On 11/13/20, Karl wrote:

The point of AP is to save Jim B. We do also need crypto markets that do more than just let us actually prepare for our deaths.

Life is nothing more than process of preparing for death, those embracing such reality are free to have more fun. Now quit top posting and block quoting.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:06 PM Zenaan Harkness wrote:

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 04:36:30PM -0500, grarpamp wrote:

<snip>

...

Now quit top posting and block quoting.

Ack, block quoting 7KiB for a 2 line (top posted!) reply is getting rather shitty ... very lazy.

The reminder helps me feel empowered to hack a little =) What client / network setup do you use?

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 6:01 PM Zenaan Harkness wrote:

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 05:22:09PM -0500, Karl wrote:

...

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:06 PM Zenaan Harkness wrote:

...

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 04:36:30PM -0500, grarpamp wrote:

<snip>

...

...

Now quit top posting and block quoting.

Ack, block quoting 7KiB for a 2 line (top posted!) reply is getting rather shitty ... very lazy.

The reminder helps me feel empowered to hack a little =) What client / network setup do you use?

mutt

neomutt balks at mbox >2GiB, so I went back to mutt

mutt sounds great. I love the command line. Wonder why that 32bit signed integer issue with neomutt. I tried to start neomutt a couple times but couldn't seem to find how to actually set it up ... I just got mutt set up on termux on my phone! I hope it already has vi bindings ... it'll be a bit for me to switch to it ...

On 11/28/20, grarpamp wrote:

...

https://augur.net

That platform looks very cool. Just the kind of thing Jim Bell was looking for. Betting for anything you want. I wonder how they calculate the odds? marxos

Coinbase Delists Augur (REP) https://www.reddit.com/r/Augur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation A political delisting attack may have just been activated against Augur and Distributed General Prediction Markets... check news to confirm any potential cancellation trend among such market projects. Further development of these innovative DGPM markets is known to enable beneficial and useful models for helping free societies to post, choose among, validate, crowdfund, and fulfill predictions towards efficiently accomplishing shared goals, such as building and maintaining "the roads", fusion power, curing cancer, etc, thereby eliminating the inefficient, slow, skimming, corrupt, and unnecessary middlemen of Govts and Banks from the process and ensuring that quality proposals are competitively bid claimed and performed according to the crowdfunded specification before payment. Distributed General Prediction Markets (DGPM's) will become the best "X Prize" mechanisms of the future, and for a free humanity. DARPA Grand Challenge Elevator:2010 Global Security Challenge H-Prize Hutter Prize Inducement prize contest L Prize Methuselah prize Orteig Prize

Decentralized protocols, oracles, for judging events, JaaS (Justice As A Service) https://kleros.io/ ChainLink

Thank you.  On Thursday, July 29, 2021, 04:58:05 PM PDT, grarpamp wrote: Anarchist Vigilantes: An Idea for Real Justice (Part 1/2) (LUA Podcast #57) https://libertyunderattack.com/anarchist-vigilantes-idea-real-justice-part-1... https://libertyunderattack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/lua-10.22-show-ima... https://libertyunderattack.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/LUA171022final.m... https://media.blubrry.com/liberty_under_attack_radio/s/www.libertyunderattac... https://ad-store.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/LUA/Documents/LUA171022final.mp... https://www.bitchute.com/video/rKuIS-dRbj4/ On this episode of Liberty Under Attack Radio, Im joined once again by our creative consultant, Kyle Rearden. In this part 1 of a 2-part series, we discuss vigilantism; more specifically: The history of vigilantism in America The role comic books have played in its popularity How to fund a committee of vigilance or an individual vigilante How vigilantism could shift public perception of anarchist to a positive light What training is necessary for vigilantes And much, much more. Next week, we will tie it all together with a discussion on assassination politics and avenging angels, a concept promoted by Rayo in the 1960s. Kyle and I believe weve put together a plausible, rough outline for how real justice could be achieved and how to further efforts towards a (utopian) free society. Anarchist Vigilantes: Assassination Politics, and Avenging Angels (Part 2/2) (LUA Podcast #58) https://libertyunderattack.com/anarchist-vigilantes-assassination-politics-a... https://libertyunderattack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/lua-10.29-show-ima... https://libertyunderattack.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/LUA171029FINAL.m... https://media.blubrry.com/liberty_under_attack_radio/p/www.libertyunderattac... https://ad-store.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/LUA/Documents/LUA171029FINAL.mp... https://www.bitchute.com/video/dsmIXa3Kno0/ On this episode of Liberty Under Attack Radio, Kyle Rearden joins me to conclude this two-part series on anarchist vigilantes, assassination politics, and avenging angels. Last week, we went in depth into how anarchist vigilantes could be used to defend person and property, drive public perception of anarchism in a positive direction, and how it could be used as a way to eventually abolish the State. This week, we tie all three of these things together and attempt to answer these questions: How could an assassination market work? How could the security of the participants be ensured? Could assassination markets be used as a tool to abolish the State? Slow the parasitism of an existing State? And more What are avenging angels? Could this use of Pavlovian psychology on the State actually work? How does an avenging angel fund differ from a legal defense fund? And more

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination... Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins Andy Greenberg http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html http://cryptome.org/ap.htm As Bitcoin becomes an increasingly popular form of digital cash, the cryptocurrency is being accepted in exchange for everything from socks to sushi to heroin. If one anarchist has his way, it'll soon be used to buy murder, too. Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official--a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market's rules, if someone on its hit list is killed--and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be--any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds. For now, the site's rewards are small but not insignificant. In the four months that Assassination Market has been online, six targets have been submitted by users, and bounties have been collected ranging from ten bitcoins for the murder of NSA director Keith Alexander and 40 bitcoins for the assassination of President Barack Obama to 124.14 bitcoins--the largest current bounty on the site--targeting Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and public enemy number one for many of Bitcoin's anti-banking-system users. At Bitcoin's current rapidly rising exchanges rate, that's nearly $75,000 for Bernanke's would-be killer. Sanjuro's grisly ambitions go beyond raising the funds to bankroll a few political killings. He believes that if Assassination Market can persist and gain enough users, it will eventually enable the assassinations of enough politicians that no one would dare to hold office. He says he intends Assassination Market to destroy "all governments, everywhere." "I believe it will change the world for the better," writes Sanjuro, who shares his handle with the nameless samurai protagonist in the Akira Kurosawa film "Yojimbo." (He tells me he chose it in homage to the creator of the online black market Silk Road, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, as well Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.) "Thanks to this system, a world without wars, dragnet panopticon-style surveillance, nuclear weapons, armies, repression, money manipulation, and limits to trade is firmly within our grasp for but a few bitcoins per person. I also believe that as soon as a few politicians gets offed and they realize they've lost the war on privacy, the killings can stop and we can transition to a phase of peace, privacy and laissez-faire." The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World, by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender. I contacted the Secret Service and the FBI to ask if they're investigating Assassination Market, and both declined to comment. Like other so-called "dark web" sites, Assassination Market runs on the anonymity network Tor, which is designed to prevent anyone from identifying the site's users or Sanjuro himself. Sanjuro's decision to accept only Bitcoins is also intended to protect users, Sanjuro, and any potential assassins from being identified through their financial transactions. Bitcoins, after all, can be sent and received without necessarily tying them to any real-world identity. In the site's instructions to users, Sanjuro suggests they run their funds through a "laundry" service to make sure the coins are anonymized before contributing them to anyone's murder fund. As for technically proving that an assassin is responsible for a target's death, Assassination Market asks its killers to create a text file with the date of the death ahead of time, and to use a cryptographic function known as a hash to convert it to a unique string of characters. Before the murder, the killer then embeds that data in a donation of one bitcoin or more to the victim's bounty. When a target is successfully murdered, he or she can send Sanjuro the text file, which Sanjuro hashes to check that the results match the data sent before the target's death. If the text file is legitimate and successfully predicted the date of the killing, the sender must have been responsible for the murder, according to Sanjuro's logic. Sanjuro says he'll keep one percent of the payout himself as a commission for his services. Just reading about that coldly calculative system of lethal violence likely inspires queasy feelings or outrage. But Sanjuro says that the public's abhorrence won't prevent the system from working. And as a matter of ethics, he notes that he'll accept only user-suggested targets "who have initiated force against other humans. More specifically, only people who are outside the reach of the law because it has been subverted and corrupted, and whose victims have no other way to take revenge than to do so anonymously." Even setting aside the immorality of killing, doesn't the notion of enabling small minorities of angry Bitcoin donors to assassinate elected officials sound like an attempt to cripple democracy? "Of course, limiting democracy is why we even have a constitution," Sanjuro responds. "Majority support does not make a leader legitimate any more than it made slavery legitimate. With this market the great equalising forces of capitalism have the opportunity to work in politics too. One bitcoin paid is one vote closer to a veto of whatever legislation you dislike." Sanjuro didn't actually invent the concept of an anonymous crowdfunded assassination market. The idea dates back to the cypherpunk movement of the mid-1990s, whose adherents dreamt of using encryption tools to weaken the government and empower individuals. Former Intel engineer and Cypherpunk Mailing List founder Tim May argued that uncrackable secret messages and untraceable digital currency would lead to assassination markets in his "Cryptoanarchist's Manifesto" written in 1992. A few years later, another former Intel engineer named Jim Bell proposed a system of funding assassinations through encrypted, anonymous donations in an essay he called "Assassination Politics." The system he described closely matches Sanjuro's scheme, though anonymity tools like Tor and Bitcoin were mostly theoretical at the time. As Bell wrote then: If only 0.1% of the population, or one person in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head. Further, imagine that anyone considering collecting that bounty could do so with the mathematical certainty that he could not be identified, and could collect the reward without meeting, or even talking to, anybody who could later identify him. Perfect anonymity, perfect secrecy, and perfect security. And that, combined with the ease and security with which these contributions could be collected, would make being an abusive government employee an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office. Bell would later serve years in prison for tax evasion and stalking a federal agent, and was only released in March of 2012. When I contacted him by email, he denied any involvement in Sanjuro's Assassination Market and declined to comment on it. Sanjuro tells me he's long been aware of Bell's idea. But he only decided to enact it after the past summer's revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA exposed in a series of leaks by agency contractor Edward Snowden. "Being forced to alter my every happy memory during internet activity, every intimate moment over the phone with my loved ones, to also include some of the people I hate the most listening in, analysing the conversation, was the inspiration I needed to embark on this task," he writes. "After about a week of muttering 'they must all die' under my breath every time I opened a newspaper or turned on the television, I decided something had to be done. This is my contribution to the cause." Assassination Market isn't the first online service to suggest funding murder with bitcoins. Other Tor-hidden websites with names like Quick Kill, Contract Killer and C'thulhu have all claimed to offer murders in exchange for bitcoin payments. But none of them responded to my attempts to contact their administrators, and all required advanced payments for their services, so they may be scams. And how do Assassination Market's users know that it's not a similar fraud scheme designed to steal users' bitcoins? "You don't," Sanjuro admits. But he argues that if it were a scam, it would be a very complex and risky one, given that even threatening to harm the president of the United States is a felony. Kuwabatake Sanjuro, the ronin samurai in the film "Yojimbo" whose pseudonym the Assassination... [+] Other than that, "I can but appeal personally," Sanjuro writes. "I live a comfortable, albeit somewhat spartan life, and the only thing that really pains me is the increasing attacks on the liberties I enjoy in my daily life, mainly my personal privacy. I cannot buy that with money, so I have no need of it. There is nothing I want more than to see this project succeed, and for that I need dead politicians." If the system does prove to work, the launch of Assassination Market may be ill-timed for Sanjuro, given law enforcement's recent crackdown on the dark web. In August, the FBI used an exploit in Tor to take down the web hosting firm Freedom Hosting and arrest its founder Eric Eoin Marques, who is accused of offering his services to child pornography sites. And just last month, the FBI also seized the popular Bitcoin- and Tor-based black market for drugs known as Silk Road and arrested its alleged creator, Ross Ulbricht. Sanjuro counters that in addition to Tor, Bitcoin, and the usual encryption tools, he has "measures in place to prevent the effectiveness of such an arrest. Naturally these will have to be kept secret." He adds that, like an earlier generation of cypherpunks, he puts his faith in the mathematical promise of cryptography to trump the government's power to stop him. "With cryptography, the state, or any protection firm, is largely obsolete...all activity that can be reduced to information transfer will be completely out of the government's, or anyone's, hands, other than the parties involved," he says. "I am a crypto-anarchist," Sanjuro concludes. "We have a bright future ahead of us."

https://www.sherrilynkenyon.com/book-series/league/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2150511/ The List (2013) When the man behind a popular website that ranks the world's most corrupt individuals is voted number one on his own site, he becomes the target of a killer who is out to murder every person named to the top of "The List." https://duckduckgo.com/?iax=videos&ia=videos&q="democide"

the promise of smart contracts for beneficial goals.

The future may soon be one of freedom, one without today's legacy archy. And Prediction Markets may answer one of the most persistant questions held back by people [1] as only being possible under the domain of the State... Q: But but but... who will build and maintain the Roads? A: Whoever answers the questions that are posed to the market for funding. System freely determining the validity of questions, level of funds accumulating, eventually motivating the takers to make predictions... fully distributed, no prime government contractors, no ownership or authority in existing roads, open specification, for all. (PM's often better than DAO's at least in the case of public roads, since DAO's typically imply and assert themselves as owners, leading to problems of anti-privacy/freedom/free-use of tracking/tolls, enforcement, access control, fraud, theft, corruption, eventual shift from "private in the public interest" to public nuisance, etc. DAO's often better in private contexts such as business, or voluntarily subscribed insurance choices, etc.) Those wanting freedom-of-travel roads will see to it that those general and particular questions will be posed and funded and thus answered by predictors when valid... no vehicle gps trackers or registration or taxes or tollbooths or anything else needed but free markets. Whether each single pothole, or all the roads of a region, Prediction Markets have been noted as capable of motivating maintainers to show up. Now go propose, fund, and predict the fixing of that annoying pothole! Peace, Love, Anarchy. [1] Who are brainwashed in government indoctrination camps (aka: public schools) to ignore that lots of roads were and are done on volunteer/donor, communal shared, or private interest basis.

Will Prediction Markets be the answer to "But Who Will Build The Roads?", and other Questions of "Shared / Public" resources? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project https://daily.jstor.org/how-accurate-are-prediction-markets/ https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC8605461 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Marketcast-Method-for-Aggregating-... https://universaldebatingproject.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-good-judgement-pro... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426620302442 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3398761.3399010 https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2108.11631.html unihedge https://dimacs.rutgers.edu/news_archive/wsforecasting https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Information+Precision+in+Online+Communities%3... https://www.jasss.org/21/1/7.html https://ci.acm.org/2019/assets/proceedings/CI_2019_paper_34.pdf https://3lib.net/book/11187069/1b5fa9

In The Age Of COVID, We're Reminded An Unjust Law Is No Law At All https://mises.org/wire/age-covid-were-reminded-unjust-law-no-law-all https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2334395618953078543/36635717282941863... https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220211-canada-s-ontario-declares-stat... https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/does-the... https://mises.org/wire/american-revolution-was-culture-war It has become something of a habit in both the American and Canadian media to insist that the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates is an "illegal protest." They are "illegal border protests," one American news affiliate proclaims. Canada's National Post dutifully refers to the protests in its headlines as illegal acts. The term "illegal" has been used a multitude of times by Liberal Party politicians in the House of Commons. The premier of Ontario—one of Canada's most hysterical politicians—not only paints the protests as illegal but as a "siege." Other opponents of the protests refer to them as an "occupation" and as an "insurrection." "Lawbreaker" as a Political Slur So why the obsession with labeling the protests illegal? The idea, of course, is to cast suspicion on them and portray them as harmful and morally illegitimate. We could contrast the rhetoric surrounding the trucker protest with that of the Black Lives Matter protests. In the case of the BLM protests, illegal acts were downplayed and ignored, with one obvious riot labeled a "mostly peaceful" protest. when it comes to protests and other acts of which the regime approves, legality is never an issue. The regimes of the world, of course, like to use legality as a standard for judging human behavior because the regimes make the laws. Whether or not the laws actually have anything to do with human rights, private property, or just basic common sense is another matter entirely. Thus history is replete with pointless, immoral, and destructive laws. Slavery has been lawful throughout much of human history. Temporary slavery—known as military conscription—is still employed by many regimes. In the US, the imprisonment of peaceful American citizens of Japanese descent was perfectly lawful under the US regime during World War II. Today, employers can face ruinous sanctions for hiring a worker who lacks the proper immigration paperwork. Worldwide, people can be jailed in many jurisdictions for years for the "crime" of possessing an illegal plant. During covid, the reality of arbitrary law came very much to the fore when unelected health bureaucrats and lone elected executives began ruling by decree. They closed businesses, shut people up in their homes, and imposed vaccine and mask mandates. Those who refuse to comply—and businesses who refuse to enforce these edicts—are condemned as lawbreakers and subject to punishment. The Moral Limits of "Law and Order" All of these legal provisions, acts, and sanctions represent mockeries of basic natural rights rather than protections of them. The notion that laws can be perversions of true justice has long been obvious to many. In fact, the disconnect between morality and legality is a fundamental aspect of Western civilization. The basic notion is very old, but the idea's endurance in the West was reinforced by the fact that Christianity began as an illegal religion and early Christians were often considered to be criminals deserving of the death penalty. It should be no surprise, then, that Saint Augustine declared an unjust law to be no law at all and compared kings to pirates: the decrees of pirates, of course, are not worthy of obedience or reverence. And if kings are like pirates, kingly decrees are of equal respectability. This same tradition fueled Saint Thomas Aquinas's support for regicide (in certain cases). Needless to say, regicide has been always and everywhere declared illegal by the would-be targets. Yet, unfortunately, declaring something to be "illegal" remains an effective slur. There is no shortage of people who proudly consider themselves to be blind supporters of "law and order" and who insist "lawbreakers" are axiomatically in the wrong. Their simple-minded refrain is "if you don't like the law, change it" and many of these people naïvely believe that acts of legislators and regulators somehow reflect "the will of the people" or some sort of moral law. The opposite is often the reality. Thankfully, in the United States, the value of lawbreaking is so "baked in" to the historical narrative that it's difficult to ignore, even today. The American Revolution was fundamentally a series of illegal acts. The Declaration of Independence was little more than a declaration of a thoroughly illegal rebellion. In response, the king sent men to the colonies to enforce law and order. The American response to this attempt to enforce the law was to kill the government's enforcers. Less violent acts committed by American rebels were equally criminal, ranging from the Boston Tea Party to a multitude of assaults on tax collectors committed by Samuel Adams's Sons of Liberty. Modern shills for the regime have unsurprisingly tried to redefine this conflict as one of a tussle over democracy. "Those American revolutionaries fought for democracy," the claim goes. Thus, by their definition, no one is ever allowed to rebel in a jurisdiction that has occasional elections. (The reality is that the American rebellion was about the protection of human rights. Elections had little to do with it.) Fortunately, it will take more than cheap slogans about democracy to undo the fact that the national origin story is about having contempt for the laws of one's political leaders. In much of the world, however, rebellion against unjust laws is not regarded with equal amounts of reverence. In Canada, for instance, the national origin story is largely about following the rules and politely asking one's overlords for autonomy. This is bound to affect how one sees the roles of law and disobedience. It Is Often Prudent to Follow Unjust Laws This isn't to say that open rebellion is necessarily wise. Avoiding illegal acts is often—if not usually—the prudent thing to do. We often follow the law simply to stay out of jail and avoid attracting the attention of regulators and government enforcers. For those who prefer spending time with their families to spending time in prison, this only makes sense. Moreover, disobeying unjust laws can often bring even more unjust laws as a result. It is one thing to follow the law for prudential reasons. It is another thing entirely to assume the law brings with it some sort of moral imperative. Few laws do. Yes, there are laws against murder, but murder is just one case where the letter of the law happens to often match up with what is fundamentally moral and right. Countless laws lack such solid standing. When we hear government officials or media pundits refer to something as "illegal" or unlawful, all this should really do is cause us to ask if the defense of these laws is actually prudent, moral, or necessary. Some laws are well founded in basic protections of property rights and other human rights. But many laws are nothing more than the fruits of political schemes to help the regime maintain power or to reward its friends at the expense of others. We can always expect the regime and its supporters to try to outlaw things they don't like. And once such things are illegal, we'll hear all about the evils of the "lawbreakers" any time those lawbreakers threaten the prestige or power of the regime. (Lawbreaking in favor of the regime, of course, is always tolerated.) It's a highly successful trick they've been using for thousands of years.

Markets Without Limits: Moral Virtues

Does the Church Condone Tyrannicide? https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/does-the... FR. WILLIAM SAUNDERS With the recent terrorist attacks, some have suggested that the leaders of these terrorist organizations be assassinated for the good of all people. What would be the Churchs teaching on this? Hitler%20headquarters.gif The moral issue here is that of tyrannicide the killing of a tyrant, and specifically, the killing of a tyrant by a private person for the common good. Technically, there are two classes of tyrants: a tyrant by usurpation (tyrannus in titulo), a ruler who has illegitimately seized power; and a tyrant by oppression (tyrannus in regimine), a ruler who wields power unjustly, oppressively, and arbitrarily. Tyrannicide has had support from various philosophers and theologians through the centuries, including the ancient Greeks and Romans, most notably Cicero; Catholics, most notably John of Salisbury (d. 1180) Jean Petit (d. 1411), and Suarez (d. 1617); and Protestants, most notably, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin. St. Thomas Aquinas gave the most substantial argument for tyrannicide. He based his position on his arguments for just war and capital punishment. St. Thomas concluded, "He who kills a tyrant (i.e. an usurper) to free his country is praised and rewarded" (In 2 Sentences, 44.2.2). A tyrant by usurpation has illegitimately seized power and, therefore, is a criminal. When there are no other means available of ridding the community of the tyrant, the community may kill him. According to St. Thomas, the legitimate authority may condemn him to death using the normal course of law. However, if the normal course of law is not available (due to the actions of the tyrant), then the legitimate authority can proceed "informally" to condemn the tyrant and even grant individuals a mandate to execute the tyrant. A private citizen who takes the life of a tyrant acts with public authority in the same way that a soldier does in war. The key conditions for a justifiable act of tyrannicide in this case include that the killing be necessary to end the usurpation and restore legitimate authority; that there is no higher authority available that is able and willing to depose the usurper; and that there is no probability that the tyrannicide will result in even greater evil than allowing the usurper to remain in power. A tyrant by oppression is one who has come to power legitimately, but rules unjustly, oppressively, and arbitrarily. Here the community must confront the tyrant, and if necessary, depose him, formally or informally, according to the course of law available. In most circumstances, a private citizen morally cannot kill a tyrant by oppression, because the tyrant came to power through a legitimate means and thereby the community must depose him. If the community does depose the tyrant, according to St. Thomas, he becomes now a tyrant by usurpation and thereby may be eliminated by an act of justifiable tyrannicide in accord with the above norms. However, if the tyrant by oppression attacks the citizen, jeopardizes the welfare of the community with the intent leading it to destruction or killing the citizens, or commits other evils, then a private citizen can morally commit an act of justifiable tyrannicide. Moreover, if because of the tyrant's rule, a nation cannot defend itself, is on the course of destruction, and has no lawful means to depose or to condemn the tyrant, then a citizen may commit an act of justifiable tyrannicide. Interestingly, many modern political philosophers would posit that a leader who abuses power and has become tyrannical ipso facto loses legitimacy and becomes an usurper. Please note that the Church has not definitively taught on this subject. The Church not only recognizes the authority of legitimate rulers and their duty to uphold the common good of the community, but also the duty of citizens to support a legitimate government. However, the Church also has set standards of just war and even capital punishment which would be applied to a conflict between a community against an unjust tyrannical leader. Keep in mind that an act of justifiable tyrannicide would have to be an act of last resort, when no other reasonable course of action is available to protect the community. Perhaps a particular example would help. In the Summer of 1944, many officers in the German military realized that their country would soon lose the war. The Allies had successfully landed in France with the D-Day Invasion and were pushing toward Germany; the Soviets were advancing from the East; the major cities of Germany were bombed heavily and frequently. To save Germany from devastating defeat and form a new government, Lieutenant Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, described as "a serious Catholic," formed a plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20. He and other members, including Field Marshal Rommel, Field Marshal von Witzleben, and General Beck, knew that Hitler had to be removed from power, and recognized that no regular means of government existed to do so. The only course of action seemed to be justifiable tyrannicide. Von Stauffenberg reportedly met with Cardinal Count Preysing of Berlin to discuss this matter, and his eminence honored the motives and offered no theological objection to restrain him. In so doing, Cardinal Preysing placed his own life in jeopardy with the Gestapo, but was never implicated in the plot. On the evening of July 19, von Stauffenberg stopped by a Church to pray and then retired to bed. The next day, July 20, he planted the bomb at the Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia. It exploded, but failed to kill Hitler. Von Stauffenberg and three others were arrested and executed that very night; others would endure the same fate later. However, they committed, or at least tried to commit, an act of justifiable tyrannicide. (See Fitzgibbon, 20 July, p. 150, Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 1042ff, Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, p. 154.) Again, the Church has not definitively taught on this moral issue. However, terrorism is a real evil that must be confronted and stopped. Terrorists must be identified, isolated, and brought to justice. However, if there are no means of bringing them to justice or there are communities who support, protect, and promote them, thereby thwarting the pursuit of justice, then the leaders of nations may consider an act of justifiable tyrannicide as a last resort. Acknowledgement Saunders, Rev. William. "Does the Church Condone Tyrannicide?" Arlington Catholic Herald. This article is reprinted with permission from Arlington Catholic Herald. The Author Father William Saunders is pastor of Our Lady of Hope parish in Potomac Falls, Virginia. He is dean of the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College. The above article is a "Straight Answers" column he wrote for the Arlington Catholic Herald.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jim_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:James_dalton_bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:James_dalton_bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/james_dalton_bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jamesdbell8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jamesdbell8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jamesdbell8

...

In fact, PM's are ideal for answering the remaining age old question of "But who will build the roads?" in a voluntary NAP preserving libertarian society.

Will Prediction Markets be the answer to "But Who Will Build The Roads?", and other Questions of "Shared / Public" resources?

Not only do General Prediction Markets (GPM's) solve the question of "What are the better 'public investments' to do?"... as determined by the actual public, instead of by tyrannies of (laughable "democratic") central authorities (which history has proven always care more about themselves than the human condition)... GPM's are also strictly better than "crowdfunding". This is because fraudulent countless crowdfund recipients will always popup to defraud the crowd at will, enabled by the fact that the contracts of the fraudulent crowdfund proposer are by nature setup as award-before-delivery mode, and even worse, in a many-losses-sent-to-one-walkaway-scammer payout mode. Whereas GPM's use award-upon-delivery to specification mode, from whatever inputs back the trusted-by-history-of-example payors (which predictors are free to choose from and predict or not), to the claimant payee upon completion. Of course such payee will need to have built up or secured via other methods the means to complete the work (herein "The Roads", or whatever meter or pothole of them) in order to claim the prediction and thus earn the reward. However, even that can be parceled out by the GPM's as piecewise rewards toward any larger goal... anyone who can earn the smallest of monetary units by their human labor, can spend that into claiming the next larger prediction, thus also remaining consistent with fundamentals of economics. Note also that GPM's rapidly advance human capabilities and drive public costs lower by being claimed by the first competitor that can arise do it profitably. No resources are wasted by any party, and crony favoritism, roads and bridges to nowhere, etc, are all driven out. Crowdfunds and Governments simply cannot match the performance of GPM's in these regards. Yes, silly tycoons will fund art deco roads to nowhere, but that is at their own loss and that of their investors, not lossed forced upon and extracted from the public through inflation and theft as all Govts immorally and criminally do today. Given the abject, guaranteed, inefficient, oppressive, corrupt, and ruinous failure of all Govt in history to do any such works... GPM's should be explored, developed, and operated to "Build the Roads", "Get to Mars", "Cure Cancer", "Fusion Power", "Charity", etc... whatever humanity feels needs done. You might find the results to be pleasantly surprising.

