It still says, “legal tender for all debts, public and private” – but it’s becoming clear the powers-that-be would much prefer you used something else.
Besides cash money, that is.
Increasingly, they are insisting.
A few weeks ago, for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a motorist on a toll road who tries to pay the toll with cash may be physically detained – and forced to submit to an an interrogation. (PDF of the ruling is available here.)
Last year, Florida residents Joel, Deborah and Robert Chandler were driving on the Florida Turnpike – hilariously named The Less Stressway – when they came upon a toll both, operated by private contractor Faneuil, Inc. for the state of Florida. They attempted to pay the toll with legal tender – cash. A $50 bill. Faneuil, Inc. really wants people to use “SunPass” electronic transponders and has eliminated cash toll lanes on a section of the Parkway between the Exit 1 and Exit 47 interchanges in Miami-Dade County. This happened to be the stretch of road on which the Chandlers were driving that day. They did not have the electronic “Sun Pass” transponder – perhaps because, like many motorists, they don’t like the idea of a government-issued (or corporate issued) electronic transmitter in their vehicle – which can track their vehicle. The transponders make it easy to monitor where a car goes, when it goes – and how quickly it goes. Reasonably, many people – including the Chandlers – prefer not to be so monitored.
So, they tried to pay the toll with cash.
This was refused – and then they were physically detained by not being allowed to proceed through the toll. Since it is illegal to back up on a highway, they had no choice but to sit there until the toll operator – now, for all practical purposes their jailer – raised the gate and allowed them to proceed. Which he would not do until the Chandlers “complied” with the toll collector’s demand that a Bill Detection Report be filled out. This report included information about their vehicle as well as the Chandler’s driver’s license info, which they were compelled to provide.
Now, the Chandlers paid – well, tried to pay – their toll with a $50 bill. Some might consider that “too large” a bill for paying a mere toll. But leavings aside that tolls can often easily exceed $20 – and leaving aside that a $50 bill is legal tender – the court ruled that it’s ok to force motorists to stop and accede to the Bill Detection Report rigmarole for trying to pay their toll with much smaller denomination bills, too – including $5 bills. In principle, Fanueil has “outlawed” cash – period. On a state road, mind. That is, on a public road.
The state – and not just Florida – is determined to force-feed electronic transponders to the masses. The better to keep track of you, my pretty. The ultimate object is, of course, to have all vehicles on all roads fitted with these transponders. It will make it so much more efficient, you see, to collect tolls. Also to issue “speeding” tickets – automatically. Perhaps also to restrict when you may drive – and when. (For more on that, look up “congestion pricing.” Transponders are essential for that little project.)
The state – and its pit bulls in the “private” sector – are literally salivating at the prospect. (Especially Republicans like Mitt Romney, incidentally – who love efficient government.)
Well, the Chandlers decided to avail themselves of the courts – which, ostensibly, are there to support the correct application of the law. Such as the law that still says Federal Reserve Notes are “legal tender for all debts, public and private.”
It does not say some debts.
It says all debts.
Pretty clear-cut, you’d think.
Not that it matters to the appropriately black-robed thugs who operate the courts in this country. Saith the Lawgivers: “In Florida, a person’s right and liberty to use a highway is not absolute.”
But of course, that’s not the issue at hand.
The Chandlers weren’t debating their right to use the highway. They were questioning the right of the state – via its proxy, Faneuil, Inc. – to refuse to accept what is still legally legal tender in this country (which ostensibly would include Florida) and, when the state refused to accept an attempted payment tendered legally, with legal tender, to detain them like criminals and force them to provide personal information – including their IDs, with all the information contained on those IDs – to a toll both operator. To some minimum wage low-life, in other words, who could then use that information to commit identity fraud, obtain credit cards – do god-knows-what.
And get away with it.
And the courts endorsed it. 
Saith the Lawgivers:
“The fact that a person is not free to leave on his own terms at a given moment, however, does not, by itself, mean that the person has been ‘seized’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”
This is reasoning only a law school graduate can comprehend. The Chandlers, after trying to discharge a debt using legal tender currency, were compelled by the threat of implicit violence to remain in situ – and then to hand over their “papers” – or else. And the black-robed thugs decree that the Chandlers were not ” ‘seized’ within “the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.” The amendment which states:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” (Italics added.)
Is it reasonable to detain – and search – people who have done absolutely nothing unlawful?
The answer ought to be as clear as “legal tender for all debts, public and private.”
Unfortunately – for us – the plain language of the 4th (and 5th and soon the rest) of the Bill of Rights is just as ignored as the simple, impossible to misconstrue statement clearly written on all U.S. currency.
It did not get that far, but had the Chandlers refused to give up their IDs, declined to provide the information demanded by the toll cretin for his Bill Detection Report, it is a certainty America’s Swinest would have arrived on the scene to enforce compliance. Had the Chandlers in any way “resisted,” they would have received the now-usual summary judgment in the street.
And the courts would have endorsed it.
This is the new America a-borning. A place in which it is suspicious to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with cash. A place in which trying to pay a toll with cash – the proverbial coin of the realm – is de facto illegal and sufficient pretext for to waylay an innocent traveler, detain and interrogate him. In which a private contractor, acting as the state’s rent-a-thug, can bully people into accepting electronic transponders – by making it an ordeal to pay for a toll with cash.
Remind me, please. What, exactly, are “our troops” fighting for again? I vaguely recall something about “our freedoms” being in need of protection.
Throw it in the Woods?
No way to reply in sequence, Eric/dom?
Regarding inflation in relation to cars.
Base price of a 76′ Trans-Am… $4987.00 Base price of a 1999 Trans-AM… $25,320 Todays TA would run a bit more then a base ‘SS’ Camaro, so I suspect that it would be around the price of a ‘2SS’ @ $37,035. A 700+% increase in the ensuing years.
Journeyman’s carpenter wages 1976… $22.50 Journeyman’s Carpenter wages in the NW in 2012 $32.00(less then a 50% increase in 37 years)if you can get it.
And that wage is usually only available in ‘Prevailing Wage’ situations where there is Federal money fully or partially funding the project, or a union shop… which are rare these days.
In reality, carpenters in the NW are getting anywhere from $15.00 to $25.00 an hour in the urban areas, and $12.00 to $18.00 in the rural areas of the North West.
No wonder, even with skill, a family has too have two wage earners.
As a part time carpitect/contractor, I won’t pay less the $16.00 an hour for labor, and to be competitive, I can’t pay more then $35.00 for a highly skilled and productive carpenter.
With all the issues and costs these days of being licensed architect and contractor, it is chasing a lot of us out of the business and driving up the cost of all construction activities. I finished my last project in Seattle in the Fall of 2012. Unfortunately, it is probably my last design/build project.
Yup – and this is why cars like the new Camaro are (mostly) for the Just for Men set…. guys well into middle age and older.
I have yet to see an SS driven by anyone younger than me (mid 40s) and most are guys a lot older than me.
Now, back in ’76, the Trans-Am was still a young man’s car. Anyone who was around back then will remember. The typical driver was not a gray haired dude in his 50s. It was a guy in his 30s or younger.
It’s sad.
Refused for years to do banking with ‘Direct Deposit’ or Electronic bill paying.
But last Fall, the Feds forced me into a direct deposit situation with Social Security. You will not get your funds from SS without a direct deposit, or one of their debit cards which are not recognized by a lot of card processing companies.
Never get much out of SS because I make too much money, but it irks me anyway on principle.
They weren’t seized. They were kidnapped. It’s pretty much the same whether you physically abduct someone, take them somewhere, and prevent them from leaving, and if you just prevent them from leaving. It’s a federal crime and just short of murder. You wouldn’t get away with it and even law enforcement are supposed to have just cause and very shortly a warrant or an arrest. When will they be filing the lawsuit, and how many zeros will they put on the suit?
You know what could be really fun? My guess is those transponders you’re talking about are passive reflectors; they must be something like RFID tags. My guess is they get strobed by some sort of RF signal and they reflect a pattern that’s sort of the logical equivalent of a bar code.
Now, faking one of them probably wouldn’t work too well, but dynamically copying one could be interesting. If you figure the things have to respond when they’re pinged it probably wouldn’t be all that hard to build a machine that pings the car behind your for their tag and echos it when you get strobed at the gate. You might need to keep a few stored signatures in memory for those lonely evenings when you’re the only car on the turnpike.
Whenever anyone begins receiving a government paycheck – is the time they essentially become your enemy. Self-interest takes over and it becomes a feeding frenzy on the taxpayer – their source of “earnings”. Senator, judge, teacher, or tollbooth operator – no difference.
http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/10/04/4315205/clover-korean-war-vet-gets-30.html <– I thought this link was too good to pass up, given the name of the town. Our military can go pollute the Middle East with depleted uranium, but God forbid some guy have junk in his yard. Even better, look at the mixture of snark and simper in the comments of the "judge."
