12 Jun Gun Free Zones: Death Abides and Government Sponsored Abattoirs by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: The national political campaign continues to demonstrate every day why I don’t vote nor think any headway whatsoever can be gained for any notion of individual liberty and freedom.

We’ve settled in to our new compound and things are proceeding nicely so my writing frequency will increase back to its fortnightly scribbling.

G3 (gold, guns and groceries) becomes more important by the day. -BB

A nightclub was attacked in Orlando, FL this morning leaving nearly 49 dead and a number injured, who knows what these figures will be in the next week. One man with a gun(s) did this. Just one.

It just so happened to be a gay club. But it could have been an octogenarian bingo party or teen rave, the venue may have relevance if it turns out the shooter was motivated by some variation on a human software virus called religion.

I despise analysis of news cycles if they are less than 72 hours old because the facts are fluid and the local authorities are still floating their interpretation of events to benefit their agenda with their media lapdogs in tow.

Here’s what we know and this is subject to change.

Omar Mateen is an American citizen born in New York in 1986 to Afghan parents with a FL issued Concealed Carry Permit and a “guard card” for security guards in the same state. He has been investigated by the FBI an indeterminate number of times. Wait for the authorities to start backtracking and attempting to cook up stories to explain all of the events that led him to legally purchase an handgun and long gun in the past few days.

And a member of the Democratic Party.

And ISIS.

I am linking to the National Parrot Radio site to assure the readers that I am being fair and balanced. NPR will broadcast what the government tells them to much like Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri), Fred Kaltenbach and Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars) during the War to Save Josef Stalin. Whatever swill you hear there will be sure to twist the facts and narrative to advance forward the gun prohibitionist standard.

Not only was it a gun-free restriction zone in the club leaving all the patrons unarmed, much like the popular free-fire zones like government buildings and schools but it apparently had an off-duty Orlando Sheriff’s Deputy in the club. If he is anything like his brethren on the street, he was most likely conveniently away during the shooting to avoid any harm to himself characteristic of the cowardly mindset that informs most police behavior in America today. It appears the Orc collective waited three hours before they moved in but there are literally hundreds of bullet pockmarks apparent on the building and no accounting for the direction the rounds traveled (toward the club).

Where is the cell phone and camera footage from the occupants of the building during and after the shootings took place?

I’m waiting for the usual suspects to crawl out of their gutters and start mewling and caterwauling for “common sense” weapons control and more bans because prohibition and heavy regulation has worked out so well for the rest of the pathologies the government has thought so vital like commerce, illegal vegetation, food and drugs. The whole raft of wildly successful programs sponsored by your betters in Mordor on the Potomac to improve everyone’s quality of life and keep us safe. I am certain the loyal Generals McChrystal and Petraeus will be able to bathe in the blood of the dead to pull the heartstrings of the usual suspects to press for more weapons prohibitions and restrictions.

The cold hard fact is that if more than one person had a gun, this murderer would literally been stopped dead in his tracks but the government will do everything it can to dispel that notion and derail that narrative because once people realize that the trillions stolen from them yearly doesn’t even assure something as basic as the ability to survive an attack, the man behind the curtain quickly reveals what a shabby charlatan he is.

Plenty of other commentators will opine on the finer points of what happened, how it transpired, what drove the young man to such extreme behavior and what ingenious programs the mandarins can devise to ensure it never happens again until your eyes bleed.

Want a common thread? All mass murders take place in places that actively discourage the unregistered and atomistic carrying of weapons. The government enables the conditions that permit mass murder to take place (a rare enough event in the first place). The only solution is unfettered and unregulated access to small arms for the entire population in America.

The state always wins in the aftermath by convincing unarmed people that if the right people were near and the regulations more intrusive, such things would never happen. Yet the weapons prohibition regime in France is demonstrably totalitarian from a gun owners’ perspective and the slaughter was formidable in the Paris attacks 13 November 2015 and Belgium this year. A massacre enabled by the worst elements of society, government.

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28 May Memorial Day is a Fraud: The True Meaning is Worse by Bill Buppert

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Publisher’s Note:  I published variation of this before last November and it certainly rings true for yet another holiday during the year when we celebrate the use of war and violence to advance the agenda of the American Federal government around the globe.  We are asked to bow our heads in honor of the dead and wounded who gave their service for freedom.  Call me a skeptic.  Individual citizens have never been in graver danger of being fined, kidnapped, caged, maimed and killed by their own government for the most banal of violations or infractions against the imperial power that has wrapped its tentacles around every living soul in the land of the free.  The export of extraterritorial violence does not make a country free, it puts every inhabitant in the hazard as the entire planet has factions enraged, women and children savaged and murdered and entire religious sects chosen for special military attention.

Full disclosure: I am a retired Army officer so I have been there and done that at neo-imperialist shit-pits around the globe.