Politicians, Elites, Govts, Corps, and their Military Complexes will be the ones doing AP, against each other, their own whitepapers proffer the subject and analysis. Already have been centuries of their literal assassination of people, both domestic and abroad, directly and contracted. And more threats... Six Ways From Sunday? Ex-CIA Director 'Jokes' About Assassinating US Senator Former CIA Director Michael Hayden on Monday joked about assassinating Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville, who serves as the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been blocking bulk confirmations of hundreds of military officers for key leadership roles in protest of a Pentagon policy that pays for troops' abortions and other reproductive services. Tuberville’s blockade prevents the Senate Armed Services Committee from quickly approving nominations by a unanimous vote, forcing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to send some promotions to the full Senate floor for votes. A spokesman for Tuberville told NBC News over the weekend that the former Auburn University football coach isn’t planning on backing down from his blockade even amid Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel. -NY Post "Should Tommy Tuberville be removed from his committee?" asked Democrat activist Nathalie Jacoby, to which Hayden replied: "How about the human race?" How about the human race? https://t.co/UCGCfF1lA3 — Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) October 10, 2023 The reactions to the ex-head of an agency that's been known to 'reach out and touch' their enemies, suggesting Tuberville's assassination, are about what one would expect: Them: The media and the deep state are not out to get Republicans, that’s a conspiracy theory CNN National Security Analyst And Former Head Of The CIA Michael Hayden: Tommy Tuberville should be assassinated pic.twitter.com/mig8jma8Lg — Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) October 10, 2023 Dear Spoogemonger. Tuberville has done America a great service. Questioning yours now. — Larry Schweikart (@LarrySchweikart) October 10, 2023 He's likely a CIA operative! None of them respect their oath. — Scott A McMillan (@scott4670) October 10, 2023 "Former CIA Director Michael Hayden calls for the assassination of Sen. Tuberville because the senator is performing desperately needed oversight of the U.S. Military," wrote The Federalist's Mollie Hemmighway on X. Truly sickening. — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 10, 2023 As the Post notes, this isn't the first time Hayden has taken shots at Tuberville. "Tuberville absolutely is a racist," Hayden posted to "X" last month. I have aphasia. Sometimes my meaning isn’t clear. What I meant to say is Tuberville absolutely is a racist. Or, in other words, it is not wrong to say he is a racist. https://t.co/bGHAhPJhQE — Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) September 29, 2023 He also signed an open letter in August from retired military and State Department officials slamming Tuberville's "reckless" protest. "Risking our military’s planning and preparedness, and our national security to make a political point is far out of bounds," reads the letter. "The world is too dangerous to cede our leadership, which is why we urge Senator Tuberville swiftly end his blockade and to respect our nation’s service members and their families."

Acting Prime Minister Of Haiti To Resign Amid Post-Assassination Political Crisis https://dailycaller.com/2021/07/19/haiti-prime-minister-claude-joseph-jovene...

If a tool can't be used to predict the building of roads and fusion reactors, then what good is it. https://foreprotocol.io/ https://discord.com/invite/foreprotocol https://t.me/fore_protocol https://twitter.com/ForeProtocol https://www.linkedin.com/company/foreprotocol https://www.reddit.com/r/ForeProtocol https://www.youtube.com/@foreprotocol The moment we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. FORE Predict, the first people-powered predictions ecosystem, will be live 12:00 UTC November 30th, 2023. Follow the countdown here. We’ve been working tirelessly to build a people-powered predictions platform that’s powered by you. A predictions ecosystem where the house doesn’t win, but you do. A trustless, secure set of smart contracts that enables you to profit off your opinions on anything, and without the bad odds and high fees seen on centralized counterparts. A decentralized platform where you hold the power, and your own funds. And above all, a peer-to-peer predictions ecosystem where you have the freedom to create, participate, and validate any markets on any events, and are rewarded for doing so. Welcome to a new era of predictions. From 12pm UTC on November 30th, you’ll be able to generate income from creating prediction markets on any event. You’ll be able to participate in prediction markets against other users, with better odds and lower fees than centralized counterparts. And you’ll be able to create a consistent revenue stream by simply validating prediction market outcomes. But we’re just getting started. After years in development, the launch of FORE Predict V1 is a huge milestone for us, but is just one of many to come. After launch, we’ll see the rollout of a fiat onramp, new market structures, new product features, new chain integrations, and even more ways for you to generate income sustainably. With our FORE token at our core, we’ll continue to ideate and iterate to develop new solutions beyond predictions, heading into new sectors ripe for decentralization and disruption. And we’ll be doing this with you in mind: our community members, holders, and users. A new world of predictions is coming, and it’s powered by you. Head here to learn more and earn FORE. Any questions? Connect with us below! FORE Protocol 6 Pottinger St, 000, Hong Kong 2PmB-VtW1AyI

