produces slugs of junk metal it calls "coins," while trying to convince people that using gold and silver in private transactions is a species of “counterfeiting” and “fraud.”


We're from the Government, and we're here to help!

Good Enough for Government Work: A Friendly Note from a “Proud American” at the TSA

Four years ago, film producer Nicholas Monahan used a piece on Lew Rockwell's website to describe how his pregnant (and nigh-on-delivery) wife was molested at a airport security check, and how he was arrested and treated as a quasi-terrorist for the supposed offense of objecting to that crime.

Just a few days ago, one of the chair-moisteners employed by the Transportation Security Administration – that's the Homeland Security Department's special division in charge of harassment, petty theft, and the molestation of passengers and children – wrote to Lew Rockwell to defend the honor, such as it is, of his degenerate agency. Since the author of that letter is a federal employee, it should come as no surprise that it is replete with errors of spelling, diction, and logic – in addition to being sent to the wrong person, since Lew was not the author of the essay that provoked the letter in the first place.

Here are the highlights, such as they are, with the spelling and punctuation intact:

"I was searching some webpages, and came accross your website that mentioned TSA in it. So i read it. You'll understand later in my letter to you. As I was reading, I was playing out both sides of the incedent that happen to you, your wife, and your child. as well as the screeners at the airport. Here's a few things that you, I guess, have completly forgotten when it comes to national security, and YOU being EXEMPT because...what, your wife is pregnant and you're tired? Sorry, doesnt work that way.... The screeners are doing their jobs. Yes, the female screener who was screening your wife SHOULD have asked your wife if she would like private screening before making her unveil herself infront of so many strangers, however, this is NO excuse for you to become irate and demand to know whats going on. Yes, she is your wife and you would like to know whats happening, but charging up to a screener and demanding to know what they did is absolutly NO way to go about it.... your total lack of confidence in what TSA is here doing, to me, as a proud american, makes me absolutly disgusted. For you to totally throw out the terrorists attacks on 9/11, and those all over the world makes me want to go house to house just so I can tell them. 'hey, you, put down your newspaper full of bs, one sided stories and get an opinon of your own, and do something for your country' but of course, I can't do that.
again with the terrorism. they HAD to touch your wifes breasts, she is no exempt because she is pregnant. Maybe you have not seen any movies with women carrying 'fake' babies but its possible. Its a maternity suit...people use them. AND they can hold a whole lot of stuff which is illegal in the sterile....So next time you start coming to conclusions, maybe you can take a step back, take a deep breathe and ask yourself "well...is it really that bad for them to be doing this?" or maybe ask yourself 'oh, do I want another 9/11?'.... It distrubs me how often I hear people talk badly about the TSA and how its all 'bullshit'. The TSA Screeners (which are now Officers) are more then capable of performing their much needed duties, every day. Yes, people make mistakes, and the female screener for your wife made a slight one, but that doesnt excuse your behavior.”

What “distrubs” me (I'm guessing that's the federally approved spelling from now on) is the news that the arrogant, illiterate bullies employed by the TSA are now “officers” -- meaning, I suppose, that they have the power to carry out arrests on their own supposed authority.

Mr. Monahan's “behavior” was to demand that someone take responsibility for official misconduct that left his near-term pregnant wife a sobbing wreck. There is no need to “excuse” behavior that is understandable, responsible, and proportionate to the offense.

At least, this would be true if we were still, in any sense, a free society.

The Pointlessness of Prohibition, part II: The Prohibitionist Pharisees

And He called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand; Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man. Then came His disciples, and said unto Him, Knowest Thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?... And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding? Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceedeth out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies....

Matthew 15:10-12, 16-19

For ten years, ex-convict Dave Lanphier was hopelessly addicted to methamphetamine. “Nothing seemed to matter but the drug ... it pretty much took hold of my life and that's what I lived for each day,” the Boise resident told the local NBC affiliate, KTVB. A large part of the problem is that meth is “cheap and easy to get,” he explained.

Lanphier's experience, KTVB invited viewers to believe, typifies the “crisis” of methamphetamine use that has seized the Treasure Valley, which extends roughly from Boise, Idaho to Ontario, Oregon.