Now, ask yourself — how quickly will these worthless assholes crack down on anyone who tries to exercise their right as a free person to engage in barter commerce with their fellow free people, once cash is illegal? I bet it will be at the speed of sound.
“I don’t want to send anybody to jail, but I do like people to follow orders,” Howell said.
Reminds me of that image Eric put up recently of the whatchya call it, submissive type of person… well, this judge is the other end of that equation.
Eric, How about some discussion and thoughts on how to protect ourselves from an eventual cashless society and outlaw of private transactions…
Nice try Homeland Security. heh
They are pretty bold, aren’t they? They apparently think that the rest of us are as stupid as they are.
We used to have the box style transceivers like you have pictured above, but the state made everyone switch over to a style that adheres to the windshield about 2 years ago. This sucks almost as bad as having to use our never ending toll system because you could at least move the box pass to another vehicle and at least have some convenience while being pillaged and tracked.
Why not stick the transponder onto a disc that has something to slip or lock into on the respective vehicles. That way you can take it off of one and slip it into the other.
Oh well, NOW you tell me. That’s actually very clever. The new ones are basically a very thick sticker with an RFID device inside.
P.M. Lawrence,
whether or not the toll booth customers had technically incurred a debt or were negotiating payment prior to a service being rendered matters very little. The issue is how can it possibly be justified to refuse payment with any form of fiat money, particularly for using a public road.
The state issues fiat money, and insists that people use it for all transactions and must not use alternative currencies like precious metals or foreign currencies. Then the state wants to target and harass people for using the very fiat money paper that the state issued and mandated as legal tender and forced people to use in the first place, on pain of the state’s monopoly on the use of force.
You don’t seem to see anything problematic about this situation!
And I don’t seem to see anything problematic about the minimum wage in what I wrote there, either. But then, I wasn’t addressing that, either. Quite simply, I wasn’t writing that to repeat what others have already contributed but to point out something that hadn’t been brought out. Yes, it’s a technicality, and yes, it has little to do with the justice or lack thereof of what happened. I myself pointed that out. Still, it means that what went on was a problem of a different sort to flouting legal tender requirements.
The terrorists hate us for our freedoms!
Don’t have a bank account and deal only in cash, though I do have a pre-paid debit card that I usually fund with a C note or less at any given time. Went to pay my rent and use money orders so I have a record of payment. At the A&P the Western Union terminal was down so I went across the street to the drug store for the orders. I ask the clerk for a money order in the amount of $930.00.
She says sure and then asks me for my drivers license. I ask what do you need my drivers license for? She tells me she has to meke a copy of it because the amount is over $500.00. This is insane. Now you’re a suspected money launderer or who knows what, if you need to pay your rent! Amerika has certainly become a gulag with no walls.
Now you need to visit multiple places and make the money orders in odd amounts. But to THEM that makes you a suspect.
Technically, the drivers weren’t trying to pay a debt with cash, as they hadn’t incurred a debt. They wanted to buy a service, but the provider wasn’t willing to make a cash transaction – nor was it obliged to (if the service had been provided in return for a promise to pay later, then it wouldn’t have been able to refuse cash later). Of course, that doesn’t make the provider morally entitled to block the drivers in so they couldn’t refuse the non-cash transaction that the provider did offer.
Unrelated, there is an incident involving someone being unable to pay cash at a department store in Heinlein’s TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE and making the same argument about legal tender. It’s eventually sorted out by someone else making the purchase with a credit card and accepting the cash.
Cash=terrorist=boogeyman nonsense word. Cops=suport state money mafia=robbers.
Federal reserve notes are debt. You settle debts with certificates of federal debt. If you put proceeds of debt transaction in bank(all cash transactions are. Debt transactions) they can loan out your debt 9.1 times the value of your debt due to 10% reserve margin process.
Like Star Trek tribbles.
The last silver certificate was issued in 1964. They were payable in a certain weight of silver bullion on demand. In 1856, a dollar bill was payable as 412.5 grains of silver. There being 437.5 grains in a dollar. Somewhere Alex Hamiltons bastards were already shorting tou 25 grains per dollar.
Withoutfiat, a $1 thould be 94.3% of an ounce worth $33 dollars today. A 1913 FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE is worh 2% today. But they had already robbed you to the tune of 1% before that.
A horrible Republican ripoff was the crime of 1873. North Eastern Republican states banks were backed by gold. The west was backed by silver. They passed the coinage act which said only Gold is money. One of the greatest fuckings-over of all time. William Jennings bryans cross of gold speech is a good read about this. Basically, like Ron Paul says, until you have sound constitutional money, nothing else is important.
SOUND MONEY KING MIDAS TURNS EVERYTHING TO GOLD. He starves due to eating golden bread.
King Fiat Bernanke turns everything to debt. He goes insane because the more he saves the more debt he carries until finally the loan sharks take everything because he was late paying the interest on 5 million $50000 toilets for the toll booths Haliburton is going to build to stimulate road construction jobs.
All these false flags. The war on texters , war on bullies, are just diversions while we stand with our pants down and they gangbang us all penniless through their Menage-De-7 billion clusterfuck.-a-thon.
Tor you are without a doubt the coooooolest writer I’ve ever read the captain of word smiths keep it up cheers.
As much as I hate the privacy concerns with the transponders, I have to say that I agree that they did not refuse to accept payment. The drivers did not pay for a ticket at the box office before they got to the gate of the stadium. Therefore they were refused entry. The big problem here is that they were forced to be detained without having any other options as just turning around and leaving.
Personally, I have a transponder in MD, but I don’t use it everyday. And it is not mounted unless I am approaching a toll, the rest of the time it is in a shielded bag in the glove compartment. They can only track me by times I am at the toll booth, but they have that info anyway because of the pictures they like to take.
That’s true that they aren’t “forcing” you except when they don’t give you a means to turn around! I’ve been railroaded into those scenarios. Now they’re placing guard rails or cables in the medians so you’re being herded like cattle. The message, at least for now, is for you to get used to it.
PML
Agreed about this not being a DEBT transaction.
Instead, because of the procedural posture, the case turned solely on the constitutional ‘detention’ issue. The Chandlers did not, according to the court, argue that they were NOT free to exit the toll road and take some other route.
That should have been the end of the analysis. Instead, the court engages in a great deal of (poorly written) dicta in discussing the alternative forms of payment the Chandlers might have used to comply with the toll operator requirements in order to minimize or eliminate the “delay.”
The case is probably a lot more legally complicated than it appears from reading the opinion (due to the role of the state, the “public” nature of such roads, privilege vs. right, free travel, taxation, etc.).
In the end, as we used to joke in federal court, it just wasn’t a big enough deal for everyone to make a “federal” case out of it.
Steve,
How is it not a debt when you are told you owe?
A toll, it seems to me, is exactly like a tax. It is a tax. Your are told you owe “x” and required to pay.
It is not an optional “service” one may elect to decline.
Point being: It’s pedantic (and sophistic) to parse the meaning of “all debts, public and private” to exclude any required payment.
The plain meaning – and intent – of “all debts, public and private” is pretty clear. Claims to the contrary are very much of a piece with modern “interpretations” of the Second Amendment; specifically, the “interpretations” that claim the phrase “well-regulated” justifies the “regulation” of firearms in the modern sense of “regulated.”
BS, in both cases.
Eric
Hi!
I was just agreeing with PML’s point that, on the facts, there was no debt owed by the Chandlers to the toll operation because the Chandlers had not yet used the service. (According to the court, they were free to turn around and leave so they were not required to pay it. According to the court, they did not argue to the contrary.)
The toll situation is one where the user PRE-PAYS for the service (use of the road/bridge). In that sense, there is never a debt.
The ‘legal tender’ issue, in the legal sense, is raised where someone is tendering something in an attempt to discharge an obligation which is recognized as enforceable at law. In that case, the payee (lender) need only accept so-called “legal tender.” However, if the payee refuses such a tender, the tender becomes an effective defense in any subsequent action by the payee to collect on the debt.
Thus, even though the debt is owed and has not been paid, the debtor has a complete defense based on the tender.
Eric,
Hi, again
BTW, I completely agree that people who interpret “regulation” in the 2nd amendment cases to mean Congress can pass laws limiting gun rights are wrong.
I believe the Constitution does NOT change over time and the words mean what they meant when they were adopted. This is not “parsing” words but this is giving the meaning that was originally intended.
In this case, “well regulated militia” means a militia that works properly. In 1789, the term “regulate” meant to make something work properly, as in “regulate the action on a piano.”
The original meaning cannot be allowed to change just because American English has changed over time.
Further, the introductory words in the 2nd amendment are mere surplussage anyway and add nothing to the substantive text which simply says that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s nothing ambiguous about that.
