“Lets go to the track and play on the monkey bars”

Quoted by JohnnyBravo on purposebuilt.org

Let me start out by saying that the “sale” of the track is not a decision that the owners want to make. They are not sell-outs, nor are they willingly abandoning the racing community. They are as deeply tied to racing, if not more, than anyone here.

In a nutshell, this was a political move. It may be one person, it may be a combination of people, but there are only 3 major players who have the kind of clout around KC to force the sale of the track.

1. Claire McCaskill. She owns approximately 27 acres (I believe) in the immediate vicinity of the track. My understanding is that she has been unable to market or sell her property for a significant profit because of the proximity of her property to the race track. That might make a good motive to lean on the city to force the track out of operation. And you can’t forget councilwoman Circo…who also happens to be a fundraiser for Claire McCaskill. Interesting how that works out, isn’t it?

2. Christine Kemper. She owns one of the houses on the hill on the other side of Noland Road, across from the track. The bulk of the track’s problems started immediately upon her taking possession of that home. Many of you will recall the huge debacle involving the storage shed that Kemper and Porrevecchio tried to use as leverage to shut down the track. Huge hearing before the BZA. City Hall was packed. While she was successful in costing the track a lot of money in unnecessary “improvements” and attorneys’ fees and ultimately restricting the days and hours of the track’s operation, she could not shut the track down. But don’t for a second think she has let it go.

3. Ms. Ulmer who owns all of the property up on the hill, east of the track. After her husband passed away, she has been trying to develop that property by herself. Rumor has it that nobody is thrilled about assisting in the development of that property because it’s right above the track.

Now which one(s) of these people are behind the political pressure to force the sale of the track is anyone’s guess. But there is a jerk in the woodpile somewhere.

Next, while what the city may try to claim is that this is a voluntary sale, nothing could be further from the truth. The city had been trying to buy the track for a while, but could never come up with any money. So the track entered into negotiations with another buyer (who would actually keep the track there, but would result in an infusion of cash for the track). After finding out that the current owners had found a buyer that would keep the track where it is, the city sent a letter threatening the condemnation of the land. Guess what that did to the sale of the property.

While under threat of condemnation, the property is dead. You can’t sell it. You can’t rezone it. And it makes no sense to spend any more money on it, because it may be taken from you at any time. So that’s the first dirty trick the city pulled. Just the threat of condemnation crushed any chance the track had of selling to someone who could improve the place and devalued the purchase price to any other interested buyer.

Then the city, through its codes administration, began really putting the pressure on the owners to “fix” certain alleged violations at the track. “You can’t have any electricity in your new outbuilding.” Ok. Then it was, “You MUST run electricity to the new outbuilding.” Ok. Then it was, “You have to repave the parking lot near the outbuilding”. Why? That wasn’t on the approved plans? “DO IT!” Then it was, “you need illuminated exit signs in the building.” Why? Those weren’t on the approved plans and this is a storage shed. It’s not a public building as defined by the codes. “Do it or we’ll fine you, etc, etc,”

So the city started making it clear that if the owners didn’t sell, at a low ball price which the city could afford, they’d just come out there every single day and find something to ticket them for. Take away their vending permit. Something. The city very clearly sent the message, ‘If you don’t give us this land, we’ll make your life a living hell. And if you make us go through the condemnation process, we’ll make sure you are offered pennies on the dollar for the property and that after you’ve paid your lawyers, you’ll walk away with next to nothing.”

Welcome to Kansas City politics. And you thought it was bad during the Cleaver days?

And so far, the city has failed and refused to provide any assistance in finding another location for the racetrack. The owners even agreed to take less money in exchange for help finding a replacement property and some time to operate while they built the new facility. The city was NOT willing to give them another season, or even another day. The city is not paying what the property is worth, but it’s paying more for the property just to shut it down NOW and to not have to find a new place. If that gives you any idea of the real motivations behind this move.

So you, the tax payers, while still getting a deal on the property, could have had it even cheaper if the city would have given the owners more time and helped them find a new place. But the city would rather pay more to run a business out of town immediately. Feel free to be pissed aS fuark about that, too.

So the city will have a completely worthless, non-income generating nuisance that it will have to take care of in place of a money earning, property tax paying business.

But hey, at least some of the more powerful women in the city will be able to line their pockets with cash after it’s gone. And when it comes down to it, isn’t being a politician really about using your power for your own profit?