“Methamphetamine crime is reaching epidemic levels in Idaho,” reported KTVB. “From Canyon County to Gem County, Meth is tied in some way to nearly every serious crime in Idaho.”

“When I say this community is in crisis,” commented Gem County Prosecutor Tim Fleming, “I really mean that by virtue of the numbers of cases of people that we're seeing of people that are charged with criminal offenses in dealing with Methamphetamine.”

And “experts” insist that meth “is the most addictive drug there is,” the report continues.

“Anything that can be done needs to be done, because it is a bad drug,” insisted Lanphier. “It's not like Marijuana were you can get stoned and never smoke again. Meth is addictive and once you get hooked on the drug you just throw your morals out the window.”

Lamphier, who is in jail once again for violating his parole, faces several felony counts that could result in another prison term. And as it happens, it was in prison that the 35-year-old Lamphier first used meth “and got hooked,” comments the KTVB report in an aside that should be the focus of the story.

Talk about burying the lead: The recidivist criminal and pitiful drug addict whose plight was used to make vivid the Treasure Valley's methamphetamine “crisis” -- the tortured soul who insists that “anything” the State could do to fight Meth is worthwhile -- first got addicted in prison.

What this means, in simple terms, is that the Treasure Valley could literally be turned into an open-air prison, and meth would still claim its bounty of addicts. Somehow, those who are determined to ingest the drug will find a way to do it. Trying to control what goes into the mouths of addicts and potential addicts simply won't work; their hearts need to be changed, and that task doesn't fall within the State's proper jurisdiction.

Full employment for armed, adolescent-minded State agents -- one of the many "benefits" of the Government's crack-down on meth.


The KTVB story is a splendid example of trickle-down totalitarian propaganda. It follows the same template used by countless other “news” stories, the definitive example being Newsweek's August 8, 2005 scare story “America's Most Dangerous Drug.”

Newsweek's scribes exhausted their thesauri in the effort to describe methamphetamine use as an autonomous, self-replicating malignancy: It is a “scourge,” a “plague,” a “menace,” an “epidemic.”

“More than 12 million Americans have tried methamphetamine, and 1.5 million are regular users, according to federal estimates,” recited Newsweek's editorial staff in an act of Statist stenography disguised as journalism. “Meth-making operations have been uncovered in all 50 states; Missouri tops the list, with more than 8,000 labs, equipment caches and toxic dumps seized between 2002 and 2004. Cops nationwide rank methamphetamine the No. 1 drug they battle today: in a survey of 500 law-enforcement agencies in 45 states released last month by the National Association of Counties, 58 percent said meth is their biggest drug problem, compared with only 19 percent for cocaine, 17 percent for pot and 3 percent for heroin. Meth addicts are pouring into prisons and recovery centers at an ever-increasing rate, and a new generation of `meth babies' is choking the foster-care system in many states. One measure of the drug's reach: Target, Wal-Mart, Rite-Aid and other retailers have moved nonprescription cold pills behind the pharmacy counter, where meth cooks have a harder time getting at them.”

(Remember that last item – the one about retail stores hiding cold pills from potential addicts. We'll return to that anon.)

For those not patient enough to wade through their prose, Newsweek's staff provided nausea-inducing depictions of meth's effects – a close-up of an addict's hideously degenerated teeth, a portrait of a horribly burned victim of a meth lab explosion, a photo of a prematurely aged user.

As I noted above, the Newsweek story is the template from which hundreds or thousands of similar “stories” have been struck.

Slate's media critic Jack Shafer, performing fact-checking and quality-control functions that Newsweek's editors no longer bother with, points out that the story was an artless exercise in misdirection.

Why didn't the magazine try to find out “how many people [meth] has killed?” asks Shafer. “If meth is really the most dangerous drug, you'd think the magazine would have provided some sort of body count.” (Based on fatality rate and related social trauma, the nation's most dangerous drug is alcohol, which is perfectly legal.)

Shafer also calls B.S. on Newsweek's State-provided estimates of the meth-using population. The publication claims that 12 million have “tried” meth, and 1.5 million are “regular” users (juxtaposing those figures suggests, pace the above-quoted addict Dave Lanphier, that one use of meth is insufficient to leave the user hooked on the drug) without establishing “whether those numbers are up or down,” Shafer notes. “How can they claim an epidemic unless they've got the numbers?”