In time, we the sheeple will be compelled to have chips of some sort in order to buy anything or pay our personal & property taxes.
You can rest assured that these chips will issued, monitored & handled by the “Kosher crowd”.
The chips may be in a card at first, but the ultimate aim is to implant them into us like cattle.
Funny how the Zionist Jews call us “Goyim” which means cattle, but I’m not laughing…
Erie how biblical it all is……
I live south of the Miami Matrix in the Keys where cash is still king. For now… Interestingly the Turnpike computers are connected to rental computers so if you rent a car, the tolls are added by “pay by plate” in realtime when you turn in the car. Not only that, but they add a couple of dollars to the toll for this “feature”. In addition, they are phasing out toll both operators by using robo-operators. Another “cool feature” is one can connect your credit card to the RFID unit, AKA SunPass, so one never has to pay-by-plate, thus “saving you money” as their ad reads.
I like cash, but my wife has put me on an austerity program demanding I use the debit card so she can track (control) my spending, plus a small weekly cash allowance. The common belief of the guys at work is that cash is no longer needed. I respond by asking them if I wish to buy a crack rock, hooker, or simply make a purchase at a garage/yard sale or buy a newspaper, they don’t take debit cards. If I choose to help a homeless person they can’t take a credit card. Our local fire department, before July 4th, go in the street to collect contributions for fireworks, they can’t take the cards. Neither can the newspaper vending machines! This is not about cash or anything else; it is about TOTAL CONTROL and enriching banks.
Using these pesky cards the banks collect a couple percent, the tax man collects his 7.5% and thus we are all impoverished each time an exchange takes place while the banker and state get paid for contributing nothing!
Originally Pay Pal was untraceable, independer of all fiat currencies if desired. The US govt just kept seizing and freezing millions of funds until finally Thiel was forced to sell to Ebay. Ebay could be a place to buy kidneys opium, whateve, but of course the long arms of tyranny reach everywhere, even into cyberspace, moms vagina, the Amish farmers cows udders, wherever.
Yep, that’s true and ebay is now announcing that they will begin reporting to the IRS and issuing 1099s to sellers. The noose tightens everywhere.
That’ll be the end of eBay.
For me, at least.
Absolutely. eBay just slit its own throat. It might take a while for it to choke on its own blood and bleed to death, but the fatal cut has been made.
Hey, all you cyber-entrepreneurs out there, now’s your chance to come up with the next greatest thing in online auctions!
Indeed. eBay is no longer a good place to sell things. Between them and PayPal, you could end up losing a double-digit percent of your sale. Now, with Uncle Sam involved…
It’s not uncommon for a seller to pay 8% of the transaction to both ebay and paypal. That seems horribly unreasonable to me and I think they are going to price themselves out of the market–at least they have for me–Craig Newmark for the win, please. Silk road and Bitcoin might also be an alternative if the noose doesn’t get them too.
I despise FuckPal.
Pay to get paid – what a great deal!
Filthy cocksuckers take about 3 percent off the top of every transaction.
Eric– as well you should. Who wouldn’t despise a private company that exacted no coercion on its customers in order to provide a financial settlement service and charged a 3% premium for providing that service?
Who in their right mind?
Hi Scott,
You’re right, technically. They do provide a “service” – in the same sense that a tax preparer provides a “service.”
If you run an online business, you’ll discover you face a Hobson’s Choice: Some clients insist on using PayPal to send money. They will not send a check. So, you have the “choice”: Decline their business because you resent being fucked by FuckPal. Or take your FuckPal fucking to get their business.
They’re scumbags.
It’s all about other people’s money Eric. You can charge interest on your money, or you can charge it against other people’s money.
If you don’t have more money than other people, the choice ought to be clear.
The irony is that eBay/PayPal are so intertwined that people fail to see they’re taking such a high percentage. I’ve sold a lot of stuff over the past decade and, besides having to calculate packaging costs, time, and the expense of delivering my packages to the nearest package drop-off, it wasn’t all that cheap! If I were to pimp something that was really popular, have a steady stream of product, and well organized distribution set up then it can be done but not for the kind of drive-by selling I do.
1099’s? Awww… Hell no! Next thing you know they’ll demand them at garage sales? Fascist swine. Maybe that explains why I’ve curtailed my business with them to zero.
What makes me despise FuckPal, as Eric calls them, most of all is that they have a nasty decade-long history of lax cyber-security that has cost their customers hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars. All because they can’t –or, more likely WON’T because they’re too cheap and lazy– follow a simple industry-standard script to harden their transaction databases. (As an aside, I remind not only my clients, but anyone else who cares to listen that just because your transacting business on line over a secure TLS tunnel does not mean that the vendor’s servers or databases on the other end of the transaction are secure. Think of someone transporting their money in an armored car, but picking the money up from one bum on a street corner who keeps the money in an open tin can, only to transport it in said armored car to another bum on another street corner who promptly deposits the money in another unsecured tin can. THAT’S what has happened when companies like FuckPal don’t lock down all of their IT resources and wind up having customer identity and financial PII stolen from them.)
That’s the main reason I avoid using FuckPal at all costs, although the other reasons stated here only add to my justification for keeping them at arm’s length.
Interestingly the Turnpike computers are connected to rental computers so if you rent a car, the tolls are added by “pay by plate” in realtime when you turn in the car. Not only that, but they add a couple of dollars to the toll for this “feature”.
Al, I wonder if this is a relatively new feature – the real-time toll charge to rental cars, that is. I was in South Florida (Miami) last winter on business and my colleagues and I, on a free day, took our rental car down the Florida Turnpike to the Keys. We didn’t have an EZPass with the rental car, so we just decided to bet on the license plate scan rigamarole. To make a long story short, it took two months for the toll charges to show up on my corporate credit card, which my rental car agency billed to me directly. That’s why I wonder if there have been changes to their processes in the last few months.
Bitcoin P2P Digital Currency – http://bitcoin.org/
What is a Bitcoin? – http://www.weusecoins.com/
Thank-you for this article, I am forwarding it to my cousin who lives in Florida. Thank heavens it is hot and humid in Florida as I almost moved there when my cousin did. I hate humidity so I couldn’t live there. I have heard the most awful things lately from those that live there, the toll issue is just one of many! Florida to my knowledge used to be a really nice place, very sad. Anyway, I never use toll roads because they are so expensive! I do know someone who uses a toll road to go to work as she feels it is “faster” to use than the usual highway, she was charged over $150 3 times on her usual $3.00 a day toll as recorded by her transponder because she forgot to give the new expiration date on the credit card she used to obtain the transponder in the first place. She was crying as she told me this, as she has had to fight with them to get the charges refunded! She said it’s a total nightmare, I am so glad I never bother with toll roads. PS I do not think they are faster in any way shape or form, as the folks in the article found out. Avoid, avoid avoid these roads even if you have to move! Most importantly do not buy a house where the only way in and out of your neighborhood and town is t0 use the toll roads!! Apparently Florida has lots of these types of neighborhoods. Heads up people, protect your-self and your families. Think long and hard about everything at this point in time!
Oh, no matter where you live, you WILL get toll roads, and you WILL like it, or else! Florida is only a pilot program. I noticed New Jersey, Maryland, and New York are starting the same scam. On the NY side of the George Washington Memorial bridge the traffic had long lines to pay the toll, but is you had the PASS, you could sail right through. Right now my pass will not work up there, but I would bet the rent money this too shall come to pass. They put in toll roads “to pay for the roads”. Now unless they put in roads for free where you live, they will pull the same scam where you live. Including side streets. Sorry to give you the bad news Kay.
While it wasn’t found to be “illegal” to have detained them (even though it certainly was). I would have thought they could have easily just driven off and not submitted to some idiot turning down their attempt to pay and trying to make them stay there against their will (plus you can run the tolls legally 3 times per month and they wont do anything about it). Thats certainly what I would have done. There was some guy I saw on youtube who tried to boot these peoples cars and make them pay 50 bucks to remove it for parking in a restricted parking lot. One of them went and bought bolt cutters and chopped the thing off and left. I’m always in favor of taking matters into your own hands when some douchebag that has no authority tries to force you to do anything against your will.
I agree – in principle. But, had they done so (run the toll) there is a very good chance they would have found themselves on the ride end of a thug scrum – a beatdown by America’s Swinest.
There again it begs the question: If you won’t let me “pay” then will you at least let me turn around?
Even rabbits fight back when cornered. But Americans don’t.
Two changes that could make a difference:
Eliminate government schools – Separation of School and State –
and all trials by jurors – not “judges” living off the taxpayer.
http://www.fija.org
Judges have become nothing but auxiliary prosecutors anyway. ALL OF THEM need to be removed from the benches.
With some precious rare exceptions.