In this day in 1937, ten innocents Americans were gunned down in cold blood by badged and costumed Orcs in Chicago. Same as it ever was.

Since 1775, there have been approximately 1.35 million deaths and total US casualties of approximately 2.8 million. The deaths could fill a lake with about 1.7 million gallons of blood which could fill a city swimming pool that was 30 feet deep and 275 feet at each side. The deaths on the other side in the belligerent camp are exponentially larger by any standard when once examines the history.

In essence not only are we asked to memorialize conflicts that always manages to strengthen the government’s power on the other side, we are exposed to a constant drumbeat of protecting “our” freedom yet no existential threat to the USSA has existed since the cessation of hostilities with the UK in 1814.

The celebration of Memorial Day should not be about the soldiery, it should be a mass wake and reflection on the untold millions of innocents detained, kidnapped, injured, napalmed, fire-bombed, incinerated, shot, mutilated, tortured and murdered by the barbaric and naked grasping of the American central government for ever-increasing power and control at home and abroad.

Those acres of tombstones are also a fitting symbol to the state of liberty over time in America as a result of the obedient slaves marching to the drumbeat of expanding government…forever. War is nothing more than a dispute between plantation owners who quizzically and cleverly get the Helots to spill their blood to build heavier chains and more effective manacle systems.

A discomforting thought: Many people on this day insist that we should honor the dead and maimed because they thought the crusade they were on was righteous. This is precisely the attitude of many people when it comes to the tsunami of cops abuses on US soil; the badged political social workers are simply doing what they think is right.

There are many heroes in these conflicts like the young helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson Jr., who positioned his bird between unarmed Vietnamese villagers and an American patrol to protect the innocents from further bloodshed at My Lai.

The only just war is one fought on your soil to defend your own soil. -BB

“Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service” or “thanks for protecting our freedom.”

What!  I hear this familiar refrain again and again every November.  I am appalled whenever this unthinking salutation is proffered.

I am a retired career Army officer and like USMC General Smedley Butler before me, I find these sentiments to be hogwash.

The only service rendered was to the American political power structure in the dishonorable hands of the Democrats or Republicans; the former, despite their protestations to peace, have gotten America involved in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Starting with the shameful expropriation of the Mexican territory from 1846-48 to the War of Northern Aggression from 1860-65; the United States went into hyper-colonial overdrive in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands and has not stopped since. The entire history of American arms on Earth has been a shameful and expansionist enterprise culminating in the first ever post-WWII (the Japanese attack on American territories in the Aleutians during the War to Save Josef Stalin and the minor coastal skirmishes in Oregon) attack on American state soil in 2001.  I am frankly astonished at the length of time it took for a substantive attack of any kind to be initiated on American soil with the breadth, ferocity and long sordid history of American mischief and mayhem abroad.

The sheer number of military expeditions the US has embarked on over time is breathtaking.  One worthy notes there have been 234 military expeditions from 1798-1993.  Another posits 159 instances of the use of United States armed forces abroad from October 1945 through December 2006.

“This list does not include covert actions and numerous instances of US forces stationed abroad since World War II, in occupation forces, or for participation in mutual security organizations, base agreements, and routine military assistance or training operations.”

Good God, if I were a Martian who landed on Earth ten years ago and found myself attending government schools, to include college, and watching television for any additional cultural education,  I would not be aware of any of this.  The constant drumbeat emanating from the State is the Orwellian chorus about America making the world safe for freedom and liberty and never using force abroad except in self-defense.  The history proves otherwise.

America, next to Rome in the Western world, ranks as one of the world’s most aggressive nation states when one examines the evidence.  A country sheltered from the tempestuous and constant warring on the European continent by one ocean and the turbulence in Asia by another ocean yet it simply cannot mind its own business nor resist the temptation to maim and murder abroad for expansion of political power and control whether for mercantile or colonial aspirations.

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21 May Short But Cogent

13 May Enemies Foreign and Domesticated: The Feminization of American Males By Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: So Trump is the nominee, I had my money on Cthulhu in a just universe but Trump will do. This is the same government supremacist party that nominates such worthies as Dole, McCain and Romney and elects Democrat analogs like the Busheviks. If it destroys the GOP, the party had a good run for hundred and fifty years helping to create the largest government the planet has ever had the misfortune of hosting.

I am still convinced that Bernie Sander is every one of these scoundrels on truth serum, they just don’t have the stones of that totalitarian gasbag.

Moving and unpacking continues apace along with all the attendant relocation time distractions that interrupt normal life. I am hoping to be done in the next thirty days so I can get back to a more frequent writing schedule. –BB

The difference between males and men is accountability, responsibility and honor. The latter is possessed of these qualities while the former flees from it. Like all complex problems, a number of vectors inform the root causes and consequences.

Men tend to take their responsibilities and accountability pretty seriously even to the point of a moral hazard that forces them into failure. Consequences aren’t always good but honor should always be intact.