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Futarchy: Robin Hanson on How Prediction Markets Can Take over the World Transcript of interview Richard Hanania https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/futarchy-robin-hanson-on-how-predictio... https://podtail.com/podcast/cspi-podcast/18-how-to-get-better-elites/ https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1438142657356656640 https://twitter.com/RobinHanson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WLg-y_gT0w CSPI #18: Robin Hanson w Richard Hanania I recently had Robin Hanson on the CSPI podcast to talk about futarchy. It’s one thing to spread knowledge on a particular issue, it’s another to invent a new technology to create more knowledge in the world, and help apply it where needed. That’s what I see Robin doing. He convinced me that although it may take a very long time, one day humanity will give less of a role to systems like peer review and unaccountable bureaucracy in determining how we understand the world, and more of a role to prediction markets. The logic is just too compelling. But sooner is better than later, and if you want to be involved, please reach out. How it would work. Source. The first step towards this glorious future is convincing people that a world where more decisions are made based on prediction markets is desirable and achievable. In that spirit, below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. To read more about futarchy, see here. (beginning of transcript) Richard: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the CSPI Podcast. I’m here today with Robin Hanson. Robin, How are you? Robin: Happy to be here and ready to talk about a big topic. Richard: We’re glad to have you. Before we get started, while a lot of our audience is going to know who you are can you just give a brief description of your background? What do you do? What are your research interests? Robin: I'm an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. I do an excessively diverse range of things. I just had a paper accepted in a astrophysics journal on the Grabby Aliens. I've done information aggregation. I have two books, one called The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and the other The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. I guess we'll just find out more about my prediction market work in this talk. Richard: Do you have a degree in economics? Robin: No. I have a PhD in social science from Caltech. Caltech has a pretty small social science department with say 20 faculty covering all of social sciences. My degree was in social science. The first time I went on the job market I actually did better in political science, but second time I got this job offer in economics. Richard: Okay. What are your interests? One of the things I think we're going to spend the bulk of the time talking today is the idea of a futarchy. Is that how you pronounce it? Robin: Futarchy would be a fancy name for decision markets applied to government. The larger topic would be what institutions can we all share to argue and aggregate information so that we can form collective beliefs that we can act on together? That’s a question in academia. Robin: It's a question in government. It's a question in business. It’s a very fundamental, difficult problem. I think there's potential for doing a lot better than we've done. Richard: Yeah. What’s the problem? What do you see as the main issue that this is trying to solve? Robin: Well, you know most of you have been in conversations all your life. You know that in conversations it’s very complicated. People have all sorts of agendas. They aren't entirely honest all the time and they aren't focused on particular tasks. It's not clear you know that you can believe what they say. A reporter calls up various expert people with credentials or whatever and gets quotes for them, but they don't have a good incentive to tell their best estimate of the truth in those interviews. They're often incentivized to sound provocative, to ally with whatever political tribe they're with, et cetera. We have these problems all over in all the rest of the conversations we have in business, and government, and academia et cetera. The question is could we give people more direct, better incentives to actually tell the truth and figure out the truth so that when we had a meeting and people raised hands, and we made a decision what to do we would be doing it on the best knowledge we could have? Richard: Yeah. The way you answered that question, that made me think of something. Do you see this as a matter of incentives in the sense that whoever the experts are they just have to have better incentives, or do you also see it as sort of a selection process in that there is some trait, or collection of traits that humans vary on, and some people are just better at getting at truth than others? Do you take the first position? Robin: Both of those factors are important, and so you want an institution that relies on both. You don't want to just take a particular group of people and give them better incentives, nor do you just want a process that selects people. You want to both select people and give them good incentives so that people know when they're selected that they will fact those good incentives and they will be selected on the basis of anticipating that those good incentives will work well for them. Richard: Yeah. Futarchy is the process of aligning incentives to get better opinions, better policy? Robin: Well, futarchy is decision markets which is an application of prediction markets in general, which is an application of speculative markets in general. We might say we have this general institution of speculative markets, basically stock markets, commodity markets, betting markets, et cetera. They've been around for many centuries. They have this remarkable property that they often aggregate information very well from a diverse people. The idea of prediction markets is to use that mechanism on purpose to get better information about particular topics of interest, and then decision markets are prediction markets where the topic is directly targeted at a particular decision, where you're asking about the consequences of a particular choice to make those market estimates and advice as directly actionable as possible. Richard: Yes. It would be an example of futarchy, say if there’s a bill before Congress. It’s a, say stimulus bill, something in the news. You would have some measure of outcome, the GDP of the country in five years if you pass it or you don't pass it. Then basically the system you envision, basically there'd be a way for the legislators to have their votes tied, or whoever makes the decision tied to the results of the market. Is that right? Robin: Right. I think it’d be easier to start with like a more personal, smaller scale example before we get to reforming national government. Richard: Sure. Robin: I would suggest considering, fire the CEO markets. In ordinary public companies there's the CEO. One of the most important decisions that the board of directors makes is whether to keep or fire the CEO. The proposal would be to have stock markets that are conditional on whether or not you fire the CEO. An ordinary stock market you trade stock for cash, and the price there is an estimate of the value of the company and all the different scenarios it might be in. Now we're going to make called off stock markets and these are markets where we make trades of stock for cash but those trades are called off, or made as if they never happened if certain conditions aren't met. We could have a ‘if the CEO stays in power through the end of this quarter’ version of the market. In those markets the trades will be based on the expectation of how much the company will be worth if the CEO does stay. Then we can also have markets where the trades are called off if the CEO doesn't leave by the end of the quarter. Now this will be markets where people estimate, how much is this company worth if the CEO leaves? Then the difference between those two prices, CEO stays and CEO leaves, becomes an estimate of the value of the CEO for this company. That would be direct decision advice. The board of directors could look at that price difference and say, “Should we keep him, or should we dump him?” Richard: Is there any legal barrier to a company doing this or someone setting up a market like this? Robin: Well, there is SEC regulations about commodities. This could be thought of as a stock derivative. You need some sort of permission there. That's the main regulation limit. Of course you'd also need the board of directors in the company to be interested in these numbers. That's more the real limitation. Richard: Yeah. But it seems like you don't need to convince that many people as long as, putting aside the regulatory issue. If you have a corporation, presumably if the system of markets being better than other kinds of decision making is right they should have a huge advantage right, in the market? They should be able to make a profit and their business should do well. Robin: Our consistent experience with speculative markets is that when we compare them to other mechanisms like polls or committees they’re either about the same or substantially better. They’re almost never much worse. Sometimes the question is just easy, and any mechanism can give you the answer, like is the sun shining right now or something like that right? Everything will just tell you the answer. But then sometimes things are hard or complicated, and then existing institutions are doing a bad job. In that case the market can cut through and give you a better estimate. Richard: Okay. I get that. But then the question is wouldn't you just be able to... I mean you should be able to do this and then you can just have a tournament for your CEOs right? You could have 10 different prices right? You can just see the best one… Robin: Right. This conditional market mechanism hasn't actually been tested out in the world outside of the laboratory tests in that we haven't been able to get people interested enough to try it. We've had a lot of tests of speculative markets that aren't conditional in the sense that we've had markets on deadlines, whether you make a deadline in sales and things like that. We've probably had 100 different trials like that over the last few decades. Typically what happens is that if there's enough support for the market in order to induce an affectivity then again the price is about as accurate or more accurate than the status quo and most users are satisfied. The costs are modest. That's been the history for many decades. However a key problem is usually the market gets killed in the sense that an organization says to stop and doesn't continue it. The main reason is that it's relatively disruptive. These markets are politically disruptive. The way they are disruptive is analogous to, imagine you put a very knowledgeable autist in the C suite, that is somebody in the C suite that knows a lot about the company and they go to the meetings. They just blurt out when they know things that it's relevant to the conversation but they have no political savvy. They have no sense of, what does anybody want to hear, or who will be bothered by anything they say. That sort of an autist would not last long in the C-suite. They would be shunted aside and become an advisor to someone perhaps, trusted advisor to their side but they wouldn't be allowed to speak in the boardroom. But that's what a prediction market is. It has no idea who wants to hear what it has to say. It will often say things that people do not want to hear, and that embarrass them, and that contradict what they've said. Then all the worse of course it will be proven right. Richard: Yeah. But what's stopping the autist, or I guess what's stopping them is nobody has just done this yet? But theoretically you could imagine the autist setting up the rules for the corporation, right? Robin: You might if they were in charge at the beginning sure. Richard: Yeah. That's what you need. You need one rich autist interested in these ideas. He would go in and he would say the board has to operate according to these… Robin: Now we move to the question of like, what fraction of companies out there are actually maximizing profits? Richard: Yeah. Robin: It’s a very basic question in economics and in our world. We economists tend to assume as a simple initial working model that organizations that are for profit actually do maximize profits. That's the thing they usually do. If you give them a choice of A or B, and B is higher profit they'll choose B. Here if you apply that model you say, “Well, this looks like it would give them key information to make key decisions like, ‘Will we make the deadline,’ and it will be valuable. The cost is relatively low so of course they would do it.” That's what you would say if you were applying that theory. Then here we have a case where it looks like, well it hasn't happened yet. You might think, “Okay, innovation is slow. It takes a while,” but we’ve been waiting several decades. Honestly if I look across a wide range of other areas of corporate behavior I can't fully support this profit maximizing theory. I think I can find a lot of other places where what they do does not maximize profits. I could give you a long list of examples. We could go through some of those but then the question is, “Well, how do I come to terms with it? What theory do I have affirms in the absence of profit maximizing to explain the behavior?” Richard: Yeah. Well, actually I like the idea of going through the list. Besides not operating according to betting markets what leads you to the position that corporations don’t maximize profit? Robin: Well, of course until recently we appeared to have too little remote work. Most commenters had though remote work should be much more widely adopted and it hadn't been. We also have the standard story of too many meetings. Almost everyone in large organizations complains there are too many meetings with too many people in them that last too long, yet they keep happening. We usually have too many people interviewing new candidates as opposed to just looking at their credentials on paper. We often have, when a new person becomes the boss of a group of people usually some of the people they're the boss of they inherited, and some of the people they get to pick. Usually they give higher evaluations to the second group of people and everybody knows that. But they leave that on the books. We let them do that. There is a standard not invented here bias where we're not so interested in stuff that wasn't invented here compared to stuff that was invented here. There is yes man bias which is of course famously well known that if you're a manager and you’re trying to get people to tell you the truth about things one powerful strategy is to ask them what they think before you tell them what you think, and then use what you think as a way to judge how good what they think is. Even if you're not very well informed compared to them it still can give them an incentive to tell you what they think because their best guess about what you think is still whatever the truth is. However many managers don't follow this strategy. They very clearly telegraph what they think and therefore induce other people to be yes men, or yes women, where they just parrot and repeat back what the boss said so that not longer produces an incentive for the people to think carefully about what they think. It instead gives them incentive to parrot what the boss says. These are a half dozen examples here but I have a blog post somewhere where I went through 20 of them. Again we go down the list and we go, “Each one, if it was just one I might say, ‘Okay. I just don't understand that somehow. I'm not looking at it right. Somehow it really is profit maximizing.’” But if I've got a list of 20 of these things and they're big things I go, “Well, I guess I need a better theory.” Richard: Yeah. Okay. What is the alternative theory? Robin: I'd say that we want to think of large organizations as fields of battle between coalitions, but that each coalition is fighting for control over the organization, and most of these policies are in the interest of individual coalitions. They're just not in the interest of the organization as a whole. For example, in a coalition you want lots of your people in the meetings so that they can push for your agenda. It's great if the other people aren't in the meetings, especially if say they're remote working and they can't make a lot of the meetings, so you want the other people to be remote and not in meetings and your people in the meetings. You want your people to be interviewing new candidates so they believe that they owe you a debt of gratitude if you're hired, et cetera down the list. When coalitions are competing with each other there's policies that help coalitions which isn't so much what helps the company. Related to prediction markets or forecasts most coalitions are organized around a set of shared interests and they form an agreement to support certain projects. They just don't want their agreement to support those projects to be at risk to fluctuating estimates. Prediction markets will fluctuate right? At the moment it might favor something and then a week later it might change its mind right? That's just not very reliable as a member of your coalition. You want to get together and support George's project, and George's division. Then you want to do that early on and stick with it regardless of how the estimates change. Richard: Do you think this is what happened? I'm sure you've seen the charts showing for example in universities administrators, the number of administrators are going through the roof and the number of professors is flatter, just barely rising. I saw another one with the same thing with doctors versus medical administrators. Then someone on Twitter said that chart was no good. I'm not sure if it's good or not, but do you think as a general matter this is what's happening? Perhaps there's this administration bureaucracy that's where this coalition is getting bigger and bigger and it's just expanding because it's optimized for its environment? Robin: It's not a crazy theory but I haven’t thought that through. The question is if I had a coalition in a university for example would increasing the number of administrators within my part of the university help me win coalition battles against the other ones? If yes, then the theory is predicting that this happens, but it's not obvious that that’s true. But I don't know university administration as well as other people so maybe someone who knows that can comment. Richard: Yeah. Is this just a matter of it’s when institutions get too big? Does your theory predict that the smaller the corporation, if you have a founder for example, just a founder of just a few people, that they’re going to behave more rationally than a larger corporation that's been around for a while? Robin: That’s not my theory. That's just very widely predicted. Almost everyone says that small organizations have fewer of these coordination problems. They have other problems. There’s a lot of problems that bedevil smaller organizations. Often it’s just like the leader is arrogant, or blind and has all sorts of just personality issues, etc. Right? Robin: That tends to be the problem you have with very small organizations is the very personal conflicts. But at least you don't have these larger coalition battle problems. Richard: This is a problem it seems like. This theory would go... Well, let me ask you this way. What's wrong with the classic free market position that what will happen is you'll have varying degrees of rationality and the ones that are the institutions, and firms, and individuals who are rational will just out compete the ones who are not? What do you see going on there? Robin: I mean I think in fact the correct response is to say the free market version is probably the best. You just have no idea how much worse things can be. People often look at the status quo of a business world say that is relatively free market. They look at this up close and they go, “This looks terrible how could you possibly be defending this?” The argument has to be, “Well, it would just be so much worse without this.” And in fact often if you look to large stable organizations like universities and government agencies, or churches that have been around for a long time it is in fact worse. I think that's roughly right. Another story might be we've hobbled some of the competition between firms that might solve some of these problems. I honestly think one of the biggest wins we could do is to just allow stronger hostile takeovers. The laws at the moment make it harder to do hostile takeovers. They require a substantial tax on them in essence. If you see a badly run company and you have an idea how it could be run better the problem is how are you going to profit on that? But if you could just buy up the company, change its management and then sell it again after it was better that would be a big, powerful engine for making it better. There have been times when that mechanism has been allowed to do more and it has made huge changes. That's what inspired people to lock it down and prevent those changes because they were scared it was coming for them. Richard: Yeah. There's just this status quo bias. What's the regulatory barrier there? Is it antitrust, or what is it that makes it difficult to do this? Robin: The key thing is that when you are going to try to do a takeover bid you have to warn people so they can bid up the price on you, which means that you end up paying a substantially higher price, 20%, even more above what you would have paid if you could have bought the stock in stealth without people knowing you were trying to buy it up. Richard: Where do you... This is a technical question. How do you announce it and what happens if just some other…. Robin: Well, there is a formal process by which you announce that you have a certain number of shares in the company and that you're hoping to buy more. Again you can't have bought very many of them by the time you announce this. Then what typically happens is the prices get bid up in the expectation that you'd be willing to pay more for the company. Then you may or may not succeed in buying it up. There's also a number of other things we allow such as poison pills, various rules in which if there's a takeover then all the sudden some people get some extra stock, and some extra voting shares, and some extra abilities to make it hard for you. We have a whole bunch of these rules that have basically made it difficult for people to take over companies. Richard: Yeah. Your view is basically irrationality persists, irrationality as in non-profit maximizing behavior, and then presumably that's hurting the aggregate wealth of society. That exists because basically we're protecting institutions. We have a status quo bias- Robin: Right. We're making it hard to make changes. On the other hand competitive business world is one of our best worlds we have in our world. It's one of our shining examples of productivity and innovation is the business world to the extent that it is free to do something. Now you could just say, "Well, if we make it more free to pursue profits and to innovate then it could be even so much better." Richard: It's funny because you say this is the best world we have when you compare it to other things. My background is in international relations. People often start with the assumption that the country is trying to maximize something… Robin: Right. That's even crazier an assumption, presumably it's even easier to find counterexamples to that. Richard: Yeah. I would go further and say it's harder to find you know… Robin: Examples of it happening. Richard: Yeah. Exactly. Why doesn't the US just.. Robin: Right. How many wars were started that were actually expected profit wars for example? Richard: Yeah. They tend to be pretty crazy. The whole field to a certain extent is sort of built around... Of course that's not how everyone thinks. Robin: Right. But in the future we could imagine for profit, for company nations for example. Might imagine that it would be possible to make better run nations and that they would be more rational in this sort of selfish, strategic sense. That's a thing that could happen in the future. In some sense futarchy is this proposal to use decision markets for governments and it could in fact achieve that. Maybe we should say a bit about how that might work? Richard: Do you put futarchy in a larger intellectual tradition? Because a lot of people when they're coming up with an idea... Did you come up with this term by the way? Robin: Yeah, and I've been ridiculed for it. It has various associations in different languages, et cetera, but I was just thinking of it as a future government. That was my origin of the name. And yet of course the context, there's two key contexts. One is to show how far the idea could go if you just talk about, say firing CEOs or changing churches, or all sorts of smaller organizations. I don't think people get quite as inspired as if they could see how it could become a form of government, because that's pretty grandiose and high status. Futarchy is trying to show how it might look if you went all the way to that level of application. Not that I'm recommending that we do that first at all. I would recommend we try small scale experiments and work our way up to large organizations, but still that can be an inspiration to go down the path because you hope you might go that far. Of course it's also related to other proposed forms of government and so it has some differences and similarities to others. You can think about what it's emphasizing and what its problems are compared to the others. Richard: We put aside, we started with the markets for CEO performance. Could you talk a little bit about the broader, the grander idea? How would your ideal government function? Robin: In the CEO case we have an outcome that we agree on that's the relevant outcome, IE the stock price for this public company. Then we have discrete decisions. Do we fire the CEO or not? That's the key things we need to make this apply to other things. For a national government say, the discrete choices would be each new bill that's proposed. We'd be asking, “If we pass this bill are we going to be better off?” Then for the outcome we're going to need to construct it more for a nation. The idea is the legislature still exists but now they vote on bills that defines a national welfare function. It's a bit like say GDP at the moment, say the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines GDP and then it oversees the measurement of GDP. Of course many scholars often look at GDP numbers and say that the countries with higher numbers are better, and try to recommend policies that would increase your GDP. Well, now we’re going to authorize this same sort of agency to estimate number like GDP except we’re going to tell them to put more things in the number. Bills before Congress would say, “Count more trees, and count leisure, and count international reputation.” They would just make a bigger formula that included all the stuff they cared about in this measure of national welfare. But now there would be assets, financial assets that pay out in units of national welfare. If national welfare ends up being 12.9 then it pays out $12.9 or some other financial unit. Now we can then bet on national welfare. But more importantly we can bet on national welfare conditional on whether a particular bill passes. Then for each bill we'd have these two prices, the price of national welfare if the bill passes and the price if it doesn’t, and then the difference between those two prices is a direct advice about whether or not to pass that bill. We could set that on the side and just have it be giving advice to a legislature, or we could put it directly in charge and just say, “When the market approves of it by having a higher price then that's just as if the legislature had passed it and it just becomes law.” Richard: To just make sure we’re clear let’s say we’re debating Obamacare. Then we would have to first have sort of an aggregate measure right? We’d say, “What's GDP going to be?” Maybe give that like 40% of the calculation. What’s the human life expectancy in the US going to be in 10 years or whatever. Then you would just do this for a bunch of different things. Then you would just have a market, basically say, “Okay. If Obamacare passes it's going to be X, and then if Obamacare doesn't pass it's going to be Y,” right? Robin: Right. Richard: And then… Robin: This national welfare function, we don't have to redefine it for each new bill. It's just the standard welfare function that we have for all the bills we consider. Then sometimes we'll change the welfare function and then we're changing our metric of consideration. But basically we might have say two slots of day where a new bill is considered by this process, or might even have say 10 slots a day. At each slot we might even have an auction to decide who gets to put their bill up during that slot. Then during that hour say, or half day, the market decides whether that bill passes. Then we go on to the next bill, and the next half day. Again the national welfare measure would just be the same measure that we had decided on months ago. Richard: Yeah. Okay. You don't need the ascent of Congress to do this? Robin: Right. If you want to just make it be advisory you would just need the legal permission to create these markets, and then we can just sit on the side and we could track say, when the Congress passed a bill versus didn't pass a bill did it follow this market advice, and see the net effect of these things. But it would be better for many reasons if it was just more directly in charge. Richard: Yeah. Robin: We already have a democratic system where there are often experts who know the right thing about bills and they tell each other the right things. The public never hears that and so politicians just ignore it. The question would be if this was just on the side as an advisory thing would the public pay any attention? Richard: Yeah. How serious are the regulatory barriers? I mean if you had enough money could you do this for the things that Congress is debating right now? Robin: Well, I wouldn't do this as the first thing. Again, this would inspire you as an end point that you could eventually get to, but a shorter term project would be say in a presidential election you've got the Democrat or the Republican who might be president. We could just estimate some outcomes for the nation conditional on whether the next president is Democrat or Republican right? We could have GDP. We could have life span. We could have war deaths. We could have all sorts of numbers and that would be a straightforward thing to do every presidential election. We could just be estimating the consequences of who we elect. We really haven't done that before. Richard: Is that the best way to do it or is that going to pose difficulties? Because if the market comes back and it says Democrats are unquestionably better for the country than Republicans or vice versa that’ll poison the idea of having markets with half the country wouldn’t it? Robin: Well, you will want to collect a track record over a longer time. My overall plan is that I want these things to happen in small organizations to get track records there and then slowly work their way up to bigger things. We don't want the only main trials to be national level politics. That doesn’t make sense because you don’t even really get enough data there. You want a lot of smaller decisions where you get a lot of data and where you can show that this is just working well. Think of it like... I’m old enough to remember a time when the government started to use computers for things. They did that because the private sector was using computers for things and people said, “Hey. Why isn't the DMV using computers if the private sector is?” They got kind of embarrassed and they decided they would try to use computers right? Because it was just obvious that elsewhere this was a pretty good idea. That's how you want to do innovation ideally is you just want to have lots of people using it because it just seems to work. Then eventually the government is shamed into doing it too. Richard: Yeah. Do you see opportunities out there besides the CEO markets? What else could be promising places to do this? Robin: This mechanism really is quite general and it can apply to a very wide range of problems. I would basically mainly be opportunistic about where there's a group of people who are willing to try it there. But just to whet your appetite we can go over a lot of options here. Most organizations hire people regularly. Each time they have a job opening they usually interview several people for each job. When they hire them for that job they're hoping for certain outcomes. Usually they have some internal process that rates how well that employee is. They could in two or five years have a rating for that new employee of how well they did. It would be straightforward then to have markets on each candidate for a particular job position saying, "What will be the rating of this employee if we hired them in, say two or five years?" That could just be a general process every time you had a candidate for a job opening. Of course every time you got a project with a deadline you should have a market on whether you'll make the deadline. You could even have that market on whether you make the deadline give you that probability conditional on changes you might make to the project, i.e. pull back on the requirements. Add resources. Those are all sort of obvious... Change who's in charge of the project. Those are all obvious things you might do to see if you can make a deadline. Students who are high school students applying to college could have markets saying if they chose college X, what will their outcomes be say after they... In five years, or if they chose college Y. The markets could tell them which college to pick. Or on the other side of the equation the colleges could have markets in the student applicants saying, "If we accepted this applicant how well would they do after four years here in our program," say. Richard: Who would be betting on, for example the individual kids going to one college or the other? Their friends and family or how does it [work? Robin: Well, so for all of these markets there's a key question of who do you allow to participate? One of the issues there is that whoever you allow to participate gets to see the information and the market prices. They're also the people you want to reveal information to so they could be better informed at making choices. If you had a student who was willing to let the world see their test scores, and their application essay, and even some description of their priorities or whatever, maybe personal information, then you open that market to the public. Then people could browse that material and make a guess about that particular person. There's a trade off though. If they don't want to reveal as much information about them then they don't have to, but then fewer people in the market will be able to make a good judgment and they will just be degrading the quality of their estimate as a cost of keeping some privacy. You know that's completely reasonable to do but you just want to make that trade off. Another application that would probably be even more disruptive is when you're thinking of marrying someone and you ask the markets, “How would our marriage go if we get married?” Or you could even think of dating particular people and ask, “How will it go if I date this person?” Those are things of course you would mostly want to be asking people who knew you somewhat better, but the whole point of these markets is you don't have to decide who's good at answering questions. You just open it up and you let them decide. Richard: I think in that case in particular there’s such an informational asymmetry between you as an individual and everyone else in the world, that if there's one place where a betting market is made that you can not improve on just people making their own decisions about the marriage, and dating, and things like that. Robin: Now other people who were in that market would want to know if you were betting in it too. There's a general phenomena in these markets where people should be wary of betting against people who know a lot more than they do. This is, for example, one of the rationales for limitations on insider trading and stock markets. There are many reasonable choices to make there. You could tell the world, "Well, I'm going to be betting in this market on whether my marriage works but you're welcome to bet too." They might think, "Well, I don't know as much as you do. I'm not going to touch that." In order to get them to bet you might say, "Well, I'm not going to bet on that and neither is anybody in my family," right? You could just set a limit on who's going to be allowed as a way to entice people farther away to participate. Similarly a company who has a stock market on that company, if they could choose to allow insiders then they'd have a choice. If we allow insider trading then people who are not insiders will know they might be trading against insiders and then that might put them off from trading on that stock. Or on the other hand if we allow... If you prevent the insiders from trading we will entice more outsiders to trade. On the other hand we'll lose the information those insiders would have given had they been allowed to trade. Richard: Yeah. That makes me think. Do you have an opinion on laws against insider trading? Do you think that they're generally good or bad? Robin: Well, it seems to me that it's the company that has the cost, so it's not clear to me why anybody else should be having a say. Whoever owns the company is making the trade off in whether to allow insider trading. Now, of course if the company is not being run in the interest of those investors then we have to worry about making good choices about insider trading, but then we have to worry about making a good choice about everything the company does. That's what we were talking about before when companies were not run for the maximizing profits then the investors have to worry about what they are being run for, and whether they're going to be basically stolen from the people who are managing things. But insider trading is one way they could be stolen from. But there's 1,000 others. Richard: Yeah. One place where this might really work is I think sports. This is something that you could get a lot of people betting on because people love arguing about sports. You could have a thing where you have the NFL or NBA draft and people always debate should you draft this player, or that player? You could have markets easily based on how many wins… Robin: Sure. I just happened to have a conversation with someone on that a few hours ago, but it's still an idea that's going to happen some day. When people say betting on a football game today, you’re betting on who's going to win the game and say by how many points, but you might have more fun betting on each play. That is not only betting on what the play will be and how it will go out but recommending on the play. You could say, “If we pass this play how many yards on average will we get? If we run this play how many yards will we get, or what’s the chance of making a first down?” You could bet on the consequence for each play. Similarly in a basketball game you could bet on taking out a player, putting a player in. In a automobile race you could bet about when you make a pit stop, when you don't. There's all these choices in games and I think people would find it more engaging to bet on recommendations for choices in the game. Richard: Yeah. Yeah. You can already with the sports betting. If you go to the websites you can bet for example not just on the game. I don't know if you can do conditional bets. I have never seen that. Robin: Right. I’ve never seen conditional bets on choices. Richard: Yeah. Robin: That's the key thing here, the choice of a player or choice by a coach. Richard: I've seen stuff like who will win the tip off in basketball, and who's going to win the coin toss in a football game? Who's going to win first quarter? Robin: I once looked onto doing this for war college war games. As you may know many war colleges have war games where they put teams on different sides and give them various equipment in a simulated war. They have them go to war. You could imagine, well letting everybody else who’s watching the war game give advice about particular strategies in the war game. That seemed plausible to me but then when I talked to people at war colleges I found that most of these war games are kind of fake. Richard: Yeah. Robin: They have a predetermined outcome that’s some lesson they want to tell, and so they aren't really letting it be open to winning one side or the other. Richard: No, that's funny because you'll see headlines every now and then that'll say, “Oh, my God. The US loses to China in a war game,” and yeah I always thought that that’s… Robin: I’m sure there probably are real war games somewhere. They just aren't at the war colleges. That's where I was thinking I could convince somebody to try this sort of thing. Richard: Yeah. Have you had any partial successes? Are there projects that are getting off the ground that you are excited about? Have people taken up your ideas anywhere? Robin: Well, there's been a whole pile of work in blockchain where people have created prediction markets on platforms and tools on various blockchain systems. Unfortunately most of that work has been at a low level of tools and platforms so they haven't really gotten very close to the applications. Blockchain people are just mostly software people and algorithm people. They're not so much business people who work with particular clients. They just haven't been very eager to get their hands dirty working with particular customers who might want to do markets and particular things. But they've still been collecting all these tools and so hopefully some day somebody will use all those tools to connect to the customers. Richard: What is the advantage of the blockchain? What is the difference between a blockchain say market versus just something like PredictIt? Robin: Well, that's an excellent question. Initially the story was that blockchain was out of control, that it couldn't be regulated so you could set up a system on a blockchain. If the regulators didn't like it they didn't have anybody to go to stop it. The blockchain just kept going regardless of who didn't like it. That was a big selling point. People said, “Well, look at all this financial innovation we can do because we are free from existing regulations on the blockchain.” That's what they said, and then a lot of companies formed on this basis. But these companies didn't take personal strategies to match that rhetoric. You would think if your plan was to put a product on the blockchain and that you were going to say nanny nanny to the regulators because, “You can’t get me,” you wouldn’t have a big public presence with the headquarters, and your picture in the magazines, and show up in person at conferences right? Because… Richard: Yeah. Sure. Robin: ...well, that makes you more obviously a target right? That's what they did though, and then they sort of back pedaled and said later, “Oh, we're following all the regulations.” But you know people don’t really believe that. It's been this big question, to what extent will governments crack down on these blockchain things that at least from the government regulators point of view are not following their rules? Richard: Yeah. Do you have in mind the Coinbase news that had come out the last few days, or was it today or yesterday that- Robin: This is just a continuing issue. I don't have any particular recent event in mind but there are lots of stories about regulators thinking of doing a lot more regulating and cracking down more. This is a big question about blockchain is how far will they crack down, and what will be the consequences? Of course people say, “Well, in principle Bitcoin can keep chugging along even if they do crack down,” and no doubt that's true to some degree. But the question of how much activity there'll be is still somewhat open. You could have it chugging along with a far lower activity because a lot of people have been discouraged. Richard: Well, yeah. Just for the listener we're talking now on September 8th, 2021 so who knows when people will be listening to this. There's been just news in the last few days about Coinbase, and the FCC, and I don't know all the details but it's something like that… Robin: In the last few months China had this big policy of saying, “No more mining here.” Richard: Yeah. Exactly. Robin: There was a big drop I believe in prices right at that point reflecting the fact that people then realized there'd be a lot less stuff happening in China. Richard: Yeah… that wasn't reflected in the fact that Bitcoin has been doing pretty well recently right? It was apparently not fatal, or not that bad for Bitcoin right? Robin: The volatility of these prices is so large that I wouldn't draw much of any inferences from the price movements. It's just wild. Richard: Yeah, but the price for Bitcoin has been doing well right? Isn't that an indication that whatever the Chinese did it wasn't hurtful to the longterm prospects of cryptocurrency? Robin: Well, the volatility of these cryptocurrencies is just really large, so that makes it hard to draw many connections between particular events and what's happening with it. That's an issue about these conditional markets. People have noted that if you have a stock market sequence and then you have events you can try to correlate events in the stock market sequence in order to untangle conditional estimates. For example people have tried to do that with betting markets on elections in the stock market in order to say which candidate is better for the stocks by looking at the correlation between those prices. It's possible to do but the price movements are noisy and so there's a lot of room for arguing there. Just the direct conditional markets are a much clearer signal than these correlations in prices. Richard: Yeah, there's noisy but there are a lot of elections right? I mean you could even do things like in places that are... You have all the national elections right every two years, and then you have even local elections when you have mayoral races. I guess there's not a lot of… Robin: Right. You just don't have betting markets in all those races. Richard: Yeah, but you have corporations that are located there for example- Robin: Sure. Richard: ... or industries there. It seems like you... Anecdotally it seems that... I remember. Do you remember Bernie Sanders during the primaries? He won some primary and then he said, “Oh, the...” Or he lost a primary. He lost and then he said... I think he lost a primary and then the market went up. Then his argument was, “Look. These billionaires are so bad.” Robin: “I’m bad for business and that's the way I want to be.” Richard: Yeah. He was proud of this. Given the political culture it was the other way around. He might have won and it went down. I don't remember. I think he lost it though. Robin: A standard story in finance for a long time has been we've got thousands of market prices in the financial world, and there's all these events that happen in the world so in some sense there's really all this information embodied in all these financial market prices, especially if they fluctuate every minute or so. In principle the answer to all your questions is somewhere out in this vast cloud of financial market prices. That may well be true. It's just not at all transparent. You'd like a clearer answer. A thing that betting markets can do is give you a more direct, clearer answer even if in some sense that answer was already implicit in all the other prices. Richard: Yeah. I think transparency is key because if someone is doing this research on the effects of stocks in the market of election outcomes I would think they’re probably on Wall Street. They’re probably not in political sciences departments. Would that be your intuition too? Robin: I mean they're in both places, but again you know there's so much dispute, I mean there are so many interested parties that with statistical analysis it's just possible to do it so many different ways to get the answer you want. I'm sure if you're in the know you could know who was playing those games and who's not, but the rest of us from the outside find it harder to tell. Richard: Yeah. But your idea of incentives and people getting things right I think would give you an intuition that people playing the stock market are doing better than political scientists, or you don't have that intuition? Robin: I mean it’s definitely true that there's a lot of very smart people playing stock markets and financial markets, and that a lot of them make money. But they mostly make money from the other people trading in those markets which has to be a warning against ordinary people trying to go out and speculate on these things. That would be my biggest advice is if you’re going to play the stock market you should be part of one of these organizations who really knows what they're doing. Because if you go out and just try to bet against them most likely you're going to be on the other side of their trades and losing. Richard: Yeah. Okay, yeah. This is all interesting. It seems like you’re saying it a little bit differently because... Two different things. Because you're saying that you want to start big with the government because it's high status and you want to start from there, but you're also saying we could start somewhere, maybe sports leagues or something. Do you see the big thinking as a way to incentivize people and just get people excited about this stuff? But do you think practicality people have to start a little bit smaller? Robin: Definitely just pointing to the big applications can inspire people even if you’re not going to do them first. Making that connection to people can make them more interested. This is also true for many kinds of innovation. Most kinds of startups or companies you'll have each person doing a pretty small think, but you'll want to tell them about how that's connected to the big project of the organization. That makes them more interested and motivated to be part of the whole project right? I definitely... For the purpose of collecting data and getting solid progress I'd rather do small things first. On the other hand I do think there's this interesting status strategy of starting from the top down. I don't know if you remember the movie The Social Network which is about the early days of Facebook. The story was there were other social networks before Facebook, but they started with average people and then had an average pool of people you could connect to which wasn't nearly as tempting as Facebook because it started at the very most prestigious place, Harvard, and slowly it worked its way down the status hierarchy adding Yale or Princeton. Then at each point as they expanded it people were eager to join because they were eager to associate with these higher status people. The general lesson here is it’s often if there’s a status barrier to doing something it’s easier to start at the top and work your way down. I think firing the CEO is a example of starting at that top. If we think about all the different decisions companies make it hard to find a more prestigious and important decision than firing the CEO. If you could just directly legitimize using speculative markets to make that decision you would have indirectly legitimized lots of other decisions, because people would say, “Well, if you can use that to fire the CEO you could use it to fire the CFO,” right, and CIO? Richard: Yeah. Robin: Then maybe to regional manager, and maybe to pick an ad agency right? You’d work your way down the less prestigious decisions but each one of them you could have said, “Well, as long as you’re willing to use it over there why not here?” Richard: Yeah. You mentioned these things backfiring, so for that specific example, The Social Network, I mean if you’re in politics today and you say an idea came from Harvard that’s usually I think a negative signal. I think most people say that’s bad, or at least they pretend to think that. It could have the opposite effect I guess. If betting markets become something that people in Washington do and they’re a little bit too complicated for normal people to understand there could be a backlash. Do you worry about that? Robin: Yeah. Let’s talk about the public perception of betting markets and what sort of attitudes there are to them, and issues with public reaction. I was involved in a publicity fiasco in 2003 when I was part of a DARPA project where we had a research project set up to create betting markets on geopolitical events in the Middle East. Then on a Monday morning two senators had a press conference where they declared that this project wasn’t going to be betting on death, betting on terrorist attacks, and that was terrible. Then by the very next morning after that the secretary of defense in front of Congress declared the project dead. In those 24 hours they never asked us if the accusations were correct. They didn’t need to because it was such a tiny project. Why bother to even think about defending it? But that shows that many people have some mental rules about, they don’t think you should be betting on death. That’s just not appropriate. It doesn’t matter why you might be doing that right? People have some things they might be uncomfortable with betting on and that’s a thing you should stay away from is betting on death, say. But you’ll notice that most of the business press tends to report news in terms of financial market price movements, and they don’t tend to question those movements. They try to explain them but they don’t question them. If the price of IBM goes up the reporters don’t say, “Well, that was a mistake. It should have gone down.” They might say it went up because of this or because of that, but that’s most accepting the prices as good estimates and then trying to explain them. Now sometimes people will tentatively say, “Well, maybe these things are too high there or too low here.” But that says that in the business press at least people do defer to financial market prices as sources of information. Then the potential that could apply elsewhere in society there is a lot of deference given to financial market prices in a wide range of contexts. Richard: Yeah. Yeah. I guess it depends on how sophisticated your audience is. It’s funny. You mentioned the people don’t like death markets. There was at PredictIt... There’s all those markets, will Bashar al-Assad or will Kim Jong-un be in office by this date? There was one on Kim Jong-un last year. That’s basically, will he be still the leader of North Korea by the end of 2020? It’s basically a death market because there’s not much chance of him getting overthrown, or voted out, or anything. There were some rumors about him having bad health. He was out of the public eye for a while. There were rumors that he was dead in the press. The market got down to something like 50/50. I remember I bet on this. I bet that he would actually stay in office. He did, and Kim Jong-un- Robin: Well, we have a more dramatic example of that in the US presidential betting markets. You might know the chance of Biden at the moment is like 20% being the next president- Richard: Yeah. Robin: ... which the chance of Trump is 30% right? But Biden is the president right now and Trump lost the last election, so why would the Biden odds be so low? Well, the story is he might die, or become obviously- Richard: Yeah, I think people also think- Robin: ... incompetent and then not a candidate. Richard: Yeah. I think it’s some combination of... You know it’s funny because the market has been underestimating Biden for a really long time, or at least in my opinion underestimating him, or betting against the market. I’ve been winning, but yeah even when he basically wrapped up the nomination it gave him a 70% chance of being the nominee which I thought was ridiculous. It also always overestimated the chances I thought of Trump dropping dead, not just when he had COVID because there was that brief period where it looked like he could actually die. He was in the hospital… Robin: Let’s just pause and notice. It’s quite possible to look at these prices and say, “Well, that doesn’t look right,” just like you can read a newspaper article and say, “That doesn’t sound right,” or any other analysis anywhere else right? Why am I recommending these market prices compared to anything else? Well, first of all there is this track record they do better, but there’s this other argument which says, “Okay. If you read the newspaper article and you think it’s wrong what can you do about that?” You can just complain. If you look at the betting market price and you think it’s wrong- Richard: Yeah, exactly. Robin: ... you can make money going, betting against it and fixing those prices. That’s the engine that makes them more accurate is all these people that can be enticed and invited to come fix the problems. Richard: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I bet on Biden not dying, and Trump not dying, and both of them making it to election day. Yeah. I made money off of that. [Laughs] Robin: There you go. I’m not going to certainly argue about that no one could ever find a mistake in these things. The question is when you can find a mistake in things which institution gives you the best opportunities to fix it? Richard: Yeah. And you can compare the betting markets to, just like punditry, because when I listened to pundits they never gave Biden a chance either so it’s not like the pundits were all saying it’s going to be Biden. I remember most people were talking… Robin: Let me at this point admit what I would say is the biggest problem with futarchy and with some of these other decision markets, which is that they make hypocrisy harder, which is actually a problem. You might think, “Well, hypocrisy is a bad thing. Making it harder is good right?” Well, let’s walk through that. At the moment, say ordinary people can claim to love trees and they just care a lot about trees. Trees real estate wonderful and they certainly wouldn’t want to have fewer trees. But then they elect politicians who have to make choices about trees versus other things. Those politicians can probably read the public and say, “Well, they say they like trees but they don’t really like trees that much, so I’m not actually going to go save some trees by interfering with something else.” Then if the public ever finds out that somehow not everything was being done to save trees, the public can complain and say, “That damn politician! They’re corrupt! They were bought out and I sure hate them. Let’s throw them out of office,”right? Because the politician is allowing the public to be hypocritical, to pretend they care more about trees than they do. This happens all through the political system. For example we have laws against prostitution that we don’t enforce very well, which allows a lot of prostitution so people can have prostitution and then pretend they’re against it. Same thing with drug laws. A lot of our laws are in some sense to allow the public to pretend to have certain positions that they don’t really have. The prediction markets, the futarchy decision markets don’t make that so easy. That is if in the national welfare definition you put a high weight on trees, then the speculators are actually going to approve the policies that do get you more trees. If that’s not what you wanted then you won’t be happy. Richard: Yeah. But I mean there’s such a step removed when you’re talking about voters and what they want right? They want trees… Robin: But I think it’s... Even when we talked about the example of hiring people. You have a couple of job candidates and you want to hire the best one for the company supposedly right? Well, I think actually when a person volunteers to be in charge of a hiring committee they don’t actually intend to pick the best person for the company. They intend to pick the best person for their coalition in the company. Forcing these metrics of who is best for the company would interfere with their plan to pick someone who is decent for the company but even better for their coalition. That’s just the sort of thing that happens in many organizations. You would be uncomfortable setting up this process that didn’t give you the flexibility to pretend to do A while really doing B. Richard: Yeah. Changing gears a little bit do you think that perhaps a foreign country, perhaps some kind of dictatorship might be more amenable to these kind of things? Because think of it this way. They’re often looking for a sense of legitimacy, a reason for status that is not based on the dominant culture which says you need elections, and you need democracy, and you need popular legitimacy. Robin: I think to answer this we have to realize that there is a world elite culture. This was very striking to me at the beginning of the pandemic a year and a half ago. At the beginning of the pandemic the usual public health experts took their usual positions say against masks, and against travel restrictions, and things like that. Then this looked like an important thing and all the sudden elites everywhere started talking a lot about the pandemic and discussing what they thought was the right thing to do, and they decided something else. They came up with a different plan with lock downs, and masks, and things like that. Once the elites had decided on that all the public health experts caved and said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s what we should do.” Not just in the United States or Britain. All around the world. Remarkably the policies adopted around the world have not varied that much from what the elites together around the world recommended. If you looked in other areas of policy like nuclear energy, or electromagnetic spectrum, drug regulation, policies around the world don’t actually vary that much. There is some sort of world culture that talks and decides what the right thing to do is. Then everybody does it. There really aren’t very many exceptions. A remarkable thing was that early in the pandemic many of us wanted there to be challenge trials where we would test vaccines quickly and effectively, or even test something like the regulation, and basically nowhere in the world did they allow challenge trials. Only say recently in Britain have there been the first challenge trials, because just medical experts everywhere. You might think, “Why didn’t some dictator somewhere want to be a hero by defying the world medical ethics experts and doing it different?” None did, right? That really suggests that dictators around the world more crave the approval of the world elites in doing things the way the world elites want to, and their political power at home is more strengthened by appearing to follow along with what the world elites say. Richard: Yeah. Political science, they call this a logic of appropriateness, and this is what guides government behavior. Although China sort of did that. I mean what China did was go much harder on lockdowns and much harder on mass testing than other people. Robin: Right. Richard: That was a limited extent but they didn’t do human challenge trials to my knowledge. But they did do things that were different… Robin: It’s important to notice there is variation in regulation of the world, but it’s also important to notice how limited it is. Richard: Yeah. It’s within a narrow range. That’s true, yeah. You see this on social issues. You see like Black Lives Matter protests in New Zealand, and you see LGBT flags. All the countries in the world decided that gay rights was important at pretty much the exact same time. Robin: This was really a problem for large social innovation. I’ve really over my life thought about lots of big ways we can make big changes to a lot of social institutions, but in a world like this where everybody wants to do what everybody else is doing it’s really hard to get anybody to try any big changes. Richard: Is an answer to this perhaps geopolitical tension? If the US and China become best friends, maybe they converge, if they hate each other maybe they do completely different things? Could this be a hope that you have international tensions and you have these blocks, and then at least people do different things? Robin: I don’t know, but a lot of people have mentioned recently how badly say the US Military managed in Afghanistan for several decades. They compare that interestingly to how flexible the US Military was in World War II after a bunch of big losses early on. The remarkable thing, the US Military at the beginning of World War II was not very well run and not very well organized. They had lousy suppliers and things. Then they made a bunch of big losses early on. Then they thought it was important enough not to keep doing that so that they fired people and fired suppliers. They now put performance as a priority because it was a big war. Apparently that’s the kind of thing it seems to require. But the pandemic apparently wasn’t such a thing right? Richard: Yeah. Robin: The pandemic was not a big enough crisis that we fired people who did badly on it. Neither was Afghanistan. We’re in a world where we have these big things we do wrong but they somehow just aren’t bad enough to really scare us into trying different things. The question is where will we ever see some nation or big organization that’s scared enough about losing to be willing to roll the dice and try some big changes? Richard: When you look at the American Military established under World War II I mean the military establishment was a new thing. You were building basically something from scratch. Now you have all these vested interests. You know it’s funny. The places, the countries with the most US Military… the most military personnel in the world are actually Italy, Germany, Japan, and South Korea right? Robin: Those are risky, dangerous spots. You’d want troops there wouldn’t you? Richard: Yeah. Well, maybe but if you notice they have something in common. Those are the Axis powers and the Korean War right? Robin: Right. Richard: Basically they’re the exact same place they were in 1945 to 1950 and so- Robin: Hysteresis right? Enormous path dependence? Richard: Yeah, exactly. Enormous dependence. Yeah, Italy. Is that obvious? The most dangerous place in the world. Maybe, maybe not. Robin: No, and it’s not remotely obviously the most dangerous place in the world. Richard: Yeah. Do you look around the world, and right now do you see variation in the extent to which countries are willing to not only take risks but take risks specifically along the path that you suggest? There was an article in The Economist earlier this year. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but the UK, the intelligence agencies have a prediction market but it’s called Cosmic Bazaar. I actually googled it and I couldn’t find it. If you can’t find it on the first page of Google then that’s not a good sign. Robin: Right. The US intelligence agency has also had an internal prediction market going for a while. They’ve had this interesting way they handle it politically. Inside the CIA the coin of the realm is reports, or analysis. Somebody writes a report that analyzes a particular place like Italy say, and summarizes the key strategic situation there, and the key intelligence situation. There are these betting markets that exist where people can bet and forecast on these things. But the rule is they don’t cite the betting market in their reports. The market doesn’t get credit for influencing the reports, although it probably does influence the reports. That limits the degree to which it gets budget or attention because why bother to bet in the market if you’re not going to get credit there? Richard: Yeah. Yeah. There is a paper coming from the intelligence agencies that compared super forecasters and people who had proven some track record versus people in the intelligence community with access to classified information. Phil Tetlock showed me this paper. Yeah. You could probably guess what happened. The intelligence community lost to the people with the track record of forecasting. You could see why the intelligence community might not want to hype up this result. It seems like there is a lot of data out there- Robin: Right. Clearly the intelligence community is basically saying, “Yes, we know we could get more accurate estimates from that but we don’t want them. We like our current system,” right? If they were scared that might turn out different right? Richard: If they were scared of China, yeah, taking… Robin: Right. Some external threat. The same thing was true about my betting market publicity fiasco in 2003. This was soon after 9/11 and just two years later. People looked at the betting markets and said, “Oh, you’re betting on death. That’s terrible. You have to shut them down.” If they were really scared of terror attacks, if they were actually feeling a large degree of threat they would have said, "To heck with this rule against betting on death. Let’s turn on these markets. Let’s find out where the attacks are going to be so we can stop them." Richard: They say Bin Laden is just going to put all his money in the market and then attack? Robin: Well, that was crazy because these were relativity thin markets, and they have a lot of money at stake. Basically a fact that people don’t know about the markets is that many people criticize by saying, “Well, somebody will try to manipulate the markets by betting on one side not because they know better, but because they’re willing to lose money in order to distort the market price.” That is true. There are people willing to manipulate markets, but that actually makes the prices more accurate. For example in the fire the CEO market you say, “Well, the CEO wants to keep his job, so he will bet in these markets in order to make himself look like the price will be higher if he stays, and lower if he leaves.” Yes he would have an incentive to do that, but when other traders know that somebody will be trying to manipulate in the market they know to increase their trading and their efforts and that compensates, and actually on net makes the prices more accurate. That’s something we see in theory and we’ve seen in the lab, and we’ve seen in the field. These markets are robust to attempts to manipulate. In fact people who want to manipulate them make the prices more accurate. Richard: Yeah. Do you think that one way to think we should do is raise the status of thinking about these things, and thinking about betting markets? Because it seems like there is data out there. I mean you could go onto the stock market. We’ve talked about predicted. You can go back to elections. You can calculate some kind of conditional probabilities. Do you think a good thing could be just have more economists just interested in these questions, and looking at data, and comparing studies? Robin: It couldn’t be bad, but the question is just how much hope should you have? That’s a key question about a lot of institutional choices. Honestly if you just look at institutional issues in the United States or other countries and you ask which kinds of choices do people get really excited about, and emotional, and interested in, if you tell them about a policy change that would just benefit most everybody they yawn and can’t be bothered to pay attention. They would just lose interest right? If you tell them about a policy change that will help their side and hurt the other side ooh, they just love that. People are really eager to fight in a battle. A lot of the topics that energize them are the topics that represent a conflict between one group and another group. That means institutional changes are just boring because even if you can find out a better institution it just doesn’t map onto their side versus the other side. Richard: Yeah. Maybe that gives me an idea for an investment idea. You see these things in the conservative press. They’re talking about some corporation has gone woke right? They have a Critical Race Theory or trading in Coca-Cola or whatever. Basically you could have some kind of mutual fund that just shorts the wokest companies, whoever could short whoever Fox News happens to be complaining about at the time- Robin: Right. And that would be a way in which you are taking a side. Then that would be more energizing to people. People would just like to- Richard: Right. Or you could invest- Robin: ... take a side. Richard: You could invest in those corporations. Right. Robin: Right. Richard: Exactly. Then eventually you would learn if this thing lost money year after year you’d learn something… Robin: Sure. And in fact ordinary people would be more interested in betting on the stock market if they could simultaneously be taking a political side with their stock market bets, which is… Richard: But they can. Yeah. Right now we have all these outrages over some corporation is doing this or that, so you’d figure... I wonder if that’s actually inspiring more people to get into the stock market? It’s hard to tell with Robinhood expanding, making it easier. But you could imagine some entrepreneurs doing that right? You could imagine somebody setting something up and advertising to people, “ We’re going to short all the woke corporations.” You could imagine them doing well. Robin: Right. The fundamental problem is how do you create, or find a created community that just cares about overall benefit of a nation, or a company, or things like that? Unfortunately one of the main ways that’s ever happened is war. We talked about World War II a bit before. There’s a literature that suggests that war has been one of the main engineers of innovation for the last 10,000 years which is a terrible fact because it means if you want more innovation you’ll have to have more war. War is just terrible thing. Richard: Yeah. Robin: But all this time of peace and prosperity we’ve had for a while here, we also do seem to see a degradation in our interest in coming together for overall collective benefit, and more focus on internal divisions, and more focus on just doing whatever helps us in these little local battles and not caring very much about the overall nation because we’re assuming that’s okay. Richard: Yeah. Well, you see nationalism manifest itself at say soccer games, like Germany and France are not fighting wars but they’ll go to soccer games. There’s this hooligan culture in Europe where people really, really get into it. Robin: Right. But would they be willing to change some key national policy in order to make sure they could win more soccer games? Richard: I think it would have to be... I think the class of the people who makes the policy is different from the soccer hooligans right? It would just be a matter of the elites having some kind of national pride. It doesn’t even have to be national. Could it be just a class pride, or a pride in background, you know these aristocrats? Before there was mass nationalism there was war right? There was these aristocrats and they had their own value system. They had their codes of conduct. Robin: Well, I mean the key thing would be say if the elites of Romania for something want Romania to look better in the world’s eye and try to make Romania be run better overall, that could be an energy that would focus on overall quality of Romania as opposed to the left elites in Romania fighting the right elites in Romania right, and being in a battle of taking down the other side. Richard: Yeah. It sounds like what’s really dangerous is there’s this global elite culture where it’s not just public health. It’s like on social issues, on just... Robin: Right. They have strong consensus in you just have to follow the global elites to be part of them. There’s not so much competition within those global elites in that sense for doing things effectively. Richard: Yeah. The competition is just the less well off people in their own countries- Robin: If you think of say, Elon Musk say, right, if the global elites go, “Tsk, tsk Elon Musk,”and say, “Well, he’s not doing it right. He needs to follow these regulations right,” and then Elon Musk is actually making things better, and making a better internet and a better space industry or whatever, well does Elon Musk... If he wins does that change the elites to be more supporting him, or do they just get more mad that he defied them and he seems to be winning? Richard: Yeah. What do you think about the potential? There’s a lot of people in Silicon Valley people and the crypto world, people like my friend Balaji Srinivasan and Mark Andreessen, and people like this who really take a dim view of the Davos set, the New York Times read in public. I don’t know if they see themselves this way. I’m not speaking for anybody, but that could potentially be a kind of counter elite right? Robin: And the danger is that if the regular elites see this defiant group of tech elites winning against them that makes them really mad and wanting to take them down. Richard: Well, that’s the risk of competition right? The good side, or the more productive side could lose, right? But if we’re thinking about how to have competition and how to... If we’re not going to have wars, if we’re not going start wars then… Robin: Right. If we can have a fair competition then it would be good if different parts of the world, if the European say tech people said, “Well, we seem to be losing against those people. How could we organize ourselves better,” if the different parts of the world fear competition and then as a result try to find more effective ways to organize themselves that’s great. That’s exactly what we want. Richard: Yeah. Robin: But they need to fear it enough to actually be willing to make big changes. The prediction market stuff we’re talking about is off actually relatively big, destructive changes that even tech companies have not been willing to do. Richard: Right. Are you involved in any projects at the moment? You talked about the post 9/11, the DARPA grant. Is there anything similar going on now? Robin: I’ve been advising a number of companies over the years but I haven’t seen big trials of the sort I’d really like to be part of. But I keep searching. Richard: If you had enough of an investment, say somebody if they were some donor who wanted to help you do it would it be a big help or is there some… Robin: Oh, sure. Of course it could be a big help. There’s two paths to go. One is do this fire the CEO market in which case you’d have to go offshore and just defy regulators to set something up right? With enough money you could do that but you’d have to have a funder who was willing to be associated with something like that. The other approach is you go within organizations and you fund these small scale trials within organizations. Then what you need is both money and an organization willing to put up with the disruption. Let me just tell you a story about deadlines. One of the most successful applications of this over the years has been deadlines. That is quite often people have a project, and they have a deadline, and they have these regular project meetings. They get together and they all tell themselves, “We’re on track. We’re going to make the deadline.” Then they open a betting market and all the sudden the prices drop below 5% that say, “No way. You’re not going to make this deadline.” Of course the market’s right. That really bothers the people running the project who don’t want to continue it. You might ask, “Well, don’t they want to know if their project is going to make the deadline?” That’s what I want to explain now. If you have a project with a deadline one of the main things you ask yourself is, “If I fail to make this deadline what will my excuse be?” I want to have a good excuse if I fail to make the deadline. Everyone’s favorite excuse is the following. “We were going along just fine and then at the last minute some weird thing came out of left field and knocked us flat. It’ll never happen again. It’s so weird. It’s so rare. There’s no point in keeping track of this thing or holding anybody responsible. We should just move on.” Now that story is interfered with if you have a betting market that said all along you’re not going to make this deadline. The story had to be, “We were going along fine and then at the last minute.” That’s why you have all these project meetings where everybody says, “We’re going along fine.” Apparently project managers would rather have a better excuse if they fail than have better warnings about failing the project. Richard: Yeah. That makes sense, but that’s one path is just to get corporations to act in their own interest and you might be able to do that. Robin: Right. Actually that is the most promising path. But it would help to have other people spur them on by funding these trials that could get them to overcome the reluctance to do these disruptive things. Richard: Yeah. I could see the barriers, but it doesn’t sound like this should be the most difficult thing in the world. You just have to have somebody out there… Robin: But I think if you look at the history of financial innovation and social innovation in general a lot of social innovations were adopted and changed long after they were possible. Richard: Yeah. Right. Robin: For example like life insurance or commodity markets, those were possible in the ancient world. They’ve been possible all through history but they didn’t really take off until say the late 1800s. That’s because it just takes a while for people to be willing to try things. Richard: Yeah. Although I don’t think technology is that independent. You have greater wealth. You have greater bookkeeping. Robin: Sure. As society gets richer then we just have more room for lots of kinds of experiments, and as more just random ways in which something might get tried. Richard: Especially, yeah it makes sense a lot of this is on software. Yeah. The cost of computing and all that is going down. Yeah. On that note are you optimistic about, maybe not in the immediate future but some day, futarchy in the long run… Robin: I’m definitely optimistic in the long run. The fundamental stance to say is when you think of technology you think about gadgets, and materials, and maybe software, but social technology is also technology. We also have technologies, how we run meetings, how we organize firms, how we compensate salespeople, how we vote. That’s all technology too. We’ve been innovating in that technology as well as the physical technology, but we just have different incentives and dynamics in the social innovation because people can’t own it as much and so they don’t create startups to sell it as often. We have a lot more of these psychological barriers to the social innovation. If you’re in a company that has physical technology and somebody suggests making a new material you can probably make that new material leave your organizational structure alone. It doesn’t threaten who’s in charge of which divisions so much. But if you have social innovation it goes to the heart of who’s doing what, and who’s in charge of what. That’s a lot more threatening. Richard: Yeah. This has been a great conversation. It’s fascinating. If there’s anybody who’s out there who’s listening to this who wants to help, who wants to advance the cause of futarchy… Robin: You know where to find us. Richard: They can just log onto Twitter, email you. Robin: Absolutely. Richard: Okay. It’s been a pleasure Robin. Great talking to you. Robin: Great talking to you.