Those are about all of the details I can provide at this time. I’m waiting for the press release to be issued by the city, to see how they “spin” this thing, but what I just told you is pretty dang accurate (other than my speculation about who is behind the string pulling). The city is RUNNING THE TRACK OUT OF TOWN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

The track has been blackmailed, bullied and beaten into selling. HOWEVER, you can still lean on your elected officials to either (a) undo the deal and refuse to fund the purchase; or (b) at a minimum, assist the owners in finding a new location for the track.

Those are the facts as I believe them to be.

http://www.purposebuilt.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43312&page=6

https://www.facebook.com/notes/kalynn-clements/lets-go-to-the-track-and-play-on-the-monkey-bars/10150913341040501

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This sure make KCMO look like a great place to start a business, eh?  These are the tactics they will resort to if they don’t like you or want your business gone.  Instead of helping bring jobs to KC, City Council likes to keep them away.

A few years ago the City began requiring taxi cab owners to post info about whether or not they accepted credit cards. It seems it was thought a great benefit to spare passengers the need to enquire about payment before riding half way across town.  The Kansas City Star put it this way: ”The city had imposed a law in 2009 that encouraged cabs to accept plastic and required them to display information if they did not. But investigators found cabs that weren’t complying with that law, and customers were complaining about having to carry cash to pay their fares.” But now the ante has been upped: the Council has passed another law requiring all cabs to take credit cards. To this THE STAR trumpets: ” Taxi cab customers will no longer have to carry large wads of cash in Kansas City.”

Excuse me, but have we not all lived through decades of bellyaching about Kansas City’s poor public transportation? Have we not endured Clay Chastain’s repeated attempts to push light rail on an unwilling voting populace, for just that reason? Thankfully, the light rail plan that finally did pass a vote in 2006 would have been such an obvious economic disaster, even our City Council was unable to bring themselves to enact it. Many of us knew that a better way existed anyway: Why not improve the bus lines and eliminate the barriers to entry for new transportation providers. Entrepreneurs might find new ways to solve our transportation needs without running deficits or requiring federal handouts.

So now, along with a still-unsatisfactory transportation system, we find ourselves in the midst of an economic downturn the likes the country has not seen since the great depression. And just as the City has begun posturing as if wishing to take great pains to remove the barriers for small business, we are treated to this—the eye watering irony of a ridiculous law which can only do one thing: make it harder to be a new independent taxi cab service provider in Kansas City.

Such stories, related by shell shocked business people, is one of the purposes of meetings like the one I attended last Monday evening (October 17), put on by the new Special Committee on Small Business. These meetings are held at commercial venues around the Metro in order to make it easier for owners who find it difficult to get downtown, or simply have an understandable aversion to setting foot in City Hall. Committee members say they want to collect testimony in an effort to reduce obstacles to the growth of small business in the Metro Area.

According to committee members, the process for getting approval to open Faulkner’s Ranch doors would be less lengthy today than it was in 2008. This is because paperwork no longer needs to wait on one desk for signing before proceeding to another. Additionally, communication problems like those experienced by the Faulkners with City Hall are said to have been greatly reduced with the creation of Bizcare, a customer service center across from City Hall which opened in 2009.

Beyond such process improvements, and the periodic off-site small business meetings, the City has launched the website KC Momentum. It’s an implementation of a third-party collaborative web app called MindMixer, described by its creators as a “virtual town-hall.” The purpose of KC Momentum is to provide direct community input via a slick, easy to use, digital forum. Additionally, Scott Talyor described a yet-to-be-developed online automation system for getting businesses off the ground and maintaining permits, inspections, etc. He said that in the near future, it would likely be unnecessary for many small business owners to make a trip to City Hall to start or maintain their businesses.

How likely is it that the work of the Small Business Committee will make a real difference? The idea of making government efficient and free of hassles is ultimately a losing battle since there are no market forces to keep it moving in the right direction. Instead, it has only one ever-present incentive: take the path of least resistance and provide less  value while increasing revenue via taxation. That’s leaving aside the out-and-out antagonism to small business displayed in many actions taken by the City Council: like the just-passed law requiring all taxi services to accept credit cards, amounting to a huge barrier-to-entry into the public transportation sector.

Short of the elimination of regulatory bureaucracy in KC altogether, this author suspects that online-based automation (like KC Momentum and the proposed future implementations) is a decent way to go—provided the software is any good. At least it could eliminate the need for entrepreneurs to have to interact with bureaucratic zombies who want to hassle them and send them on wild goose chases. Of course, good software can’t to be taken for granted: the same inherent problems that plague other government endeavors, make it inevitable that software government produces will likely suck too. But third-party web solutions like MindMixer, designed by entrepreneurs, will be far better than solutions cities might develop themselves.

