Too many offices

a society without standing legislatures and courts

Dick the Butcher:  The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Cade:  Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? |That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? 
Some say the bee stings, but I say, ’tis the beeswax; 
for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never 
mine own man since.
~ William Shakespeare, Henry VI,
Part 2, Act iv, scene 2, published AD 1594

It has come time to consider in the fullness of our contemplation the difficulties we’re in and how we got here. If this essay is to have a theme song, let it be “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads. “How did I get here?!” Well, let me tell you, it took time. Also, know that the evil Gmail people have declared this essay too long so go ahead and click the title to read it on the Substack web site or in its reader app. kthx

There used to be a feudal system. It arose in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman empire and was quite well established in Christendom, which is what we used to call Europe around Christmas day in Anno Domini 800 when Charlemagne established the Holy Roman empire. He added to what was already there - a system of fiefs and lesser nobles and counts to govern counties and dukes to govern duchies, and minor “kings” usurping the title and governing kingdoms. Charles the Great, as his name translates, had the intention of being emperor not of the old pagan Roman empire, but of a new Holy Roman empire which would simply add one more level of fealty.

And what, you may ask, is fealty, Jim? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s what I do. The countryside was beset, as countrysides often are, by thugs, brigands, robbers, and bandits. The lords had castles and troops and would go out to thwart these outlaws in protection of what lords always protect: their ability to collect taxes from the people in their area of control. From whom? From vassals who had consented to a relationship of fealty to that lord. It was a system that worked both ways. The vassal has the obligation not to harm the lord or his properties. The lord has the responsibility to protect the vassal.

In addition to his obligation to protect his vassals, the lords, counts, dukes, kings, and emperors could impose fees for the use of their properties. To this day there is a fellow (previously prince upChuck, today prince Willie) who owns some important toll bridges in Cornwall and has other important ways of making people pay, known as the Duke of Cornwall. Property owned by someone without heirs becomes the property of the duke, for example. It’s good to be the duke.

This system went on, in England, under various monarchs and dynasties, from somewhat after the Romans left in AD 409 until right in the middle of the sixth month of AD 1215 when a group of barons insisted that “king” John had to recognise certain rights and powers of individuals, freeborn men, yeomen, and of the barons. John was so much hated that there has never to this day been a second “king” John. The barons felt that they would need to occasionally have the rules modified, so they established a parliament, let the “king” call it into session when he wanted to raise new taxes, and have it make things up as they went along.

So, fealty by itself worked reasonably well in England for 800+ years. And in other parts of the Holy Roman empire for somewhat longer. But, adding a legislature seemed, at first, to be a good idea. There was now a body of people who could say what the laws were and get rid of bad laws, add new laws, and maybe also add regulatory agencies. Oh, dear. Then they had so many laws that it was no longer really sensible for the lord of the manor or the count of the county or the duke of the duchy to sit in judgement of criminal matters and have the occasional hearing about a major calamity that was caused by some tort or negligent act. No, they had to have standing courts.

Now, a standing court means buildings, and that means upkeep. It means offices with desks. Hearing rooms to meet the accused in front of the public - something denied in many places ever since “Covid19” conveniently excused the in person hearing. Clerks needed offices. Eventually air conditioning was invented. Lawyers needed to meet with their clients. More rooms! Papers had to be filed. Filing rooms! Filing cabinets. Later it would all be digitised, so there would be computer rooms! Computer equipment!

You had to pay for these things. So county sheriffs would position highwaymen on the roads to interdict traffic and make accusations. A road that was perfectly safe to traverse at 120 miles per hour (mph) was set to 55 mph, and suddenly there were more “criminals” to bring to court. Not “felons” engaged in some “fell” act of evil, but people whose “crime” was so esoteric that a word had to be grafted onto the English language, “misdemeanour” to refer to failure to behave right. Your “demeanour” was offensive, vassal. No one was any less a vassal, by the way. After a couple hundred years, sometime in the 15th Century the English had to come up with this misdemeanour concept to categorise the great many rules that were being enforced by courts that could not exist, whose upkeep could not be maintained, whose clerks and judges and bailiffs and gaolers and turnkeys could not be paid, if there were not hundreds of things you could do as a vassal somewhere in the “jurisdiction” of the court, and be caught and brought by a deputy or a bailiff before the court and forced to pay.

It Got Worse

Of course it did, things accrete to any system. That’s especially true of government. But you find it in automobiles. The engine drives the power train which puts the power to the axles which turn the wheels and the car goes. But, look, friends, most of the time there is more power from the engine than you really need to turn the wheels.