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grancrap spammed:

I promise to pay $1,000,000 to the officer(s) who, complying with their constitutional duty, arrest(s) Putin as a war criminal

lawl - you are way more stupid than I assumed grancrap

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 8:41 PM, grarpamp wrote:US Sen Graham calls for Putin Assassination... https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/3/lindsey-graham-calls-vladimi... I'm glad, almost exactly 27 years after the Part 1 of my Assassination Politics essay publicationhttps://cryptome.org/ap.htm  on the Cypherpunks email list (Feb 14, 1995, but the archive for 1995 has since been forged to conceal nearly all reference to it) that people are finally awakening to the extreme advantages of killing a few hundred to a few thousand politicians around the world, rather than millions of ordinary people in a nuclear war.  I hope this realization is not too late, for the latter group. What Senator Graham, and perhaps all other politicians, do not realize is that my AP  solution, however effective it was going to be, was never going to be pain-free: It will get rid of all politicians, either by forced resignation or far worse. Jim Bell

On various dates, jim bell wrote:

Yes, Sukumaran's essay is by far the most competent treatment of my Assassination Politics idea and essay.

All in all, the public's handling of my AP essay has been atrociously incompetent. For people who claim they love freedom and hate tyranny, I've described the solution. People have had 26 years to disprove or just cast doubt on AP, and nobody has accomplished that.

AP will work, when tried.

...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/3/lindsey-graham-calls-vladimi...

I'm glad, almost exactly 27 years after the Part 1 of my Assassination Politics essay publication https://cryptome.org/ap.htm that people are finally awakening to the extreme advantages of killing a few hundred to a few thousand politicians around the world, rather than millions of ordinary people in a nuclear war. I hope this realization is not too late, for the latter group.

Given recent global rumblings of nuclear use, new wars killing millions and more of innocent civilians, calls for assassination of "war criminal" leaders of various countries, inherent brutal authoritarian force of legacy GovPol models, etc, many areas might have some relevance... Perhaps Jim and others should begin making appearances on podcasts, having conversations on Youtube, Odysee, and other video channels. 27 years later, the internet now does support realtime video medium, and it has become a widespread de-facto way for millions of people to discuss and share topics. Jim and others could explain their systems, answer those who have questions, cover how General Prediction Markets could be used in peaceful voluntary societies to do things such as building roads, space travel, medicine, defence, crowdfunding, and many other things in freedom preserving non authoritarian and efficient ways. Jim and the other early debaters advocates and detractors won't be around forever, and AP and Prediction Markets in general certainly will end up being debated, and perhaps even implemented, by others in the future. Thus it might seem important for the world to have their current thoughts on such things, even if only noted as history for the future's reference, by way of making and joining podcasts today. To the extent Jim and the others are up for it, people could begin by listing and suggesting potential podcasts to join, and or by making mutual introductions and inviting them to do podcast conversations. If cypherpunks claim that their Prediction Markets and other ideas could solve some of the world's hard problems, perhaps they should start actually getting out in the larger real and podcast world and talking about them so that more people can see, study, debate, improve, etc. Because as it is now, half the world has still never heard of cypherpunk's cryptocurrency, and roughly 0% have ever heard of Prediction Markets or Libertarian or anything else. But 100% are now hearing many global politicians threatening total destruction of the world as we know it. The only way to acheive a more free and peaceful world is for cypherpunks and others to get out there and discuss it.

https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-causes-and-impact-of-political-assassinations/ https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Sentinel-January-2015-v... The Causes and Impact of Political Assassinations January 2015, Volume 8, Issue 1 Authors: Arie Perliger Categories: Terror Behavior , Weapons and Tactics , Individual Terrorist Actors PDF Political assassinations have been part of social reality since the emergence of communal social frameworks, as the leaders of tribes, villages, and other types of communities constantly needed to defend their privileged status. In the ancient world assassination featured prominently in the rise and fall of some of the greatest empires. While many people are familiar with the military victories of Alexander the Great, few today recall that his ascendance to power was facilitated by the assassination of his father (an innovative and talented politician in his own right), who was struck down by a bodyguard as he was entering a theater to attend his daughter’s marriage celebrations. In a somewhat more famous incident, Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE by Roman senators who increasingly feared that Caesar would revoke their privileges. In modern times, political assassinations continue to play an important role in political and social processes and, in some cases, have a dramatic effect. For example, many argue that the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin in 1995 was a major reason for the collapse of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.1 It is also difficult to deny the impact of the assassinations of figures such as Martin Luther King or Benazir Bhutto on the success of their political movements/parties following their deaths. Thus, it is not surprising that Appleton argues, “The impact of assassinations on America and the World is incalculable,”2 and that Americans cite the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the crime that has had the greatest impact on American society in the last 100 years.3 Nonetheless, despite the apparently significant influence of political assassinations on political and social realities, this particular manifestation of political action is understudied and, as a result, poorly understood. This article is a summary of a broader study that will be published later by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) and aims to improve our understanding of the causes and implications of political assassinations. It makes use of an original and comprehensive worldwide data set of political assassinations between 1945 and 2013. The findings illustrate the trends that characterize the phenomenon and challenge some of the existing conventions about political assassinations and their impact. Data and Rationale In order to investigate the causes and implications of political assassinations, the CTC constructed a data set that includes political assassinations worldwide from 1946 to early 2013. After defining political assassinations as “an action that directly or indirectly leads to the death of an intentionally targeted individual who is active in the political sphere, in order to promote or prevent specific policies, values, practices or norms pertaining to the collective,” the CTC consulted a variety of resources, including relevant academic books and articles, media sources (especially LexisNexis and The New York Times archive), and online resources, to identify 758 attacks by 920 perpetrators that resulted in the death of 954 individuals. (Some attacks led to the death of multiple political leaders; however, the death of “bystanders” is not included in this number.) This study is guided by the rationale that the logic of political assassinations is different from that of other manifestations of political violence. Hence, it is important to understand the unique factors that may encourage or discourage violent groups or individuals from engaging in political assassinations. Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that these factors vary among different types of assassinations because in most cases the characteristics of the targeted individual shape the nature and objectives of the assassination. Indeed, this study establishes that different processes trigger different types of assassinations and that different types of assassinations generate distinct effects on the political and social arenas. General Observations Although the first two decades after World War II were characterized by a limited number of political assassinations, the number of such attacks has risen dramatically since the early 1970s. This is reflective of the emergence of a new wave of terrorist groups, radical and universal ideologies operating on a global scale, and a growing willingness by oppressive regimes to use assassinations as a tool in their treatment of political opposition. Indeed, while most assassinations of government officials were perpetrated by sub-state violent groups, most assassinations of opposition leaders were initiated by ruling political elites or their proxies. This important observation supports the notion that a growing number of terrorist groups see assassinations as a legitimate and effective tool, and that one of the major obstacles for democratization is the vulnerability of political opposition. Additionally, our data indicates that assassinations are not limited to specific regions or specific time frames. In fact, the opposite is true. Both regions that are considered politically stable and economically prosperous, such as Western Europe, as well as regions that are considered politically unstable, more prone to political violence, and economically weak, such as sub-Saharan Africa, have experienced similar levels of political assassinations. In some regions, however, political assassinations have become dominant only in the last couple of decades. In South Asia, for example, 76 percent of the assassinations have been perpetrated since the mid-1980s, possibly a consequence of the growing instability in the region during and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And more than 85 percent of assassinations in Eastern Europe were perpetrated after 1995 with the start of the transition to democracy in most Eastern European countries, a process that in many cases was accompanied by growing ethnic tensions and political instability. In terms of targets, the data indicates that most assassinations target heads of state (17 percent), opposition leaders (who are not part of the executive or legislative branch) (18 percent), and members of parliament (21 percent). In rarer instances the targets are ministers (14 percent), diplomats (10 percent), local politicians such as governors or mayors (5 percent), and vice head of states (3 percent). Causes of Assassinations The research findings indicate that, in general, political assassinations are more probable in countries that suffer from a combination of restrictions on political competition and strong polarization and fragmentation. More specifically, states that lack consensual political ethos and homogeneous populations (in terms of the national and ethnic landscape) and include politically deprived groups will face a decline in the legitimacy of the political leadership and the political system and an increase in the likelihood of direct attacks against political leaders. One of the most glaring examples of such a dynamic may be found in Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group that represents the deprived Tamil minority, organized a bloody campaign of political assassinations against the political leadership of the state and the Sinhalese majority from the early 1980s until approximately 2009. And since these issues tend to be present mainly in times of electoral processes or of actual violent strife, one should not be surprised that our findings indicate that election periods or periods characterized by a general increase in domestic violence are moments when a country is more susceptible to political assassinations. Another interesting finding is that the territorial fragmentation of a country is correlated with an increase in the number of assassinations. When a government loses control over some parts of a country to opposition groups, both sides are more willing to use assassinations to enhance their influence and to consolidate their status as the sole legitimate rulers of the polity. When looking specifically at the facilitators of assassinations of heads of state, we can identify some unique trends. To begin with, the polities most susceptible to assassinations against the head of state are authoritarian polities that lack clear succession rules and in which the leader enjoys significant political power. This is true even more so in polities that also include oppressed minorities and high levels of political polarization. Therefore, non-democratic political environments that feature leaders who are able to garner significant power and in which the state lacks efficient mechanisms for leadership change following an assassination, provide more prospects for success in advancing political changes via political assassination. This stands in contrast to democratic systems, in which it is clear that the elimination of the head of state will have only a limited, long-term impact on the socio-political order. Although heads of state represent what could be considered the crown jewel of political assassinations, lower-ranking political figures also face this threat. In this study, we specifically examined attacks against legislators and vice heads of state. Attacks against the latter are fairly rare and are usually intended to promote highly specific policy changes (related to areas under the responsibility of the vice head of state) or to prevent the vice head of state from inheriting the head of state position. Legislators, on the other hand, are most often victims of civil wars or similar violent domestic clashes in developing countries; in democracies they are almost never targeted. To illustrate, no less than 34 Iranian legislators were assassinated in 1981, when the new revolutionary regime was consolidating its control over the country. Hence, assassinations of legislators are almost always a result of national-level conflicts rather than local ones, contrary to what some may suspect. Lastly, legislators’ assassinations are rarely perpetrated to promote specific policies or to gain access to the political process. In other words, the assassination of legislators should be considered more as acts of protest against an existing political order than political actions that are intended to promote specific political goals. One of the unique features of this study, among others, is its focus on assassinations of political figures who are not part of governing platforms. Unlike other types of assassinations, the state is typically a major actor in the assassination in these cases. Consequently, it should not surprise us that opposition leaders are more likely to be targeted in authoritarian systems or in weak democracies, as the political environment in these types of regimes provides a space for the emergence of an opposition while also providing the ruling elites tools and legitimacy for oppressive measures against a “successful” opposition (e.g. Pakistan as well as many Latin American countries). It is also clear that opposition leaders are more vulnerable during violent domestic conflicts, when the number of opportunities, and maybe also the legitimacy, to act against them are on the rise. Impact of Political Assassinations The study provides several important insights regarding the impact of political assassinations. In general, political assassinations seem to intensify prospects of a state’s fragmentation and undermine its democratic nature. The latter is usually manifested in a decline in political participation and a disproportionate increase in the strength of the executive branch. When we looked specifically at different types of assassinations, we were able to find significant variations among them. For example, assassinations of heads of state tend to generate a decline in the democratic nature of a polity and an increase in domestic violence and instability as well as economic prosperity. The latter may sound counterintuitive but could reflect the rise of a more open economic system after the elimination of authoritarian ruler. The assassination of opposition leaders has a limited impact on the nature of a political system, but has the potential to lead to an increase in overall unrest and domestic violence. And assassinations of legislators are often followed by public unrest (illustrated by growing anti-government demonstrations) and by a decline in the legitimacy of the government. Policy Implications This study illustrates that most polities experienced political assassinations at some point in their history. Thus, our ability to improve our understanding of political processes must also include a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of political assassinations. But how can the findings presented in this study help us to understand the potential role of policymakers in the occurrence or prevention of political assassinations? To begin with, it is evident that governments can promote political and social conditions that may decrease the prospects of political assassinations. For example, while governments in polarized societies sometimes have the tendency to restrict political participation in order to prevent further escalation in intrastate communal relations, our findings indicate that this action will actually increase the probability of political assassinations. Moreover, in order for electoral processes to become a viable tool for promoting a productive and peaceful political environment, it is clear that they are more effective after ensuring the most intense political grievances have been addressed. Otherwise, electoral competition has the potential to instigate further violence, including the assassinations of political figures. The shaping of stable and regulated succession mechanisms is also highly important, especially in countries that are struggling to construct stable democratic institutions. Interestingly, it seems that while theories of democratization have for a long time prescribed the creation of institutions as a first step to ensure wide representation, followed by stable routines and protocols, the opposite order may be more effective for the promotion of stability and eventually a liberal-democratic environment. The findings also indicate that more attention needs to be given to the safety of the political leaders during instances of violent domestic clashes or transitions to democracy. Opposition leaders are most vulnerable in the early stages of democratization, so the effort to facilitate a democratic environment must also include the creation of mechanisms to ensure the safety of opposition leaders. This in turn will enhance the legitimacy of political participation, reduce polarization, and enhance political stability. Moreover, although civilian victims naturally attract most of the public attention during a civil war, this study highlights the need to evaluate how harm to political figures may be prevented, as this has significant potential to lead to further escalation of a conflict, especially when the assassinated figures are heads of state or opposition leaders. Lastly, the findings also provide several practical insights for law enforcement. More than half of the assassins (51.3 percent) had been involved in criminal activities prior to the assassination. This may indicate that a group usually prefers one of its veteran members to perform an assassination, probably because of the high stakes involved in these kinds of operations and the relatively high level of operational knowledge necessary to conduct them. In one extreme example, the leader of the Bangladeshi branch of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), Mufti Abdul Hannan, was revealed to have participated actively in the attempted assassination of Sheikh Hasina, the leader of an opposition party in Bangladesh and the former Bangladesh prime minister, in August 2004. Also, because of the particular risks involved in these kinds of operations, groups may prefer to expose members who are already known to law enforcement agencies to conduct an assassination rather than exposing members who are still unknown to law enforcement bodies. (However, this may be problematic since the veteran members are often at higher risk of being under surveillance). Conclusion The dearth of research on political assassination represents a crucial oversight, especially considering the frequency of the phenomenon and its implications. Our study highlights the major theoretical and policy implications of assassinations and identifies some promising directions for further research, with the hope that this unique type of political violence will be better understood in the future. Dr. Arie Perliger is the Class of 1977 Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. [1] President Bill Clinton, the main sponsor of the Oslo peace process, speculated that if Rabin had not been assassinated, peace would have been achieved in three years. See Atilla Shumfalbi, “Bill Clinton: If Rabin Would Have Not Been Assassinated There Would Be Peace Today,” YNET News, September 14, 2009: www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3805013,00.html [Hebrew] [2] Sheldon Appleton, “Trends: Assassinations,” Public Opinion Quarterly 64:4 (Winter 2000): pp. 495–522. [3] Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “The Political Consequences of Assassination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52:3 (June 2008): pp. 385–400. Related Articles July 19, 2022 The Relentless Terrorist: A Profile of Muaz al-Fizani Matteo Pugliese Real or Imagined: Evidence Concerning the Mental Health-Terrorism Nexus from Australian Terrorism Trials Rodger Shanahan The Buffalo Attack: The Cumulative Momentum of Far-Right Terror Amarnath Amarasingam, Marc-André Argentino, Graham Macklin May 26, 2022 Going Viral: Implications of COVID-19 for Bioterrorism Gary A. Ackerman, Zachary Kallenborn, Philipp C. Bleek April 27, 2022 The Urgent Need for an Overhaul of Global Biorisk Management Filippa Lentzos, Gregory D. Koblentz, Joseph Rodgers A View from the CT Foxhole: Lawrence Kerr, Former Director, Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats, Office of Global Affairs, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Paul Cruickshank, Don Rassler, Kristina Hummel A New Age of Bioterror: Anticipating Exploitation of Tunable Viral Agents Stephen Hummel, F. John Burpo, Jeremy Hershfield, Andrew Kick, Kevin J. O’Donovan, Jason Barnhill April 21, 2022 Iran Entangled: Iran and Hezbollah’s Support to Proxies Operating in Syria Nakissa Jahanbani, Suzanne Weedon Levy

https://medium.com/chainrift-research/dark-markets-jim-bells-assassination-p... https://twitter.com/AugurProject/status/1021631296265768960 https://ipfs.augur.casino/ipfs/QmYaHYKE3ozoJrXCksETCEnAoyUmXY4o3qarE9oZmXfMbc/?augur_node=wss%3a%2f%2faugur-node.augur.casinoðereum_node_ws=wss%3a%2f%2fgethnode.com%2fws#/markets?category=TECH&tags=ELON%20MUSK https://ipfs.augur.casino/ipfs/QmYaHYKE3ozoJrXCksETCEnAoyUmXY4o3qarE9oZmXfMbc/?augur_node=wss%3a%2f%2faugur-node.augur.casinoðereum_node_ws=wss%3a%2f%2fgethnode.com%2fws#/markets?category=TECH&tags=AWS.~_SMARTPHONE.~_PHONES Matt ฿ http://www.itsmattbit.ch/ Bitcoin, privacy and cypherpunk stuff Dec 18, 2018 · 4 min read Dark Markets: Jim Bell’s Assassination Politics Anonymity and private communications online have opened up a myriad of ways for individuals to communicate and transact in cyberspace, in ways that thwart surveillance. This series of articles will explore some of the notable proposals (and iterations) of digital marketplaces furthering crypto-anarchic agendas. First up: the prediction markets for betting on the lives of individuals. Even to hardline crypto-anarchists and libertarians, this one is a bit of a stretch – on the surface, it would appear to stand in stark opposition to the non-aggression principle. Jim Bell, however, remains adamant that the ends justify the means insofar as government employees/politicians are concerned, as he explains in depth in his 90s essay entitled Assassination Politics. According to Bell: In receiving [a paycheck of stolen tax money] and in his various acts, [the government employee] violates the “Non-aggression Principle” (NAP) and thus, presumably, any acts against him are not the initiation of force under libertarian principles. In the essay, the author discusses the harnessing of public-key encryption and digital cash to create a system where anonymous donors could add to a fund, which would be paid out to whoever correctly ‘guessed’ the date of death of an office holder. Note that the term ‘guessed’ here should be interpreted very loosely — the implication is that a $10m kitty might just incentivise someone to ensure that their guess was correct. Do I need to spell it out? Anarchy Through Fear Envisaged by a staunch libertarian, Bell’s hypothetical marketplace had an ulterior political motive: the eradication of any hierarchical governmental structure. He reasoned that, as leader after leader was offed for continuing to “tax us to death, regulate us to death, or for that matter send hired thugs to kill us when we oppose their wishes” (I can’t stress the extent to which he really hates taxes), others would eventually fear assuming office, and government intervention in the lives of individuals would be drastically reduced. From there, everything falls into place – global access to the assassination markets would mean that militaries across the board cease to exist (lack of leaders and lack of funding). You might be wondering how such a system would remain limited to persons involved with the government. I’m not altogether convinced that the ‘ethical underpinnings’ of the society that uses these would make it infeasible for a competitor to simply start taking bets on anyone (though you might struggle in finding people with enough hatred for your neighbour who keeps blaring music at 3am to contribute to the pool that would be paid out in the event of their untimely death). That said, Bell argues that if you wanted to hire a hitman (which is what you’d essentially be doing here, as opposed to crowdfunding one), that’s already possible today. AP Today Bear in mind that this proposal was floated at a time before the magic of blockchain or the advent of decentralisation for the sake of decentralisation (and raising obscene amounts of money for mere mentions of the word). In Bell’s model, a centralised organisation is the ultimate arbiter over which names are added to the system, and therefore has certain ‘moral’ rulebook. If, on the other hand, someone were to create a decentralised prediction market, you’d be firmly in the chaotic code is law domain. Hello! Whilst it runs in a decentralized manner, Augur operates much like traditional prediction markets: users trade contracts with payouts tied to a future event. These contracts are binary, meaning that bets are placed on whether an outcome will or will not occur. Can you see where I’m going with this? You’re by no means limited to attempting to predict the deaths of people here – want to bet on whether Elon Musk is going to cry in a video interview before a certain date? Here you go. When Apple will release a folding iPhone? Right here. That’s not to say deaths haven’t been predicted – bets on terrorist attacks, mass murders and assassinations of prominent politicians are all there, too. It’s trivial to set them up, though liquidity is still lacking. Not so trivial is shutting them down – the Forecast Foundation burned the escape hatch some months back, effectively removing its central point of failure. While Bell’s Assassination Markets are abhorrent to most, they’re a textbook example of the markets that will crop up as the result of anonymising technologies and in the absence of legal obstruction. It’s perhaps too early to tell whether decentralised prediction markets will live up to this notorious potential (there’s still some kinks to iron out where oracles are concerned), though it certainly appears that the proverbial table is being set as we speak.