One of the frequent questions I am asked in speeches and interviews is the cosmic question of what is to be done as if a shooting war or revolution will set everything right for which the historical precedent process the opposite. The few humans who accept abolition as the right philosophical perspective with their fellow man are often expected to give some sage wisdom that strikes the sword to dash the Gordian knot that is the ubiquitous human chattel system called politics.

It all begins at the atomistic level and if you have children and they attend a government school, you have failed fundamentally. I realize that convenience and the conventional wisdom informs so many of these decisions but a cursory examination of first principles would reveal that statist reeducation camps are the mainstay of creating and sustaining the global gulag systems that go by other names whether towns, counties states or nations.

Here in Arizona, we have yet another initiative on the ballot for dolts dim enough to believe the government-media complex drumbeat to give more money to these wretched school systems that miraculously turn formerly human individuals into brain-deadened chattel with the critical thinking skills of a cactus and political followership traits that would put a smile even on the dour Josef Stalin. I find that conservatives are just as bad as liberals in thinking that government is the best and brightest for delivering the most fundamental services.

Imagine if you will that in the 1930s, RedDR had considered food so important, he nationalized all food production from farm to grocer. Fast forward to today and one is buying rotting and diminished quantities of food from the local Venezuela Vittles or Collectivist Co-op government grocery store staffed by DMV trained customer service representatives after you’ve waited in lines for three hours for a stale loaf of bread, cat/dog food and birdseed (to attract the extra meat staple to augment your ration card losses).

A wet dream for Bernie Sanders.

Again, first principles.

The empirical history of state-run schooling is a direct relationship to more dollars equating to an even greater instupidation of the students and the increasingly intellectual imbecility of the esteemed teacher caste. The moral case would demonstrate to most thinking parents that surrendering their progeny to the care of a government facility for most of the child’s waking hours staffed by union-led dimwits in the classroom would alarm even the most jaded and lazy mothers and fathers. No government school ever in North America has improved scholarship and erudition with more money pumped into the abyss.

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19 Apr Freedom Betrayed: The Constitution is Lexington’s Tombstone by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: 19 April is the 241st^h anniversary of the “shot heard ‘round the world” at Lexington and Concord. The British regulars who started the fracas were following an age-old government tradition of seizing powder, munitions and property for a pretentious King who had assumed such wide distribution of the tools of resistance should be available only to the government-approved groups such as soldiers despite the danger on the frontier. We celebrate that time of defiance against tyranny when for sixteen years (1775-1791), all thirteen colonial provinces and the thousands of rural polities that existed outside or alongside the framework enjoyed a freedom they had not previously had; unfortunately after 1791 they would become enslaved once again under the totalitarian doomsday machine known as the Constitution. The lobster-backs and British taxing regime would be replaced by a domestic variety of even more extreme virulence whose sole safety mechanism was a constant western diaspora trying to escape the clutches of the “Republic”. By the middle of the 19th century, all the pieces were in play to seal the deal and Lincolnian project buried the Second American Revolution under hundreds of thousands of corpses to let freedom ring.

The whitewashed history since then has lionized the inauguration of the divorce from the United Kingdom on this day and mistakenly links these events to all the “freedom” enjoyed under the Constitution. The Federalist coup in 1787 that re-established an English-style yoke of central planning, national taxation and slight tinkering with indentured servitude to a kinder and gentler tax and regulatory apparatus did no more grant individual freedom than the Romans gave to conquered lands.

I won’t belabor the point here as I have done this in previous essays and the resistance commentariat has taken up the cudgel with aplomb and covered it adroitly.

The Declaration of Independence, whether penned by Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, is as elegant a jeremiad against tyranny as has been written. The relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution is the same as the one between the crucifix and the vampire. One cannot be consonant with the other because their aspirations are antithetical to the opposing aspirant. As the brilliant Lysander Spooner would opine: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

Captain Parker commanded the militia this day for an idea that was smothered and crushed by the Federalist coup in 1787.

When you look around on this day in this time at the minimum security (for now) Club Fed that is America, ask yourself what Parker would think. Everything you see (and don’t see in the surveillance state that surrounds you) is a product of the glorious Constitutional Republic that Spooner described so splendidly.

As an Appleseed Instructor and Shoot Boss on extended sabbatical, part of the instruction in this extraordinary marksmanship program was a gripping retelling of the Three Strikes of the Match that led to the divorce proceedings with George III and started the First American Revolution. While I don’t share all the goals of the program hence the extended leave of absence, the telling of this ripping yarn has no match. I regret you can’t hear this from a seasoned instructor but the reading can be compelling.

For those who wish further elucidation, I recommend Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty and Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride. The two books will lead to many more books to better understand the hoodwinking you have suffered through government schooling and the attendant media apparatchiks who reinforce the mewlings of the mind laundries. These books will lead to better understanding the modest but brilliant interregnum when the North American Confederation was free excepting the large number of indentured servants and chattel slaves. But the Constitution would remedy this by nationalizing the former and codifying the latter. The destruction of individual liberty would begin apace.