Well, it has to be an epidemic, y'see, because the State's law enforcement agencies have identified it as Enemy Number One in the War on Drugs. It matters not whether the statistics vindicate that designation; the State through its priesthood has revealed the truth to us, and our duty is to believe and obey. Blessed be the name of the State.

There are good reasons to suspect that methamphetamine use today is much less common than it was during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1958, notes Shafer, pharmaceutical companies “produced 3.5 billion legal tablets of various amphetamines in 1958, enough to supply every American with 20 standard doses ... a year. Those pills were potentially just as addictive and potentially just as deadly as the meth found on the street today. Less than a decade later, the annual production of pharmaceutical amphetamines had climbed to 8 billion tablets, and by 1971 it topped 12 billion. These quantities far exceeded the amount needed for the then-approved medical uses of amphetamines in treatment of narcolepsy, obesity, depression, fatigue, anxiety, and hyperkinetic children.”

Government-sponsored drug addiction: Beginning in WWII, pilots and other combat personnel have been encouraged to use amphetamines.

As a Kindergarten-age child considered hyperactive by my teachers, I came very close to being put on amphetamines; my parents didn't permit this to happen, and this ranks very high on the lengthy and growing list of reasons why I love and honor them without measure. But my own experience tends to validate, at least for me, Shafer's observation that doctors “over-prescribed these drugs” as late as the early 1970s. And perhaps the best-known and most prominent user/addict of legal amphetamines was John F. Kennedy.

Those whose doctors were reluctant to prescribe amphetamines resorted to a growing black market; this led to the 1965 Federal Drug Abuse Control Amendments. In keeping with Grigg's First Law of Federal Action (“Those problems Washington doesn't create, it exacerbates by imposing a `solution'”), this attempt at regulation created huge profit incentives for “kitchen chemists” who cooked their own meth. As government continued to constrict the legal amphetamine market, profits continued to soar for illicitly manufactured amphetamines.

In 1988, the Feds clamped down severe restrictions on the P2P precursor compound used to manufacture amphetamines. “Some chemists switched to ephedrine, which could be found in cold remedies,” Shafer recounts, “and when the government suppressed ephedrine, some moved on to pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed and other decongestants. Now the government limits even the sale of over-the-counter preparations containing pseudophedrine.”

And that, Dear Reader, is the reason why Claritin-D, Sudafed, and other non-prescription palliatives for cold, flu, and allergy suffers are covered by the so-called PATRIOT Act, and – as of last March – have been treated like controlled substances at your local retail store.

Under the “Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005” (take that, oh ye of little faith in the divine State!), which was grafted onto the PATRIOT monstrosity, “The sale of cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine is limited to behind the counter,” explains the Food and Drug Administration (a federal agency that, like nearly all the others, has no Constitutional excuse to exist). “The amount of pseudoephedrine that an individual can purchase each month is limited and individuals are required to present photo identification to purchase products containing pseudoephedrine. In addition, stores are required to keep personal information about purchasers for at least two years.”

Where does that information end up?

While nobody can say for certain, here's a very good guess: Your pseudophedrine consumption habits are pooled with other personal data being collected by the State and used to assess your tendency toward terrorism and other anti-social behavior.

After all, as Republican Congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania puts it, the Meth epidemic “is a form of terrorism itself.” Which means, I suppose, that if we were able to buy and use Sudafed without federal supervision, the terrorists will win.

Many dangerous and destructive things – from trans-fats (which have been targeted by prohibitionists as well) to narcotics, both smoked and swallowed – can be taken in through the mouth. Those exercising wise stewardship over their bodies will avoid the worst of them, to the extent their knowledge allows, and be judicious and moderate in consuming healthy things, as well. This is in keeping with what the Apostle James called the “perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25; see also Galatians 5:1-18; Colossians 2:12-17).

This approach is immeasurably preferable to the suffocating – and murderous – paternalism practiced by prohbitionist Pharisees, ancient and contemporary.

