From: Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>
>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".
While I only described the solution to the problem of government in general
terms, 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 wanting
to 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's
1% 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 to
heel? 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 especially
interesting, 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. Augur
is to be a market for predictions: What predictions will it be allowed to handle? Who will
decide?
Nick Szabo said, " A sufficiently large market predicting an individual's death is also,
necessarily, an assassination market, and similarly other "prediction" markets are also
act markets, changing incentives to act outside that market to bring about the predicted
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 the
United States government..." But anybody who has read the AP essay