You can make sure Parker’s sacrifice, he would die in September of that year, was not in vain.

Reflect and remember this day should force you to think on the state of your chains, whether you acknowledge them or not.

See you at the Green Dragon Tavern.

Resist. –BB

The First Strike of the Match

It’s 19 April, 1775. In Massachusetts Colony, the times were hard. The Colonial government had been abolished, and a military governor, General Thomas Gage, controlled Boston under martial law. Boston was practically a ghost town. The Port Act had seen to that, as the port had been closed to all traffic for months. The town slowly died without commerce, and many of those remaining in town relied on the kindness of outsiders to acquire food and necessities. Troops destroyed buildings and their contents for fire wood. Disease was rampant. The King was bent on breaking the radicals and bringing the colonies back in line, where they would pay dearly in taxes and subjugation to the motherland, and he was close to doing it.

The precedent had been set. In order to subjugate the colonies, England would have to disarm them. The colonies had a long standing custom for militia, and the militia was armed. The most expedient method of disarmament was to take their ammunition. Gunpowder was typically stored in a specially built powder house for safety and security and drawn for the militia when needed.

It was a simple matter to march in and take the colonists powder supply, and they had indeed done it before. In September of 1774, they had marched swiftly into Cambridge and carted off 250 half barrels of powder, hauling them back triumphantly to Boston.

This had so alarmed the colonist that with 24 hours there were nearly 30,000 men on the march to Boston, hearing rumors that the Brits intended to burn and shell the town. The incident ended without bloodshed, but General Gage, penned up in Boston with barely 3,000 troops had been so frightened that he asked the crown for an additional 20,000 men.

Paul Revere swore that this would never happen again, that they would not be taken by surprise, and instituted the Committee of Observation, an elaborate spy network throughout the colony. Then they began to smuggle arms and powder and hide them in various remote locations. They had even stolen four brass cannon right out from under Gage’s nose, a theft not taken lightly by General Gage.

Then in December, Paul Revere had ridden more than 20 hours straight, through a blinding blizzard, to warn the colonists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that a British patrol was on the way by ship to confiscate their powder and ball. The Redcoats were met by a band of militia who raised the drawbridge across the river and simply taunted them. After a short skirmish, the Brits marched back to their ships empty handed this time. But the failure stung the pride of the British Army, and they yearned for revenge.

Now the stage was set for another such raid. This time to Concord where they would have the added honor of capturing not only the provincial government, which had been meeting there, illegally, but also perhaps the traitorous Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were destined, they thought, to swing from the gallows in England. There was also rumored to be quite a stockpile of war materiel stored there. (more…)

18 Apr Worse Than Zero Redux: Taxes and Barbarism by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Here we are in another deadline for paying the king and country their ”fair share” of honest wages and wealth earned and resources capitalized. Much like the burgeoning welfare state comprising one third of total government spending in 1900 on Union pensions from Lincoln’s bid to crush the entire nation under a Hamiltonian boot that foreshadowed the Bolshevik revolutions in the twentieth century.

 Taxes advance barbarism and not civilization. They promote the notion that death and taxes isn’t necessarily the right sequence if you stand up and refuse to be robbed. All government is based solely on hitting and stealing and rationalizing all forms of anti-social behavior and legalizing piracy and plunder and calling it an enterprise for your own good. Government are nothing more than sophisticated brigand bands with bad music, colored rags flapping in the breeze and large bands of armed thugs with a license to kill.

 We all pay at the peril of our children and grandchildren as we feed the beast that makes life more and more centralized, regulated and less than optimal.

 Just a note that I quote Reagan for one of his few sober thoughts on economics because while he talked a good game, he was no more fiscally conservative than any of the Presidents following Eisenhower and succeeding him in office in 1989. I will give Reagan his due for reducing income tax rates from a high of 70% to 28% but no closer to zero than my comfort zone for taxation. Eisenhower managed to reduce government spending per GDP by two percentage points, not Reagan who spent absurd amounts of other people’s money and popularized deficit spending for the voter mobs. I highly recommend The Great Deformation by former Reagan advisor David Stockman for a fairly thorough analysis of the fiat currency and bankster chaos that has consumed the American economy for the better part of a century. I don’t agree with all of Stockman’s conclusions and his continuing faith in the “right” regulatory regime is quaint but illusory in application.

 I’ll be back to more regular essay production as soon as our moving and unpacking is complete in our new location.

 Happy tax day, Helots. -BB

“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”
― Ronald Reagan

Taxation is theft and the acquisition of other people’s resources with a velvet glove backed by a mailed fist. It is simply one of the many ways in which the state brutalizes and impoverishes its tax cattle on a daily basis. Despite the government-media complex insistence that the tax rate in America is tolerable if not fair, anything above zero is morally wrong if the robbed don’t agree implicitly and consensually to the mugging for whatever fantastic services the state proclaims it provides.