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_dead_pool_jim_bells_crowd-funded_ass... The Dead Pool: Jim Bell’s crowd-funded ‘Assassination Politics’ 06.05.2013 10:20 am Topics: Current Events , Politics Tags: Jim Bell Richard’s epic rant yesterday on Ernst Stavro Blofeld Peter Brabeck’s unfortunate remarks on privatizing water reminded me of an idea developed by crypto-anarchist Jim Bell that was controversial even in those circles and that (according to some) is what landed him in Federal Prison in 1997, keeping him there on and off (mostly on) until 2012. Bell’s idea and essay were entitled “Assassination Politics,” and if you haven’t encountered it before, well, you’re in for a bit of a shock, particularly as the nuts and bolts necessary are rapidly coming into place: Anonymous and untraceable digital cash (leveraging Bitcoin), uncrackable Internet traffic mixers in the form of the TOR network, and TOR hidden services. (According to Bell the idea is inevitable—it’s coming—though I’m personally quite skeptical of that claim. But no matter…) Basically, the idea is this: What if there was a system that took bets on which politicians, military leaders or water-privatizing CEOs would be assassinated and when? And what if the system preserved the anonymity of any and all bettors and could pay those who “guessed” correctly without identifying them? Using modern cryptographic techniques such a system is indeed technologically possible and described (see video below). Remember The Dead Pool, Clint Eastwood’s final “Dirty Harry” film? Kinda like a high-tech crypto-anarchist version of that, but seen as a practical way to destroy the Shitstem. Big fun. Now in case you’re tempted to believe that this is merely the dream of a Libertarian crackpot, it’s worth noting that Bell not only received a chemistry degree from MIT, he was a relatively early employee at Intel and even started a computer storage company. In other words, Bell, who admittedly is a bit of a weirdo, is most certainly not an intellectually challenged man and the AP idea makes use of a smattering of cryptographic techniques that have largely come to exist in the years since he first proposed it. So it probably can be done. So now, you might ask, What’s so controversial about what is essentially a market for predictions? So what if people are betting on the deaths of world leaders? We all have to die sometime. Well, the key to note here is that the bettors can bet and get paid (if they are correct) without revealing their identity or location (read: IP address) on the Internet. Bell believed that this combination would prove truly irresistible to certain murder-non-averse types who a) Like lots of money and b) Like to kill people and, oh yeah, c) Who don’t mind knocking off hated dictators or other “enemies of mankind” (to quote Samuel Fuller). Indeed, according to Bell’s formulation, the system is designed precisely to encourage someone to, let’s just say, increase their odds of winning the “dead pool” substantially. Universal hatred of a specific figure would increase the odds of his or her impending transience greatly, as an enormous bounty is accumulated via all the bettors betting on (and thereby encouraging) a rapid demise. In his essay Bell then went on to predict the collapse of world governments as they are understood today, because it would become just far too dangerous for even local petty bureaucrats to remain in their position and alive at the same time. Further claims by Bell and others predicted fewer wars, as aggressive military leaders got knocked off via gaining the opprobrium of the masses (thereby accumulating a huge payoff against his name) and then attracting legions of fortune-seeking assassins, one of whom is eventually successful and who can then cryptographically and anonymously collect his huge payout. Of course, claims of the end of war or even the end of governments as we know them sound suspiciously like early comments about the Gatling gun: It’s such a terrible weapon that no one will start a war again (though it wasn’t too much longer before WW I showed us exactly how insightful that comment was). And does anyone really want a world in which, theoretically, anyone’s name can show up on a worldwide kill list? That’d kinda suck for American Idol contestants and pundits from the right and left. But the point here is that if the Brabecks and Koch Brothers of the world keep trying to put the rest of humanity into a great big headlock by attacking our water through fracking and privitization (an interesting combination, BTW), people with serious cypto skillz may get pissed off enough to actually build a secure AP system and load it up with a couple of names. You know: just for fun. In other words, Herr Brabeck, you might want to rethink your position a bit. Do you REALLY want to make an enemy of practically all of humanity? Just stick to poisoning the world with your powdered baby milk formulas and candy bars and maybe you’ll live to a ripe old age.

https://thepriceofliberty.org/2021/12/20/ideas-for-liberty-the-jim-bell-syst... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Planet_for_Texans Ideas for liberty – the Jim Bell System revisited Posted on December 20, 2021 by TPOL Nathan A few weeks back, someone suggested in a comment that it might be time to set up the “Jim Bell System.” This idea, also known as a type of “Assassination Politics” was invented back in 1995 by an anarchocapitalist (or crypto-anarchist) seeking a way to directly address tyranny and the seeking-to-be-omnipotent State. For details on his original proposal, visit this website. It provides the complete series of essays he wrote between 1995 and 1997. (For readers’ convenience, I’m providing an extract of his proposal at the end of this commentary.) But in brief, people use crypto-currency, digital cash, and online encryption to establish organizations which are clearinghouses for people to bet on exactly when some politician or leader or bureaucrat – at home or abroad – croaks, and put their money down. As the pot grows, lottery style, one of those bettors bets on a specific date and covers his/her bet by ensuring (in some manner) that the subject of the bet does indeed die. And then anonymously claims the stake anonymously, in one or more forms of cryptocurrency which is untraceable. For those more interested, visit this website which more recently exposed Mr. Bell’s invention and addresses the pros and cons of the entire concept. The Price of Liberty takes no stand on the entire idea. It is beyond our limited understanding of encryption, anonymity, and cryptocurrencies – or gold bars, for that matter – to be able to evaluate. It appears feasible. Although I do not think there is a connection, the proposal is very much reminiscent of the major plot device in H. Beam Piper’s Lone Star Planet, also known as A Planet for Texans from 1957, in which Assassination Politics (AP) is the key feature of government on a distant, long-colonized planet. It has even more in common with another novel, which I often conflate with Piper’s story. On that planet, all of the politicians in office wear explosive collars tied wirelessly to a system of voting booths in which citizens can express their disapproval of the politician’s actions. If the weight of votes is sufficient, a signal is sent to the collar, and bang! – there is one less dastardly politician infesting the body politic. (If a reader can identify the forgotten name of that novel, please let us here at TPOL know!) But the Jim Bell System goes beyond that. The explosive collar idea requires that there BE a government. As did Piper’s system. AP claims to require NO organized government or even a public organization – everything is done anonymously and online, using current technology and methods. And although “legal” could function even if made illegal by government. Other than a fascinating look at an idea that is very much “outside the box” the issue here at The Price of Liberty is a simple one. Is this (as Jim Bell labeled it) a form of “murder by hire”? Or just plain encouraging/inciting murder? Or is it actually a legitimate (and moral) form of self-defense against those tyrants, large and small, that infest our society, our nations, and our world? What do you, dear reader, think? And is it truly a solution, or just another idea (a form of technology) that can be used as much for evil as for good? Would government begin using this against the people? Would this open Pandora’s Box anew? For almost three decades, free-market and other anarchists and even minarchists have been discussing this. Is it time to seriously consider this? Let us here at TPOL know.

From Jim Bell’s third essay (found at this website):

…it should be possible to LEGALLY set up an organization which collects perfectly anonymous donations sent by members of the public, donations which instruct the organization to pay the amount to any person who correctly guesses the date of death of some named person, for example some un-favorite government employee or officeholder. The organization would total the amounts of the donations for each different named person, and publish that list (presumably on the Internet) on a daily or perhaps even an hourly basis, telling the public exactly how much a person would get for “predicting” the death of that particular target. Moreover, that organization would accept perfectly anonymous, untraceable, encrypted “predictions” by various means, such as the Internet (probably through chains of encrypted anonymous remailers), U.S. mail, courier, or any number of other means. Those predictions would contain two parts: A small amount of untraceable “digital cash,” inside the outer “digital envelope,” to ensure that the “predictor” can’t economically just randomly choose dates and names, and an inner encrypted data packet which is encrypted so that even the organization itself cannot decrypt it. That data packet would contain the name of the person whose death is predicted, and the date it is to happen. This encrypted packet could also be published, still encrypted, on the Internet, so as to be able to prove to the world, later, that SOMEBODY made that prediction before it happened, and was willing to “put money on it” by including it outside the inner encrypted “envelope.” The “predictor” would always lose the outer digital cash; he would only earn the reward if his (still-secret) prediction later became true. If, later on, that prediction came true, the “lucky” predictor would transmit the decrypt key to the organization, untraceably, which would apply it to the encrypted packet, and discover that it works, and read the prediction made hours, days, weeks, or even months earlier. Only then would the organization, or for that matter anyone else except the predictor, know the person or the date named. Also included in that inner encrypted digital “envelope” would be a public key, generated by the predictor for only this particular purpose: It would not be his “normal” public key, obviously, because that public key would be traceable to him. Also present in this packet the predictor has earned. (This presentation could be done indirectly, by an intermediary, to prevent a bank from being able to refuse to deal with the organization.) Those “digital cash” codes will then be encrypted using the public key included with the original prediction, and published in a number of locations, perhaps on the Internet in a number of areas, and available by FTP to anyone who’s interested. (It is assumed that this data will somehow get to the original predictor. Since it will get to “everyone” on the Internet, it will presumably be impossible to know where the predictor is.) Note, however, that only the person who sent the prediction (or somebody he’s given the secret key to in the interim) can decrypt that message, and in any case only he, the person who prepared the digital cash blanks, can fully “unbind” the digital cash to make it spendable, yet absolutely untraceable. (For a much more complete explanation of how so-called “digital cash” works, I refer you to the August 1992 issue of Scientific American.) About TPOL Nathan Follower of Christ Jesus (a christian), Pahasapan (resident of the Black Hills), Westerner, Lover of Liberty, Free-Market Anarchist, Engineer, Army Officer, Husband, Father, Historian, Writer, Evangelist. Successor to Lady Susan (Mama Liberty) at TPOL. View all posts by TPOL Nathan → This entry was posted in Nathan's Rants and tagged anarcho-capitalism, anarchy, assassination politics, crypto-anarchist, Jim Bell, liberty. Bookmark the permalink. ← US military establishment – too bloated to work? Honor, self-respect, and … love? → 10 Responses to Ideas for liberty – the Jim Bell System revisited jim nbell says: April 7, 2022 at 1:32 am 27 years ago, when I wrote the AP essay, it may have seemed far too radical, far too extreme, to awful to even consider. Today, April 7, 2022, we have Putin attacking Ukraine, and people are wondering how to take him out of his position. It is time for the AP system to operate! Like Reply Pingback: How stupid do you have to be, to be a senator? | The Price of Liberty pigpen51 says: December 28, 2021 at 1:58 am One other thing that I can see needing attention to. The person who is named must be some government toady, or politician, or other high profile person deserving of death. Otherwise, it is possible that a vindictive person might place a couple grand on the head of his old high school math teacher who made his or her life a living hell, just to see if they can get them whacked. Now, I might not be understanding this right, and this might not be possible, and if so, forgive me, and forget I even mentioned it. Another thing, before I lost my other computer, and all of the data, including my saved books, i had a book that spoke about a group of the people in the U.S. who got pissed with the government and started to eliminate some of the government officers, like the BATFE’s and personal assistants to Senators, the head of planned parenthood, an odd Senator or Represenative, and then, as they became more bold, people who supported them in the nation started to help with the task, killing people like the DC head cop, etc. The main person who started it was some retired SOF guy, with a huge stockpile of weapons, of course, and friends. If anyone has an idea of the name of this book I would love to find it and download it again. someone sent the link to me, it was a freebie. I think it was like 600 pages long, but a good read. I am not saying that I would ever be involved in a scenario like that, but if a civil war were to break out, that is probably the only way to win it, just like the Vietnamese and the sort of how the Afghans did, by being smart, and hitting and running. Although from a few friends who went to Afghanistan told me that sometimes, the Afghans were simply stupid. They would take 2 toyota trucks, full of men with AK 47’s and drive up to the main gate, jump out and run to the gate, while a SAW simply mowed them down, to the last man. The one friend was from work, and he mostly rode shotgun from Kuwait to Bagdad every other day. But when he was in Afghanistan for a month, he said that 3-4 times he saw the trucks come at dusk to the gate, and the guards simply let them get out, run up to the gate, and then mowed them down. Our shop gave this guy, a former Marine, and a member of the National Guard or the Reserves or something, a computer, a bunch of phone cards, I think, some things for his wife and kids, they treated him really good. When he came back, within less than 2 months, they fired him. Total jackasses. Trumped up charges, but they made certain that their expensive lawyers were involved, so you cannot win. Like Reply TPOL Nathan says: December 28, 2021 at 5:50 pm Pigpen, that is an interesting thought. Is the Jim Bell System “just” an anti-government method, or can it be applied to anyone who is aggressing against people? And who limits the potential targets? (And how?) For example, would the CEO of General Motors have been a legitimate target (that is, violence in defense/for self-protection or protection of your family) back in 1964 for producing the Chevy Corvair? Or would the boards of Big Tobacco be legit targets for selling tobacco? There are very thin lines here, aren’t there? Many people agree with you that an unconventional, even low-intensity urban and rural warfare is the best, if not only, way to overthrow an entrenched tyrannical government. And that the more violence and threatened violence against ordinary people and military veterans and lovers of liberty is done, the more people are driven to resistance: not just civil disobedience and passive resistance but active guerilla warfare against the state and those they see as allied to and supporting the state. Situations like that you describe with the veteran can and have led to such things in the past, even here in the Fifty States in recent years. Yes, many Afghans were stupid – but a good many of those were simply tools for the more cunning: religious fervor can lead to that sort of suicidally-stupid action. But it still benefited the groups and people resisting the occupation by the ferengi. And at the same time, reduced the problems they faced during the US withdrawal (and now): it “purified” the population of the most fanatical. Like Reply Slave Larry says: December 21, 2021 at 5:28 am “Bind them down with the chains of the constitution.” How’s that worked out for ya. There is no justice in this life. They literally “Believe” they are God. From POTUS to the local code enforcer. There must be consequences or it just gets worse. Like Reply TPOL Nathan says: December 22, 2021 at 11:54 am Right to the point, Larry. Among others, Boston T Party and Tom Knapp have pointed that that the Bill of Rights really doesn’t have an enforcement provision. The impeachment process has been demonstrated to be nothing but a political, partisan game – all image and grandstanding. And Congress has virtually nothing – vote them out of office? Come on! And recall elections? Depends as much on the alternative person proposed as it does abuse of power or law-breaking by the incumbent. Like Reply jim bell says: December 23, 2021 at 1:32 am Thank you for your coverage and comments. Jim Bell, author of Assassination politics. I occasionally do a web search for ‘ “assassination politics” jim bell’. I can usually be found on the Cypherpunks email list. Like TPOL Nathan says: December 24, 2021 at 6:36 pm Jim, you honor me and all of us here at TPOL. You have suffered much for the cause of liberty, and we salute you. Like Steve says: December 20, 2021 at 4:59 pm Bell’s system needs a couple further things to be moral, in my opinion. First, there can not be anything even resembling to a bounty. Instead, some form of a bet needs to be in place. Maybe a betting pool, where for a buck or a sawbuck, you get to choose a date and time. That might actually be enough, though I’m also inclined to think you need one thing more — a way to retract your “bet”. People change. Situations change. I think that’s probably achievable with just the outer wrapper. At the option’s expiration, either the original owner can supply the key and redeem the coupon, or maybe you choose a beneficiary — at expiration, your proceeds go to the orphanage or whomever you chose. Others buying into the pool could also see when various bets were expiring. If the pot isn’t worth it, or won’t be worth it when a bunch of the pot disappears next Thursday, he just doesn’t bet. In this way, there’s always a way for someone on the list to repent, and if enough of the pool assigned reasonable expirations, the repentance can still have some worldly impact. Like Reply TPOL Nathan says: December 22, 2021 at 9:58 am Good thoughts and ideas. Remember Jim Bell first proposed his idea quite a while ago, as far as technology and issues (and divisions in the States) are measured. Like Reply

https://gizmodo.com/behind-the-sordid-world-of-online-assasination-betting-1... Behind the Sordid World of Online Assassination Betting By Jamie Bartlett 6/01/15 11:35AM https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-dark-net/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TT41PRW https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612194893 I have heard rumors about this website, but I still cannot quite believe that it exists. I am looking at what I think is a hit list. There are photographs of people I recognize—prominent politicians, mostly—and, next to each, an amount of money. The site’s creator, who uses the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, thinks that if you could pay to have someone murdered with no chance—I mean absolutely zero chance—of being caught, you would. That’s one of the reasons why he has created the Assassination Market. There are four simple instructions listed on its front page: * Add a name to the list * Add money to the pot in the person’s name * Predict when that person will die * Correct predictions get the pot The Assassination Market can’t be found with a Google search. It sits on a hidden, encrypted part of the internet that, until recently, could only be accessed with a browser called The Onion Router, or Tor. Tor began life as a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, but today exists as a not-for-profit organization, partly funded by the U.S. government and various civil liberties groups, allowing millions of people around the world to browse the internet anonymously and securely. To put it simply, Tor works by repeatedly encrypting computer activity and routing it via several network nodes, or “onion routers,” in so doing concealing the origin, destination, and content of the activity. Users of Tor are untraceable, as are the websites, forums, and blogs that exist as Tor Hidden Services, which use the same traffic encryption system to cloak their location. The Assassination Market may be hosted on an unfamiliar part of the net, but it’s easy enough to find, if you know how to look. All that’s required is simple (and free) Tor software. Then sign up, follow the instructions, and wait. It is impossible to know the number of people who are doing exactly that, but at the time of writing, if I correctly predict the date of the death of Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, I’d receive approximately $56,000. It may seem like a fairly pointless bet. It’s very difficult to guess when someone is going to die. That’s why the Assassination Market has a fifth instruction: * Making your prediction come true is entirely optional The Dark Net The Assassination Market is a radical example of what people do online when under the cover of real or perceived anonymity. Beyond the more familiar world of Google, Hotmail, and Amazon lies another side to the internet: the dark net. For some, the dark net refers to the encrypted world of Tor Hidden Services, where users cannot be traced, and cannot be identified. For others, it is those sites not indexed by conventional search engines: an unknowable realm of password-protected dissident movements, pages, unlinked websites, and hidden content accessible only to those in the know, sometimes referred to as the “deep web.” It has also become a catchall term for the myriad shocking, disturbing, and controversial corners of the net—the realm of imagined criminals and lurking predators. The dark net, for me, describes an idea more than a particular place: internet underworlds set apart yet connected to the internet we inhabit, worlds of freedom and anonymity, where users say and do what they like, often uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society’s norms. It is dark because we rarely see these parts of digital life, save the occasional flash of a hysterical news report or shocking statistic. This is not a book about Tor, since the net is full of obscure corners, of secret back alleys on parts of the internet you likely already know: social media sites, normal websites, forums, chat rooms. I focus instead on those digital cultures and communities that appear, to those that aren’t part of them, dark, insidious, and beyond society’s gaze—wherever I found them. This dark net is rarely out of the news—with stories of young people sharing homemade pornography, of cyberbullies and trolls tormenting strangers, of hackers stealing and leaking personal photos, of political or religious extremists peddling propaganda, of illegal goods, drugs, and confidential documents only a click or two away appearing in headlines almost daily—but it is still a world that is, for the most part, unexplored and little understood. In reality, few people have ventured into the darker recesses of the net to study these sites in any detail. I started researching radical social and political movements in 2007, when I spent two and a half years following Islamist extremists around Europe and North America, trying to piece together a fragmented and largely disjointed real-world network of young men who sympathized with al-Qaeda ideology. By the time I’d finished my work in 2010, the world seemed to be different. Every new social or political phenomenon I encountered—from conspiracy theorists to far-right activists to drug cultures—was increasingly located and active online. I would frequently interview the same person twice—once online and then again in real life—and feel as if I was speaking to two different people. I was finding parallel worlds with different rules, different patterns of behavior, different protagonists. Every time I thought I’d reached the bottom of one online culture, I discovered other connected, secretive realms still unexplored. Some required a level of technical knowhow to access, some were extremely easy to find. Although an increasingly important part of many people’s lives and identities, these online spaces are mostly invisible: out of reach and out of view. So I went in search of them. My journey took me to new places online and offline. I became the moderator of an infamous trolling group and spent weeks in forums dedicated to cutting, starving, or killing yourself. I explored the labyrinthine world of Tor Hidden Services in search of drugs, and to study child pornography networks. I witnessed online wars between neo-Nazis and antifascists on popular social media sites, and signed up to the latest porn channels to examine current trends in homemade erotica. I visited a Barcelona squat with anarchist Bitcoin programmers, run-down working men’s clubs to speak to extreme nationalists, and a messy bedroom to observe three girls make a small fortune performing sexually explicit acts on camera to thousands of viewers. By exploring and comparing these worlds, I also hoped to answer a difficult question: do the features of anonymity and connectivity free the darker sides of our nature? And if so, how? The Dark Net is not an effort to weigh up the pros and cons of the internet. The same anonymity that allows the Assassination Market to operate also keeps whistleblowers, human-rights campaigners, and activists alive. For every destructive subculture I examined there are just as many that are positive, helpful, and constructive. Because the internet has become so interwoven into the fabric of our lives, it presents a challenge to our existing notions of anonymity, privacy, freedom, and censorship—throwing up new challenges not yet resolved: should we have the right to complete anonymity online? Are our “digital” identities distinct from our “real” ones—and what does that mean? Are we prone to behave in particular ways when we sit behind a screen? What are the limits of free expression in a world where every idea is a click away? Particularly since the revelations of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, these questions dominate debates and discussion about the role of internet privacy and freedom in an increasingly digital world. I don’t propose any easy answers or solutions. I’m not sure that there are any. This book is not a polemic—more modestly, it is a series of portraits about how these issues play out at the fringes. I leave it entirely to you to decide what you think it means. Connected The net as we know it started life in the late 1960s, as a small scientific project funded and run by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a development arm of the U.S. military. The Pentagon hoped to create an “Arpanet” of linked computers to help top American academics share data sets and valuable computer space. In 1969, the first networked connection was made between two computers in California. It was a network that slowly grew. In July 1973, Peter Kirstein, a young professor of computer science at University College London, connected the UK to the Arpanet via the Atlantic seabed phone cables, a job that made Kirstein the first person in the UK online. “I had absolutely no idea what it would become!” Kirstein tells me. “None of us did. We were scientists and academics focused on trying to build and maintain a system which allowed data to be shared quickly and easily.” The Arpanet, and its successor, the internet, was built on principles that would allow these academics to work effectively together: a network that was open, decentralized, accessible, and censorship-free. These ideas would come to define what the internet stood for: an unlimited world of people, information, and ideas. The invention of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in 1978, and Usenet in 1979–80, introduced a new generation to life online. Unlike the cloistered Arpanet, Usenet and BBS, the forerunners of the chat room and forum, were available to anyone with a modem and a home computer. Although small, slow, and primitive by today’s standards, they were attracting thousands of people intrigued by a new virtual world. By the mid-nineties and the emergence of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, the internet was fully transformed: from a niche underground haunt frequented by computer hobbyists and academics, to a popular hangout accessed by millions of excited neophytes. According to John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, cyberspace at this time was more than just a network of computers. Users saw it as “a new kind of place,” with its own culture, its own identity, and its own rules. The arrival of millions of “ordinary” people online stimulated fears and hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which announced to the real world that “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew. (The New Yorker put it more succinctly: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”) Leading psychologists of the day, such as MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her influential 1995 study of internet identity, Life on the Screen, offered a cautious welcome to the way that online life could allow people to work through the different elements of their identity. But others worried what might happen if no one knows you’re a dog. Parents panicked about children infected with “modem fever.” Soon after Turkle’s study, another psychologist, John Suler, was studying the behavior of participants in early chat rooms. He found that participants tended to be more aggressive and angry online than offline. He suggested this was because, when protected by a screen, people feel that real-world social restrictions, responsibilities, and norms don’t apply. Whether actual or perceived, anonymity, thought Suler, would allow you to explore your identity, but it might also allow you to act without fear of being held accountable (in 2001 he would call this “The Online Disinhibition Effect”). It’s true that from the outset, many BBS and Usenet subscribers were treating cyberspace as a realm for all sorts of bizarre, creative, offensive, and illegal behavior. In Usenet’s “Alternative” hierarchy, anyone could set up a discussion group about anything they wanted. The first group was alt.gourmand, a forum for recipes. This was swiftly followed by alt.sex, alt.drugs and alt.rock-n-roll. “Alt.,” as it came to be known, immediately became the most popular part of Usenet by far. Alongside purposeful and serious groups for literature, computing, or science, Usenet and BBS contained many more dedicated to cyberbullying, hacking, and pornography. Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death It was in this heady atmosphere that the radical libertarian Jim Bell first took the promise of online anonymity to a terrifying conclusion. In late 1992, a group of radical libertarians from California called the “cypherpunks” set up an email list to propose and discuss how cyberspace could be used to guarantee personal liberty, privacy, and anonymity. Bell, a contributor to the list, believed that if citizens could use the internet to send secret encrypted messages and trade using untraceable currencies, it would be possible to create a functioning market for almost anything. In 1995, he set out his ideas in an essay called “Assassination Politics,” which he posted to the email list. It made even the staunchly libertarian cypherpunks wince. Bell proposed that an organization be set up that would ask citizens to make anonymous digital cash donations to the prize pool of a public figure. The organization would award the prize to whoever correctly predicted that person’s death. This, argued Bell, wasn’t illegal, it was just a type of gambling. But here’s the ruse: if enough people were sufficiently angry with a particular individual—each anonymously contributing just a few dollars—the prize pool would become so large that someone would be incentivized to make a prediction and then fulfill it themselves in order to take the pot. This is where encrypted messages and untraceable payment systems come in. A crowd-sourced—and untraceable—murder would unfold as follows. First, the would-be assassin sends his prediction in an encrypted message that can be opened only by a digital code known to the person who sent it. He then makes the kill and sends the organization that code, which would unlock his (correct) prediction. Once verified by the organization, presumably by watching the news, the prize money—in the form of a digital currency donated to the pot—would be publicly posted online as an encrypted file. Again, that file can be unlocked only by a “key” generated by whoever made the prediction. Without anyone knowing the identity of anyone else, the organization would be able to verify the prediction and award the prize to the person who made it. The best bit, thought Bell, was that internet-enabled anonymity safeguarded all parties, except perhaps the killer (and his or her victim). Even if the police discovered who’d been contributing to the cash prizes of people on the list, the donors could truthfully respond that they had never directly asked for anyone to be killed. The organization that ran the market couldn’t help either, because they wouldn’t know who had donated, who had made predictions or who had unlocked the cash file. But Bell’s idea was about more than getting away with murder. He believed that this system would exert a populist pressure on elected representatives to be good. The worse the offender—the more he or she outraged his or her citizens—the more likely they were to accumulate a large pool, and incentivize potential assassins. (Bell believed Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini would all have been killed had such a market existed at the time.) Ideally, no one would need to be killed. Bell hoped the very existence of this market would mean no one would dare throw their hat into the ring at all. “Perfect anonymity, perfect secrecy, and perfect security,” he wrote, “. . . combined with the ease and security with which these contributions could be collected, would make being an abusive government employee an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.” In 1995, when Bell wrote “Assassination Politics,” this was all hypothetical. Although Bell believed his market would ultimately lead to the collapse of every government in the world, reality hadn’t caught up with his imagination. Nearly two decades later, with the creation of digital currencies like Bitcoin, anonymous browsers like Tor and trustworthy encryption systems, it had, and Bell’s vision was realized. “Killing is in most cases wrong, yes,” Sanjuro wrote when he launched the Assassination Market in the summer of 2013: However, this is an inevitable direction in the technological evolution . . . When someone uses the law against you and/or infringes upon your rights to life, liberty, property, trade or the pursuit of happiness, you may now, in a safe manner from the comfort of your living room, lower their life-expectancy in return. There are, today, at least half a dozen names on the Assassination Market. Although it is frightening, no one, as far as I can tell, has been assassinated. Its significance lies not in its effectiveness, but in its existence. It is typical of the sort of creativity and innovation that characterizes the dark net: a place without limits, a place to push boundaries, a place to express ideas without censorship, a place to sate our curiosities and desires, whatever they may be. All dangerous, magnificent, and uniquely human qualities. Excerpted from The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett. Copyright © 2015. Courtesy of Melville House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher. The US edition of The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld comes out tomorrow, June 2. We’ll be hosting Bartlett for a live Q&A tomorrow at 3 pm ET on Gizmodo, but until then, check out the first few chapters on Bartlett’s deep dive into the web’s most sordid corners.

https://twitter.com/SilverSpikeSam https://twitter.com/SamJournals/status/1500293691021352969 Sam Steele, Founder of The Silver Spike Society. @elias_714 @R1mElvis @zeemczed @hwinkler4real Look into an idea called "Assassination Politics" by Jim Bell. that would be exactly the sort of system we need for checks & balances. AP (not a new idea) (Read 2802 times) https://secure.thementalmilitia.com/forums/index.php?topic=36673.0 Joe Kelley Jr. Member ** Offline Offline Posts: 72 AP (not a new idea) « on: September 25, 2019, 03:01:05 pm » I first read Assassination Politics more than a decade ago, as documented on my own Web page, and from my Web page the link I have there is still a working link: http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm I just stumbled on a YouTube presentation by Jim Bell, the author of Assassination Politics, as he eventually made his way out of prison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcJdvQvzlNU According to Jim Bell the first time someone announced the idea coincided with the sudden tripling of Bitcoin price. I follow this idea (not a new idea by the way) and so I saw the Forbes Article mentioned in the Jim Bell YouTube video above: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination... The date on that article is Nov 18, 2013, 08:30am. The Jim Bell Project is here: https://jimbellproject.org/press-release-hackers-congress-paralel-polis-oct-... The idea is simple, it is based upon this: "The king, so far from being invested with arbitrary power, was only considered as the first among the citizens; his authority depended more on his personal qualities than on his station; he was even so far on a level with the people, that a stated price was fixed for his head, and a legal fine was levied upon his murderer, which though proportionate to his station, and superior to that paid for the life of a subject, was a sensible mark of his subordination to the community." - 1 Hume, Appendix, l." (Trial by Jury, Lysander Spooner, 1852) Anonymity for each individual is one thing, but group anonymity is altogether more difficult to maintain, along the lines of a chain being only as strong as the weakest link. For those who care not to peruse the AP information, I will quote a sound bite: "Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official--a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market's rules, if someone on its hit list is killed--and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be--any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds." Forbes « Last Edit: September 25, 2019, 03:03:52 pm by Joe Kelley » Logged Bill St. Clair Techie Sr. Member ***** Offline Offline Posts: 6852 End the War on Freedom Re: AP (not a new idea) « Reply #1 on: September 28, 2019, 02:27:05 pm » The normal way to collect an AP bounty is to make the closest estimate to time of death before the fact. Logged "The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war." -- Bill St. Clair "Separation of Earth and state!" -- Bill St. Clair Joe Kelley Jr. Member ** Offline Offline Posts: 72 Re: AP (not a new idea) « Reply #2 on: September 28, 2019, 05:54:47 pm » “The normal way to collect an AP bounty is to make the closest estimate to time of death before the fact.”