In a real sense, turnkey solutions like MindMixer, represent a way the market is coming to its own aid in combating the natural inertia of government.

Occupy KC demonstrators at Penn Valley Park with IOU/USA sculpture in the background.

While not all of the stated goals of the occupy movement jibe with Libertarian ideas for how to improve our economic and political problems, there is much common ground and libertarians are increasingly getting involved. For instance, this Saturday, a large group of Occupy KC demonstrators marched to Troost Park and back to Penn Valley park where the occupiers have staked their ground between the Federal Reserve and Liberty Memorial. Representatives of Liberty Restoration Project, along with KMBZ Radio personalities, Landmine Billy and Granny Major, were there to provide hotdogs, sodas, chips and candy for the marchers upon their return.

Also present to show support for the marchers were We Are Change KC and Young Americans for Liberty, from Lawrence. Both groups lent a hand distributing food and discussing issues with other “occupiers” throughout the evening. After sunset, LRP projected economics and liberty related videos from a small projector attached to a laptop for the edification of die-hard occupiers remaining after dark.

This was the second march local Occupy forces have undertaken to raise awareness for their cause to reclaim democracy from corporate and financial elites. As with the previous march on October 5, it was done in coordination with the original New York demonstration and with other local demonstrations throughout the country. This time, however, the movement reached yet further with protests taking place in the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

If you are not familiar with the movement, here is how the original Occupy Wall Street demonstration officially describes itself:

Occupy Wall Street is a people powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy and the UK, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people who are writing the rules of the global economy are imposing an agenda of neoliberalism and economic inequality that is foreclosing our future.

Official Occupy Wall Street website: http://occupywallst.org/

Official Occupy KC site: http://occupykc.com/

So, was he a president of peace?  Not everyone agrees.  He himself did not think much of his legacy.

Tim Weiner wrote a book in 2007 about the Central Intelligence Agency. He took for his title a comment by Dwight D. Eisenhower. On leaving the White House in 1961, Eisenhower said that he feared, because of the foreign policy mess created largely by an out of control CIA and military industrial complex, he was leaving to his successor a “legacy of ashes.”

Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes is very well written and thoroughly researched. About a third of the 700 pages are devoted to extensive end notes detailing far more, especially about the scandals that have been declassified. The entire book from one end to the other, including notes, reads as a history of incompetence, foul ups, idiocy, corruption, abuse of power, and genocidal massacres.

The book, although written by an author sympathetic to the concept of overseas aggression and evidently convinced of the need not only for an extensive intelligence service to learn about other countries, but also an extensive covert operations program independent of the military to subvert and attack other countries, is an indictment of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other espionage agencies. It is, in short, a detailed indictment for high treason of every director of central intelligence, every director of covert operations, and many specific agents and analysts.

What have these people done?

Since the founding of the CIA in 1948, the men and women who believe their role is to run the world have feathered their nests; destroyed lives; massacred children; committed or supported genocide on every continent except Antarctica; prevented the development of property regimes in space, in the deep sea beds, in Antarctica; spied upon Americans at home and abroad; and overthrown governments all over the world, including most likely our own. In pursuit of these goals, the CIA has blown the cover of hundreds of agents, sent thousands of Americans and American-trained foreigners to their deaths on missions compromised from the start, failed to engage in effective counter-espionage, knowingly over-estimated the strength of foreign regimes, and either failed utterly to correctly assess Soviet nuclear capabilities, or deliberately lied about them. In other words, it has been charlie foxtrot all the way.

Perfect Storm
Weiner gives plenty of examples of many of these various and sundry atrocities. The “perfect storm” of corruption and abuse of power was certainly in the Vietnam era. Few presidents have been more willing to lie, cheat, steal, and massacre than LBJ. Few people in the history of the world have been more corrupt, more conniving, more eager to abuse power for the sake of feeling powerful.

On page 239 Weiner writes, “The war was authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, rammed through Congress after what the president and the Pentagon proclaimed was an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam on American ships in international waters on August 4. The National Security Agency, which compiled and controlled the intelligence on the attack, insisted the evidence was ironclad. Robert McNamara swore to it. … But the full truth did not come out until November 2005, in a highly detailed confession released by the National Security Agency.”