The French aren’t the only ones to achieve a 100 percent tax rate, they’re just more blunt about it.

So I want to destroy a myth, I want to show you through sheer numbers and data that the state in America has a tax rate that exceeds 100% to which the normal American having had a proper government education will insist that is impossible.

I’d like to excise some of the population that is obviously at this point. Now the tax rate for incarcerated Americans is exactly 100% since their lives have been stolen in total. The tax rate on certain targeted marijuana businesses in the US under IRS code 280E are taxed in excess of 80% (some approaching 100%).

“I believe that the feds extend the drug war through 280E,” said Cornelius. “If (the federal government) can’t put them out of business legally when voters are mandating these businesses to move forward, it’s very easy to put them out of business financially. A lot of times, instead of paying a tax rate that should be 30 to 40 [percent], they are paying rates between 80 or 90 percent. I even have a client right now that is paying more than 100 [percent] effective tax rate.”

Apart from the sheer moral hazard and absolute immorality of the aforementioned cases, I would suggest that all Americans pay an effective tax rate that exceeds 100% even though that beggar’s belief and rational thought but we are talking about the government.

Direct taxation in America on the Helots residing within and without the US and its territories is enormous and takes on many tangential impacts. “The United States is the only country that taxes its citizens’ worldwide income, even when those citizens live indefinitely abroad.”

An ordinary US subject will pay Federal, state (43) and/or city income taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, sin taxes, sales taxes, Socialist Security, Medicare, unemployment and corporate income taxes. I have given a brief overview of most progressive taxes and there are regressive taxes like the gasoline tax that the Feds are gnashing their fangs over since prices have gone down and they were foolish enough to assign a percentage of price instead of flat fixed levy.

Then there are the death taxes to pay a gratuity to the state(s) per the required death levy once the owner has assumed room temperature and you are taxed once again on monies that have already had taxes stolen from the whole. This tax is 18-40% on previously taxed assets.

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09 Apr Necromongers: The State is Always a Police State by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: This is my 400^th post at ZeroGov and I wanted to thank all the readers and supporters who have made this possible.

“You can’t boil the ocean.”

That’s why I try to drill down deeply on singular topics. Borrowing from the giants like Spooner, Tucker, Rothbard and Higgs and countless other voices in the wilderness carrying on the anti-slavery and abolitionist tradition in spite of the overwhelming floodtide of government supremacist idolatry that permeates human thought for millennia. At the cosmic level, I do spend a disproportionate amount of time parsing out the implication of the American police state.

Recent life events have severely curtailed my writing output hence the relative infrequency of essays and extended the timeline for the publication of The Cancer Club but fear not, it will not suffer the fate of Absolved. We’ve moved locations in the American Southwest and my day-job has monopolized more of my time than I am accustomed to. 2016 has slowed my literary and podcasting roll to a near full stop.

I have a longer commute until we move into our new house next week and while I listen to books on MP3 frequently, I occasionally tune to the radio and the talk radio is abysmal on the airwaves. The Beck show is especially loathsome with its constant drumbeat for this collectivist notion or that government band-aid in addition to the mewling for superstitious intervention in the affairs of man. His posse of co-hosts at the Blaze prove the notion that the sycophancy of his crew obviates any ability to have a rational conversation. Back to Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Baroque Cycle on MP3.

My books that are published remain on Amazon and a veritable library of media appearances can be found in Media and Interviews in the tab above.

And no, I have not followed the election nonsense very closely and remain convinced that Bernie Sanders is every American politician for the last ten generations on truth serum. The pursuit of the Offal Office is nothing more than a subtle change of the guard for the looting of the Helot plantations and the careful trimming of dissident and samizdat voices in the bloodthirsty but incompetent “whack a mole” behavior that is government violence. -BB

My friend D. Brian Burghart:

“And that list doesn’t even get into fundamental errors in attitude toward police killing—for example, the tendency of large outlets and wire services to treat killings as local matters, and not worth tracking widely. Even though police brutality is a national crisis. Journalists also don’t generally report the race of the person killed. Why? It’s unethical to report it unless it’s germane to the story. But race is always germane when police kill somebody.

This is the most most heinous thing I’ve learned in my two years compiling Fatal Encounters. You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men. You know who dies in the least population dense areas? Mentally ill men. It’s not to say there aren’t dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.

And if you want to get down to nut-cuttin’ time, across the board, it’s poor people who are killed by police. (And by the way, around 96 percent of people killed by police are men.)”

He maintains the database at Fatal Encounters. It’s filled with gut-wrenching anecdotes of the government sponsored killing spree executed by its low information security legions.

The police forces that prey upon the American population are simply the political face of every society weaponized. Cosmically, no human can have any vestige of their liberty and freedom reduced absent the institution of government policing.