From Assassination Politics by Jim Bell:

“If, later, the "prediction" came true, the predictor would presumably send yet another encrypted "envelope" to the organization, containing the decryption key for the previous "prediction" envelope, plus a public key (despite its name, to be used only once!) to be used for encryption of digital cash used as payment for the award. The organization would apply the decryption key to the prediction envelope, discover that it works, then notice that the prediction included was fulfilled on the date stated. The predictor would be, therefore, entitled to the award. Nevertheless, even then nobody would actually know WHO he is!” On the web page AP Part 9 is dated: February 27, 1996 I was on the National District 40 House of Representatives Ballot in 1996 as a Libertarian. My talking points included statements concerning burning alive men, women, pregnant women, children, babies, after torture for weeks, experiments, all by the “government” in Waco. The point I think that is worth noting here with this AP update, which includes an active Web Page today, is the point about assassinations already are funded, not an idea, not a future possibility, but a demonstrable fact that matters in each murder case. Example: THE COURT: Let me ask you, do all of you agree with this verdict? THE JURY: Yes (In unison). THE COURT: In answer to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your answer is yes. Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant? Your answer to that one is also yes. And the total amount of damages you find for the plaintiffs entitled to is one hundred dollars. Is that your verdict? THE JURY: Yes (In unison). Above are the Trial by Jury transcripts concerning an example of actual Assassination Politics. Whoever paid a penny, nickel, dime, or 100 pennies to U.S.A. Inc. (LLC) (National Government in America) previous to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., for speaking the truth, is one of the documented investors in that (capital) murder. This “cause” to put Jim Bell in prison (for proposing an encrypted - anonymous - assassins for hire market competitor) is much like “democrats” blaming “republicans” for rigging an election. This is a basic deception, like a thief pointing and yelling “THIEF!” just before the thief perpetrates yet another theft while employing the same basic deception. Potential defenders of theft are sent on a wild goose chase so as to afford the actual thief the required anonymity.

https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoin-assassination-markets-could-quickly-end... JVictor42 Mar 13 2022 Bitcoin assassination markets could quickly end war Writer and libertarian Tim Bell, described by Wired Magazine as “one of the Internet’s most famous essayists,” reported in 1997 that after the creation of an Internet-native cryptocurrency-such as Bitcoin (BTC)-the world’s first decentralized assassination markets would emerge. Bell describes in 10 articles entitled Assassination Politics, how these markets could work. Initially, the heads of dictators, despots and psychopaths could be put up for a bounty, similar to the jurisdiction of the American Old West, where there was a reward for criminals; “Wanted dead or alive.” The prize could easily be raised in a voluntary fundraiser done in cryptocurrency. How many people would be willing to pay the equivalent of $10 dollars to see their country’s dictator die? Perhaps millions. “Consider how history might have changed if we had been able to “overthrow” Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Khadafi, and several others, along with all their replacements if necessary, all for a measly few million dollars, instead of the billions of dollars and millions of lives that subsequent wars have cost.” — Tim Bell. The reward would then be awarded to whoever could accurately “predict” the day of death of the person with a price on his head. Usually, this person would be the killer himself. Payment would be made in cryptocurrency, so that it would not be possible to identify who received the prize. Russian-Ukrainian War If such a market already existed at a more advanced stage of trust and liquidity, Vladimir Putin’s head would certainly be on the line by now. Surely, many powerful people today already have an interest that the Russian pseudo-dictator disappears. However, allowing anonymous payment to anyone close enough to consummate the act — such as employees, friends or family members — exponentially increases the chance of an eventual attack. The same could happen with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, who has tyrannically prevented men from leaving the country, as well as politicians and high-ranking officials in the Russian and Ukrainian governments who are condoning these actions. “At the Village pizzeria, while they were sitting down to a pepperoni, Dorothy asked Jim: ‘So, what other inventions are you working on? Jim replied: ‘I have a new idea, but it’s really evolutionary. Literally REVOLUTIONARY.’ “Okay, Jim, which government are you planning to overthrow?” she asked, jokingly. ‘All of them,’ he replied.” Problems to be solved In order to create a market like this, some fundamental issues will need to be solved. Bitcoin needs to have more anonymity and fungibility, something that should occur over the next few years with updates and soft forks. Taproot, the last major update to the Bitcoin network, was another step toward making transactions harder to trace. When this occurs, and a market emerges that demonstrates trust and success in its first use cases, such as enabling the assassination of some small country dictator, it would certainly attract attention and funding from around the world. Like it? Consider donating some satoshis to this brazilian humble bitconer: 1BxmvJGdfPWFoXa6qQpk9FafmLT6BKxFJB An assassination market paid in bitcoin could potentially end hundreds of despot conflicts around the world in a much more efficient and less costly way.

https://thelibertarianideal.com/2022/02/21/political-liquidation/ Political Liquidation 2022-02-21 chrisshaw1993 Chris Shaw Oscillations of political power, the expansion and contraction of sovereign and elite control, define the nature of conflict and cycles of politico-economic activity. Elites will always exist as political power is always in grasp so long as dynamics of status and wealth gains and the consolidation of support bases are possible. “The tendency in both the hard and soft managerial regimes has been for managerial forces to pervade all areas of political, economic, social, and intellectual life”[1]. Such consolidation is the hallmark of any elite structure. It must dominate and control so as prevent subversive elements and sub-elites from marking out their own territory and developing their own powerbases. The circulation of elites as Pareto called it is a consistent game of governance and power. Much of modern political thinking has concerned itself with the transformation and supersession of such conditions, forging a revolutionary moment or a balance of power so as to either destroy or nullify elite power structures. Elite cultivation is a long game though. It extends beyond the immediately political and into the cultural and meta-political. The slow accrual of power isn’t done through the electoral process and popular means of messaging. It begins in the institutions of high culture, universities, broadsheet newspapers, academic journals, education, etc. Slowly it filters down into the tabloid newspapers, news programmes and political manifestos. Such cultivation isn’t measured in election cycles but in decades, slowly transposing from a minority sub-elite to a larger power-elite. In this movement from abstract intellectualism to widespread propagation, this new elite creates positions and inculcates ideological frameworks that make wider structures and institutions reliant on their expertise, control of resources and/or capacity to judge. “Until one begins to list all the professions and activities which belong to the class, it is difficult to realize how numerous it is, how the scope for activities constantly increases in modern society, and how dependent on it we all have become”[2]. The expansion of Keynesian and neoliberal modes of thought out of economics departments and think tanks into elite policy circles, civil society, corporate management and government bureaucracies and the growth of a transgressive culture industry favouring minoritarian concerns and control over educational institutions are testament to this long march. Both popular politics and constitutional restraints struggle to meaningfully curtail the circulation and expansion of elites. The latter become increasingly reliant on the types of expertise and social capital these elites foster. Administrative managers and policy experts become interpreters and shapers of the constitutional mechanisms that undergird legal precedents and legislative parameters. Through them, new interpretations become integrated which justify new policy actions and new bureaus to manage them. We see this in the transformation of speech rights via the transgressive culture industry which is attempting to codify hate speech and Silicon Valley technocrats who narrow the range of speech available on public forums. The law isn’t changed, but expanded in its scope, creating legal arbitrage which these elite structures manipulate. In the former, there are substantive difficulties with mounting a popular political front against emerging elite consensus. Electoral politics has little effect, as major parties converge toward general agreement over matters of economic and social policy, quibbling over details. Even when supposed outsiders like Trump are elected, they quickly find any attempts to interject into existing bureaucracies almost impossible, facing strong resistance from established groups in the intelligence communities, military brass and wider civil administration. These bureaus and their programmes have consistently expanded despite congressional and executive scepticism and pushback. This is why a policy of “retire all government employees”[3] is so hard, as it isn’t just a matter of the employees but of the educational/training materials that integrate new recruits and the impunity with which these organisations escape substantive accountability. Forces of constitutional expansion and ideological consolidation limit the potential for any popular movement or fragmentary group to challenge elite power. The Overton window is reshaped and established methods of political participation are effectively meaningless. You cannot vote out or even question civil bureaucrats or the policy-making networks which actually dictate legal procedures and their implementation. A political liquidation occurs where the various aspects of political and economic life are closed off, to be decided amongst technocratic groups and procedures. They are nominally accountable in that they publish their meeting minutes and must answer to ministerial or presidential requests, but they intensively entrench their power, lasting longer than any one government administration. Their political power is the power of the closed network, defined by intra-competitive norms and shared cultural attributes that are beyond boundaries of electoral or legal power. A political liquidation, the entrenching of a post-political consensus and the denial of a meta-political critique coming in the form of fragments (national populism, conspiracism, sectoral strikes, protest convoys, a re-emerging petit bourgeoisie), is currently happening within elite political and economic networks. The power of foundation funding toward social causes (as with the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the Gates Foundation funding and depoliticising various aspects of socio-economic policy), the digitalisation of modern life (through the ubiquity of digital IDs, vaccine passports, bureaucratic smartphone apps and mass data gathering) and the increasingly technocratic bent of various institutions and functionaries both public and private (as in BlackRock’s recommendations for central bank-led fiscal policy that depoliticises wealth distribution[4] or various health committees’ control over healthcare and vaccine policies, presenting expert opinion as unitary and beyond reproach). In establishing this political liquidation and post-political entrenchment, they are also happily propagandising their efforts and pushing the negative externalities of their policy recommendations onto the middle and lower classes. Lockdowns are easy for the managerial and administrative sectors (the laptop classes[5]) while crushing for the precariat and lower middle classes (whose businesses are closed and work uncompensated). Climate change policies around net zero and the Green New Deal push high-cost solutions onto the wider population, whether through electric cars, higher energy bills or cost-inefficient, highly subsidised food economies and health cultures. The effects of wage-less inflation (brought on through structural overreliance on tenuous and fragile supply chains combined with cheap labour as well as asset inflation via QE and risk free liquidity) are now coupled with a huge tax burden through income tax/national insurance increases. The original causes of these problems (governance failures, corporate power, inequality, closed networks) are neither questioned nor held responsible, with those who do labelled as conspiracy theorists, fearmongers or doomists. The closed networks that inform and construct these events are immune from popular participation. Reliant on systems of educational attainment, professional credibility and internal peer review, they are susceptible to status quo and confirmation biases, creating knowledge that’s largely unquestionable. This also makes it difficult for existing elite structures to be opened up or reformed, as they exclude alternative forms of information and different methodologies due to them being outside their paradigmatic conceptions. “The interlacing of money, power and lobbying alliances deprives politics of the last crumbs of potential autonomy, to the point that democracies all over the planet now welcome our philanthropic predators with open arms, without even asking questions”[6]. Financial crises and the pandemic have entrenched elite consensus as networks of power have responded aggressively to the challenges they pose. Existing elites exist in the uchronic[7] condition of transvaluing challenges to within their sphere of influence. The 2008 financial crisis has simply cemented neoliberal ideology, as asset inflation and the financial framing of economic stability encompass responses to economic stagnation both in the light of long-term productivity inertia and the affect of coronavirus shutdowns that focus on the monetary policy toolkit as the only adequate way to tackle inflation and induce liquidity. The campaigns in the post-coronavirus era of Build Back Better and the expansion of digital identification and tracking infrastructure are simply more explicit retellings of the neoliberal narrative around financial and logistical globalisation. The WEF and the G8 simply reemphasise their continued position, that the expansion of global trade and governance are unstoppable, and that any impediment will be regulated and controlled. Whether that be the coronavirus itself, with governments of all varieties hubristically assuming they can control a respiratory virus (that flows on the very structures globalisation maintains), or those populations opposed to their integration into international databanks who are caught up in travel sites cum checkpoints that determine whether one is allowed to move based on their medical history and vaccine status. Slogans like “you will own nothing” are nothing new, just more explicit variations on a continuing theme. Any emerging consensus amongst a new elite appears to entrench administrative objectives and ethics in a post-liberal scenario rather than extending freedom or a limitation of coercive power. The power of networks in the civil service, health and education attest to this. As do the prevailing alternatives to Western governance, such as those represented by China’s capitalist authoritarianism with attendant social credit systems. The response to coronavirus has only entrenched such false binaries as parties and interest groups compete to see which one can be more authoritarian in their pursuit of biomedical perfection. Populist challenges of various stripes that attempt to make the various coalitions and interests groups integral to the state and wider establishment more transparent or accountable have been met with vociferous resistance. Whether in the Trump presidency, Latin American populism or the Corbyn opposition, confected media tales and smears as well as severe limitations on their capacities to act (in crafting policy or forming alternative alliances to established powerbases) hampered any efforts to meaningfully construct populism as a political force that could integrate the state into itself. Instead of becoming another such political force, it was diminished into a fragmented base (the Red Wall or Brexit voters in Britain; Trump voters and the flyover states in America; Zemmour supporters or the Gilets Jaunes in France; the trucker convoy in Canada; the farm protesters in India; anti-vaccine passport and anti-lockdown movements in various countries) that were reviled. They were accused of various transgressions that the elite cannot abide: antisemitism, xenophobia, protectionism. That they dare question a socio-political consensus (however concocted) was beyond the pale. “Against recalcitrant groups, organizations, even whole states, our ruling class uses its control of communications to wage demonization campaigns akin to two-minute hates, except lasting much longer”[8]. Thus the bleating around expert-opinion and purging democratic systems of these obfuscatory and dangerous forces. Politics here is impossible as the capacity to make systems of governance transparent is met with extreme resistance from the full coterie of established interests. Alternative sub-elites are thus hampered, either cast off as populist recalcitrance or easily integrated within the ideological apodictic. As Francis notes regarding the development of elite challenges to the current soft managerial elite, the cleavage of this conflict concerns cultural control rather than a wider meta-political critique[9]. An emerging sub-elite would co-opt existing institutions and use their wide-ranging powers for their own ends, potentially exacerbating such powers in the tyrannical direction they’re already heading. The so-called post-liberal direction of populations that favour increased economic intervention alongside a culturally conservative ethic have proved amenable to coronavirus regulations, as UK opinion surveys attest to. Strong government messaging and media fear campaigns have turned ordinary citizens into glorified covid wardens and snitches, happy to be locked down despite the stratified risk and endemicity of the virus. If such a cleavage were to occur where elite consensus moves from soft managerialism to hard managerialism, the prospects for individual liberty and the capacity for decentralised autonomy would only decrease, as more securitised governance becomes commonplace. A libertarian response to the permanency of elites and their oscillations of power is to be a mechanism of exit rather than a political programme of actionable proposals. Such is the nature of elite functioning (their cyclicality and desire for control), that in the case of elite co-option the answers for decentralist movements must remain as bottlenecks in the system, pushing it beyond its boundaries and sitting within its interstices, rather than acquiescing to such power due to ideological alignment. Successor elites are still elites and will exhibit the same tendencies of authoritarianism and expansive control. By maintaining a level of autonomy and/or resistance, such elites can be tempered, subverted or ignored as they move from dynamic flexibility to ossification. The game of the “intellectuals” that Hayek writes on is one libertarians have struggled to exist within. Where it has been successful as through the move from the Mont Pelerin Society and other free market think tanks to neoliberal hegemony, it has inverted the very goals of libertarianism to proscribe coercive entrenchment and institutional ossification and extend mechanisms of freedom, compromising with sovereign and corporate power centres to the extent it is now part of coercive power structures, extending their power rather than ameliorating it as they become part of the intra-competitive dynamics of elite policy-making networks[10]. This game cannot be won by libertarians. Beginning to escape this trap means defining what individual liberty and political freedom really mean in the modern context of sovereign power, elite consensus and coercive apparatuses. Freedom shouldn’t be defined by a means-ends matrix of understanding that moves from deontological to consequentialist axes. Rather it should be seen as a capacity to act, affecting both means and ends as they involve forms of decision-making. Such capacity also extends upwards in scale, from individual to institutional levels as each has abilities to act. In these acts, individual and collective actors produce constraints and tensions that induce conflicts as capacities of freedom delineate into different courses of action. How these tensions are worked out is through means of negotiation and force (both defensive and offensive), which involve varying levels of conflict and violence in their resolutions or continuations. Freedom as capacity goes beyond the dichotomy Friedman identifies as inherent to libertarianism: that of deontological versus consequentialist defences of libertarian political thought. The former, defined as “that most natural and universal of all human activities: the persistent attempt on the part of humans to achieve . . . mutual understanding”[11], is subverted as capacity doesn’t necessarily lead to mutual understanding, rather the extension of projects and collective formations that put their claim onto resources and propagate their ideological underpinnings. Consequentialism too is undergirded by capacity. Friedman’s defence of a consequentialist mode of libertarian thought serves to recognise the underlying variable of freedom and liberty are the capacity for actors to extend and secure their rights in distinction with others, as does Nove’s distinctions in property ownership definitions as emerging from the consequences of their control[12]. Both come back to the fundamental proposition of the capacity for control to extend freedom and rights. Political freedom at its most basic is the capacity to take and conserve force. Friedman’s and Nove’s arguments regarding expansive definitions of freedom only extend force in a particular direction, while libertarian “limitations” of coercive force are themselves nothing more than the preservation of a particular order of property relations. Coercion and political force that comes from it are the fundamental premises of freedoms. Friedman then makes an error in assigning to Hayek’s knowledge problem an aprioristic quality of freedom in showing that the assertion of spontaneity doesn’t provide a ground for the production of the good. The point of the knowledge and calculation problems is to demonstrate the very limits of freedoms themselves and their capacity to expand toward integrated orders. Spontaneity is not a mark of morality, but a recognition of the inability of coercive authorities to necessarily contain all economic and political actions within their plans or purviews. Within their interstices always grow new methodologies of action that exist in their blind spots. This then invokes a defensive concept of property acquisition and the implementation of effective authority. “When these things are said to be ‘important,’ to ‘matter’ to people, these are not value judgments on my part, directly, but rather observations on what matters or is important to them — that is, to all persons, to ‘us.’ We shall have to consider altering our proposed course of conduct in the light of how others react, if their reactions can influence the likelihood of success in those courses. Other people in that sense become the source of special problems (and opportunities) for us. When we contemplate people's potential to affect us for good or ill, we may find ourselves motivated to do something about it, in particular in the way of modifying previously adopted programs of behavior”[13]. The essence of individual liberty is the extension of actions into the social space, modifying and curtailing them in the face of potential conflicts with other such individuals and groups who retain potentials for defensive force and negotiable outcomes. In many ways, the wider libertarian focus on negative liberty and associated concepts of self-ownership are abstractions of the very conditions of coercion, force and the negotiation of action over the social space. In the social space of modern states and other coercive institutions, this entails libertarian engagement with said institutions in the manner of both positive and negative (offensive and defensive) force and negotiated outcomes. At a wider level of abstraction, it is the fracturing of sovereignty into the wider social space, limiting their coercive potential while extending the potential actions of other individuals and groups i.e. increasing the means of their liberties. This process is described by Olson[14] as the negotiation over the social field of distributional coalitions that extend their own means of power at the expense of other groups (both other distributional coalitions as well as fragmented populations that bear the costs). In particularly advanced societies (those characterised by a long-term minimisation of wide-scale conflict and a largely integrated governing structure) the extent and depth of distributional coalitions is such that monopolisation and stagnation are commonplace in multiple sectors. This produces ungovernability where there is an inability for wide-ranging authorities to coercively enforce mandates in the face of powerful distributional coalitions that collate and occlude power from wider society. In such a situation, libertarianism should act as an interstitial agency, exploiting the ossification brought about by societal gridlock that ungovernability entails. As Olson notes regarding the Indian caste system, this is representative of a distributional coalition that ossified power and limited access to outside groups. However, as Doniger noted[15] regarding the various offshoots and alternative practices of Hinduism, the Dalits and lower classes of Indian regions created horizontal patterns of socio-religious organisation that routed around the domination of the caste structure. In a similar manner, libertarian engagement with elites should be to encourage their circularity amongst various groups, making themselves ungovernable and presenting avenues for alternative/innovative modes of socio-political activity. The aim of such interstitial ungovernability is the maintenance of sufficiency and a degree of control over one’s livelihoods, against the spirits of globality and abstraction. Instead of trying to break or reform elite consensus, thus entering the intellectual game which breeds co-option, there should be a libertarian strategy of exits that envelop autonomous institution-building and a defence of liberties against wider coercive forces as well as more offensive, violent interactions that indirectly challenge the state’s and capital’s monopolies on force and economic exchange. However, traditional notions of exit that libertarianism has pursued around “free markets” are limited in their capacity to engender true exits from monopolistic power structures (both state and non-state). Escapes via the means of the market are themselves doomed to failure. The crude libertarian construction of markets as purely spontaneous phenomena underlies a serious deficiency in their worldview, ignoring the overwhelming power of sovereign bodies in constituting and directing markets, as well as the autonomous nature of capital in developing market power which aims at monopolisation, the accrual of profit and the limitation of creative destruction. All markets develop distributional coalitions that aim to extend their own power. Any truly free market in the sense that all exchange and all parameters are organised through voluntary methods and are constituted by contracts (around security, law and property) are extremely decentralised and limited in their scale (not that this is necessarily a bad thing). Fundamentally, they are premised on the means of exit as a constant mechanism for any actor. Modern markets by contrast are constantly caught in the paradoxical contradictions of both denying the involvement of the state while constantly relying on it to set the rules of the game. As Gamble notes, “the paradox for neo-liberals is that their revolution in government requires that a group of individuals be found who are not governed by self-interest, but motivated purely by the public good of upholding the rules of the market order. Yet if such a group existed it would contradict a basic premise of neo-liberal analysis”[16]. As the groups that make up government are governed by the same motivations as others, they will inevitably attempt to accrue power to the detriment of wider society, specifying rules to their benefit and creating selective incentives that favour particular traits, backgrounds and statuses thus constituting an elite structure. The nature of capitalist markets “are ideational, being understood as structures that have an almost static quality in relation to existing capitalism. Epitomising markets as simple conduits of capitalist activity constitutes a form of authority, recognising instrumental rationality and its subsequent socio-economic actions as the generalised mode of action in a market economy”[17]. In other words, the formative construction of political violence and the development of governance as an overarching system precede markets as economic phenomena. They are not separable from their political context, making the notion of free markets as a desired policy goal completely reductive. Markets are an expression of power, whether it be the voluntary power of contractarianism or the coercive power of interest groups controlling prices and the provision of credit. Instead, cultivating forms of financial and economic autonomy are crucial. Whether through cryptocurrencies, mutual exchange systems or securing control over cultivatable land, a multiplicity of options is necessary. Political liquidation portends homogenisation, and selective violence must accompany solid foundations of micro-power that can affectively hold their own in the machinations of monopolistic capital and coercive sovereignty. In the defensive stance, this means the development of counter-institutions in the agorist tradition of black market activity, becoming middlemen and exploiters of weaknesses and bottlenecks in the “free markets” and corporate machines. Figures like the economic middleman, the dishonest cop or the private counterfeiter as described by Block[18] represent meaningful interventions into monopolistic and coercive practices, delegitimising government functions while opening up pockets of freedom. The middleman can exploit bottlenecks and move goods on their own terms, having one foot in and one foot out of the system. On the offensive front, the focus should be targeted forms of violence that always keeps centres of power on their toes rather than waging war on leviathan. War entrepreneurialism[19] as the use of terroristic and insurrectionary force to extend political gains and hold control over owned space presents means through which decentralised forces can circumvent and strike coercive powers. As a military corollary to the economic middleman, the war entrepreneur can exploit the bottlenecks of bureaucratic armed forces and their slow chains of command to quickly affect battlespaces and become guerrillas rather than trying to emulate massed shows of strength. Things like assassination markets are potential mechanisms for how such targeted, decentralised violence could be enacted. “The reason we're still stuck under the thumb of the government is that to the extent it's true, ‘we've’ been playing by THEIR rules, not by our own. By our own rules, THEY are the aggressors and we should be able to treat them accordingly, on our own terms, at our own convenience, whenever we choose, especially when we feel the odds are on our side”[20]. Insurrectionary violence here then is the capacity to invert the ideological presuppositions of the elites themselves. They talk of the essence and importance of liberties yet happily destroy them on a whim. Rights then are temporary entities granted which must be seized if they are to have any permanent fixture in life. The trucker convoy in Canada has done such a thing as they’ve exposed the hypocrisy of Canadian liberalism as a sham. Protests now can only be government mandated and certainly cannot inconvenience the managerial classes in Ottawan high-rises or disrupt cross-border trade. It’s fine if violence is directed at small businesses or street corners, as ruling elites don’t care much about them (as lockdowns showed). But when protests start to bite into their lives, then they show how arbitrary liberties really are in their eyes. As the trucker convoy becomes a “‘state within a state’ of co-ordinated services”[21], we see the authorities’ complete lack of tolerance for any degree of autonomy from their power but also their fragility as they are reliant on trade infrastructure that can be switched against them. They show their true face and their weakness all in one go. The evental potential of decentralised political violence can thus invert the dynamics of systems that first legitimated such violence. Strategies for exit emerge in the violent tumult of unconstrained excess. “Terror then is the nature of the entropic breakdown of institutionalisation, with their re-founding requiring truly anti-systemic properties that will always have the potential to fail”[22]. Political violence of this kind is beyond the control of central authorities, placing buffers and boundaries that constantly oscillate in relation to sovereign power and coercion. The capacity to cultivate such defensive and offensive capabilities will become the main factor through which individual liberties and exits are maintained, expanded and consolidated. There is no compromise with coercive entities but nor is there is a utopic endpoint at which the state, capital and it’s elite structures will whither away. They must be fought and undermined. “A contemporary Libertarianism demands an intellectual and cultural labour of striving towards freedom as a value against technological and utilitarian temptations including a willingness to bear the costs of this freedom. It also needs to understand its limits. It acknowledges the logic of technology and accepts the historical state as a necessary form, while rejecting its cultural implications of heteronomy. Like seldom before, Libertarianism has identified the need to secure untouchable spaces in the home, family, and body to secure against statist intervention. On the cultural front, it celebrates unconstrained individualism with all its pitfalls and dangers, which the technological state will always code as dangerous madness. It chooses it over the dangerous submission to the norm which can always be perverted by propaganda and enforced by the folly of crowds”[23]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan & Its Enemies [2] Friedrich Hayek, The Intellectuals and Socialism [3] https://graymirror.substack.com/p/coriolanus-and-the-conservatives [4] https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/insights/blackrock-investment-institute/... [5] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2022/02/07/the-covid-caste-structure/ [6] https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/prolegomena-to-a-franciscan-capitalism/ [7] Paul Virilio, Ground Zero [8] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-continuing-crisis/ [9] Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan & Its Enemies [10] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2022/01/12/big-government-libertarians-biome... [11] https://philpapers.org/rec/FRIPVP-2 [12] https://philpapers.org/rec/NOVQFP [13] https://philpapers.org/rec/NARLPA [14] Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations [15] Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History [16] Andrew Gamble, The Spectre at the Feast [17] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2016/11/09/modern-markets-as-a-dialectic/ [18] Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable [19] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2021/09/19/war-entrepreneurs/ [20] Jim Bell, Assassination Politics [21] https://www.ft.com/content/1f83d3dc-a95b-4947-92ba-4f08899228a3 [22] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2021/08/07/violent-machinations-capital-revo... [23] https://im1776.com/2022/01/21/post-libertarianism/