As for Lyndon Baines Johnson, he summed up what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin four years after the 1964 incident. “‘Hell,’ said the president, ‘those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’” And so he escalated a war which ended up killing over 58,000 Americans, millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, Hmong, and Cambodians, and causing untold misery throughout the region. Because, at heart, LBJ was a corrupt maniac war monger. His personal fortune was made from the sale of military gear through his involvement in various defense contractors, it seems.

“Richard Helms ran the CIA…. He had three major covert-action campaigns to fight that year. Each one had been started by President Eisenhower, then strengthened by President Kennedy, and now was central to LBJ’s quest to win the war in Southeast Asia. In Laos, the CIA fought to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In Thailand, it set out to fix the elections. In Indonesia, it provided secret support for leaders who massacred countless communists (p. 252).” No doubt the lessons learned by the CIA in subverting the government and election process in Thailand proved useful in other countries, including our own.

The massacres in Indonesia involved at least hundreds of thousands of people, and were by no means limited to communists. Nor were they the only massacres—the government of Guatemala massacred hundreds of thousands, also with the full support and enthusiastic encouragement of the CIA. Pinochet in Chile would do much the same with support from Nixon and Kissinger—so much support that Kissinger is an internationally wanted criminal suspect.

Corruption
“Laos started out as an intelligence war. Under accords signed by the superpowers and their allies, all foreign fighters were supposed to leave the country (Ibid.).” But, of course, the CIA fought a war there, anyway. “Station chiefs and their officers had orders to fight a war in secret, defying diplomatic niceties and the military facts on the ground (p. 253).” These “diplomatic niceties” meant repudiating a treaty to which the USA was party, something many Native American Indian nations had direct experience with in the 19th Century. And, of course, there was plenty of opium in Laos to smuggle back to the USA.

“Patriotism for profit became a $50 billion a year business …a sum about the size of the American intelligence budget itself. … A CIA officer could file his retirement papers, turn in his blue identification badge, go to work for a much better salary at a military contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Booz Allen Hamilton, then return to the CIA the next day, wearing a green badge. After September 2001, the outsourcing went out of control. Green-badge bosses started openly recruiting in the CIA’s cafeteria (p. 512).” Shameless.

The corruption and drug sales were illustrated repeatedly in the hearings of the Church committee during the 1970s, and the Iran Contra investigation during the 1980s. No one in the government cares about corruption and abuse of power, they just want to dip their beaks in the same trough. Ugly.

Destroyed lives
On page 265, Weiner reports, “A quarter of a million American soldiers were at war when Richard Helms took control of the CIA [in 1966]….Bob Gates, the future director of central intelligence and secretary of defense…entered a forbidding seven-story concrete slab topped with antennas. … The CIA made Gates a 90 day wonder….From there the CIA analyst caught a chilling glimpse of the course of the war in Vietnam: The United States was running out of pilots….’We knew then,’ Gates remembered, ‘that we could not win the war.’”

Now, how sleazy is that? The Vietnam war cost the lives of 220,357 South Vietnamese, 1,176,000 North Vietnamese, 58,159 US soldiers, 4,960 South Korea soldiers, 1,446 PRC soldiers, 1,351 Thai soldiers, 520 Australian soldiers, 37 New Zealand soldiers—altogether 1,463,277 military lives lost, plus some 2,094,000 wounded soldiers (many of whose lives would never be the same due to their injuries), plus 5.3 million civilians killed in South Vietnam, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and Laos. So, on the close order of 8.9 million lives utterly destroyed or unimaginably altered. And these jackasses in the CIA knew in 1966 that the war could not be won. Most of those lives would have been saved, had the government of the United States simply admitted that it could not escalate the war to victory. Where was the intelligence service?

Screwing up, that’s where.

Massacred children
Weiner documents numerous instances where the CIA directly funded and directly ordered the massacre of civilians. By some estimates, half a million civilians in Indonesia in the 1950s, nearly a quarter million in Guatemala, tens of thousands in Cuba, thousands in Chile, five million plus in Southeast Asia, by some estimates half a million children in Iraq during the sanctions under Clinton, as many as 600,000 civilians during the Iraq war. The CIA loves to massacre children, considering it one of their main purposes. Every CIA agent must be responsible for murdering children in order to be considered for promotion.

“For the next three weeks, he and his fellow CIA pilots hit military and civilian targets in the villages and harbors of northeastern Indonesia….Hundreds of civilians died [in April 1958], the American embassy reported (p. 151).” And that’s just one incident.