So we can put a belt from the engine crankshaft to some other doohickey. It can do something useful while the engine is running, like power the alternator to replenish the battery, and power the fan that moves air past the radiator to cool the engine. But it can also power an air conditioner, so if you are in a situation where you are a concern for fuel (you are running out) or you want to get peak engine performance accelerating up a long hill, consider turning off the air conditioner. And the car has lots of electrical power, so we can put a doohickey in that recharges your cell phone, or lights your cigarettes, and some other things to power an onboard computer that decides how much an unworthy vassal like you should get in terms of fuel efficiency, and so forth. The Model T cars that I’ve seen that were running around car shows thirty years ago may not have original parts, but they work. And under the hood, the engine compartment is pretty simple. The “starter” is a crank you put into the engine and turn by hand, for example.

By the same token, the standing court system is only the beginning of how things got worse. Instead of having the lord mostly lording it over the vassals and occasionally having a court, there were judges. But then there had to be rules for judges. So there was a standing legislature which could make up rules of procedure that only lawyers could follow. This was inherently good, of course, for lawyers, and since 90% or more of all legislators are now lawyers it was obvious that things would get too complex for ordinary people to manage.

By the 1970s there was a “paperwork reduction” act that made some things less complicated and, of course, other things more. There was a freedom of information act to make it possible to find out who was doing what to whom, except if it were important and then the information would be “redacted” to show you even an entirely redacted page with nothing readable on it.

Starting in the early 20th Century the bad got even worse in a hurry with Teddy Roosevelt demanding food safety not through market actions (boycotts, Good Housekeeping seals of approval for food processors, insurance companies providing better liability rates for manufacturers of quality foods) but through a federal (feral really) food and drug administration (fda).

Brief digression: You will notice that I don’t like to capitalise the names of agencies like the fda, fbi, cia, and so forth. That’s because they are not worthy of capital letters. These are low life people who hate humanity and do nothing but make the lives of other people difficult. So I won’t gum up the page with a bunch of acronyms, and if I do, they won’t be capitalised because they don’t deserve it. /digression

Today there are literally tens of thousands of feral agencies. A good friend of mine in Kansas began in 2012 a personal project to make a list of all the agencies by name, including all the names of the departments and offices and so forth. She sent me one file (burned a CD ROM) that had all the data for the agencies beginning with the letter A, of which there were 3,000. It also had office locations, purpose of the outfit, and heads thereof.

Why?

Why has there been a proliferation of agencies? Several reasons, of course. First, presidents tend to want to be seen as “doing something” about a problem. So Richard Nixon started the environmental protection agency so he could have Billy Ruckelshaus outlaw the production and distribution of DDT by American companies, condemning hundreds of millions of people in the years since then to death by malaria, dengue fever, and other insect borne illnesses. (And, by the way, eagle eggs are just fine in the presence of DDT, as long as you don’t deny them any source of calcium as was done in the faked research that inspired the “Silent Spring” book by Rachel Carson. Environmentalist grifters, also known as watermelons because they are commie red on the inside and want to see billions of people dead, have been lying to you for decades.)

Nixon also wanted to give the rebellious youth a bunch of jobs in gooferment so he could co-opt them. And most of the hippies and yippies, when they really looked at what they wanted, liked a job in an office with air conditioning, a pay cheque, and the opportunity to yell at other people, fine them, be abusive toward them, and steal their businesses and life savings more than they wanted peace, justice, harmony, or freedom. In some cases, a lot more.

But why does congress, and why do state legislatures assent to these indignities? Cousins. Nieces. Nephews. Every politician has some, not to mention children. And they want those relations to have nice jobs, indoors, with nice salaries. How nice? The highest paid feral employee is paid $10.5 million for 2023, and was paid $9.8 million in the previous year, and so forth, for running the “Tennessee valley authority” or tva powerplant operations because the gooferment hates you and wants you to suffer in poverty.

Chevron vs Natural Resources Defence

Something was done to you in 1984. Even if you were alive at the time, as I was, it probably escaped your notice. It was a supreme court of the United States decision in the case of Chevron versus the Natural Resources Defence Council in which the court held that if a gooferment agency was acting on its own and doing stuff that seemed in the agency’s view to be within its purview and authority, the courts should not interfere and attempt to evaluate these things closely. And the gooferment agencies were off to the races.

Of course, it didn’t seem worse right away because a clever man, Ronald Reagan, had enacted an executive order to freeze gooferment regulations such that no new regulation could be issued. Even the postal disservice couldn’t raise the price of postage stamps without a new regulation. So the people who figured out how to make money sending letters to ask for donations for causes and other bulk mail were able to get their operating costs down. Guess what year the postal disservice made the only profit in its entire history? 1988

How much profit? A billion dollars plus. And ever since then? Losses, generally much more than a billion dollars each year. Because the next year George Herbert Walker “I was in Dallas watching them murder JFK” Bush took office and immediately ended that fateful year of 1989 and began making it easy for the goofs in gooferment to ruin lives and hurt people. Bush is a Skull and Bones guy, which means he was not a low level freemason, but an active demon worshipper. Making humanity suffer and murdering people is what many bonesmen do.