The singular point I want to get across is that political policing is one and the same. Politicians at the end of the day are simply violence brokers. They are the suits and ties that determine how the stolen goods and hijacked production is apportioned to the politically connected who are plugged into the plunder system.

All political systems are de facto and de jure police states.

Terrorism is politically motivated violence against non-combatants and innocents. Government can’t function absent a terrorism modality to its everyday actions. If the police weren’t present to threaten and actually cage, maim and kill; no one would obey the various edicts, diktats and nonsense spewed and vomited from government offices and their willing colon connoisseurs in the media and education complexes. The enormous penal population serves as not only a punitive sanction against the weakest elements of the captive population but provide a warning to others on the price of disobedience.

Most of these unfortunates caught in the nightmarish Kafkaesque construct that is the American legal system end up there because of confidential informants. And whether you like it or not, one of your friends and family either are now or will be. Informants, of course, are the life blood of fabricated crimes and prohibitionist legal regimes. Like torture, it rots and hollows out the moral core of everyone involved.

Claudia Rusch, quoted in Mary Fulbrook’s book, The People’s State:

“That was the real strength of the state security; to produce the effect that millions of people behaved towards one another with anxiety, self-control and suspicion. They ensured that if you told a political joke you automatically lowered your voice. Anticipatory obedience spread through every sinew of society and intimidated a whole nation”.

Yet another reason that prison populations should stop demarcating themselves into a factionalism that favors the state and start behaving as prisoners of war especially on the Irish example in the twentieth century in the UK system. At the Federal gulag level, the lion’s share of prisoners are genuinely political in nature who have trespassed the state drug cartel prohibitions on essentially non-violent behavior in offenses in which the only victim is the state. In this case, the third party of the state steps forward and claims a grievance wholly manufactured to serve its malum prohibitum pretensions as a component of rule and control.

It’s no more simple than that.

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10 Mar WRSA Asks Ten Questions for Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Pete at WRSA asked me to complete this interview for him. He has been kind enough to link to my bloviations here at ZeroGov and this is the least I could do. I can entertain any further questions on my blog or at WRSA.

Enjoy. -BB

1) Tell the readers about yourself and your experiences.

I’m a retired Army officer who has served a number of tours in neo-imperialist shitpits planet-wide with the Legions and as a contractor. I have a BA in Political Economy and an MA in Asymmetric Warfare (Resistance and Rebellion).

I am the founder of Zerogov.com and have two published books on Amazon with a fiction novel of Fourth Generation Warfare on the horizon called The Cancer Club.

I live in the American Southwest with my wife and the mother of our five children (who keep boomeranging back home).

2) When did you first notice politics?

As a volunteer for Greenpeace in my distant youth, steeped in the misconceptions and naiveté of a system that actually worked to benefit the Helots it farmed on the tax plantations. The rest of my life would teach me otherwise.

3) How did your political thinking evolve over time?

My philosophical and intellectual journey from a mushy post-WWII liberal to a libertarian was greatly influenced when I attended Humboldt State University in the northern reaches of Absurdistan, known to most as California after a stint in the Navy. My formative experiences in the USN would shape the conditions for the transformation anyone in military life can bear witness to. HSU was where you went if you thought Berkeley was too right wing and oppressive. I happened to fall under the academic thrall of two Austrian economists hiding in the basement of the Economics Department. The collectivist nature of the student body and the Sovietized professoriate would go a long way toward forcing a deeper defense of my emerging individualist worldview. This also set me on the path to historical revisionism and a complete deprogramming of all the learned nonsense I had forced into my skull through years of government mind laundries.

Among libertarians, I am a one-digit minority in completely rejecting statist constructs and government as legitimate moral vectors of human relationships. I think the idea of limited government is absurd on its face and deeply flawed in all its assumptions. There is absolutely no historical precedent for it east or west. Politician is just a more neutral word for violence broker, nothing more and nothing less.

The research I embarked on to examine the American Founding forced the realization that the Constitution was a devilishly clever slave document and that the 18^th and 19^th century abolitionists asked all the right questions but ultimately stopped short of the right answer; I read hundreds of books to include consuming the six volumes of Liberty Fund’s Founders Constitution (which I gave as a gift to Fred who runs the Revolutionary War Veteran’s Association and the Appleseed program to get it off my shelves). Several things really turned me around to include Royce and Spooner but when I read the massive three volumes of the foreign relations between the states from 1775 to 1787 as a preamble to finishing the Anti-Federalist Papers, all the pieces fell into place.

No matter how well-intentioned the document that “binds”, human psychopathy will inform the entire political structure at the expense of the Helots subject to the apparatchiks’ wishes and diktats issued.

How many shelves of regulation are groaning in various government offices across the fruited plain whose touchstone is innocent words like “general welfare” and the “commerce clause”?

I tend to refer to myself as an abolitionist instead of an anarchist because the latter term makes most folks fill their pants in fear and misunderstanding.