Genocide committed
On page 458 Weiner documents, “In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency’s 1954 coup against an elected president. Between 90 and 96 percent of those deaths came at the hands of the Guatemalan military. In 1994, the CIA’s officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations to the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its [the CIA's] payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves.” The only reason we happen to know some of these details is because much of the secret information on Guatemala was declassified, in part when a CIA director tried to fire a few of the scum bags responsible for the genocide in that country.

Genocide supported
In 1970, according to Weiner (pp 304-309) the CIA was involved in faulty intelligence which resulted in the carpet bombing by B-52s of six suspected communist camps that were in fact peaceful villages in Cambodia. At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger began planning to overthrow the elected government of Chile and put in place a mass murderer who was responsible for at least 3,200 civilian deaths, many by gruesome torture and the jailing and torture of tens of thousands more in what became known as the Caravan of Death.

“There is no doubt,” the agency confessed in a statement to Congress after the cold war ended, “that some CIA contacts were actively engaged in committing and covering up serious human rights abuses (p. 316).” I believe that all CIA agents and all CIA contacts are engaged in brutal abuses of individual civil and human rights, because they enjoy it. There is not a single CIA agent anywhere in the world who is a decent human being. One of these scum bags, Manuel Contreras, assassinated in 1976 the former ambassador of Allende’s government to the US, and an American aide, with a car bomb fourteen blocks from the White House. The agency and the Pinochet government “…knew and approved of that terrorist killing on American soil,” and blocked the extradition of Contreras. Kissinger is being pursued by courts in Chile, Argentina, Spain, and France by survivors of the Caravan of Death—but the scum in the USA government won’t send him to be tried for crimes against humanity.

The CIA also backed “…a Cambodian rebel army fighting Hanoi’s forces…And it placed the CIA’s allies in alignment with the butchers of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge (p. 420).” By some estimates, the Pol Pot government of the Khmer Rouge eventually massacred or starved to death as many as 3 million people. Even the CIA, which was clearly involved in supporting Pol Pot’s bid for power, admits to 100,000 killed and 1.2 million starved to death (see Wikipedia History of Cambodia).

Property regimes prevented
It has been well established that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was negotiated by Johnson’s team to eliminate the possibility of private property or national sovereignty in space. The same trick had been pulled by the team negotiating the 1957 Antarctica treaty, and was the official position for the Law of the Sea Treaty in 1982 to govern deep sea beds.

Now, you have to see LBJ as a sleazy villain of the worst sort. He knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was “just sailors shooting at flying fish” when he lied about it and used it to excuse a massive buildup. He knew in 1966 that the war could not be won, but sent more troops to their deaths than ever before. And he sold out the concept of a private property regime anywhere in space, so more money could be spent on the Vietnam war and his socialist programs in the USA. He was a monster, and his memory should never be rehabilitated. LBJ should be castigated and damned forever, his library burned down, and his monuments destroyed. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a mass murderer, and the CIA was one of his weapons of mass murder, a willing accomplice in the deeds.

Governments overthrown
The list of half-baked attempts is long, but the successful efforts is significantly shorter. These include the replacement of the democratically elected governments of Chile, Guatemala, Panama, and Iran, among many others.

In Panama, the CIA couldn’t find a communist party, so they invented one. They did so, ostensibly to get one of their agents into the Soviet Union, but they never were able to get a high level infiltration. Of course, where there is no real enemy, the CIA is eager to create one.

One of the obvious applications of their techniques of forging election results, using intimidation and abuse of power, and otherwise bringing about regime change against the will of the people involved, is to use these techniques to control their access to cash. I believe the CIA has used extortion and intimidation, among other techniques, to get more money in the CIA budget, especially its black operations budget. I believe the CIA has used its techniques to create a government in the USA favorable to a larger CIA budget, because, of course, the CIA is filled with scum who have no ethics. They want to fight wars for the sake of massacring children because they individually and severally like to see children maimed and killed.

Dangers to the Bill of Rights
The CIA has claimed, falsely, that it needs to be able to spy on everyone, everywhere, all the time. As a result of repeated lies by its agents and officials, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been approved by Congress, including a vote in favor by Barack Obama while he was a Senator. Warrantless wiretaps, opening private mail, bugging phones and computers, torturing suspects in foreign prisons, disappearing dissidents, lying to Congress and the American people, raping and torturing for the sheer pleasure of it, and murdering anyone who gets in their way are typical of the CIA, both in the USA and abroad. The CIA is a den of rogues. There are no members of the CIA at any level who are not guilty of or complicit in murder, torture, rape, theft, and violations of civil rights. Every single one of these filth are traitors to the oath they swore to uphold the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Every single one of these treasonous scum have been making war on the United States while giving aid and comfort to its enemies. In a just world, they would each be tried for treason, found guilty, and punished accordingly.