A Better Way

Well, you say, sure, Jim, but if you don’t like the way things are done in the Untied States of America, why don’t you move to Somalia? It has been said to me IN ALL CAPS on Failbook and Twitter for many years. As it happens, I did.

I was led to accept a position managing the development of a port city on the coast of Awdal province in what is now calling itself the republic of Somaliland in 1998. A little later we were also working on a toll road project, utilities such as water purification (without adding poisons like fluoride) and sewage treatment, electric power, communications networks with satellite transponder leases, and low cost housing. Of course, these didn’t get very far out of the planning stages before the wicked demon worshippers at the cia arranged for the murder of thousands of Americans on the 11th day of the 9th month of 2001. Very soon thereafter, NATO general Tommy Franks said it should be policy to bomb all port facilities in Somalia. Which ended our venture.

But I was actually in what the Somali people call Somalia, or Greater Somalia, in the 8th month of 2001, and returning from Europe a couple days before the “planes” hit two buildings in NYC and made three buildings fall down, and something like a missile hit the Pentagon. I spent quite a lot of time in Somalia, including Djibouti, Awdal, Somaliland, and I worked with people who had related projects in other parts of the country, including Kismayo.

On the whole, I didn’t like it because there were too many governments. One of the people in Hargeisa, who at the time called himself vice president of the republic of Somaliland and wore very expensive gold framed glasses when he wanted to make a point of looking at printed pages of text, threatened to have me executed if I ever returned to “his” country. So I stood up, put my arms straight out, and said, “Why not execute me now?”

After picking his jaw up off the floor, the vice president also stood up, because I was now towering over him, and said, “No! The time for killing is not now!” Which he would know, since in 1988 he murdered 30,000 people at the town of Berbera on the coast of the Gulf of Aden while he was chief of the secret police for the mass murderer Xiad Barre (it would sound more or less like “zee ad bar” when spoken), using funds borrowed from the International Monetary Fund for that express purpose. But I digress. (And I do it so well!) So he ordered us to be taken out of his office, which was easy because Michael van Notten and I were eager to leave at this point.

When we got out to the Range Rovers that had brought us to the meeting, we were told by our translator that we were to be taken to the police station. So, I tapped Michael’s arm and said, “We aren’t going.” This was clearly a surprise to our host who conveyed the orders of the vice president to the driver. Our translator asked why not, and I said we didn’t need to go to the police station to have our arms broken and our heads pummeled, if they were seriously wanting us to leave the country, they needed to take us to the airport. And they needed to get our tickets for the next day revised to today, and we would be taking the matter before the people of Awdal through our associates there. Our translator smiled at me when I said that part.

About twenty minutes later, the order came back that we were to be taken to the airport, our tickets were to be fixed with the airline, and the intermediary was to stay with us until our plane took off. I have dined out on this story a few times in the years since then. By the time our plane landed in Djibouti the vice president’s vehicles and entourage had been surrounded by a crowd on the highway into Borama, the capital city of Awdal province, and he had to summon a helicopter to help him escape.

No Standing Courts

When I went to school for the first time age 5, my mom walked me there, and arrived to walk me home afterward. It was a kindergarten and only half a day of class. After that first day my two older brothers would walk me home since their classes got out at the same time in the afternoon. Mom and I would often talk about school, and books, and stories, and other topics as she was walking or driving me to school. One of the first things that I found remarkable was that the other kids were mostly unaware of how to read, or could only recite part of the alphabet.

My brothers had drilled me on the alphabet and with flash cards on reading. They taught me when I was age 3 using the “Dick and Jane” readers. So by the time I was in the fifth grade, any sign of restlessness on my part would result in my being sent to the school library. Thus it is that by the time I was “out in the world” after graduate school, I was routinely reading at 1,500 words per minute. Therefore I would buy all the books on a business project’s background, or get them at a library for a time, and read all about everything I could. Since I’ve now worked in about two dozen major industries, written business plans for the formation of hundreds of companies, and travelled on four continents, I am a little like a walking encyclopaedia.

Which is how I learned about kritarchy. My late friend Michael van Notten used this word casually the first week we knew one another, early in 1996, and I read all about it. The rule of judges is a kritarchy, just as the rule of a monarch is monarchy, and the rule of dukes is a duchy, and the rule of the individual by himself is anarchy.

The Somali people don’t have court buildings like the Old Bailey shown above, nor any like your county court house in the county seat near you. They have judges, but judges work for a living. They don’t judge for a living. There is a customary fee to pay for the court to come into session, but there is no court sitting around sending out bailiffs to grab people off the street to be tried and fined to keep the court from going out of business. In many ways, the same system was used by the clans of the Israelites at the time of the book of Judges, 1380 BC to about 1045 BC more or less.