Here’s a friend of mine–a libertarian criminal defense lawyer–running for judge in Texas:
Bennett for Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
Let’s use that asinine slogan against the Statists: “think globally, act locally”
Central government is doomed. It’s in its death-throws; it looks powerful, but it’s the equivalent of a drowning drunk grasping everyone around him in a futile attempt to stay afloat. Won’t work.
So let’s start building local power–primarily to survive the central decay, secondarily to devolve power…eventually back to the individual.
I certainly hope that your friend wins the election. I’m sure, if he’s public about his libertarian/limited government views, he’ll face some very nasty opposition from the local criminal establishment.
Some of the worst abuse I’ve had to face has been directed my way from “conservative” Republican types. I – briefly – joined the local Tea Party. I got in very hot water with them for criticizing real estate taxes and the idea that anyone should be forced at gunpoint to provide funds for the education of someone else’s kids (or for any reason at all, for that matter). I got the same response you’d expect had I told a gathering of Democrats I opposed welfare and EBT.
Most Americans are fundamentally the same n terms of their core belief in collectivism and coercion. They only differ when it comes to who shall be coerced – and to what end.
I’m deeply pessimistic that about the chances of a peaceful transition. And I fear we will have to endure perhaps a generation of horror before enough people are ready to finally turn their backs on the collectivist-authoritarian model and try something different.
Great article Eric.
I happened to read a comment today posted on another site in response to the lame debates. I thought it was very truthful. Here it is…
Yes, the political show goes on while we continue to breathe air saturated with chemtrails, eat foods saturated with harmful additives and GMOs, drink or bathe in fluorinated water, watch the FED continue to make our dollar worthless, and watch the government continue to pass laws to control and corral us like cattle, etc. Most of us also haven’t told the hard truth to the young people coming up that there is no hope for their future in America and that there’s a good chance many of them will be dead, or in captivity soon.
Looking at all this treachery taking place gives real meaning to why blood has to be spilled to preserve liberty. Such sacrifices are the only thing that stops tyrants and traitors.
I wish I could be more optimistic.. but it just doesn’t seem possible.
I know – I feel the same way.
I imagine we are in much the same position as the handful of aware “old Romans” were in the years preceding the final collapse of the empire. We can see it coming. We can explain why. But fewer than one out of 100 are interested in even giving us a hearing. They are comforted by panem et circences – fuhhhhhhhttttball and Teeveeeee and GMO McFood… their debt-laden “consumerist” we’re-numbah-one mantras of superiority.
Good article, but scary…!
If that phaze is accepted, then they can implement “Personal implant chips” without any resistance.
I think that’s the end-point goal. Ever hear of Aaron Russo? He was an early prophet, as well as somewhat of an insider. You might be interested in the following:
I wonder if enough Christians will freak out at that one? The World Council of Churches is a globalist, Tavistock-controlled institute that’s masterfully taken over American churches.
The preach a garbage Romans 13 doctrine, “the government is of God”, “Submit”, “Obey” ad nauseam.
But I suspect there’s enough fire left in the bellies to revolt against the “mark of the Beast”. I mean, it’s right there in black and white in the Bible.
Will they revolt?
Most “Christians” in Amerika today belong to “churches” that are so enthralled to the State (at least as long as a Republican majority dominates it) that they’ll accept anything the state does and go to ridiculous ends to justify it from a biblical perspective. And they wonder why church membership is in decline…
I don’t know about decline. In these parts, the flag-humping, cammo-snuggling, rabidly nationalistic-militaristic Christers are everywhere.
Move along folks, nothing to see here:
The Elitists want a cashless society so that they can shut down the underground economy. The underground economy has been estimated to be 15% to 20% of GDP. Also,much of the economy above ground is done “off of the books” and is untaxed. Only by going off the books or underground can the average Joe survive. The megalomaniac Elitists want to control everyone’s life. They want to make serfs out of hard working Americans. “Voluntary” Tax filing is essential. Most of the wealth of these Elitists is tied up in Tax Free Foundations,Endowments and Trusts. What hypocrites. As an aside,the 10th Plank to the Communist Manifesto calls for free Public Education.
They can try all they want to outlaw cash, but it won’t work. People will simply find alternate means of exchange and do ALL transactions “off the grid.” There aren’t enough Stasi moles in the country to stop it. Besides, once the Imperial currency loses ALL value, NO ONE will be motivated to work for the Emperor anyway.
Exactly. It’s not about revenue, per se. It is about control. Absolute, total control. They want to make it impossible for any individual to do anything they don’t know about – or without permission.
It is the blackest evil imaginable.
That reminds me of the tail end of “America: From Feedom to Facism” where a list of all the taxes /revenue makers keep rolling on the screen… and I’m thinkin’, OMG, I could not have believed it without having seen it listed like that. I had to re-wind a few times and re-watch it to let it absorb. People put up with so much if they can’t see it plainly, but then the resistence to the reality is another huge mountain to scale.
Sounds like a good reason to boycott the Florida Turnpike.
I think a lot of people are boycotting toll roads everywhere. First off all, the tolls have gotten to be outrageous on many of them and state DOTs constantly raise them (the Dulles Toll Road in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties in Northern VA has seen at least five toll hikes in the past three years, which have used to fund the D.C. Metro extension out to Dulles Airport). Second, many of these roads impose HOV restrictions during peak commuting hours, which turn these roads into rolling parking lots. Who the hell wants to pay to crawl through traffic? We can do that FOR FREE on public roads.
A particularly funny example, IMO, of a toll road boycott is the Inter-County Connector in central Maryland that connects I-95 with I-270 so that the cubicle moles in thrall to the fedgov who live in MD can “commute faster” to their “jobs” in D.C. and Northern VA. After almost four years of construction and a “grand opening” nearly a year ago, the road is almost DESERTED on weekday mornings and late afternoons. Why?
1) The toll is $3.75 ONE WAY from end to end. Since most people would have to take the road all the way from its end points, that means $7.50 per day in toll money, never mind gas and other commuting expenses. That adds up, fast, and is a serious financial burden on the average working commuter.
2) Like most other toll roads in the UFSA today, you can’t use cash or a debit/credit card. It’s EZPass only. So in addition to paying the outrageous tolls, as if to add insult to injury, you also have to pay for an EZPass transponder. Imagine that – paying an additional fee to be robbed and tracked/spied upon.
I shudder to think how much money that MD and D.C. (through federal highway subsidies) wasted to build a toll road that no one uses. By the time it even comes close to paying for itself (that will NEVER happen), TS will have HTF and the collapse will have come. Imagine the Romans building a major extension to the Appian way in, say, A.D. 460. That’s what MD did in building the ICC.
Back when I lived in NOVA – and worked downtown – I did my best Han Solo in the Falcon every single day violating HOV restrictions on I-66. It was a point of honor. And I never got busted. Fuck ’em! I paid for the damn road as much as any stinking car-full of bureaudrones!
Sweet. I always talked my way out of no insurancea and out of state plates for years by pulling a Chewbacca Talking a blue streak in agitated wookie noises usually gets them back to their deathstar cruises after a while. I am not the droid-rage they are looking for.
Statie stormtroopers will usually stick it out and puncture the bs bubble I’m inflating. They’re trained by Darth personally or get bigger Empire kickbacks, or something because they always make me fax in proof or else pay up sucka.
P.S. what Nazi made Lucas redo the Bar scene to hide the fact Hans shot the bounty hunter first, not killed him in self defense. Is nothing off their propaganda radar?
Don’t get me started over the bar scene. Lucas has for years steadily run off the rail and lately off the cliff. He’s certifiably insane!
Eric, I don’t know if you’ve been up to NoVA lately, but I-66 is absolutely to be avoided at all costs now. With all the expansion going on in the Tyson’s Corner area of McLean and Fairfax, it’s an absolute nightmare. I passed through the area during the summer on one of my business trips back East and am sooooo glad I moved the hell out of that area. I just can’t imagine even living there anymore and having any shred of humanity left in me.
As for dodging the HOV lanes on 66, it’s fairly easy to do if you’re outside of Arlington County, especially down in Prince William around Centreville/Manassas (or at least it WAS easy more than six years ago when I last lived in the area and made the commute toward Rome-on-the-Potomac). The closer you get to Arlington/D.C., though, the more bacon presence there is and the stiffer the fine if you get caught. I do agree, though: FUCK’EM! IT’S MY ROAD TOO AND I’LL DRIVE ON ANY PART OF IT I WANT TO!
I don’t doubt it!
