From: Zenaan Harkness <[email protected]> >Assange on ‘US Empire’, Assad Govt Overthrow Plans & New Book ‘The >WikiLeaks Files’ http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/25/assange-on-us-empire-assad-govt-overthrow-plans-new-book-the-wikileaks-files/
>youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3HWiydFlJc (~450MiB at highest quality) >Sorry folks, USGovMil are the greatest evil on the planet today. >There's no other way to cut it. And yes, that's terribly sad. But tell >that to the over 250,000 Syrians who are now dead as a result of USA >Government foreign policy and CIA and military actions, training, etc. >And others all around the world. >There seems no way to pull the pin on this evil entity called the >United States government - but perhaps every little bit we do can >speed the process, educate those who don't understand what is >happening, and for citizens of the US of A, what is happening by their >implicit authority by acquiescence. [snip] At the risk of blowing my own horn (which I haven't been doing very much, recently),almost exactly 21 years ago I began writing my essay, "Assassination Politics".http://cryptome.org/ap.htmWhile I only described the solution to the problem of government in generalterms, there was much more than enough detail to convince many people that I was on the right track. Consider that the US government collects over 3 trillion dollars per year in taxes.Further, recognize that anybody who is forced to pay those taxes would be wantingto reduce or eliminate that cost, and especially if that money was used to fund misconduct. If every taxpayer was willing to pay 1% of the tax he pays to stop it, that's1% of 3 trillion, or $30 billion. If an average death would cost $100,000 with a functioning AP system, that could finance about 300,000 deaths. Does anybody seriously believe that it would take that many deaths to bring the government toheel? And particularly if those deaths start mostly at the top levels of the government,rather than the bottom. And that's only for the first year.Yes, a lot of work still needs to be done. But consider that it is at least as important to society to eliminate governments as it is to implement a new form of digital cash,i.e. Bitcoin. Governments killed perhaps 250 million people in the 20th century. Somebody put a lot of work into Bitcoin, and it is working today, as we speak.Similarly TOR, which despite being initially financed by the US government,points the way to better anonymity on the Internet. Ethereum and Augur are especiallyinteresting, a distributed system of computation that (if it is to be believed) will implement a blockchain system which simply cannot be stop by any realistic methods. Auguris to be a market for predictions: What predictions will it be allowed to handle? Who willdecide? Nick Szabo said, " A sufficiently large market predicting an individual's death is also, necessarily, an assassination market, and similarly other "prediction" markets are alsoact markets, changing incentives to act outside that market to bring about the predicted events. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2015/05/small-game-fallacies.html If the original quotation, above, is directed at ordinary folks, I can see why Assange might say, "There seems no way to pull the pin on this evil entity called theUnited States government..." But anybody who has read the AP essayknows that there will be, in fact, a way to do that. And it should be quite clear that there is much more reason for this today, in 2016, than there ever was in 1995, when I began writing the AP essay. Jim Bell