One of the men I knew who was a judge had a trucking company and owned a bunch of Toyota pickup trucks and a bunch of Mercedes Benz over the road trucks. These were the two brands of trucks available in the region, nobody else was willing to distribute parts. Another judge who was also a sultan ran a store when he wasn’t doing judge or sultan related work. Yet another judge owned a fishing boat and had a business selling fish into Djibouti. The point being that the court was not their living.

Which means that when someone commits a crime or tort (a negligent act) it is up to the victim, or in the event of their death, the family of the victim, to approach their judge to seek a hearing over the matter. And if the perpetrator, the criminal in the case of a crime or the negligent party in the case of a tort, isn’t in the same part of the clan, then the judge for the victim would go and seek out the judge for the criminal or negligent person. Those two judges would meet to hear the evidence and listen to the witnesses and consider the exculpatory justifications from the party responsible. If the two of them could not make a judgement consistent with clan traditional law (xeer in Somali) the two of them would find a suitable third judge and the three of them would come to terms, either unanimously through the able counsel of the third judge, or by majority of two to one. Three is obviously the first odd number higher than two, so the Somalis practice at the rule of William of Ockham and don’t multiply entities unnecessarily.

And there were not dozens of clerks and officials filling a building. If the court met, it was often outside. If a sentence was handed down it was to the family to pay restitution and deal with the criminal or negligent person. If the family exiled or put to death someone who was criminal or negligent that was regarded as a family matter. There are a huge number of other nuances, entire books have been written on the topic. I’ve only read some of those books.

When we began proposing to build a new Hong Kong and a free port and a toll road, we were asked how to handle the lack of clans amongst the Europeans who would be visiting and working in Samaron territory in Awdal. Our very wise advisor, the late Spencer MacCallum (may his eternal soul rest in peace) suggested we require all non-Somalis working with us to have an insurance policy. The insurance company would stand “in loco parentis” in place of the clan or family, so any crime or tort would be satisfied to the policy maximum. This was reviewed in much detail in a series of meetings and found to be agreeable.

Of course, your community is not in Somalia, so you are free to do things differently. But you might consider that you would have fewer constables, fewer meaningless and irritating rules to obey, and a lot less in the way of permanent bureaucracy, if you got rid of the standing courts. Ad hoc courts get the job of justice accomplished. And who needs a lot of bureau-rats?

No Legislature

Another feature of several countries I’ve visited is the absence of a legislature. Why is any legislature needed? If the law is comprehensible why does it need to change?

Well, obviously, so the legislators can change the rules, benefit some companies and not others, and invest in the ones that are going to get more profits. People may have heard that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a bartender and part time actress when she tried out for the role of congress critter from her district. She got the gig. Now she is worth, I’m told, in excess of $100 million, after only a few two-year terms in office. Her official salary is something on the order of $174,000. So it is not by diligent savings and careful investing, it is through graft and corruption and being exempt from insider trading laws. Nancy Pelosi on information and belief was worth $114,662,521 in 2018, and figures since then suggest that her insider knowledge of Nvidia brought her into the billionaire (three commas) league.

Clearly, you as an American are being thwarted in your daily life so that legislators can feather their nests and run roughshod over your individual liberties. Until you make it unprofitable, they will continue to increase regulations, taxes, fees, interest, and burdens on you. So, tell me, what is it that has you wanting a legislature?

No Standing Army

It was the policy of the “founding fathers” at the time of the American revolutionary war that a standing army was a bad idea. Thomas Paine and others served in militia with sharpshooters and won a lot of skirmishes and battles. But George Washington was an evil freemason and wanted a Prussian style military. So he whipped and hanged people at a whim and killed lots of soldiers with his “military” tribunals, and had something like a regular army toward the end of the war. Congress promptly disbanded the lot, and there were only a few soldiers around Philadelphia for the next several years, commanded by some number of even fewer officers.

The military industrial financial pharmaceutical complex from which you suffer slings and arrows was not made a permanent standing army until after the end of the “first” world war in 1918. The war powers boards and the war industries committees were allowed to lapse between the two wars, and president Truman, to his credit, insisted on the same in 1948 which led to the post-war boom in the American economy. (The war itself was a drag on the economy, and Keynesian economists who say otherwise are liars.)

How would a militia win wars? Ask the Somalis. In 1977 the Soviet Union found a vast natural gas reservoir under the Ogaden. But, way back in 1948 and through other negotiations up to 1954, the “Crowne Protectorate of British Somaliland” was split apart by the evil and perfidious British government foreign office. Ogaden and Western Awdal (red area, map above) were given, without authority and without the consent of the Somali clans living in those provinces, to the country of Ethiopia. Ethiopia was at the time a Coptic Christian country, and the Somalis were Sunni Islamic, so it didn’t set well, at all. But what were they able to do?