https://slug.com/group/VoluntaryMutualDefense/discussion/310561/warm-and-sof... Warm and Soft or Cold and Hard by Joe Kelley 2-3-2022 Hot and Confused or Freezing and Dense. Absolute Heat Forced into Absolute Compression or Forced into Absolute Dispersion. Absolute Cold and Forced into Nothing Nowhere. Too soft and everyone goes their separate ways with no one facing the cold hard fact that mankind must – as a rule – reproduce and care enough for future generations to not merely keep on reproducing, but to get better at it in order to face the cold hard facts about natures provisions. Too hard and everyone is compressed into one body of mass mankind forcing everyone under the crushing weight of everyone else with no room to move an elbow or dare to think an original thought. Taking a lesson from the unnatural laws enforced by Treasonous Frauds, as they inject into their victims the means by which the slave numbers are kept at a manageable level, a self-exterminating idea injected into the pests as a form of pest-control, cost less enforcement of eugenic nirvana, with the side effect of the few and fewer remaining rats inheriting all the remaining power, the Rat Final Solution to their too many rats problem, turned around and used unnaturally to cull the herd of Treasonous Frauds. Draining the swamp with the Treasonous Fraud Final Solution mirror image. What comes around goes around. Fuck around and find out. The Rulers exterminate those they Rule – as a rule – and just as that rule works factually, the same Rule consumes the Rulers. The Final Solution to the unruly too-many-slaves problem turns against the Masters on Judgment Day. I’m (not) sorry, nothing (psyc) personal, here is your Bill, and it has an expiration date. Now you may be softened up in preparation to learn these facts as we-the-humans face these facts together in lockstep, or, remain in our collection of collective Infantile States. If Treasonous Frauds controlling the pesky slaves were not bad enough, what do you think happens when there are no more slaves to eat, due to a general learning curve flattened from top to bottom? Flatten the curve and everyone is a master and there are no more slaves, the ultimate logical End Game, with no more need for torture, since everyone knows everyone else as a fellow Rat in the Treasonous Fraud game, no more room left for disingenuous intellectually dishonest prejudicial pretense. There is no one LEFT to Rat on when all the defenders are attackers. All the former innocent producers make each other into guilty criminals. Who is going to care to know what everyone already knows? The End Game proves itself when We The People Constitute The Human Rat Race. We all pay each other to enslave each other until no one has any time LEFT to produce anything worth stealing from any of the slaves that have already been eaten. That leaves one very Fat Rat as the last slave turned master on the sinking ship of the Infantile State. No? Have you ever heard of the essay titled Assassination Politics by Jim Bell? Before jerking your knee looking for a moderator to help alert the Treasonous Frauds of a Rat in their Ranks seeking to incite Assassinations by Politics, you may want to know that this is not merely common knowledge, it is Public Knowledge, and it is actually a confession as to the basic principles running The Infantile State. The magazine Forbes ran an article on this concept not too long ago, with the required Twist on the original essay title. Plagiarizing by Forbes authority to do so, the title is now Assassination Markets. This was published into The Public Domain, by Forbes, in a piece attempting to assassinate the character of people using cryptocurrencies. How dare you. Jim Bell went to prison for a time, not for his Essay, but for trumped-up charges having to do with tax evasion, or who knows what, I did not get the transcripts of the charges and my guess is that there was never an antiquated common law criminal due process of law authorization for persecuting Jim Bell. No independent grand jury true bill. In other words, the mere act of ignoring the law of the land is a confession of Treasonous Fraud during an effort to bring someone to injustice. Jim Bell is free now and still working the Assassination Politics gambling app, as far as I know currently. It turns out that Assassination Politics, or the Forbes version Assassination Markets, logically lead to Direct Democracy in the Modern versions of Legalese. Forget about the actual meaning of the word democracy, forget the original meaning, ignore the grass-roots and organic meaning, exile the adapted meaning adopted by the Ancient Athenians during the Golden Age of Greece. Not that democracy, but the New World Order version of Democracy, you know, as in the saying “Spreading Democracy” with “Gun Boat Diplomacy” type New World Order Democracy, that plagiarized, falsified, false flag meaning of Big D Too Big To Fail Patents Pending Limited Liability Legal Fiction Dogma Democracy. There is a more recent slogan for New World Order Build Back Better Great Reset Democracy parroted around the world by the slaves who are hired to read from the script and avoid any original thought while doing so, and perhaps you are familiar with this tune too. Dangerous To Our Democracy IFrame How dumb are the slaves? It turns out that the slaves will insist upon mass murdering each other at the ringing of a Jim Bell. Marginally hidden just below the surface of slave-speak are confessions of malevolent minds made evil by evil masters. One confesses one’s malice aforethought during the perpetrating of Treasonous Fraud when one does onto another that which one would defend against if the targeted victim were to dare do the same. Vote Republican. Do as I say, not as I do, cook the books with two sets of rules, one for the slaves, another for the masters of slaves. So what is the confession in Assassination Politics that threatens to turn everyone into Rats in the Ranks, and then there are no more innocent people making a living by producing things worth stealing, such as children? Modern Direct Democracy IS Assassination Politics, something known to malevolent mankind because that is the choice made by those choosing that criminal path, and they do so because that path pays better than all the workloads that cost so much to me. When targets choose the path to make a living producing things worth stealing, such as children, made by thee, and you are defenseless, that constitutes opportunity for me, on my chosen Rat path. Who needs a confession once everyone turns onto the lucrative Rat path when there is at least one Rat LEFT? Stop Jerking your Collective Knees, looking for the moderators, the censors, the thought police, and deal with the facts facing you, this time, just once. Please. You know, everyone knows this to be true, fact-based, undeniable in fact, and facts matter, because all lives matter, or an individual chooses otherwise, and then the only life that matters, according to a malevolent mind, made by choice, is that individual in time and place, choosing that Rat path. One more for me, one less for you. Nothing personal, just working the injustice business, on your dime. A penny for your thoughts, crickets. The cost of membership in the Cult is the basic criminal choice to feed upon humanity one calorie at a time or all at once. The facts check out factually. The adjudication of these facts in any other way is based purely on falsehood, or so-called Fake News. Stop Jerking your Collective Knees. The study here is not focused on a moral process known as charity, which is a human thing to do, given the fact that people have done the work to produce anything worth giving before charity was invented the first time someone adapted to natural forces with the clear leverage of charity. Nature provides life forms that are charitable when that adaptive function serves nature, or God. Working to be charitable, or just plain old dividing the spoils of dirty Rats feeding on the innocently productive defenseless hordes, made stupid and servile with Treasonous Fraud. For those in spiritually oriented organizations, or, Established Institutions of Religious Dogma, there are plenty of adaptive ideas useful in forming disciplined studies of the uses and abuses of the process known as charity, but that is not the subject matter of my work, not here, not now, not your work, if you are taking the time and effort required, expending the cost, to read these words. Direct Democracy followed to the logical conclusion is clearly followed with forensic precision in the essay by Jim Bell, or the rewrite of the same principles in the Forbes article on Assassination Markets. The Cold Hard Facts are that Direct Democracy quickly turns everyone against everyone else until there is only one last Rat standing, or someone grows a moral conscience and opts out, but doing so puts a target on one’s back as the next-in-line to be exterminated for failing to obey the enforcement mechanisms of Direct Democracy Writ Large with modern technology that affords everyone the equal opportunity to gamble on the fate of humanity. Mutually Assured Destruction one Fake Democrat at a time. Enough about that, which exists in reality, not for the faint of heart, but blaming me for what exists in reality, proves the point, as you reach for your moderators, while your knee jerks reading this fact-based report on Modern Democracy as defined by malevolent minds. Moving on to Federated Republics, please, credit where credit is due. Due process. With Modern Democracy a.k.a. Assassination Markets being Cold and Hard, what are, then, the Soft and Warm Cold Hard Facts constituting the opposition? Federated Republics soften up the enforcement mechanisms to a point at which human beings can return to liberty, living and letting live, choice-based decision making on an individual level, to do as one pleases while agreeing to subject themselves to the will of the… Did I smell a knee jerk? Is everyone a fucking progressive liberal these days? Not the patented "will of the majority" - if that is what you thought. The voluntary informed consent of those choosing to be subjected to a power over the individual sovereign decision making power - by natural rights - agreeing to be subjected, by informed choice, subjecting oneself to the collective enforcement mechanism, for the collective good, according to the collective will, is not to a nebulous, ambiguous, fluid, and Rat Racing battle to gain status as a member of the Majority, farthest from that as is humanly possible. The Federated Republican prescription for those maladies injected into mankind from malevolent individuals is… Drum roll? The People as a Whole, dictate to individuals, and expressly not a division thereof. Now you are informed, but will you consent, if you were to hear from The People as a whole, as they may, or may not, demand any service from individuals of mankind? If The People as a whole have no voice, then, every individual does as each one pleases. Everyone is invited, demanded, by suggestion, by informed consent, to take their seat at the adjudication table, adding their voice to the collective whole number of people in the area, the territory, adjudicated by natural laws, also known as the law of the territory, the law of the land, in Latin: legem terrae, and in English: the common law, and in America: Federated Republican sovereign entities. Each King and each Queen are individual Kingdoms by natural right. He, she, he-she, she-he, or whatever each wishes to be called, for dinner at the dinner table, or for adjudication at law, is up to the individual according to the individual's individual power at law. Who speaks for The People as a whole so as to forensically establish the collective voice to be obeyed as an enforceable suggestion suggested to the law-abiding? Did you buy the lie that criminals obey rules? Not the majority, not a gang, not The Angry Mob, not a faction, not a cult, not a minority, not a Special Interest, not a supermajority, not The Übermensch, not a National Communist Party hiding behind a thin veil of a cartoon Jackass stealing everything and giving away some of their stolen loot to fellow cult members in their exclusive Jackass Party, and not a National Socialist Party hiding behind a thin veil of an oppressive Elephant in the room shitting on everyone while all the party members, the cult members, ignore the shit they have to eat because they make nothing but shit, and their sources of wealth transfers are a closely guarded patent-pending limited liability intellectual property wrong, above the forensic scrutiny of the Angry Mob. The people, through their own authority, as independent individuals, private prosecutors, private defendants, independent grand jurors, and independent trial jurors, each individual, all responsible, and all accountable to The People as a whole, all speaking for themselves. All people are internally considered as a single republic, so there are as many republics as there are people in a republic, or what you are dealing with is not a republic. Have a clue, please. How are The People afforded their say so as The People speak for themselves, and as The People then speak as a whole, so all The People know what The People say to all the individuals? Equal Footing Doctrine. Did your knee jerk again? The New meaning of the word Equal does not Equal the original meaning. The federal idea is documented into the public record as the voice of The People as a whole in many forms by precedence, or stare decisis, for all to see, to help when your knee jerks, to confirm what The People say as a whole, when people decide to find out what The People say as a whole, without leaving anyone out by choices made by numbers of people less than the whole: individual dictators or cults of dictators issuing and following dictates. Run that through your processor, but secure your processor from infection by virus, defend your processor with a working bullshit detector when running the numbers yourself, by your own authority, because the collective good depends upon your unique input added to the whole. Can the Public Access Public Record of The People speaking as a whole be confirmed or denied with the following defining moment defining American Federal Republic Principle? "That the question was not whether, by a declaration of independence, we should make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a fact which already exists: That, as to the people or Parliament of England, we had always been independent of them, their restraints on our trade deriving efficacy from our acquiescence only, and not from any rights they possessed of imposing them; and that, so far, our connection had been federal only, and was now dissolved by the commencement of hostilities: That, as to the king, we had been bound to him by allegiance, but that this bond was now dissolved by his assent to the late act of Parliament, by which he declares us out of his protection, and by his levying war on us a fact which had long ago proved us out of his protection, it being a certain position in law, that allegiance and protection are reciprocal, the one ceasing when the other is withdrawn:" That is not the official meaning of the principles defining American Federated Republics because God or Mankind or Nature set those meanings of those words onto Stone, or paper made from hemp plants, rather, the fact is that the principles work out factually, logically, and are morally justifiable by each individual each time. Those who arrive at a different result, when crunching the numbers themselves, rely upon falsehood to do so, as a matter of record, recorded into cases tried in Courts of Law, when following due process of law, based upon that principle right there on The Public Record which records the collective voice of The People as a whole, without exception, except for those who rely upon falsehood, or worse, Rats in the Ranks called Treasonous Frauds. "There is no question of the general doctrine that fraud vitiates the most solemn contracts, documents, and even judgments" (United States v. Throckmorton, 98 US 61(1878). All individuals are republics unto themselves federated with all other individuals from grass-roots, organically, so as to adapt to natures dictates, locally, in couples, families, churches, legal jurisdictions or countries, towns, townships, cities, counties, states, or federations of states, or federations of federations. If you live and let live, you pay the cost of membership. If you do not, you join the cult of Treasonous Frauds. In either case, you get what you pay for, and you lie in the bed you steal fearfully or sleep comfortably secure in liberty that you defend with accurate accountability of the facts that matter in any case of controversy foreign or domestic. Caveat Emptor

Assassination Politics: Government, The Bell Tolls For Thee https://c4ss.org/content/1157 Thomas L. Knapp | October 1st, 2009 James Dalton Bell expects to be released from federal prison on December 20th, 2009. Given past events, however, that release may be short-lived, or simply not occur at all. The US government considers Bell a very dangerous man. So dangerous, in fact, that during his last trial (if it can even be called that) the entire court record was sealed, he was forbidden to subpoena witnesses, and he was forcibly "represented" by a lawyer chosen by the government, whom he was not allowed to fire. What makes Bell so dangerous? He has an idea, and he's written about that idea in detail and at length. His version of the idea is one that most would probably classify as "extreme," but it's the nature, not the extremity, of the idea which got government into a tizzy. Bell's calls his idea "assassination politics:" An anonymous prediction market in the deaths of political figures. In a prediction market, participants place bets on events, and collect if their predictions are correct (the players who aren't correct lose their money). Simply put, Bell's idea is that anonymous, untraceable digital money will allow the enforcement of "good behavior" on politicians. A politician who pisses people off will find his or her name listed in the "assassination market." Once enough money is in the pool under that politician's name to make it worth the risk, someone will "bet" on when that politician is going to die, kill (or arrange the killing of) the politician at the time in question, and collect the pool money. Actually, calling this Bell's idea is stretching things. He didn't invent digital money, nor did he invent the concept of an "assassination market." He just wrote about the political implications of both. He's now spent more than a decade in the court system and in various prisons for doing so. Bell's essay took emerging technological developments to their theoretical extreme, but government prosecutors couldn't try him for "felony production of essays." Instead, they patched together a crazy quilt of allegations, ranging from tax evasion to "stalking a federal employee" -- some possibly true, some probably false, most unworthy of being called "crimes" even if true. It would be easy to write off the Bell case as an outlier -- a rare case of government overreaction -- if not for the fact that in the decade following his initial prosecution, lots of other people have found themselves confronted by police, and some have even gone to jail, for implementing a non-extreme, but central, element of the package he put together. That element? Outing and identifying bad actors in government. With the advent of small, portable digital cameras, "gotcha" moments have embarrassed "law enforcement" with public documentation of abuses on a regular basis. The response has been a general crackdown -- not on bad cops, but on those who expose them. Bloggers, "real journalists" and regular citizens have been roughed up, and in some cases arrested on bogus "disorderly conduct" charges, for nothing more than taking pictures of public employees in action. Post-9/11, the "global war on terror" has provided new excuses for suppressing the urge to take photos or video footage. In America "suspicious" behavior worthy of police attention now includes taking photographs of buildings, an activity once considered a common pastime. The United Kingdom's 2008 "anti-terror" law effectively makes it illegal to photograph a police officer, a development no doubt looked upon with approval by American "law enforcement." The courts have generally upheld the power of a police officer to demand identification from a citizen, but the trend has gone in the other direction when it comes to the identities of police officers and other government employees. Police departments routinely withhold the identities of officers involved in shooting incidents. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona even subpoenaed and arrested two newspaper editors for publishing his home address. Also in Arizona, Phoenix police raided the home of a blogger who exposed bad cops, stealing his computers and records. http://carlosmiller.com/2009/04/02/phoenix-police-raid-home-of-blogger-whose... The connection between the increasingly secretive attitude of "law enforcement" and the writings of Jim Bell may seem tenuous, but it isn't. Politicians desperately want you to not know, and to never learn, three things: That you don't need them, that they do you more harm than good, and that there might be something you can do about it. Just as the music industry is losing its ongoing fight with peer-to-peer file sharing tech, government is going to lose its fight with digital photography and videography. And with Jim Bell.