We moved out in 2004 – but twice a year, we make a trip up to Fairfax (Vienna) to get our toofs cleaned (we really like our old dentist). We always have a 7 a.m. appointment. Leave our place around 2 (a.m..) to make it. The congealation begins almost as soon as you get on I-66 from I-81. By the RT. 29 exit, traffic is all bunched up the rest of the way in. But we can still slide in to our dentists before it stops completely by using the HOV lanes. About an hour later – around 8:30, we’re headed home the opposite direction (66 westbound) and the traffic is stopped in its tracks from the Rt. 123 exit all the way back to Gainesville. On either side of the highway, depressing clots of clustered-together McHomes – all exactly the same (or three of the same styles, every third one turned a different direction) on postage-stamp lots within eyesore range of the latest Lowes/Regal MultiPlex/Sports Authority mini-mall awfulness. Each McHome selling for probably $400k or more.
We always comment: Thank god that’s not us….
For the most part, I don’t travel the toll roads either. In the rare time I do, I pay cash, although I know that the spies are taking pictures of my car license plate.
I refuse to be identity jacked by money and power hungry toll road authorities by coughing up my LP and DL and my bank account to pay their stupid tolls.
They can all inhabit hell as far as I’m concerned.
Since the Illinois toll road authority increased the tolls on I294, the traffic on I94 has gotten worse. At least during my travel times. Which has oddly made the tolls worth it to avoid the hassle.
That’s the idea, Brent.
Here’s how the toll road scam works, boys and girls, libertarians and their opposite, idiots:
We’ll take Houston as an example.
Statist and Crony Capitalist Plan of Action:
1) build toll road with bonds issued at some favorable rate.
2) promise the world, especially for the children, that you’ll use the tolls to pay off the bonds, then only for maintenance on the roads and the rest will go to the skoooooollls.
3) pay off the bonds
4) fuck the serfs! Sell the road to a private offshore company like Cintra or NTTA. But don’t actually sell it, lease it–that way you can lie some more to the serfs.
5) call it a PPT–a “Public-Private Partnership” so anyone with two neurons to rub together can call it what it is–fascism
And here are the REALLY clever tricks:
6) neglect the non-toll roads until they’re pothole-ridden congested nightmares, forcing anyone with a decent car onto the toll roads you’re now getting handsome kickbacks from
So in this manner, WE build the roads, WE pay for them, and SOMEONE ELSE takes the profit and runs! Whoopee!
The corruption is so far gone that essentially the entire government is a criminal organization. Historically once it reaches this stage, there’s no turning back. They’re all in and they know it; if they don’t win, they’re prosecuted. So they’ll fight like cornered animals.
Prescient comments. There was a time I actually believed the shit they pumped out about “government working together with business”. Never did put two and two together and see it for what it was: FASCISM! (Damn them all to hell). And you’re absolutely right. When the theft and brazenness runs rampant even during the day then there is no turning back.
BEAUTIFULLY summarized, Methyl! What really makes my jaw drop in awe (and horror) is that it’s so obvious. You’d think this would only have worked once, that even the most brainless of the ovines would have learned their lesson, and that anyone who would have tried to pull it off a second time would’ve been tarred, feathered, and crucified. The fact that the sheeple have continued to be fooled by the same ruse, over and over and over again for the last 80-90 years, serves as a better indicator than anything else that this civilization (or what passes for it) is fucked. Done. Finished. Gone. Hopeless.
While true, the I94/I294 thing is strictly the government and its quasi-government entity the toll road authority screwing with us.
Only the skyway was ‘leased’ to a private company because the city of chicago owned it. The Illinois toll road authority is such a den of corruption and money for insider political types I cannot see someone getting the political power to pry it out of their hands and into the hands of some private company.
BTW the same thing applies to:
Sports Stadiums–man the Romans were amateurs compared to today’s psychopaths!
Look at the F1 track built in Austin. Ecclestone got his little playground at taxpayer expense–from which he’ll reap more money.
Those things ALWAYS, ALWAYS end up an albatross around the taxpayer neck.
@MoT and @liberranter–thanks for the kind words. I’m pissed off today and I’m not going to take it anymore.
This is a key strategy – one I have been advocating for some time now. If only… things such as force-feeding of transponders – and the TSA – and much else – could be done away with very quickly, if only enough of the people were willing to make a minor sacrifice… one that would be temporary and certainly come at no cost to them in terms of blood.
But, no.
They fly. They stand in queue like good “freedom loving” Americans and submit quietly to being groped and scanned and otherwise demeaned… because they just have to go to Disneyland this year.
They accept the transponders. Because it’s “easier” to get to work now.
Fuuuuhhhhhhhttttball. TeeeeeeVeee……
Freedom is sacrificed on the damn altar of “convenience.” I have no way to figure it except believe that all the flouridated water has done the trick, just as it did back in Germany in the 30’s. Mindless, blundering, blithering idiots drooling over football games like there’s nothing more meaningful to care about.
I ran across that friend-of-a-friend, a lawyer, a while back at the local pool.
Last time I talked to him we’d started an interesting 4th amendment conversation, and he brought up football. I asked him if he really thought that was more important than watching the Republic imploding.
Saw him again recently and before I’d said anything he asked if I’d “seen the game”. My reply was:
“I don’t know what ‘game’ you’re talking about. I grew up after I left my teens and now I’m worried my kids are growing up in a fascist hell-hole. Doesn’t it worry you that the country is totally fucked?”
He looked stunned for a second, then said,
“You’re always so negative, why don’t you lighten up?”
I walked away.
At this point, I’m adopting a new way of awakening people. If I don’t get a nibble, a glimmer of hope or interest right away, I move on. Most of them are too brain-damaged to save and you’ll just waste your time and get angry and bitter.
Find the ones that are ready and help them. Ignore the rest.
When next I go to the Houston area we should grab some brewskis. I can only imagine the conversation a fly on the wall would hear.
@MoT–
I’d like that. And by “fly on the wall” you mean your NSA spy device AKA cell phone…we’ll remove the batteries 🙂
“You’re always so negative, why don’t you lighten up?”
The national motto of the United States of Clovers. Can someone translate it into Latin?
Hi Liberrannter,
“The national motto of the United States of Clovers. Can someone translate it into Latin?”
Not so sure I can translate that for you, but I think the motto should be, “Si Quaeris Dominātionum Amoenam Circumspice”.
I haven’t taken Latin in more than 40 years.
I’m trying to cross-link two thoughts together here, perhaps others would find it interesting, especially those who have children:
On the one hand, I think I totally see the point here:
http://modernmarketingjapan.blogspot.com/2012/02/winning-at-bingo-and-winning-at-life.html
On the other hand, this ‘being positive’ outlook is a lot like the lawyer in methylamine’s encounter.
Is there a fine line between the two, and how does it all fit with perspectives such as Mogambo Guru’s, “We’re Freaking Doomed!!!!” (WFD) outlook? Is it a matter of ‘going John Gault’ vs. running in place, or something?
Just now I’m watching an old Robert Redford film. An old man is addressing the 1930’s New York Knights baseball team:
“Loosing is a disease. As infectious as bubonic plague… but curable”
Hi Michael. You say, “By the time people are adults out in the world, they’ve been mentally and emotionally implanted with artificial ideals such as subservience, servility, obedience, compliance, and silence.” That is the primary purpose of the government schools, and they perform it all too well.
OMG.. So true! I was talking to my daughter this evening at the dinner table. It’s one of the few moments of the day we really concentrate on talking. I always joke around with her and ask what she did at school that day etc. I asked if she sang any songs at school today and she said no at first. Then she remembered she did have music class today and did sing some songs. So I asked what she sang. All she could remember was singing a song about being respectful and some other rules crap. What the fuck! When I was a kid we sang good song in music class (most of which I still remember). She is singing some bullshit that is not worth even remembering. Hana is six years old and in first grade. As soon as the wife gets a job it’s back to private school for the kid!
Just curious, dom. If you don’t mind my asking, why not homeschool?
If SHTF as many People say it will, you will have to wind up doing it anyway.
Side note to webmaster:
I entered the word ‘clover’ into the Google search slot on EPA homepage and it seemed like most of the links didn’t work or were garbled.
I don’t know if that’s something you can fix or not, just thought you’d like to be aware of it.
Or maybe it’s just due to my old browser? Firefox 3.6?
Don’t mind at all. My wife is Japanese and doesn’t speak fluent English. Just so happen she was a English teacher in Japan for 14 years too. We have three primary reasons for not home schooling, at least for now:
1. Want Hana to have interaction with peers
2. Give her a chance to master English
3. Akiko doesn’t want to teach at home
Thanks for the letting me know about the search problem. I need to update some stuff on the old gallery software (that’s causing the messed up looking results). It’s always something!
Wife is native Japanese as well. How funny is that! From which part is she from?
Akiko and her family are from Nakatsu.
dom wrote: “1. Want Hana to have interaction with peers”
I saw a video from a homeschooled kid on LRC about “interacting with others” awhile back which pretty much dis’ed that whole notion but I couldn’t find the link at the moment. He said it just requires more effort, which is an invaluable skill. I think that’s a cop-out reason to not homeschool. Course it’s your own prerogative.