Well, in 1960 the people in Europe were following a certain fashion of re-arranging their colonial empires into mercantilist commonwealth style plantations. So Italy made Somalia its own country. Britain did the same with Somaliland. The two former colonies got together and formed Somalia. It ran as a corrupt parliamentary democracy with a corrupt president and a corrupt legislature. Italian and British companies bought all the influence they needed to screw over the local population. Until 1969 when Xiad Barre declared himself dictator, shot the president and kidnapped the prime minister (or the other way around, you can look it up in your copious spare time if you really care), and declared for communism.

To his credit, Mohammed Ibrahim Egal who had been the head of Somaliland just before independence became minister of education. He instituted a policy of literacy that began by inventing a Somali written language using Latin alphabet characters. By 1974, the country was over 96% literate. When I got there in 2000, everyone was literate. I celebrated Eid by giving away ball point pens to all the children, saying “Eid wanexen” or “have an excellent Eid” to one and all.

But, you see, there was oil off the coast of Somalia and natural gas in that enormous field in Ogaden. The Soviets were, in 1977, happily sending geologists to their client states. Both Ethiopia and Somalia were communist countries at the time. Oh, and Ethiopia had huge deposits of gold, silver, platinum, and diamonds. Uranium and thorium were found near Mogadishu and emeralds near Borama. But far and away the vast treasure trove of mineral wealth is in Ethiopia.

So in 1978, Xiad Barre declared war on behalf of his clan and all the Somali clans against Ethiopia. The Soviet Union promptly sent military advisors and aircraft to Ethiopia. And there was another war in Africa.

It lasted about a year. Every day there was a truce while the qat from the trees in the highlands of Ethiopia was delivered by aeroplanes to the various major cities in Somalia. Qat is a mild amphetamine, which can be concentrated by boiling and processing. The Somalis lost the war. So in late 1978 different Somali clans began organising militias against the Xiad Barre government.

There was a guy in 1978 writing a book about all the communist dictators of the world. He was based in London. He wanted the cover to show little photos of all the glorious leaders of the glorious revolutions in all those countries. Yes, I do believe he was a savage academic of the commie sort. Anyway, his publishers sent a letter to the Somali embassy in London asking for a photo of the communist dictator of Somalia, Xiad Barre. They got a very sternly worded letter back that if they were to publish this falsehood that Xiad Barre was a communist dictator, they would be sued.

You see, Xiad had switched to become a Western dictator. So the USA, the UK, Italy, the Saudis, and the Gulf States were suddenly interested in supporting him. And behold the aid and the loans flowed in. In 1988 he applied for and was warmly awarded $333 million in loans from the International Monetary Fund for the express purpose of combatting the rebellion in his country. So he had his secret police chief Dahir Riyale slaughter at least 30,000 civilians. The men, women, and little children were buried in mass graves. Their deaths motivated a massive escalation by the Somali militias.

They defeated and banished the dictator who died, I think, in Abu Dhabi some years later. They won independence for their various clans in the first month of 1991. Then they began having meetings in Mogadishu about what to do.

It was kind of a problem for them, because they had tried “everything Western.” They had been a colony under the colonial empires of Italy and Britain, and part of the territory of Greater Somalia still is a colony of France going by its mercantilist plantation commonwealth pose as Djibouti. They had tried a corrupt parliamentary democracy. They had tried a communist dictatorship. They had tried a Western dictatorship. There were no other Western experiments in how to invade the privacy and impose upon the liberty of individuals that were available, so they gave up.

In the fourth month of 1991 the official policy of the convention to form a new government was: we won’t. We also won’t have a national tax to pay back the $1.6 billion in debts of the former government. Go get that money from Xiad Barre if you want it. The officials of the convention got on the radio and told all the Somali people to go back to their homes and live according to the traditions of their clans from before European colonisation.

Naturally, the evil violent and disgusting Boutros Boutros Ghali was outraged. How dare anyone not have a nation state! How dare they oppose his beautiful close (some say very close) friend Xiad Barre who was such a charming host when Ghali was ambassador from Egypt to Somalia. This aggression will not stand, man! Ghali (“golly” is how I’ve heard it said) was angry! And he became secretary general of the United Nations. So he pretended to send food aid to Somalia in 1992.

Inevitably, the Somali clans struggling over who was going to run Mogadishu received the aid at the ports and distributed it to the clan running the port. And not to clans further inland. So lying filthy shill propagandists from the hoax stream media, evil and personally foul mouthed perverts from major newspapers and television networks, came and told endless lies about how people were starving. None of it was true, which you can verify independently by reading “Somalia on $5 a day” by Martin Stanton (find it at booksellers you prefer, I won’t link to Bezos’s Amazon). His team found huge warehouses all over the Juba and Shebele river valleys full of food.