Covers blown, agents to their deaths
Valerie Plame was not the first CIA agent to have her cover blown, and she very likely won’t be the last. Weiner relates numerous instances of CIA agents recruited, trained, and sent to their deaths.

In the 1950s, agents and paramilitary forces were trained up and parachuted into places like Albania, China, and Ukraine. In many cases, double agents like Kim Philby did the dirty work. “Philby worked for Moscow out of a secure room in the Pentagon….For more than a year, before and after many a liquid lunch, Angleton gave Philby the precise coordinates for every agent the CIA parachuted into Albania. … Roughly two hundred of the CIA’s foreign agents died. Almost no one in the American government knew. It was a most secret thing. Angleton was promoted to chief of counterintelligence when it was over (p. 46).”

So, there you have it. Not very competent. Every few paragraphs of the entire book, which runs to over 677 pages including end notes and index, Weiner gives account of some massive stupidity, incompetence, dirty deed, corrupt act, massacre, torture, unconstitutional activity, or crime against humanity. Although one does want to cheer for the deaths of CIA agents, who clearly richly deserve violent ends, one cannot help but also feel sorry for some of these poor dumb Idaho farm boys recruited out of college, trained poorly, and sent to their deaths with absolutely no gain.

“All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no penalty assessed for failure (p. 47).” Indeed, some of those responsible were actively promoted to high levels within the agency. Secrecy prevented their incompetence from being held against them.

Soviet nuclear and missile capabilities under-estimated
To give you a sense of how completely screwed up these guys were, they both underestimated and later overestimated Soviet nuclear weapons and missile capabilities. In September 1949, “…the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years. Three days later, Truman told the world that Stalin had the bomb (p. 48).” Missed it by four years.

Soviet nuclear and missile capabilities over-estimated
“Since 1957, the CIA had sent Eisenhower terrifying reports that the Soviet buildup of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles was far faster and much greater than the American arsenal. In 1960, the agency projected a mortal threat to the United States; it told the president that the Soviets had five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961. The Strategic Air Command used those estimates as the basis for a secret first-strike plan using more than three thousand nuclear warheads to destroy every city and every military outpost from Warsaw to Beijing. But Moscow did not have five hundred nuclear missiles pointed at the United States at the time. It had four (p. 158).”

Utter incompetence. The 1960 election included dramatic statements about a “missile gap” that was false. The CIA was utterly unable to properly estimate the Soviet nuclear missile capability. It either failed to make use of hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware and spy systems and U2 over-flights and even satellite surveillance data, as well as human intelligence, or it deliberately lied about the extent of the threat. Given that these dramatic and false over-estimates would continue until the end of the Cold War in 1991, I believe that incompetence can only explain so much. I think the CIA lied about the enemy in order to justify a larger budget for itself.

The dangers of secrecy and opaque government in a free society.
To secure the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, governments have been instituted among men and women. It is the function of government to defend those rights. Such governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

But what does it mean, consent? If you examine contract law, consent has the following features. It must be entered willingly, knowingly, and competently. Also, there must be an exchange of value between the parties to the agreement. If any of these features is missing, there is no valid agreement.

So, what is secrecy and opacity in a free society? It is, simply, the absence of consent. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be said to consent to it. Agreement without knowledge is not agreement at all. It is fraud.

And that is what the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the Homeland Security department represent. They are a fraud, perpetrated on the American people, to deprive them of a government by their own consent. Without knowledge, there is no consent.

As long as the government of the USA engages in secret wars, secret contracts, corruption, intrigue, espionage, and the operation of a secret government, it cannot pretend to have the consent of the American people. A government without consent is tyranny.

Eisenhower set the USA firmly on this path toward the destruction of individual liberty, the overseas adventurism, and the final end to the dollar.  Ashes indeed, Dwight, ashes, indeed.

This post contributed by Jim Davidson who is primarily responsible for its content.

Long story short, Red Light Cameras will not be coming down this session, but if we don’t act… we will be getting SPEED CAMERAS!!!!

You can find your Missouri Representatives contact information here:
http://www.house.mo.gov/member.aspx
Please, make phone calls and send emails.  We must not allow this legislation to continue!!!
It is very critical that you contact your State Rep., as well as Tim Jones, House Floor Leader and urge them to kill or change HB 430. SA 11 needs to be removed! Please urge them politely to do so.