I also think my military training, experiences and saturation in the incredibly dysfunctional and sclerotic American and Western war machines showed me the futility of socialism working and the apex factor of war-making in expanding state control over every facet of human transaction. My eyes were forced wide open as a combat tourist around the globe as described earlier.

4) Who do you consider your top five influences in that evolution, and for each, why?

 I’m going to make this more accessible by listing intellectual and philosophical influences on my thinking and worldview. If folks read my essays at ZeroGov, they can get hundreds of recommendations for further elucidation in the concepts and brain zephyrs that have shaped my liberty journey.

First and foremost, philosophical Stoicism from Seneca to Epictetus to Aurelius to Shackleton and everything in between, these are the original abolitionists, the true believers and Socratic drillers of human self-government. Again and again, I go back to these foundational thinkers to really divine the fundamental constructs of a just society based on the atomistic individual.

Austrian economics from the early school under Menger to von Mises and even better in Rothbard; a whole crop of new Austrian observers are on the scene to further mine and research all the implications that are playing out in this nadir of human civilization. These are the bright lights that illuminate a path out of the murderous thought-rubble that passes for thinking today in academia and the government-media complex. When matched against the scientific axioms being discovered in chaos theory and complexification, it makes sense at the individual and meta-level. Per economics, keep in mind that all macroeconomics is merely a sophisticated academic rationalization for government intervention and the throttling of individual volition and incentive. For better or worse, I have never finished an Ayn Rand book nor do I break bread with Objectivists.

Libertarian historical revisionism from Lysander Spooner to Harry Elmer Barnes to Jeffrey Rogers Hummel that plumbs history to divine the one golden thread that runs through it continuously: it all comes down to power and the consolidation and expansion thereof through the initiation and aggressive monopoly of violence. It was Gibbon who opined there were only five Roman rulers who retained a patina of humanity in their conduct of the state over the course of seven centuries. Five. The Gods bless Cincinnatus.

Military history and the evolution of irregular warfare; there is no more compact and interdisciplinary pursuit of history and human action than military history. When you tease out all the factors both obvious and sublime, it paints a vivid portrait of how state murder machines behave and why warfare is the health of the state. It also offers hundreds if not thousands of ingenious and mostly unheralded lower register forces in the irregular warfare arena who best these numerically and technologically superior behemoths time after time. I offer the current Middle Eastern troubles for the Western military as Exhibit A that technology may not be the deciding factor in any warfare that is not cosmic in its dimension. For a snapshot, I would urge you to read Arthur C. Clarke’s short story Superiority from 1951.

Finally, the evolution of my secular if innate antinomian attitudes leading to my dismissal of the state as anything more than slavery animates most of my thinking now. Once I shed any pretense of party affiliation or getting misty when a colored rag is flying at half-mast accompanied by bad music, I no longer feel shackled by the fog that is necessary to genuinely feel patriotism or a heart-felt connection to my wardens and zookeepers. I can’t go back from the moral standard I have planted in the ground despite all the Rube Goldberg attempts by the usual suspects to bring back the Constitution or take DC back or any of the other delusional nonsense.

Buppert’s Corollary to Acton’s Axiom is “that power attracts the corruptible and absolute power attracts even worse”. If you wish to rule over others as a statist, you will justify all manner of barbarity: fining, kidnapping, caging, maiming and killing of those who resist the tender assignations of the mandarins of the state.

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05 Mar The Evil That Men Do: Willful Submission To Illegitimate Authority by Bill Buppert

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

– Henry David Thoreau

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”

– Banksy, Wall and Piece

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”

– Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.”

– Stanley Milgram

“Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man’s natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.”

– Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power

“If physical power be the fountain of law, then law and force are synonymous terms. Or, perhaps, rather, law would be the result of a combination of will and force; of will, united with a physical power sufficient to compel obedience to it, but not necessarily having any moral character whatever.”

– Lysander Spooner

“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery they may indeed wait for ever.”

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800—1859)

The US Federal government through its satraps and political goons in Nevada just crowd-sourced and thug-scrummed fourteen folks from the Bundy circus in 2014. The prosecution complex at the beck and call of the DC Orcs will print out reams of charges and indictments to bury these hapless souls in. I am assuming that they will wait until 2018 to gather up the latest miscreants who occupied an empty Federal facility in Oregon. Note the irony of the use of the word occupy in all these circumstances.

The massive Stasi-like scheme to make preemptive speech and behavior actionable for kidnapping, fining and imprisonment under color of law is moving apace. Read the indictments carefully because more of the same and worse is coming. Much like the infamous Roberts ruling on National Socialist healthcare that taxes inactivity. Of late, starting with the noxious McCain-Feingold campaign speech nonsense in concert with the enormous national security state, the weaponizing of the state has taken an exponential leap forward in its ability to prosecute not only victimless crimes and objections to state growth but the notions of pre-crime are starting to emerge with a vengeance.