George Herbert Walker Bush had not been re-elected in 1992, thanks to the awesome work of billionaire government contractor Ross Perot. But he was still president in the twelfth month of 1992, so he sent American troops, including Marines, to go “help out.” Eventually, in the fifth month of 1993, the commandant of the Marine corps ordered those marine units home because of all the food found in warehouses, growing in fields, and everywhere else. Bush and Ghali had lied.

It was not until 1993 that the Somalis became very unhappy with the united nations operation in Somalia (UNOSOM). When a group of Pakistani soldiers in UN blue helmets went to a Habr Gidr radio station to seize it, and the associated armoury, the local militia reacted violently. They killed a number of soldiers and restored control of their radio station.

Fresh from murdering and barbecuing seven dozen Texan children, women, and men in a church near Waco, Bill Clinton sent in a group of military helicopters armed with TOW missiles. The Habr Gidr elders, including a very elderly poet, were meeting on the top floor of a Mogadishu apartment building when Clinton ordered them to be obliterated by machine gun, cannon, and missiles fired indiscriminately into their meeting, and into the crowds of civilians fleeing in all directions from the carnage. A war crime was committed. It is thoroughly documented by Mark Bowden in his book “Black Hawk Down” which I recommend, and ignored and distorted and lied about by ugly nasty Jerry Bruckheimer in his very bad agitprop jingoistic turd fest of a film by the same name. Read the book, ignore the film, would be my advice.

In the tenth month of 1993, the Habr Gidr militia defeated the combined arms of UNOSOM, the USA Army Rangers, and various military deployments from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and other countries. They used shoulder fired rocket propelled grenades to bring down the vulnerable Black Hawk helicopters (named by the military contractor after a defeated enemy because that’s how the military industrial complex taunts people) by hitting the tail rotor assembly.

I myself read about that tail rotor vulnerability in Aviation Leak and Space Technology all the way back in 1986 iirc while working for Deke Slayton. He’d finish with his copy of the ragazine and stop by my office, chuck it on my desk, and tell me what was interesting. One day it was, “You should read what they think about that helicopter. I don’t think they know what they’re saying.” So five minutes later, having read the ten page article, I went to his office and we sat and talked. Deke said he’d seen a guy with a bazooka shoot down a small plane circling overhead by standing with a trench behind him. We mused together on how beefing up the tail rotor assembly wouldn’t cost much, and it was going to cost lives leaving it the way it was.

Sure enough, that’s what the Somalis did. They either stood at the edge of a building or they stood in front of a trench. The “backwash” from the rocket exhaust didn’t cut the legs out from under them as the contractor lying management claimed, so using a simple rocket propelled grenade led to six (count ‘em) six Black Hawk helicopters shot down, or damaged, not just the one in the book and film title, and not just the two that landed in Habr Gidr held territory in Mog.

Camel and goat herders defeated your military. So your standing military is crap. You should get over it and stop pretending it is worth anything. Goat herds in Afghanistan defeated your military. Rice farmers in Vietnam defeated your military. Your standing military is now and always has been a waste of money, designed to grift. War is a racket, wrote Smedley Butler, one of the few men who won more than one Medal of Honour and lived to write about it. Don’t be all angry, veterans, I’m not saying you didn’t serve your military industrial financial corporate masters well. I’m saying you didn’t uphold the constitution, which denies to congress the power to have a standing military and is supposed to make them stop funding any such military after two years. But you don’t want to do the work of enforcing the constitution you swore to God in heaven you would uphold and defend from domestic and foreign enemies, so I don’t much care if you don’t like what I say. Go cry about it.

Or come visit. I’m happy to buy you a slice of pie at the Sharis in Central Point Oregon. Everyone there knows me. So stop on by pointers and setters, and we’ll have a nosh and a chat.

There is an important codicil to this story. After more than a year of fighting, when it had been taken off the news for a while, the USA feral gooferment under evil mass murderer rapist communist scoundrel Billy “look what I can do with a cigar” Clinton decided in 1995 to have peace in Somalia. So they sent a message to Mohammed Farah Aideed, the guy they were trying to kill in 1993 when the Black Hawks were shot out of the sky by the aforementioned camel herders, and asked that he join them in a conference in Nairobi. They sent a military passenger plane to Mogadishu airport for him and his personal guards. He went.

In Nairobi they regaled him with wine, women, and song. They promised him the moon and the stars, and a huge salary, and a big embassy. All kinds of buildings would get built and his friends and family would make bank selling labour and supplies to the projects. A new airport would be built. All those trucks that had hauled “dirt” from the uranium and thorium deposits that were easily accessible around Mogadishu and took that dirt to ships at the port of Mog? Those would be his property. And if more uranium and thorium were found he’d be paid a severance fee for the taking away of that dirt, too. All he had to do was agree, enumerate the people in a census, and tax them to pay for the $1.6 billion in borrowed money. How much tax? Oh, $3 a person? About the annual income of the average Somali at the time, that’s all, just their entire earnings every year. Gosh.