Perhaps you’d consider these bits? Just breeze through the titles and contemplate:
Homeschooling Archives
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/homeschooling-arch.html
Homeschooling and the Myth of Socialization
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/zysk1.html
Maybe I’m just typing into ether, but maybe it’ll stop someone from sending a child into co-ed prison Hell?
Also, thanks for the honest reply.
Clark, you have to either have the time to do it yourself from home, if you’re self employed, or have your significant other on board with it. I tried it, and failed, because the missus was too indoctrinated into the Japanese school mind-set. She could conceptually “see it” but had no faith in herself to actually do the deed. The kids languished and I had to ship them back into the system. I would have done it but then who was going to pay the bills? So you have to be firing on all cylinders in your household.
@DOM “Akiko and her family are from Nakatsu.”
Another Kyushu gal. Noriko if from Isahaya. I’ve been there, Nagasaki and Fukuoka, amongst other places.
I’ve been saying for a while now that the institution of school is the enemy of humanity.
It was organized on purpose that way. The Prussian system of education was copied and brought to the US to replace the one room school houses.
The Underground history of American Education by John Taylor Gatto lays it out.
Yes, Gatto’s book is brilliant and well worth reading. It appears to be out of print, but it’s available for free on line: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
It is masterful.
The miracle is that anyone manages to outgrow their conditioning. It is exactly like The Matrix. You’re asleep… but content. You have a sense that something’s not right, but it’s just a background feeling, or occasional uneasy thought.
But then one day something happens and you wake up. And your world will never be the same. Because you see the world for what it is. And now, all the people around you are like things. Automata. You try to wake them up, too – but most are utterly indifferent, or downright hostile. They like being in The Matrix, just as Cypher did…
YEAH CYPHER IS THE REAL PROBLEM. You could get used to agent smith, the machines that use you for power, the countless drones trying to kill you.
Does anyone eve know Iran had a major earthquake, that its 75 million people lost half the value of their savings because of sanctions.
Do they know Americans lost 40% of their wealth from 2007-2010. The war on terror and drugs. The Yankee north new yorkers and beltarians have declared a war on the whole world. They are Cortezing and carpetbagging every last nickel out of every befuddled yokel they can.
There squads run california, and other zones of fiscal holodomor.
Maybe Turkey is a safe haven? 20 million Istanbullians refuse to use credit or banks. Constantinople they used to call it. The eastern half of the roman empire that didn’t fall until the 1300s. Who knows where the shadow rulers really are. It really is impressive the way they keep 7 billion sheep in line, that’s for sure.
Right now I’m watching a comedy show on pay tv, and half the words are censored. How does the FCC get to censor non-public airwaves I wonder.
Their endgame is for everything to be public, and this world wide great depression is getting them closer everyday.
The more you can’t drive or fly, the more you can’t take their funny money into a free market and find out how worthless it has become.
@ Tor Munkov “Constantinople they used to call it. The eastern half of the roman empire that didn’t fall until the 1300s.”
Actually, it lasted until the middle of the 1400s — something I would never have known except that I have a friend who is something of an expert on the subject. Yes, the Roman Empire lasted until the Fifteenth Century! They still called themselves “Romans” too. Anyway, during one of our early conversations on the subject, my friend was telling me about Constantinople, and since I was just then reading about Austrian Economics, I asked him “what about their monetary system? How did they manage to maintain their system for 1000 years after the fall of Rome? I bet they must have had a stable monetary system!” So he did some research and yes, Constantinople apparently learned from the mistakes of Rome and instead of devaluing their coins to pay for warfare/welfare they instituted horrible sanctions against screwing with the amount of precious metals in their coins. Consequently, all during the Dark Ages of Europe, Constantinople maintained a healthy economy with tremendous trade and expert craftsmen. It wasn’t until the last 150 years or so that they began to (finally) debase their coins. Once that became acceptable, they were conquered within a few generations.
Thans for the correction. Great thing that fact checking is instantaneous on the net.
America is in the latter stages and starting to fall. In the 60s we had vehicle at very bottom of challenger deep and the ocean.
I believe a Roman armament engineer helped the ottoman sultan breech their defenses with a seige engine.The muslim sultans had sound money and paid better.
The dark ages emerge when every document without the word jesus or mohammed on it gets flushed down the memory hole. Good stuff, Jason.
Eric,
You’re turning into a veritable William Grigg here. Awesome article.
It’s a real problem that people are unable to theoretically take something out to it’s logical conclusion. By the time people are adults out in the world, they’ve been mentally and emotionally implanted with artificial ideals such as subservience, servility, obedience, compliance, and silence.
On a side note, not that this ruling will have much effect anyhow. It’s only a matter of time before all dollars become invalid as payment. Those holding FRNs will be just as bankrupt as those with electronic bank balances.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
They taking things out to their conclusion. Exactly what the German people said after WW2.
The gap in Germany of 1933 is the same gap between govt propaganda and reality you see in America starting in July of 1934. That’s the time from which all major industies became controlled by a production code administration.
Tivo some 1932 1933 1935 1936 movies and watch a few minutes of each. The early movies are clever witty women blacks rich poor everyone is full of what Ayn Rand called the sense of life.
The later movies are babyish clunkingly moralistics. Women only want to be mothers and stay home. Blacks talk in folksy gibberish and are always a chauffer or “in their place”.
If any actor steps out of the moral box he quickly ends up in the hospital, jail, or dead.
WWI, PROHIBITION, the fedderal reserve, stock market crash, and finally the laws that make it illegal to mention the govt and cronies as being the ones who left americans penniless.
American nazis were plenty busy shaking down central, south, carribean, and pacific america to make hitler look like an amateur.
Until we hold title to our wealth, and can speak to power we won’t be free.
Sad but true. Just check out those kids giving their outstretched “salutes” as they pledge to the flag and you’d be mistaken for believing it was Nazi Germany when in fact it was good ole ‘merkin youngins doin the deed. Also note how those pictures went down the memory hole until recently they were unearthed.
I witnessed something very disturbing the other week when I visited my grandson’s Christian school in the South. At assembly in the school’s cafeteria first thing in the morning, the kids all said the pledge of allegiance. That was bad enough, but that by itself wasn’t what disturbed me. What REALLY got my goat was when they said a pledge of allegiance to the Bible after the pledge of allegiance to the Fascist Cloth Idol.
What in the name of all that is holy are this school’s priorities? While I wasn’t surprised by the pledge to the Fascist Cloth, nor did I at all object to a pledge of allegiance to the Bible, the fact that the pledge of allegiance to a symbol of the State came FIRST is horrifying!
Well, there you have it, Liberanter. Their priorities are clearly bent. And that’s the sad thing with many of today’s “Good Americans/Christians” is they don’t see the hypocritical forest for the trees.
Two of my favorite movies are the pre-code and post-code versions of the Maltese Falcon. I think the actors are better in the later version but the earlier version has those pre-code qualities you refer to. It has more grit so to speak. Both are equally close to the book in their own ways.
I actually thought the Bogart version was some sort of ironic “noir-ish” comedy. Seriously.
It sounds like Bebe Daniels was good in the original, which became only allowed to be shown in the US in the late 60s, but otherwise the 41 version kicked its ass.
A 1936 VERSION – “Satan met a lady” is also said to be better than the original.
The pre code films aren’t just grittier. The better ones compare like a 69GTO to an 89ESCORT. Depreesion era actors tower above 1941. They were of a time of individual craftsmen, not a time of styles and studios cranking out pablum assemblages according to
Part 2: according to commitee approved formulas.Maltese looks to be one of the greats, Ill check it out. If you set youtube search to longer than 20 mins, you should find: Mary Astor , red dust, ladies love brutes, easy to love. Humphrey Bogart: Big city blues, love affair, the bad sister.
I prefer gritty reality to sing songy weepfests about old glory, cops, self-immolation, aloof to temptation, and lordy I’s loves my new pairs of goody two shoes massa. Musicals, war movies, and tapdancing seen in all 1935+ movies
Brigid gets banged, spade slams 2 bottles of hooch a day or why bother. Let the Nazi make their own Reichsfilmen.
Yes, gentlemen Florida is in beta test as a pleasent tropical interment camp. What is not included in the story above is that Hillsbourgh and Pinellas counties provide all of this personal information obtained illegally to the DHS Regional Intelligence Fusion Center (RIFC). Yes friends, every time you interact with agents of the state, or their contractors, you are being added to the data base. In fact, most of the analysts (also known as analists) in the RIFC are contractors as well. Once they turn on this machine the gird will track you everywhere. So what exactly does everyone expect the outcome of all this to be?
Picture the scene from The Godfather where Sonny Corleone is gunned down at the toll booth – only this time, the scenario happens in reverse.
We really are on a highway to hell and that highway is going to have a toll that FRN’s won’t even be acceptable payment.
