Cold Shutdown and Don't Re-Start!
by Michael Bradshaw
www.usrepeals.org

Exclusive to TLE

In TLE 335 Lady Liberty ends her excellent column "So What's Your Back-Up Plan?" with the following paragraph:

"My computer will almost certainly be resurrected with some patience and some parts. In the meantime, I have my back-ups. But what about the Constitution and the freedoms enshrined within it? Will it come back? And what, precisely, do we have for back-up if it doesn't? "

I hope that her computer will survive, that she is using a whomping-big surge-protector and "UPS" to power her system; and that she is using either Mac OS or Linux. I also hope that her backups (system, program installers and data) are on optical disks, like CDs, that are immune to magnetic fields—especially pulsed-fields that erase magnetic disks and fry electronics. The Bush regime has been floating trial balloons about an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) attack on America with a pulse-tuned atomic bomb detonated high in the stratosphere over the center of the country. Say "good-bye" to utility power and communication, as well as your data on magnetic media. I stored my magnetic disks in a G. I. steel ammo can as a Faraday-box and also backed-up to CDs.

Re the Constitution and "the freedoms enshrined within it":

It is my observation that the Constitution of the United States is dead as a door-nail; and has been at least since 1933. Welll... maybe 1938, but I won't give you 1939! I hope it never returns, because it was a dismal failure. As Lysander Spooner told us, it either authorizes what we have now or has been powerless to prevent it. In Lady Liberty's idiom it was "Freedom 1.0"—and the Microsoft version, at that!

If I may be permitted to kick a straw-man while he is down; rights should no more be enshrined in a document than a lady should be confined to a pedestal. Like a muscle or a mind, they should be exercised to keep them strong and vigorous. Enshrining them in a law is no protection and makes people complacent; thinking that the government will protect them from itself. Instead, we need to dump empty "guarantees" from the very people who most victimize us and take our lives and freedom back into our own hands.

The Constitution and the republic it was used to create were advertised as a guarantee of life, liberty and property. Whether that was the original intent or not is now moot. The reality is that they have, at best, slowed the process of tyranny, not prevented it. As the "thing to be backed-up" is not the state (I hope, LL!), but political freedom; it is now time to admit that the "constitutional hard drive" is corrupt beyond any recovery and we should get a new PowerBook (TM). In fact we should get and read two of them! These "books on power" and its elimination are:

Unintended Consequences by John Ross, at fine book stores everywhere, and "Assassination Politics" by Jim Bell at www.libertarianthought.com/texts/asspol.html and elsewhere on the net.

Mr. Ross tells us how to delete government. Mr. Bell tells how to prevent its recovery with a "low-level re-format".

We have repeated the same experiment many times over the past six thousand blood-soaked years. We have always gotten the same results, the four basic functions of all government:

• Robbery
  
• Rape
  
• Slavery
  
• Murder (About 250,000,000 in the last century, alone.)

Perhaps it is time to try a new operating system.

Anarchy. (That just means "not having a state" for those who got their education in a government school.)

Anarchy imposed and maintained through self defense.

After all, decent folks have been using anarchy and the free markets to make just about all of the wealth and other benefits of civilization whenever the government goons were looking the other way (and despite them when they were watching) with an unbroken track record of success for over six thousand years. Otherhandwise, if we repeat the same mistakes again; trying to eliminate and then prevent tyranny by imposing a new tyranny; we will get the same results.

Tyranny.

The reliable catastrophe—of those four basic functions mentioned above.

Well, there you have it, Miss Liberty. A precise plan (or as close as one may get in this messy old world) to not only back-up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, now that the government has deleted them; but to replace them with something better. Something with a track-record of unbroken success wherever it has been allowed to work—for all of recorded history and as far back as archeology can infer.

Freedom.

The reliable miracle.

Michael Bradshaw is the Speaker (also the Lord-High Janitor) of the United States House of Repeals. www.usrepeals.org (Off-line as of Sept. 5, 2005 due to server weirdness. "We are working on it!" Sheesh!)

Amazon.com

Help Support TLE by patronizing our advertisers and affiliates.
We cheerfully accept donations!