Aideed agreed. He loved these ideas. He came home and got on the radio and announced that he was forming a new government. He would be president. So the remaining clan elders who had replaced those brutally massacred by Clinton in 1993 were called together for a meeting. Aideed wasn’t invited. Two weeks later he was killed by his own bodyguards. Somalis, to quote William Wallace, “won’t be ruled.”

No Standing Executive

There is story in Somalia about the one time the Somalis had a “king.” It ends better than the story I told you about how the foolish and subsequently evil Israelites clamoured for a “king,” rebuking God and ending up with the messes caused by Saul and David. (David enumerated the people of Israel which led to a lot of deaths from his evil wrongdoing.) I put “king” in quote marks like that because there is no king but Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and will come to judge the living and the dead.

In this story the Somalis got together a few hundred years ago to agree on a “king.” All the clans gathered. They talked about all the possible candidates. The elders sat for many days. They prayed many prayers. They agreed on a particular person. He was named. A coronation ceremony was devised and he was crowned. There was much rejoicing.

His very first act of office was to demand that from now on he would only eat the bone marrow of kid goats and newly born lambs. Six of each were killed, cooked, and the bone marrow harvested for his breakfast. The same again at dinner. The same again at supper. He believed that this food would provide him with eternal youth for many hundreds of years. Within a few weeks the elders who had appointed him were having another meeting.

They worked out that the entire country would be devoid of sheep and goats within a few years. Eating the young would hasten the extinction of their herds. So they came up with a new idea. They had the “king” killed. They agreed there would never be another Somali monarch.

The Law of Oceania or “Whaddaya gonna do, start yer own country?”

One day it might be fruitful to publish an autobiography, but until then you’ll just have to piece it together as I have occasion to tell one or another thing I’ve done looking for freedom in an unfree world. Here I will briefly mention the constitution and law of Oceania. It was a free country project started after the election in 1992.

Why did a group of libertarian political activists in Clark County, Nevada find that election unsatisfying? Well, they had put together the campaign of Tamara Clark as the libertarian candidate for the legislature seat from Clark County’s district. She won. But she lost.

You could see it live on television. Her vote count was much higher than the incumbent. Then at 2 a.m. the machines went dark. Then at 4 a.m. her vote total appeared next to the name of the incumbent, and his next to hers.

So they appealed. They got huge boxes full of evidence. They learned that absentee ballots had been delivered in truck load lots to the Culinary Union, and they learned that those ballots were marked identically and returned in batches of 100. They learned that there was a huge amount of fraud. They brought all of this evidence to the appropriate senate committee of the state legislature that was responsible for considering the propriety of elections for the house.

The chairman of the committee welcomed them. Then he asked for a motion to adjourn. One was made and seconded. Then he adjourned the meeting without considering any of their evidence.

I wrote a book in Spring 1994 called The Atlantis Papers about the constitution and law of Oceania. It was two books. The constitution was about 30 pages and had a very strong and consistent bill of rights that would put the framers of the USA constitution to shame if their intention had ever been to protect liberty (it was not). The law was about 50 pages. It covered all manner of crime and tort.

There was to be no legislature. None was needed. You don’t need a bunch of grifters to meet, as they do in Texas “for five months every two years” or even, as many Texans would prefer, for two months every five years. They don’t do any good, and they do much harm. Once you have the laws, why do you need more? Did murder become popular? No? Then why change the law.

The answer, you will find, in the 1994 crime act authored by Joe “the daughter raper” Biden is grift. The prison industrial complex is lucrative af. Legislators exempt themselves from everything, including the Covid19 vaxxajabs and other poison mandates. But you, vassal, you have to pay and pay and pay. So why do you consent to be governed?

I don’t think you actually did, unless you signed some document I was never offered. You cannot be under an “adhesion” contract because you have to enter into every contract knowingly, willingly, and competently. If you don’t know the terms of the contract, you don’t have a contract, despite what “patriot” mythology may be circulating on the interwebz. So you probably don’t consent to be governed. Which leads me to wonder, why are you being governed by tyrants in the District of Corruption?

Ten is enough

You may be one of those freedom minded conservatives who hates everything I’ve written so far because you’ve been shouting at your screen “we can fix it with term limits.” I don’t think you can, but suppose we go there, friend.

Are you going to term limit the congress critter filth who lade themselves with thirty pieces of silver for every betrayal? How? By getting them to pass a constitutional amendment for term limits? By getting them to undo the 17th amendment popular election of senators that deprived the several states of being a meaningful check or balance against the weight of the feral gooferment? Them? The people making billions of dollars in loot and divvying it up aren’t going to pass any amendment ending their grift. So you’ll get the last few states to call a constitutional convention, and that’s going to turn out well?