Often times as a libertarian, looking back on centuries of history with little progress, or the state of contemporary society, one can become discouraged. Struggling forward, for a new society, can seem daunting. This is one reason we need for solidarity and mutual aid amongst ourselves, not just for protection from the state, but for encouragement. And there are many forms of such encouragement, from reflecting on past successes, to music, to working on a new project. For, despite the lack of progress, change is gradual and step by step, individual. And each step forward is one step closer to our dream of a society without systemic violence.

Though there are many strategies, I promote one of living, as close as possible, to libertarian society. Within the market anarchist tradition, a man named Konkin coined a term, agorism, to define the consistent synthesis of non-aggression libertarian ethics with counter-economic action. Counter-economics is any action, including non-financial actions, which are done peacefully, yet are prohibited by the state. And it is this agorism, living a non-aggressive life off the records of the state, that I promote, as a strategy for living one’s libertarian ideals. Instead of ending the state directly, merely living under it, rerouting around it, and replacing it as it dies from its own internal inconsistencies.

With this in mind, many ask what they can do to participate in the agora. And it is this question that George Donnelly and I have sought to answer with a new unconference, the Agora I/O Unconference from March 25-27.

Due to being a web unconference, based on livestreaming technology, meaning location is not an issue for participation. And, if you’re unaware of how unconferences work, they’re decentralized, participant-driven conferences avoiding the problems of a central authority. Within such a structure, one can listen to, and financially support, those talks they deem valuable while not listening to or supporting those they deem unworthy. In this way, the individual has the control over their participation and their desires are more accurately reflected in future unconferences. And if you can’t attend a certain talk for some reason? Well, recordings are being made, in order to better supply you, the participant, with the information you desire. And while we encourage you to donate, its also free to participate! Whats a reason not to participate?

What can one learn from participating in the Agora I/O Unconference? Allow me to provide a sample of various talks, though I highly encourage you to visit the Speakers or Schedule pages to learn more.

First off, Liberty on Tour’s Pete Eyre is speaking on Effective Activism: Foundation to Impact on saturday, March 26 at 5pm est. He’ll be going over how to be a good ambassador, maintain a calm, reasonable tone, as well as various scenarios and what was beneficial and what could be improved upon. If you’re wanting to be a front-lines activist, this may be the talk for you, straight from one of the most successful activists out there.

Perhaps one is interested in a basic lesson of how to transition from ideas to actual practice? Cat Bleish is speaking on Transitioning from Agorist Theory to Practice on friday, March 25 at 3pm est. Having made the transition herself, she’ll be able to impart lessons from her own experiences. For anyone interested in getting involved in living as an agorist, this would be a key talk to attend. Cat Bleish has long been involved in working against government incursion into our lives, having strongly opposed the fusion centers, but is now working to create positive solutions around statist tyranny.

Construction is a historically counter-economic profession. Want to get involved in an industry easier to hide from the state than others? Josh Carter’s Construction with Agorist Principles on sunday, March 27 at 2pm est. Living a life as an agorist and having worked within construction, he’s the one to know how to operate a business off the books, but also how to minimize the costs, when you do have to surface temporarily. If you’re involved in construction and would rather work for yourself, this would be a vital talk to attend.

And once you’re ready to get involved, perhaps start an underground business, then Momma Ally’s Underground Business Marketing & Anti-state Security Measures at sunday, March 27 at 3pm est is the talk for you. Having operated the Last Biscuit for two years, under the noses of the Savannah, Georgia police state, she was successful in building the business from a local southern food delivery business to a city-wide underground business. Only when filming Savannah police harassing a defenseless homeless person was when the business came crumbling down. And now, recovering from that loss, plans are being made to expand nationally.

Perhaps Being the Media in Your Community, to profile abuses such as the one against that homeless man, is more your style? Well, that’s Jason Talley’s talk on sunday, March 27 at 1pm est. Interested in building a strong community, media is one part of promoting a community’s work and if your community needs a voice, this may be the talk for you.

And if you want to build an agorist community yourself? Then Marc Stevens‘ Building a Local Free Market could be the first step in that direction, on friday, March 25 at noon est. Though not entirely focused on community, I believe a local market is a key step to beginning that community, to self-sufficiently support itself from within. And if you know many people producing goods, or able to, off the books, you may be the key person to begin a local community market.