The Pointlessness of Prohibition (Pt. I)

Last of the breed: Legendary Frontier Marshal Bill Tilghman, a casualty of our nation's first "War on Drugs."


On this day (December 5) in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified by Utah, thus bringing to a merciful end one of our nation's most deranged experiments in social control: The federal ban on “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States....”

It is a pity that this exercise in civic derangement, which began in 1920, hadn't ended a decade earlier. Had reason reasserted itself by 1923, numerous tragedies could have been avoided, including the murder of legendary frontier lawman Bill Tilghman by a drunken, corrupted prohibition agent named Wiley Lynn.

At the time of his death in November 1924, Tilghman was seventy-five, and had spent a half-century in law enforcement. As a teenage buffalo hunter, Tilghman had dropped thousands of the prairie bison, an accomplishment not to be mocked even though he and other hunters were being used (often unwittingly) in a federal scheme devised by General Sherman to herd the Plains Indians into reservations. During his hunts the young Tilghman made the acquaintance of Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and others with whom he would later collaborate as members of the legendary Dodge City Peace Commission.

During the 1890s, Tilghman, as a federal marshal in Oklahoma, led the effort that defeated the Doolin-Dalton gang; he single-handedly captured gang leader Bill Doolin in 1895. Widely and properly admired for his insane courage (“Tilghman would charge hell with a bucket,” said an admiring Teddy Roosevelt), the marshal was also respected for his kindness and integrity. “The man I consider it an honor to have known and to have ridden with was Bill Tilghman,” wrote George Bolds, a widely respected frontier marshal in his own right. “Wyatt Earp was a great Western marshal, but to my mind, Bill Tilghman was greater, both in character and in deeds.”

After a brief career in politics and a short stint as a Hollywood consultant, Tilghman was dragged out of retirement in 1924 to serve one last term as a city marshal. At the time the venerable lawman was dying from cancer, something known only to himself and his intimate friends (including, of course, his second wife, Zoe; his first wife Flora had died several years earlier). Oklahoma Governor Martin Trapp gave Tilghman the assignment to clean up Crockett, an oil town widely reputed to be the “wickedest city in Oklahoma.”

Cromwell was dominated by a criminal syndicate headquartered in Oklahoma City. Like many other murderous cliques of its sort, the OKC mob was profiting handsomely as a result of prohibition, which led to vastly inflated prices for sub-par booze. Killian, the mob boss who ran Cromwell, diverted a portion of the profits into the pockets of federal Prohibition Agent Lynn.

Tilghman, aware that the federal agent was in the pocket of the mob, had sharp words with Lynn on more than one occasion, generally after the Fed had released a criminal suspect the marshal had put in jail. Tilghman was also aware that the mob had put a price on his head. Tilghman was fatally shot during an attempt to arrest and disarm a drunken Lynn on the night of November 1. Despite being identified by one of Tilghman's deputies as the one who fired the lethal shots, Lynn was acquitted of the crime he's still widely believed to have committed.

Bill Tilghman was the last of his breed, a Frontier Lawman devoted to maintaining a civic order intended to protect life and property. His murderer could be regarded as a particularly corrupt specimen of the New Model Federal Lawman, a parasite serving the whims of social engineers determined to use the State's coercive power to correct what they consider to be defects in the way others choose to live.


It's always "For the children": A 1920s-era federal propaganda poster urging compliance with the national ethanol price support program (aka Prohibition).

Biologist and political commentator Bill Walker describes Prohibition as the first federal effort to “regulate the bloodstream of all US citizens.” It was also a huge subsidy to both the criminal Underworld and the bureaucratic political class with which organized crime lives in corrupt symbiosis.

One of the little-appreciated benefits of alcohol is its use as a termagant repellent.

At the time alcohol Prohibition (what Walker calls the “federal ethanol price support program”) went into effect, the equivalent program for narcotic drugs was in its infancy. Like its long-dead sibling, the narcotic price support program, known colloquially as the “war on drugs,” has done nothing to reduce consumption of various controlled substances, but a great deal to enrich the criminal underworld and, even worse, to empower the much deadlier criminal syndicate called the State.

I'll have more to say on that subject tomorrow....