If you have never been in a convention run by Robert’s rules of orders, you have no idea how they’ll screw you over. If you had seen any of the last eight national conventions of the Libertarian party, you’d have seen endless corruption and abuse of power to get the likes of Republican Bob Barr the nomination of the party. I don’t think you probably want to know, but best wishes for all that.

While you are contemplating term limits, let me mention an idea from architect Richard Morris of Florida. He suggested that you term limit the bureau rats in the government agencies. It’s a great idea. His idea was “ten is enough” if I recall correctly. Eight would be better. You might get twelve or twenty. But the bureau rats get more and more money for having bigger and bigger budgets and controlling more and more people. So you have to figure out some way to limit all that.

I myself would simply do away with all these bureaus and the rats that infest them. Close it all down. Turn off the government and leave it off.

But Henry David Thoreau told us in 1848 in a speech you can read called “On Civil Disobedience” that the people must have a machinery of government and hear its din to satisfy that idea of government that they have. You can get rid of it, but your neighbours will get together and harrumph and make excuses, and start another government, and they won’t let you know until it comes around demanding taxes.

At which point, you should be prepared to defend your home and family with extreme violence, because it will never end unless you end it right then. The author of the Gulag Archipelago told you, and you should have listened.

Subscription Hospitals

Yes, I do have answers for a lot of problems. I’ve read a lot, wandered the world, and asked a lot of questions. I’ve gone where people were talking about individual sovereignty thirty-three years ago. Which, back then, was a very small number of places.

Mike Oliver, who founded the Republic of Minerva in the early 1970s with money provided by Sir John Templeton (about $56 million in today’s money based on the price of gold then and now) spoke at the founding conference of the New Country Foundation, the archives of which I suspect my friend Courtney Smith’s family has now discarded. Mike spoke about his youth in Lithuania.

He said that before the Germans and Soviets occupied the country there were hospitals paid for by subscription. The subscription rolls were published in the local papers from time to time as a news story. Hospitals were well thought of, and to be a local property owner who did not donate to the local hospital was regarded as a sign of anti-society behaviour. People would be ostracised. So they would make a donation and get back in the good graces of their community. And there were good hospitals in those days, not run by evil pharmaceutical company indoctrinated filth.

You could do the same thing, by the way, with a volunteer fire department. Most of the United States has volunteer fire departments that are not city bureau-rat run messes. Helping out as a volunteer or donating equipment or money is regarded as a good idea in places where volunteers are going to come answer the call when you call for a firetruck.

You could do the same thing with a mutual aid society. The mutual aid society could have a local search and rescue team that looked for stolen children and interdicted human traffickers in your county. You could train up a militia and defend yourselves against the depredations of city dwellers come to squat in your family home while you are on vacation, and pay for it by subscription or donation. You could work together to defend against thieves in uniform calling themselves tax collectors, too. But I don’t know if you will.

Prayer for Deliverance

So I pray:

Eternal Father please help us free the slave, stop the wars, end tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction, and all souls in between. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. Amen.

Prayer to holy Michael the archangel

You are afraid. I can feel your fear. I know it. I’ve felt it my whole life. You’re afraid of the people in power. You outnumber the feral gooferment by 341.3 million to 1.87 million, but you are afraid. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you that you have a choice.

And when you are afraid, call upon God for help. You have that power, especially if you believe and do the words of Jesus Christ and are baptised in water and with the Holy Spirit. (And if you aren’t, stop by and I’ll be delighted to talk with you. Those who believe may be baptised.)

Here are the words to say:

Holy Michael the archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray, and do thou, oh prince of the heavenly host by the power of God thrust into hell Satan and the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

There is an order in the universe. There are many holy orders here on Earth. God is the God of Hosts, meaning that He commands legions and legions of angels. So if you are in a fix and the answer is violence, call upon God’s prince of the heavenly host. You’ll be glad you did.

You Americans do outnumber the people who are actively in the gooferment. You have about 16 million veterans as well as some millions of “annuitants” formerly in gooferment positions. You might be able to put things together and win your freedom once again. If you do, you should ask God to help, because God is against tyranny in all its forms. And if you would only fight, just a little bit, to become free, I fervently believe God would send angels to fight for you and with you to win the victories.

Ye are many, they are few, wrote Percy Shelley hundreds of years ago. God has more angels than they have rounds of ammo for their rifles in the feral gooferment. And God has said, repeatedly, in the Bible, do not fear, do not be afraid, tremble not.

Will you listen? Will you screw your courage to the sticking point and stand up for yourself, your family, and your posterity?

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.