Don’t trust the fiat currency imposed by the state due to its inherently inflationary nature? There’s at least two talks regarding alternative currencies! The first is Ron Helwig’s Shire Silver and Silver Currency on saturday, March 26 at 2pm est. The second is Silver Bullet and Coin Silver, by Nick Saorsa and Drew Phillips of Freedoms Phoenix, on saturday, March 26 at 3pm est. With inflation causing the value of federal reserve notes to silver to fluctuate wildly (from under $20 to nearly $40 in a year), accepting and holding alternative currencies is a very beneficial policy in these economically uncertain times whether you’re an individual or involved in a business, community, or free market.

And in such uncertain times, the state cracks down socially as well. The world witnessed the internet blackouts during the ongoing middle eastern peoples’ revolutions. Do you have a plan to communicate with comrades and loved ones? J Kent Hastings‘ How to Survive with Ham Radio When the Internet is Set to Kill, on friday, March 25 at 4pm est, provides much needed information on one useful form of communication if the internet is shut down, from communicating itself, to building a makeshift ham radio. This would be a key talk to attend, and save offline, for such an eventuality.

Of course, counter-economic action isn’t all business or survival preparation, its also fun, and there’s two talks on entertainment, yet which still have value. Sovereign Curtis‘ Ask Soviet Curtis: Uncle Joe of PorcFest and J Neil Schulman’s Why Alongside Night as a Movie is a Vital Part of Agorist Mass-Marketing Strategy. Both are on sunday, March 27 at 11am est. For those unaware, PorcFest is a freedom festival, including an agorist market 80+ vendors strong, with police kept out, and everything from open, respectful use of various substances to family-friendly activities. Basically, an experiment in statelessness. And Alongside Night is the most successful agorist novel, written by J Neil Schulman, and now being converted into a feature film. And whats the value in these talks? From Curtis, one could learn how to begin their own local freedom festival for those who can’t always travel to PorcFest. And from Schulman, one can learn the value of why a fictionalized account of agorism is a key part of agorist mass-marketing.

There are also many more speakers and topics, so be sure to check out the Speakers and Schedule pages to learn more! And, if you value their talk, please donate as a thank you for their time and knowledge

The busiest travel day of the year was designated National Opt Out Day at airports around the US, encouraging travelers to forego going through the full body scanning devices implemented by the TSA. The body scanning devices reveal in full detail all of one’s bodily nooks and crannies, but unfortunately the only other alternative in airports is a pat-down that many are describing as intrusive and insulting, given that it gives workers the authority to feel virtually every part of the body, genitalia included.

I went up to Kansas City International Airport earlier today to get some shots of the local opt-out advocates handing out fliers and information at one of the terminals – Wednesday, November 24, 2010.

Travelers passing through Kansas City International Airport, like at airports across the nation, have apparently opted-out of the National Opt-Out Day protest, as the TSA reports no delays over so-called intrusive body scans.

A small group of protestors did demonstrate at the airport on Wednesday, upset over body scans that they say are an unwarranted invasion of their privacy. The group urged passengers to cause delays by refusing the full-body scans and instead request the more time-consuming pat-downs instead. But the majority of travelers, like Curt McMillan, say it’s more important to him to be safe, with as little inconvenience as possible.

“Honestly I would probably choose whichever line is the shortest,” said McMillan. “So for me, it’s really more about getting through in a timely fashion. Certainly I understand why they’re doing it. So I’m really not offended either way. I just want to make sure that I get through make my flight, whichever line is the shortest that’s the one I’ll go.”

Protests appeared to be fizzling out at other major airports across the nation. However, Tracy Ward, a protestor with the Liberty Restoration Project, says that there is an outcry from the public about the airport security body scans.

“The public is speaking out, saying we’ve had enough we want something to be done about it,” said Ward. “We want the airlines to stand up and take a stand for us as well. Privatize security for airlines. Let passengers choose which airline to fly on as far as their security measures.”

The protests may have fizzled out, and Federal officials claim they will continue working on less invasive ways of keeping terrorist off airliners. But the fear of travel havoc has airport managers continuing to urge travelers to cooperate with security workers.

“Part of TSA’s operations is that they do things a little differently each time,” said Kathleen Hefner of KCI. “That’s a security procedure to keep people off-guard. What happens for one person is not going to be the exact same thing that happens for another person. So it’s good to be a little flexible. Expect that it might be a little different for you compared to the person in front of you in line.”

http://www.fox4kc.com/news/wdaf-thanksgiving-travel-kci-security-112410,0,5552374.story

http://www.kmbz.com/pages/8644866.php?contentType=4&contentId=7212173