When it’s my time, I’ll have 2 gold pieces on my eyes and take the boat instead.
The river Styx!
You know it’s truly pathetic that something like a $50 has become the NEW $20 and they treat it like kryptonite. Hell… just trying to make a sizable deposit into my account at my own damn bank and they wanted ID! On my own deposit slip! Now what kind of a scammer would go to the trouble of depositing two thousand and only ask for one hundred in return? Nuts, right?! That’s how crazy things have become.
Hell… just trying to make a sizable deposit into my account at my own damn bank and they wanted ID! On my own deposit slip!
This is why, in my little sideline business I have going, I accept cash only and this cash will NEVER see the inside of a bank.
A good heads up. Maybe that’s what I need to start doing on the side as well. Even barter my services.
Barter is totally the way to go. I’m an MS (and occasionally Linux/Unix) tech and when I moonlight I always offer barter whenever the customer has goods or skills I can use. Hard for the thieves to track down (for example) a trade of server repair for plumbing repair.
I also don’t take checks, even certified. I’ve had to explain to prospective customers many times that my day job pays me by check, and I’d have to be head-injured to voluntarily bump myself into a higher tax-bracket. Most of them seem to thoroughly get it, even the ones who proudly rep Red/Blue Team, which strikes me as an oddly self-destructive form of cognitive dissonance.. so pretty much par for the course as far as humanity is concerned.
Jay, you and I are on the same page – and in the same industry.
Best of success to you, my friend!
You just gave me an idea. Sorta like L. Neil Smith’s books, which tend to get too preachy for me, where people get paid in ounces of silver. I think I’ll just request payment in cash and immediately convert to silver or ask for the client to prepare ahead of time.
I’m trying to get payment in pre-1965 dimes, quarters, and half-dollars.
Good luck to me.
But a cash-only side business is the way we’re ALL going to have to go to survive inside Leviathan.
And happily, it will deprive them further of their life-blood.
Fuck them. And Fuck the troll toll operator with her fat jiggly jowls and nascent cancers eating her insides.
The real trick is fostering this idea within a community.
I wish I knew what I know now 10 years ago, rather than having begun to wake up only a few years ago. I never had a chance to ride the bubble (be locked into the hypnosis known as The American Dreamworld), and now I am struggling to figure out how to survive the incoming burst..
There’s going to be a bit about what People can do to survive financially on The Daily Bell soon. Perhaps you’d find it informative?
I expect it to be something worthwhile to read.
Meth,
Be careful with that one. A guy in Las Vegas was arrested for paying employees with silver and gold “legal tender”.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/las-vegas-woman-gets-prison-time-for-role-in-tax-evasion-scam-102938379.html
Here is the best part: “In early summer 2003, armed law-enforcement raided several Kahre business sites and workers’ homes. While most agents worked indoors collecting evidence, workers were held outdoors at gunpoint, in high heat at length, without shade or water.”
Sovereign Man had an article yesterday about paying for a car with $1k face value silver quarters.
I’ve read both those cases.
The guy in Vegas was actually paying them face value in silver–and “evading” taxes thereby.
I don’t mess with the IRS.
I read Sovereign Man’s article too, good stuff. That’s more what I’m talking about.
Consensual barter between individuals; with the bartered item being silver coins. Nothing more. Nothing to see here.
These are not the transactions you’re looking for.
Wait untill 2013 when there will be a 1% tax on all bank transactions and when you sell realestate there will be a 3.8% tax on the sale price. Get ready boys the revenuer is at the door and he wants to tax the animals and produce in the gardens.
“a $50 has become the NEW $20 ”
It’s more like the $100 note that is the new $20. What I was able to do in the ’80s with a roll of $20s now takes a roll of $100s. The fact that the $100 is the largest bill in production also shows that the PTB want to limit our use of cash.
In the 1920s, it was common practice to use $1,000 notes for large transactions. A commercial buyer could easily conceal enough cash to make a large purchase of goods for resale or for a real estate purchase since $1,000 was a considerable amount of money.
Today, $1,000 won’t cover much of a wholesale purchase of goods for your retail business, and wouldn’t cover even a broker’s fee on the smallest commercial real estate deal. Carrying even as little as $5,000 gives you a roll that isn’t easy to hide. That’s one of the reasons that young thugs in the urban drug trade adopted the baggy, oversized style of jeans and shirts, to conceal rolls of cash and the pistols that go with carrying cash in an illegal market.
The same is true of the adoption by outlaw bikers of the leather vest with inside pockets for cash and handguns. Cash must be outlawed so our “leaders” can win the drug war, don’tcha know.
I think this is exactly why we haven’t seen the introduction of a larger denomination bill, such as $500 or $1000. The buying power of the dollar certainly warrants it; a cashless society does not. In addition, a bigger bill would make inflation visible to the public, which must not happen.
Grant –
You must mean the re-introduction of $500’s and $1000’s. They were printed by the government up until 1945 and were withdrawn from circulation in 1969 under the guise of cutting into “organized crime”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_States_currency
I’d like to see these bills returned to circulation, simply because I believe that we should be entitled to privacy in all of our financial transactions. Apparently, our overlords do not feel the same way.
Currency inflation is at nearly 1100% since 1973.
Vietnam war accelerated the rapid growth of currency inflation. And subsequent wars etc., have only added to the situation.
You can see the inflation of currency by just looking at vehicle prices for the first few years before the end of the war, and after the end of the Vietnam war.
You can see the dollars inexorable inflationary climb in the prices of the Vega. And keep in mind, that GM held the price down on the Vega to promote sales, so it is not the best example.
’71 Vega_ Prices-2,090-2,328
’72 Vega_ Prices-2,060-2,285
’73 Vega_ Prices-2,087-2,323
’74 Vega_ prices-2,505-2,976
’75 Vega_ prices-2,786-3,244 (Cosworth 5,916)
’76 Vega_ prices-2,984-3,450 (Cosworth 6,066)
’77 Vega_ Prices-3,249-3,745
You are so right, Tre. And don’t forget that the Vietnam war coincided with the war on poverty and the space program, both of which consumed great quantities of money. The government severed the link of money to silver in 1965, and then in 1971 was forced to discontinue paying foreign countries gold for US dollars. When Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, this country effectively declared bankruptcy.
After that, the dollar had no more connection to any precious metal and became a purely fiat currency. Since then inflation has been virulent, except for a few years when Volcker was chairman of the Fed. I’m sure you remember the interest rates of the early 80s. Great for savers, awful for borrowers.
On a related matter, the feds changed the way inflation is measured in the 80s, and again in the 90s. The official numbers vastly understate inflation. This has the effect of limiting cost of living increases (e.g., for Social Security); it also leads to overstating GDP growth by reducing the deflator. If you go to shadowstats.com, the numbers are shown the way they used to be calculated. If you take the numbers from that site, the US has been in recession since 2001, except for one quarter of growth in 2004.
Incidentally, according to the shadowstats numbers, unemployment is now over 22% and inflation is running close to 6%. Again, these numbers are computed according to the old methodology, which was used before the government realized it needed to hide the facts from the public.
Thanks ‘Mike’ for fleshing out, some of the details/salient points of the pre-history of our current dollar/inflation situation.
Would liked too have given a more comprehensive outline of the modern history of inflation, but the time I allow myself on this site during the day is limited, due to the proactive active application of less stressful activities…fun stuff.
Checking out a 67′ Mustang, notch coupe for a possible Trans Am replica project, working on the Olds Speedster, and getting a hike in, have personal priority.
V-8 Mustangs are a lot more fun then contemplating our F–ked economic situation.
http://medford.craigslist.org/cto/3334991548.html
Reg; “and inflation is running close to 6%” As you well know, Mike, we export our inflation along with our jobs.
Regards ..Tre
Here’s another in re inflation:
My 1976 Trans-Am had a sticker price of about $5,400 when new.
I plugged this into the government’s own inflation calculator. Result? $21,961.
So, today, you’d need about five times as much Fed Funny Money to purchase the same car.
But has the paycheck of the average American increased by a similar amount?
That’s all under the guise of fighting the war on counterfeiting. Want to have a little fun? When you finally get to the point of being sick of getting service charged to death and close your account, ask for the money in cash. Then, ask to borrow the teller’s counterfeit detector pen and check *every single bill* with it. I did this with my account and my wife’s account back when Washington Mutual was circling the drain and both times, the teller acted as if it were a personal insult.
I’d be tempted to ask for all of my money in pre-1965 coinage. To add insult and aggravation to injury, I’d also be very specific about the combinations of coin denoninations that I wanted the cash in AND I’d take my sweet time in sorting through each coin roll to make sure that EACH AND EVERY coin was of the pre-1965 mintage that I asked for. No slipping worthless slugs on me, you thieving frauds!