Victimless crime and fictional crimes like malum prohibitum demand an informant culture that, like torture, morally corrupt everyone ensnared in the system. And that informant culture in the USSA is massive indeed.

The entire concept of a rule of law is specious and only feeds the evil people in charge. And keep in mind that one human on Earth can have their personal liberty sundered if not for the use of police forces by government planet-wide.

The US government has managed to electronically replicate what the East Germans built:

“45,000 sections of reinforced concrete—three tons each. Nearly 300 watchtowers.
Over 250 dog runs. Twenty bunkers. Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches—signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails. Over 11,000 armed guards. A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints. 200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime. 96 miles of concrete wall”.

The Feds need none of this anachronistic infrastructure, they have simply used the electronic ether tethered to a vigorous police state apparatus to replicate the choking and monstrous affront to human freedom that the Berlin Wall represented.

We live in tumultuous times that demand close attention to the yokes being placed on us. The US government is seemingly in the throes of a coup that is exponentially creeping and expanding into what was formerly a fairly autonomous province. Every sector and branch of human transactions that are palpable in this mortal coil is now being subject to regulation, taxation or both. With no authority whatsoever, entire swaths of American society are being subsumed under Leviathan state.

What is the authority or color thereof that these alien entities are gobbling up entire patterns of human existence? I have hinted before that the denizens of Mordor on the Potomac act as if their authority is unlimited and their ultimate reach is anything they please. We are witnessing a vicious brew of Sovietization and Mussolini-style state corporatism that will take a revolution to undo. The annals of Western history are full of this kind of grand hubris enabled by consent both willing and silent on the part of the populace. Humans tend to submit to a yoke or collar when invested with fear and anxiety about futures worse than now. The corpse-count in the twentieth century topped 262 million outside of warfare through democide.

Wholesale murder is big business for government.

These morbid thoughts seem intemperate measured against the apparently “peaceful” measures of Mordor to instill Keynesian stability and save the banksters from themselves with nary a peep of protest from the appropriately red-colored Grand Old Politburo. If you ever had the notion the parties were different, just look at the seamless transition between Bush II and Obama. The only difference between these monsters is skin color because collectivism is thicker than water.

Look at the temptation — you step into the cockpit of the Offal Office and decades of creeping totalitarian weeds have strangled and mastered practically every facet of American behavior and life. A simple touch of the controls and hundreds of thousands of subsidiary bureaucrats in the Executive agencies somewhat smoothly respond to the yoke to amp up taxation here and increase regulation there and the heady brew of total power starts to go to the President’s head. One can count on a single hand the number of Presidents who took the limitations on their power seriously (Van Buren, Cleveland and Coolidge among the all-stars). As Royce pointed out in his brilliant but under-appreciated book, The Hologram of Liberty, that the Constitution was doomed at the beginning by Hamilton’s curse (Burr did not get to him soon enough) and the temptations of George Washington to start the executive imperial ball rolling (witness the Shay’s and Whiskey Rebellions) against state sovereignty.

The most basic building block for compliance to illegitimate authority is fear. Drivers speed but always take caution if a hint of police presence or the increasingly ubiquitous camera systems are in place. Rare is the libertarian who wants to pay taxes of any stripe but compliance is heeded to avoid fines and imprisonment, or worse. We do not obey because it is the core right thing to do when it comes to most government edicts.

Fear and obedience are the brick and mortar of the state and the collectivists are the stonemasons.

I don’t harm my neighbor nor do I steal his property because it is against the law but my inner moral compass best exemplified by the Ten Commandments or the Categorical Imperative provides my azimuth for behavior. I want to eliminate the perennial bugbear that the MSM and government schools drill into the populace — righteous and correct behavior only emanates from government coercion to make you do the right thing.

Step back and examine that proposition. Can you think of any government initiatives or programs that not only supported perverse incentives but made you much worse off? I will let you ponder your own answers but they are legion. Just think — the entire Federal Register provides the enterprising social science researcher with a gargantuan solution set to the second- and third-order effects of perverse incentives and iotragenic effect that animates the entire sordid history of government intervention.

Consider this. Once again, the usual suspects from both sides of the aisle (how quaint) in Mordor are proposing the abolition of cosmetically offensive (the assault weapons misnomer) weapons at the stroke of an executive pen. There are tens of reasons why this is wrong-headed but one of the reasons proffered by the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, is that the Mexican drug cartels are getting weapons from America to use in their campaign against the Mexican government.

So let me get this straight: the American Drug War has not only failed in America but has led to the instability of both Columbia and Mexico among others, forcing the latter to the brink of collapse which will have untold deleterious effects on every border state in these united States. As a result of these calamitous events, I now have to surrender my weapons to the FEDGOD to prevent them from falling into the hands of drug lords whose very existence is a second-order effect of Federal drug policies that enable their criminal empires.

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