“ask to borrow the teller’s counterfeit detector pen and check *every single bill* with it.”
No shit, I like that idea.
“the teller acted as if it were a personal insult.”
Now they know how we feel too, eh?
Note to webmaster:
It would be nice if the comments were color coded or something so I could breeze through this thread and read the new comments.
And wow was this ever an interesting comment thread to keep up on.
That is getting to be common on this website.
I’d like to steal that pen. Try it on every newspaper, schoolbook, legal document, institutional religious document. Ann Romney’s “I’m a coal miners daughter” face. Michelle Obama’s hairy ‘”I am not a shaved wookie” arms and shoulders.
The stories of our founders, our parents, our neighbors. Its all a bunch of countersheit bathroom scrawlin hi infidelity white lie noise that not even Hilary Dennis Rodham Penis Implant would believe after a billion oval orifice bong hits while reciting that “I did not have counterfeit relations with this currency”
That is quite possibly the most hilarious diatribe I’ve ever read! Thanks, I needed a little humor.
Eric – those things are all over Texas. Here, though, if you don’t have a transponder they just snap a photo of your plates and send you a bill. As to what they’re fighting for, Remy sums it up nicely in a song:
Don’t remind me! I was visiting friends in the DFW area and accidentally managed to get onto a section of toll road that was not clearly marked nor did it have any booths. Upon returning to the northwest weeks later I received a letter with a damn bill inside demanding payment! I said to myself? “What the hell?!” Where did this happen? Seems they do indeed snap the pics. I wrote a long letter, not that I thought anyone gave a shit, telling them it was just another reason I was glad I left the area.
Shouldn’t have written tha letter, MoT. Unless it’s sent certified mail and you sign for it, there’s no way for them to prove you got the bill, and therefore you aren’t liable for it, so tear it up and throw it in the trash. At least, that’s what I’ve been told, I’m not a lahyur donchaknow. I plan on doing that anyhow, if I ever get such a ticket.
Government doesn’t work that way. Government assumes you got the letter and ignored it. It then proceeds to the next stage.
Guys who have been hit by the Kafkaesque child support system without recourse—after the system claimed it sent a notice of intent to collect unless contested within 30 days, but the targeted man never received that notice—will affirm exactly what BrentP said. The system assumes you got it, and it’s impossible to prove a negative.
ekrampitzjr,
I’ve read countless stories now of about the same facts. Most are de facto fraud on the part of the woman; some are honest accidents, such as a man with the same name being held liable for a child he couldn’t have fathered. (Had never been to the state prior.)
However, I find it to be just another glaringly obvious slap in the face to all Americans:
How is it possible to decide a letter is appropriately delivered, when it is sent to (a) the wrong address; (b) the wrong person, (c) a residence the individual has not resided in for some time (years), or (d) someplace the person NEVER LIVED? Or even a FICTIONAL address, as in doesn’t exist?
Unbelievable what we have ALLOWED to continue. But the child support / alimony scam shows us where things will go, very soon, for the rest of us, just as the inner-city ghetto shows us where the family will go.
But it was just those worthless DEADBEAT DADS, dontcha know….
(Note the campaign to demonize the fathers – most of whom were UNABLE to pay, for whatever reason. Readers are free to research on their own, but don’t be surprised to find people ordered to pay over 100% of their earnings. Further, licenses and the like will be cancelled to create an “incentive” to pay. Because the cabbie who can’t afford to pay child support NOW, will be so VERY MUCH MORE motivated – when he cannot earn an income at all.)
We are now allowing the demonization of veterans; fathers; divorced men; single men; whites; Christians; heterosexuals; “The Rich” (Including, believe it or not, probably EVERYONE on this board – if you bring in more than $70K yourself, JUST EARNINGS, you’re “elite” by the tax codes; yet the poverty line is just under $30K, IIRC.)
We NEED the reset button. It’s not OPTIONAL, it’s ESSENTIAL.
Imagine we dodder on for another 20-50 years. What will we do when people have implanted computer devices? Do you actually believe people will be TOLD about it ahead of time? Or will you find out your child has been injected with a chip, and delivered into your arms in the hospital with an implanted device – “for the child’s safety”, to prevent kidnapping?
And how do you imagine a mother will react, when told the rate of hospital errors is 25% or so?
In that time, how long before houses are built with a scanner at the door, to read those implanted chips – that don’t exist?
Minority Report, anyone? (Scanners are now able to read the retina at a distance of 3 meters. Roughly 9 feet. think of what will happen when you can’t go anywhere without retinal scanners, and a GPS RFID chip. But it’ll be a “crime-free” society, of course… )
It’s coming regardless. What we can AND MUST do is decide who will control the technologies. THEM or US. David Brin wrote the transparent Society about the surveillance society in 1998 to warn us where we were heading.
He was dismissed, essentially, as a kook. The simple example was surveillance cameras.
If police have the only access to the surveillance cameras, they’ll be better able to find criminals and imprison them. (Whether they’ll actually DO it is another question.)
OTOH, if CITIZENS have access to the cameras, there will be less CRIME, because the citizens can see bad situations and avoid being in them – thus reducing crime, and the need for police.
We know what’s happened.
I saw a percentage on CopBlock, not going to look it up – but some city out west outfitted the police with body cams, and the rate of brutality charges went down severely, like 50%. The Copsuckers over there claim this is because most charges are fabricated; their kind is incapable of understanding that the ACTS may have changed, because the cops are now ON RECORD while on shift. No HOPE of catching a video from an ATM Across the street, or a security camera on the building – the cop is WEARING the camera. “A” glitch – maybe.. Multiple glitches? Not even a judge could manage THAT. There’d be riots, especially if the “victim” was (Any race other than white).
Circling it back: The marginalized “Deadbeat dads” are beginning to get the word out: They’re not deadbeats, they’re living hand to mouth quite often – income is below the poverty level. Paternity testing is illegal. (Exaggerating – there are attempts to make it illegal.) You’re notified if the notice of parentage goes to an address you never lived at – for a child that CANNOT be yours. And the clock to challenge the claim starts from when you’re “notified,” not when you actually find out. And the woman isn’t punished if she’s caught out in a lie, either. For that matter, it’s too damaging to the child for the claimed father to stop paying, as well. And you’re not likely to get a REDUCTION in child support, even if you lose your income…
Now you’re telling me it’s going to be applied to public tender?
Skip gold and silver, pay it in lead and bloodshed.
—
*: One thing about this story which could be made clearer: It’s a PRIVATE group collecting tolls on PUBLIC roads. Some might not get that.
If it were a private road, the argument would still stand – because of what legal currency is supposed to be: Good for payment of all debt, public and private. The Coin of the Realm. We don’t usually get into the metaphysics of money, if you well – that it’s a medium for exchange of value. Like X in all those algebra problems so long ago.
However: If a PRIVATE entity owned the road, and DEMANDED payment in steel pipe, say – the government would descend like locusts, strip the private individual of everything, and quite possibly kill them in the process of destroying everything they had. All for the crime of “counterfeiting” (Guessing that would be the charge, as it was applied to someone who minted silver into “coins” for a while – giving only the weight, telling people the coins had no value – only a silver purity. He went to prison.)
But the FRNs declare – backed by government guns – that they can be used to pay any debt.
Ridiculous, really: A valueless piece of paper can be used to buy gold from us. But we cannot go and demand gold from the Fed Reserve – that (by itself) is criminal.
I cannot put my head far enough up my own ass to see their point of view – NOR can I understand why NO ONE will actually DEAL WITH these traitors. No one even TALKS about it publicly.
Americans will get the government they deserve – very soon, now.
Because they’ve ignored what is going on, and turned a blind eye to what they are creating.
Because they think they’ll get something for nothing – and Someone Else will pay the bill, later.
Any MEN left in this country? Or are we all a bunch of pussies?
Oh, the cost is too high….
And you don’t care that the cost is only going to go up?
Oh, OK.
It is human nature to take the “easy way.” If we allow that base nature to continue much longer, we won’t have the option to say no – to anything. It won’t be “the machines” that plug us into a matrix; it will be US, plugging OURSELVES in – because, “it’s easy.”
As someone said a while back (Carlin, maybe?) – We’re all niggers now.
Woot! Funny and sad at the same time. I’ll have to bookmark that one.
Damn.(shakes head)
Rather this curse ,Chris:
“Damn those Marxists/socialists/communists/feminists!”
The M O T H E R I N G / C O N T R O L L I N G / S P Y I N G
nature in Leftism is building this anti-liberty network of
unelected masters (( see Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler )).
If you’re able to get through the God-/Bible-oriented
view of America’s founding, you’ll be stunned to
learn the extent to which Marxists had penetrated and
influenced America’s political/social organizations in
the early 1800s, to eventuate today’s very bad out-
comes. Read/study:
“Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists”
(( see Amazon.com )).