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/assassination-has-been-utilized-as-... Assassination has been utilized as a political tool Published: 1st Jan 2015 Introduction Assassination has been utilized as a political tool since the beginning of recorded history, marking, altering, or determining the course of events through murder. Even today, assassination and its forms, including terrorism, continue to plague most nations throughout the world. Additional acts of violence, such as ethnic tensions and coups, executions, and civil wars, continue to frequent societies and political systems in the 21st century. Unique to assassinations, whether or not the act is successful does not always reflect failed consequences; all too often, attempted assassinations are equally impactful as complete, or deadly, assassinations. If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help! Assassinations and assassination attempts, particularly upon heads of state, are often highly ranked in terms of political violence and significance. Besides affecting or killing the victim, assassinations have direct consequences upon critical political institutions and the targeted individual’s nation as a whole. As studied and discussed by political theorists and analysts, assassinations and assassination attempts of important political figures have far-reaching political and societal repercussions. Obviously affecting the targeted government or nation, the sudden and unexpected murder of a head of state or high-ranking official not only interferes with a nation’s political effectiveness, but also promulgates terror and unrest within a government. Most significantly, assassinations and attempts to assassinate often disturb or change the focus of domestic and foreign policy within a nation. As previously mentioned, terrorism is closely related to assassination and no discussion on the latter would be complete without a discussion of the former as well. Besides an obvious systematic and deliberate act of murder, terrorism can also be referred to as either a mass assassination, or a terroristic assassination. Terrorism, according to one source, is “assassinations contrived to create a fear sufficient to destroy a whole system. Terrorism implies a movement whose objective can only be achieved by repeated assassinations over relatively long periods of time, for fear dissipates when pressure is relaxed or exercised intermittently. Similar to assassinations, terrorism has plagued and continues to plague many (if not most) nations, often resulting in political chaos or upset. Furthermore, as with assassinations, terrorism is also saturated with politics; however, unlike assassinations, terrorism is employed through strategy, fueled by religious or ecological motives, and carried out with the ultimate goal of power. Although united by a common denominator, murder, the conceptual differences between assassinations and terrorism are profound and worth separate examination, for the purpose of this study. The Concept of Assassination The violent act of assassination is defined as the murder of a (most likely) political, royal, or public individual. The term is derived from the order of the Assassins, which was an 11th and 12th century Muslim sect that advanced its political goals by murdering high-ranking officials. The origin of the word is assassiyun,Arabic for fundamentalist, from the word assass, foundation. The suicide squad of the Assassins, which was a militant arm of the Islamic Isma’ili sect, was founded by Hassan Sabah and operated from the Alamut cliff top fortress in the Elburz Mountains of Persia, now known as northwestern Iran. The Assassins, according to legend, were called hashishiyun, “smokers of hashish,” by their enemies as the hashish was believed to be the source of their visions—which commanded their violent acts. Marco Polo even wrote of the sect and an impregnable fortress in the mountains of Persia when detailing an account of his travels. However, although the term assassination was not defined until the Muslim sect materialized in the 11th century, their method or tool of political murder had been in use since as early as 900 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a word that corresponds with our word assassination. “A killing was simply a means to an end; its moral significance depended entirely on the nature of the person killed” [italics original]. An individual who killed a public figure was either a murderer or a tyrannicide, and the latter term was a synonymous word for “liberator,” one who freed his country. According to Cicero, some of the most celebrated figures in Greek and Roman history were tyrant-killers. Brutus, who murdered Caesar, was born of a long line of tyrant-killers. Undeniably, assassins make history. The Concept of Terrorism For the purpose of being thorough, it is worth examining the earliest uses of the word terror. The word terrorist first appeared in modern politics in the French Revolution, when revolutionists occasionally applied the term to their actions. The revolutionists characterized terrorism as “good” when implemented against individuals deemed to be enemies of virtue and modernity, according to one source. Eventually, upon the defeat of the Frenchman Robespierre and his military force in 1794 (known as the Reign of Terror), the term terrorist became a pejorative. Thus, although the term initially was meant to conjure or reflect what “good” a government could do to achieve and ensure the acceptance of a revolution, within a century and a half, the term had evolved into an evil principle of terror. Russian communist Vladimir Lenin acted upon the belief that “the purpose of terror is to terrorize,” and his orders during the Russian Civil War are reflective of how terrorism can be utilized as an instrument of states. As with assassinations, terror tactics have afflicted or been a part of societies since the beginning of time. However, terrorist campaigns, defined as “the prolonged, systematic use of terror to secure a political objective, [have been] by comparison, conspicuously rare, and the true terrorist enters history late.” As previously referenced, the first example of terrorism can been seen in Medieval Islam with the Ismaili sect. The instances of terrorism thereafter multiplied, resulting in almost every country in the world having experienced an act of terrorism. Ultimately, the development of modern terrorism is too complex to be detailed here, but for the purposes of this study, it is worth noting that terrorism evolved immensely in both strategic and tactical principles in the twentieth century—emerging as the most wielded tool for political murder. Problem Statement Without a doubt, assassinations and terrorism, whether successful or unsuccessful, remain one of the most devastating acts of political violence. The fact that the United States and other world-renowned democracies have not been immune to these two types of violence, assassinations and terrorism, illustrates the very severe nature of the problem. The various assassination attempts that have been made against leaders (primarily presidents) within the United States is indicative to onlookers (or speaks) of a national security issue—opening up questions of vulnerability or enticing a violent act. Essentially, any violent attack against a president or his nation disturbs the social and political stability of the targeted country. Regardless, the impacts of these acts of violence ripple across the world and are felt by other nations, whether directly or indirectly. A critical analysis of the available body of information and related discussion portrays assassinations (complete and attempts) and terrorism as violent acts which not only have the inherent ability to heighten national security, but also interfere with the foreign policy of the United States. The fragile balance that exists between the United States and other world nations, particularly the Middle East, also exemplifies the latter. Research Objectives This thesis/study seeks to evaluate the impact of political assassinations within the United States, as well as the impact of terrorism in the United States. The specific objectives include the following: To evaluate the consequences of political assassinations upon policy* To examine the consequences of terrorism or terror tactics upon policy To compare and contrast the impact of both violent acts, assassination and terrorism, upon the United States Hypothesis In addition to impacting the timing of political action in the United States, the assassinations of presidents and public figures such as civil rights leader Martin Luther King and Black Muslim leader Malcolm X has had the effect of catalyzing public concern and activating the politicization of major policy issues. In essence, broadening support and paving the way for major policy initiatives. Furthermore and most significantly, this study posits that although both assassination and terrorism have been of major consequence within the United States, the brutal act of terrorism has had the greater impact than all U.S. assassinations combined. Terms and Functional Definitions For operational terms and concepts, the following functional definitions were employed in this study: The victim is defined as the intended target of the assassination or act of terrorism. The method is defined as the weapon of assassination, or the tactic employed in an act of terrorism. The result is focused upon the intended victim. The impact is focused upon the effect of an assassination or terrorism upon policy The venue is to identify the location of an assassination or terrorist attack. The assailant is defined as the individual or individuals who planned, carried out, or ordered an assassination or act of terror. For example, an accomplice would also be identified as an assailant. The motive represents the reasoning, when known, of why a victim was targeted by either assassination or terrorism. In this study, policy change is meant to reflect the different judicial, executive and legislative decisions that were made after each act of assassination or terrorism. The following terms are used repeatedly throughout this study: Assassination is defined slightly different according to various sources, but is universally agreed upon as being the sudden, premeditated murder of a political figure, due to the victim’s perspective, prominence, or some combination of the two.Many sources classify an attempted homicide as assassination, so for the purposes of uniformity, this study shall follow the same classification. However, the realm of attempts does not include written or verbal attempts, stalking of a victim, or mass demonstrations. The latter actions are more often, depending upon the situation, characterized as foundational or threshold acts to assassinations rather than as acts of assassination alone of themselves. Generally, assassination is defined as the murder of a public figure by an assailant who aims solely at the death of the victim. For further clarification, a historical event can be described to showcase the employment of terms within an assassination situation. Guiseppe Zangara, for example, attempted to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami, Florida, but hit and killed Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago instead. This example illustrates how the latter event is classified as an assassination attempt upon the President and the murder, not assassination, of Anton Cermak—a bystander victim. Our academic experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have. From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. In this study, terrorism is defined according to a definition that has remained sound for over a quarter-century: “[T]he deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends.” The latter definition was proffered by analysts in 1979 at The Jonathon Institute at Jerusalem (a conference on international terrorism) and has been widely employed by scholars and analysts since then. While other definitions exist, all agree that terrorism is the use or threat of use of murder to infuse fear. Contrary to assassinations, victims of terrorism are not always specific targets. For the purposes of effectively analyzing the true impact of assassinations on policy in the United States, assassinations of only those individuals in political public life were considered for this study. Literature Review The violent act of assassination has been commonly presented as the premeditated execution of an important political, religious, or social figure. Contrary to regular homicides, assassinations strategically target important individuals who maintain a prominent position of power and influence in society. In addition, such acts are motivated by clearly defined objectives. For instance, victims can be assassinated for political, economical, or ideological reasons. In the case of complete and attempted assassinations against American presidents, another category of motivation exists: revenge. The majority of presidential assassinations within the United States fall within this category, with the act most often being the work of an unstable, lone assailant and politically aimless. To the assailant, their victim is seen as an obstacle in the realization of a personal goal or established agenda. Although any individual can be the victim of an assassination, the available body of literature that was surveyed for this study depicts political leaders as a high-risk group. Undeniably, the political aspect of assassination has often been depicted as the most complex dimension of the violent act. Politically motivated assassination, regardless of whether an attempt or successful, is always considered an act to murder political leaders. A crucial defining characteristic of these political assassinations is their fundamental objective to advance political interests. The underlying assumption of every assassination is that political figures are individuals upon whom huge responsibilities rest, such as the ability to implement major domestic and foreign policy decisions. For illustration, the presidencies of John Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy were particularly viewed by the communist world dictatorial regimes to be an obstruction in the advancement of the United States’ political and socioeconomic interests. As seen after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack upon the United States, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” policy that remains in effect today, although it has changed dramatically with the introduction of current President Barack Hussein Obama and his administration. But notably, the act of terrorism on September 11 led to a policy in which suspected terrorists within and outside the United States were to be tracked and dealt with accordingly. Throughout history, the key targets of political assassination have included Mahatma Gandi of India, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Within the United States, the first attempt to murder a political figure through assassination occurred in 1835, when Richard Lawrence attempted to assassination President Andrew Jackson. Since the nineteenth century, a handful of U.S. presidents have been the victims of this type of political violence. Included within this group are Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Their deaths have continued to be a topic of unparalleled debate amongst political analysts, scholars, and the general public, due to the concerns that assassination poses to then security of political figures, particularly a president, of the United States. Although as previously mentioned, the majority of assassinations and assassination attempts against U.S. presidents have been classified as random, politically aimless acts committed by a lone individual, the general contention is that they were well-planned and executed. The latter results in the prevalence of conspiracy theories, which contend that within the realm of U.S. assassinations, each act was meticulously planned by individuals working together and with a defined motive in mind. Instead of classifying one factor as the primary cause of assassination, conspiracy theories posit that such violent acts stem from numerous factors. For example, many conspiracy theorists believe that Lee Oswald, the murderer of President John F. Kennedy, was functioning as a component of a network of conspirators. The Politics of Murder: Assassination in the United States The act of assassination can be described as one of the oldest techniques to perpetuate the politics of power. The phenomenon of assassination in the United States has received increased attention in the 20th century, with having only received notable research and attention since the infamous trio of assassinations in the tumultuous 1960s. Nevertheless, the available body of information and research reveals that assassination dates back to when civilization and the concept of formal governments became an entrenched aspect of society. The murder of kings such as Gedaliah and Julius Caesar can perhaps be termed as the earliest assassinations to be recorded in history. However, within the context of the United States, the act of assassination became markedly more common in the 19th century. Such acts of political violence were not expected to happen. The rationale behind such a mentality was due to the United States being a democratic state whose executive authority was responsible and responsive to the will of the popularity majority. Thus, between 1789 and 1835, when the first assassination attempt occurred, no significant protection details (on behalf of either federal or local enforcements agencies) were dedicated to U.S. presidents. Perhaps this rationalistic and optimistic mentality regarding human nature and America’s system of government serve as an explanation for why the politics of assassination have been largely under-explored until the 20th century. For extended periods, prominent political leaders continued to underestimate the threat that assassination posed to U.S. presidents. William H. Seward, who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, once remarked, “Assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system. This conviction of mine has grown so strong since the civil war began. Every day’s experience confirms it.” Ironically, only three years after making the latter statement, President Lincoln was assassinated in what appeared to be a carefully constructed plot. And the optimistic Seward barely survived an assassination attempt on himself during the murder of Lincoln. It can be posited that Seward’s expressed certainty regarding assassination was not unique unto himself, but rather demonstrative of the general mentality of the U.S. populace as well. President James McKinley solidified this rationalistic viewpoint when he declared, “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning; and it is best not to worry about either.” Sadly, McKinley would later regret his overconfidence in a morally sound and rational society—an admirable trait, but one that enabled his death. The Politics of Assassination CHANGE TITLE! While the murder of any political leader of a society is going to have repercussions upon said society, the assassination of a president precipitates significant social and political transformation. In the past, the assassination of a political head was viewed as an appropriate method to eradicate oppressive tyrannical leadership. However, in today’s societies, such acts of violence are hardly condoned as an ideal strategy for catalyzing political change, nonetheless positive political change. Conversely, assassination attempts and assassinations have the impact of destabilizing social and political structures, as the murder of a president or highly-ranked political leader is regarded as particularly detrimental to social and political harmony. Despite the reality of assassination and widespread acknowledgement of its threat, negligible attention has been given to the impact of such acts, particularly upon domestic and foreign policy and the American way of life. The available body of research postulates that assassinations and assassination attempts upon U.S. presidents and political figures have had considerable social and political consequences. Political analyst Sheldon Appleton maintains that the “impact of assassinations on America and the world is incalculable.” He also posits that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was arguably the most outstanding act of violence in terms of (American) societal impact. However, it must be noted that in regards to assassinations, Appleton’s argument does hold water; but in regards to acts of violence upon American soil, it can be argued that the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, resulted in the greatest impact upon society. Other political analysts have concluded that presidential assassinations activate a crisis in areas that are related to authority. Furthermore, it is agreed upon that presidential assassinations have the effect of triggering countermeasures, particularly those that elicit changes in the arena of presidential security. Such beliefs are not unfounded, as presidential assassinations inevitably result in negative consequences due to the extreme importance of the office of the president. Thus, assassinations are likely to spark significant social and political upheavals, even demonstrations, strikes and riots. However, such reactions to an assassination can be described as minor in comparison to other manifestations. One political analyst states: “Beyond these relatively minor reflections of domestic malaise, the sudden and violent death of a leader may also embolden dissatisfied groups to push for greater political change, in extreme cases leading to coups, revolution, and even civil war.” Interestingly, factors that play a role in the influence of an assassination can also serve to mitigate its social and political impact. Political analysts Iqbal and Zorn report recent empirical data that notes that “assassinations are less likely to occur in systems that provide a regular, institutionalized means of leadership turnover.” They also state that a nation’s political structure and its method of executive turnover to be instrumental in the reaction of said political system’s reaction to an assassination. Simply, nations such as the United States, who have a “regular and (mostly) nonviolent” executive turnover, will inevitable react differently to assassinations than countries that do not. Ibqal and Zorn also analogically postulate that assassinations create a “power vacuum” within a political system—of which the suction strength will vary dramatically from nation to nation depending upon the strength of the targeted political order. It can be argued that within the context of the United States, the strength (or impact) of a power vacuum—implemented through assassination—would be notably weaker than Methodology In completing the objectives of this study, the various aspects underlying the topic of political assassination and terrorism, particularly within the context of the United States, were explored. More specifically, this study follows the various presidential assassinations and acts of terrorism that have occurred since the 19th century. Crucial information regarding the consequences of these violent acts was collected and analyzed, with the goal of making appropriate deductions. The information that was required to properly address the objectives of this study was primarily collected from online academic resources, both secondary and primary, as well as various works by political science or historical scholars. This method enabled the acquirement of information that was relative to the impact and nature of political assassinations and terrorism in the United States. The information collected was directive in achieving the objectives of the study and provided thorough analysis of the subject of inquiry. The principal technique used in assembling information related to assassination was content analysis, whereas the subject of terrorism received not only the latter approach but was researched from primarily post-2000 dates. A qualitative approach was utilized to determine the relevance of gathered materials, with said approach taking into consideration the strengths of the arguments presented, as well as their weight. To guarantee the authenticity of arguments and their conclusions, only accredited sources were considered or used. These included books, peer-reviewed political science or history journals, and former studies completed on the subject of either assassination or terrorism. The hypothesis that was previously advanced was tested against the articulations of researchers and scholars, with the objective of achieving a consistent and valid conclusion for this study. A qualitative method was implemented to interpret and analyze the data gathered. This enabled individual analysis of the various instances of political (primarily presidential) assassinations and acts of terrorism in the history of the United States. While doing so, both contrasting and concurring opinions and conclusions expressed by analysts and scholars were considered. The primary expectation in this study is that both political assassinations (attempts or complete assassinations) and terrorism have not only impacted the society and social conscience of American society, but also empowered the adoption of sweeping policy changes. The latter claim will be realized through examination of the response and reaction of society and the political class after a violence act of assassination or terrorism. To consider the impact of assassinations, this study discusses the attacks against U.S. presidents since 1865. The core factor of interest is the degree of policy changes and transformations that took place after an act of violence, beginning first with assassinations, and then acts of terrorism. In this study, policy change is meant to reflect the different judicial, executive and legislative decisions that were made after each act of violence. The various events that took place after each assassination or act of terrorism were reviewed, with special attention given to how each event influenced U.S. domestic or foreign policy. The underlying premise in the various instances of assassination and terrorism is that each violent act had significant political repercussions, but that of these two types of acts, terrorism has achieved the greatest impact. Edelman, Murray, and Rita James Simon. “Presidential Assassinations: Their Meaning and Impact of American Society.” Ethics, 35, no. 2 (1969), p. 199. Rapoport, David C. Assassination and Terrorism. Toronto: T.H. Best Printing Company Limited, 1971, p. 3. Harmon, Christopher C. Terrorism Today. (2nd ed). New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 5. Laucella, Linda. Assassinations: The Politics of Murder. (1st ed). Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1998, p. xi. Ibid xi Rapoport, p. 7. Harmon, p. 4. Ibid 4 Lacquer, Walter. The Age of Terrorism (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1987), p. 11, citing French dictionaries of the 1790s. Harmon, p. 4-5. Rapoport, p. 45. CITATION NEEDED Rapoport, p. 43. This study acknowledges that assassination attempts have been and possess the ability to influence policy in the United States, both foreign and domestic. Such instances are not completely disregarded within this study, but for the purposes of the study, not all attempts are examined. It is also acknowledged that monitoring national security and suppressing public anxiety and fear play a role in the assimilation and release of information regarding threats and attempts (assassinations or other violent acts) against political leaders, particularly the President. Thus, due to the latter and the lack of a full, or complete, release of information regarding assassination attempts, proper analysis is rendered impossible or faulty. Defining danger, p. 1 FINISH LATER Heaps, Willard A. Assassination: A Special Kind of Murder. New York: Meredith Press, 1969, p. 5, citing the New International Encyclopedia. Laucella, p. 128 Harmon, p. 7. Ibid 32; Harmon posits that not only is terrorism a challenging term to define, but one which possesses many gray areas. However, the definition that was a result of the conference in Jerusalem “clarifies much of what is white and much of what is black. One must not demand more of a definition than what the nature of its subject allows,” he concludes. Further extrapolation upon the classification of assassinations is to follow in this study. Goldberg, Alfred. Conspiracy Interpretations of the Assassination of President Kennedy: International and Domestic . Security Studies Paper, Los Angeles: Ford Foundation, 1968, p. 2. Ibid p. 2 Edelman, Murray, and Simon, p. 199. Crotty, William S. “Presidential Assassinations.” Society, 35, no 2 (1998), p. 99 CITATION NEEDED Kingsbury, Robert. The Assassination of James A. Garfield (Library of Political Assassinations). (1st ed). New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2001, p. 93 Ibid 184 Crotty, p. 18. U.S. Department of State. The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Attempted Assassination of William H. Seward and Frederick W. Seward V2 1867). New York: Kessinger Publishing, Llc, 2008, p. 102 Kingsbury, p. 5 Crotty, p. 109 Appleton, Sheldon. “The Polls-Trends: Assassinations.” Public Opinion Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2000), p. 495 Appleton’s argument does take acts of terrorism into account, but considering the date of his publication, 2000, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are obviously not considered. It is not illogical to thus conclude that his argument has been rendered faulty, or outdated, due to the series of events that have occurred since 2000—but his points regarding assassination remain valid. Edelman and Simon, p. 199 Iqbal, p. 387 Ibid, p. 387 Ibid, p. 388 Due to the overwhelming prevalence of information regarding terrorism, only the most current and balanced works and online journals were utilized in this study. Furthermore, due to the moral sensitivity of the subject of terrorism and its often-unavoidable religious connotations, only language that spoke to the impact or consequences of terrorism was studied.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060505214123/http://www.anti-state.com/murphy/... The Politics of Destruction by Bob Murphy robert_p_murphy@yahoo.com https://web.archive.org/web/20060505214123/http://zolatimes.com/v2.26/jimbel... https://web.archive.org/web/20060505214123/http://anti-state.com/vroman/vrom... https://web.archive.org/web/20060505214123/http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy... For some time now, I have been aware of a widespread fascination among many libertarians with Jim Bell's "Assassination Politics" (AP). At my request, Robert Vroman has defended the merits of AP. In this article, I will argue that AP is just about the single worst idea that libertarians could advocate. Despite my misgivings, I thank Vroman for his article, so that AP sympathizers may be reassured that I am not attacking a strawman. Now, before I get going, let me offer a serious note: It's true, as alluded to by Vroman's snide remark, that I have recently defended the merits of (qualified) pacifism. I realize that many libertarians find this stance hilarious and indicative of how much of a coward/wuss I personally must be. For the purposes of this debate, let me be clear: I am not at all relying on a pacifist philosophy, but merely the values held dear to most libertarians. I believe that one of the chief attractions of AP is that its proponents can sound like realpolitik tough guys; indeed, I think many people want AP to be practical. But such hopes must be put aside in a sober discussion over whether AP will in fact give libertarians the society they desire. THE JIM BELL SYSTEM For those readers who have never heard of Jim Bell's proposal, and because Vroman abstracted from details that Bell himself deemed essential, let me summarize the original AP vision: (In the following I draw on Parts 1 and 3 of the Bell article linked above, though I have taken some liberties in the interest of clarity.) There would be two groups of people, the predictors and the patrons. The predictors would submit an untraceable (due to modern technology) "guess" to the AP administrators. The guess would contain an encrypted prediction of the exact date of the death of a certain individual. (The contents of the prediction would be unreadable, not only by the authorities but even by the AP administrators.) The patrons would send (untraceable and anonymous) digital cash donations specifying only the name of a certain individual. The administrators would hold the donations and publicize the totals accumulated next to each person's name. Then, after a person on the list died, if anyone had sent in a correct prediction beforehand, he could send in the key needed to decrypt his original guess. The administrators would find that the key worked (i.e. the message would be unscrambled), and they would at that time see that the predictor had in fact correctly guessed the date of death of the deceased. The successful predictor would also specify the public key to be used to encrypt, as a digital cash payment, all of the accumulated donations associated with the now-deceased person. The appeal of AP is obvious: It would ostensibly allow people to pool their money and finance assassinations of hated political figures. The use of modern encryption techniques would make such financing completely anonymous and risk-free. Because even the administrators would never know the identity of the assassins, there would apparently be no way for the government to crack down on the system. * * * Now, Vroman has defended AP on two major grounds: First, he claims that it is inevitable; whether we like it or not, AP is coming. Second, he claims that AP should be cheered by libertarians as the source of their salvation. I dispute both claims. Despite the arguments of Bell and Vroman, I find the AP system completely impractical, and do not think anything like it will ever operate. (This is not to deny that modern encryption and e-currency trends will make traditional assassinations easier to finance. But this will not lead to a mass market in hits placed by the average consumer, which is the hallmark of AP.) Moreover, I will argue that if AP could somehow be made to work, then it would spell the downfall of modern civilization. The libertarian dream of a free society, where people's property rights are respected, would be impossible in a world with AP. WHY AP WON'T WORK Supply Side Although the proponents of AP have done a good job defending it from perhaps the most immediate objections, nonetheless I find the proposal completely impractical. Now, I am no expert in the possibilities of anonymous digital cash payments, so I will concede for the sake of argument that this aspect of the system is as foolproof as Bell and Vroman believe. Even so, I think there are tremendous flaws that would prevent a workable AP system from arising. My most fundamental practical objection is this: To the extent that AP works as advertised, then no one could possibly use it. That is, if it really were the case that the AP administrators could collect millions of dollars in donations, and funnel them to completely anonymous assassins, then what would prevent the administrators from simply pocketing the money? After outlining his system, Bell asserts (in Part 3) that, "Potential future predictors are satisfied (in a mathematically provable fashion) that all previous successful predictors were paid their full rewards, in a manner that can't possibly be traced." But isn't this statement contradictory? Suppose someone sends in a prediction, and takes out the target on the correct date. Then he sends in his claimant message (containing the key to unlock his encrypted guess), which is simply ignored by the AP administrators. Instead these unscrupulous organizers, who have previously flooded their own system with every possible prediction (and "paid themselves" the nominal fee for submitting each guess), act in whatever way is necessary to convince the public that they have paid off the assassin. In such a case, what is the cheated killer going to go? Complain to the police? (The reason drug dealers can carry on despite the lack of courts and police is that purchasers can inspect the product they're buying. And whatever mechanisms the AP proponent comes up with to solve this problem – e.g. having a private, underground rating agency to which assassins can complain – what would prevent governments or other groups from registering phony complaints to discredit the system?) It thus seems to me that the AP administrators themselves would need to be publicly known. Unlike Vroman's idea of a completely automated system, Bell recognizes this need. In an argument designed to prove that "ethical" AP organizations (i.e. ones that only target "deserving" people) would outcompete unethical ones, Bell says: Since both organizations will accept donations for "deserving" victims, while only [the unethical one] will accept them for "just anybody," it is reasonable to conclude that [the latter's] rates…will be higher for its donations....In addition, [the ethical organization] will become larger, more credible, believable and trustworthy, and more potential "guessers"…will "work" its system, and for lower average potential payments. (Bell Part 6, bold added) Now, to the extent that an AP system would require name-brand recognition to attract widespread donations, I think it is clear that governments could easily kill it in its infancy. It's possible that smaller systems could continually spring up after each set of administrators is tortured (much as the court rulings against Napster won't prevent teenagers from swapping songs), but the ostensible advantage of AP – the ability of hitmen to receive small contributions from millions of consumers – will never be realized. Incidentally, Bell himself admits that the realization of AP would require martyrdom on the part of the initial administrators. I offer the following as proof (and to show just how poorly Bell understands American society): Now don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that EVERYONE would be identified. The "donors" to the system would remain perfectly anonymous, and the "guessers" would likewise be perfectly anonymous, but the organization itself would be made up of real people, who have published addresses, who have simply decided that they have had enough of the current system and are going to participate in a PERFECTLY LEGAL enterprise by the laws of the country, and just DARE the government to try to stop them....Suddenly, all the politicians would be put on the spot! Instead of being asked by the reporters for their position on the economy, pollution, the budget deficit, or some other thing, they'll ask, "Why should the public NOT want to see you dead?" (Bell Part 10, CAPS original) One of the most immediate responses of the government to the rise of an AP system also proves that Vroman's idea of an automated administration is unfeasible. Imagine a credible AP system emerges, and the government can't stamp it out of existence. The first thing that would happen is high-level officials would disappear from public sight (perhaps implementing the "shadow government" plans originally designed to counter nuclear or other attacks on Washington). After they had done this, how would the public know when a particular politician actually died? Even if the politicians inside underground bunkers were still liable to hits from their colleagues, the government would simply lie about the official time of death. So any automated AP system would conclude that the "winning" prediction was in fact a losing one, since the computer would have no way of knowing the true date. Demand Side Simply put, I don't think Vroman or Bell realize just how nutty and horrible the AP idea seems to the average American. Especially if the government institutes a standing penalty of, say, a mandatory twenty-five years for placing an AP donation, I don't think we will have the millions of small donations that AP requires. The situation would be a prisoner's dilemma: No individual donation of $10 or even $100 is going to make the difference between a target being killed or not, and so there would be no reason for the average person to use AP. The fact that the donations could be made "safely" is not enough; the government would surely institute eavesdropping measures and would punish anyone who even visited AP sites. As a final note on the impracticality of AP, let me ask, Why hasn't it happened yet? Bell was discussing the "inevitability" of his system back in 1996. The technology it requires is supposedly already here. So why haven't the heads started rolling? WHY AP, IF IT WORKED, WOULD BE HORRIBLE So far I have expressed serious doubts about the practicality of the AP system. But let's grant for the sake of argument that it could function the way Bell and Vroman believe. I contend that such an occurrence would be horrible from a libertarian perspective, and would in fact spell the downfall of Western civilization. Most obvious, there is nothing in the AP system to restrict its targets to politicians or others "deserving" death. Think of the power the AP option would grant to labor unions (or the NAACP for that matter). Bell claims that his proposal "would make being an abusive government employee an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office" (Bell Part 2). And by the same token, a functioning AP system would make being a cost-cutting corporate executive an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of personnel manager would even risk holding his job. At the slightest inclination of a proposed layoff, the shareholders of the company in question would be snuffed out. Business would come to a standstill. To the extent that AP could make coercive government prohibitively costly, so too would it render the system of private property obsolete. (And again, whatever countermeasures the AP advocate proposes to protect private officials, could be used tenfold by government officials.) Despite its claims, a functioning AP system wouldn't eliminate government. There are very few people in the world with the skill to execute, say, the Prime Minister of England. The "Mafiosos, Hell's Angels, Islamo-fascists, McVeigh acolytes, etc., plus a virtually bottomless supply of standard small time thugs and starving junkies," whom Vroman views as the vanguards of freedom, would be completely unable to penetrate the enhanced security surrounding federal officials in an AP-world, no matter how high the bounties. Rather than delivering us the heads of the masterminds of the New World Order, AP at best would pick off the mid-level bureaucrats. (The proponent may point out the cliché that no one can stop an assassin who is willing to die. That may be, but if the AP hitman is killed, then the government will know who he is, and will have no qualms in arresting his entire family and circle of friends. So we see that a common claim for AP – that it will allow suicidal assassins to execute contracts and specify beneficiaries to receive the millions in bounties – is foolish.) The response of Bell and Vroman to this objection (that AP won't be limited to the "bad guys") is typical of the flippancy with which they propose mass murder. Vroman says, Fear not, because AP only recognizes the power of the dollar, and unless someone, somewhere is willing to part with a small fortune in order to doom the [relatively harmless] government peon, he is probably just as safe as every other person listed in the phone book. In the first place, this is little consolation for the "government peon," since everyone in the phone book is only a point-and-click away from having a bounty on his head. But more serious, Vroman has here grossly misled the reader: The entire appeal of AP is that it doesn't require a "small fortune" from anyone; rather, it requires small donations from large numbers of disgruntled people. Presumably hundreds of thousands of people would be willing to pay $10 to see, say, Eminem or Barry Manilow removed from public service. If Vroman denies the profitability of these assassinations (or of the rude clerk at the local DMV), then he should stop claiming the profitability of hits on government personnel, who will spend millions and even billions of dollars to defend themselves. (Keep in mind that the primary reasons a person can't currently take out a contract on, say, his boss after being fired is that (a) he wouldn't know where to go to hire a trustworthy hitman and (b) the police would know who had a likely motive and would probably be able to discover the identity of the assassin through interrogation. But if AP worked as advertised, someone could place, say, a $5,000 bounty on a regular Joe's head, and a completely unrelated assassin – who has never even met the financier and is thus completely safe – could fulfill the contract. In the world of AP, people would be dropping like flies.) In the same vein, Bell pooh-poohs the fear that his system could get out of hand. In an apparent demonstration of his intellectual honesty, Bell tells his reader of an initial worry that he later deemed illusory: I thought, suppose a person used this system as part of a sophisticated extortion scheme, in which he sends an anonymous message to some rich character, saying something like "pay me a zillion dollars anonymously, or I put out a digital contract on you." For a while, this one had me stumped. Then, I realized that an essential element in this whole play was missing: If this could be done ONCE, it could be done a dozen times. And the victim of such an extortion scheme has no assurance that it won't happen again, even if he pays off, so ironically he has no motivation to pay off the extortion....If making the payment can't guarantee to the target that the threat is removed, he has no reason to make the payment. And if the target has no reason to make the payment, the extortionist has no reason to make the threat! (Bell Part 6) The visionary Bell has apparently not realized that this same game theoretic reasoning "proves" why rich people are invulnerable to blackmail and kidnappers. * * * Ironically, the real reason AP should be anathema to libertarians is that its creation would be the best thing to happen to the government. Look at how much raw power the American people have granted the federal government since the 9/11 attacks. What Vroman and Bell fail to realize is that average people will not look kindly upon the assassinations of the "leaders" for whom they voted in the previous election! The alleged virtues of AP would allow the government to do whatever it wanted. For example, Vroman believes the AP administrators would have an easier time than drug dealers, since there is no physical evidence. But by the very same token, it would be much easier to frame people on false charges of AP activity. The government could lock up anyone at all, and claim that it had "reliable" evidence of the suspect's "electronic terrorism." Civil liberties groups would demand to know what this evidence was, but the government would patiently explain that to reveal such information would compromise its ability to fight the clever AP computer whizzes. Anyone who thinks the public would object is a fool. (Of course, the government wouldn't even need to lock up political enemies, and suffer the bother of criminal trials. It could simply take out a contract within the AP system itself.) On this point, Vroman says: But then what if the State, facing imminent destruction, lashes out blindly and tries to shut down the friggin internet? Or what if they establish martial law in the scariest uber-polizei-stadt since Adolf was dancing jigs? These and other Orwellian nightmares are possibilities. However, one must consider that any path to anarchism will eventually take us to a point to where the State is cornered and crazed, and thus this is not the fault of AP. This is simply not true. Even overlooking the breezy dismissal of martial law, we see that Vroman completely misunderstands the role of public opinion in curbing the power of the State. The reason we have enhanced FBI powers this year, rather than last, is that the American people had the crap scared out of them by the 9/11 hijackers. And if AP ever started, the American public would be absolutely scared shitless and would grant the federal government unprecedented powers. On the other hand, if we adopt the commonplace and admittedly humdrum tactic of persuasion, we can effect a bloodless revolution. The Soviet Union fell without the horrors Vroman claims are inevitable. We can do the same with the American federal government. CONCLUSION Libertarian anarchists must realize that the absence of a functioning government is not a sufficient condition for a free society. As critics are quick to point out, there are "lawless" areas in Colombia and Somalia that have no effective government. And if we look at human society before the rise of the State, we certainly do not see an exact model for the world we desire. The only way to achieve a truly free society is to convince the vast majority that property rights must be respected with no exceptions. That is, people must realize that theft is theft, even when 51% endorse it. People must come to realize that murder is murder, even when duly elected "representatives" order it – or when thousands of people pay for it. Any honest proponent must admit that even if AP works as advertised, it will take many years to completely kill off the State. In the meantime, we will have a generation who sees nothing unusual with assassinations of famous people – not just politicians but movie stars, businessmen, models, and anyone else envied or hated by the masses. Such a society could not possibly believe in the sanctity of property rights, or take seriously the non-aggression axiom. I will close with an analysis of Vroman's response to this objection: If society degenerates to the point that putting a $100 bet on someone dying tomorrow results in a very real possibility that you will be right, then this would imply that AP players are so widespread and killing so unremarkable, that you might as well just whack the person yourself and save the C-note. At this point AP will fall into disuse for being an unnecessary middleman in the homicide business, except for those rare hard to find targets, as was its original purpose. Therefore, AP has a feedback loop that prevents it from being practical as a means of facilitating petty murders. And by the same token, if we were to achieve anarchy by using nuclear devices to wipe out all the politicians (as well as millions of innocent people and modern civilization), then the survivors would find the further use of nuclear devices impractical. July 11, 2002 discuss this article in the forum! Can you help us out? Click here to see why you should support anti-state.com. with PayPal Bob Murphy is a graduate student in New York City. He is a columnist for LewRockwell.com and The Mises Institute, and has a personal website at bobmurphy.net. He is also Senior Editor for anti-state.com back to anti-state.com

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2015/05/small-game-fallacies.html Small-game fallacies by Nick Szabo Monday, May 25, 2015 A small-game fallacy occurs when game theorists, economists, or others trying to apply game-theoretic or microeconomic techniques to real-world problems, posit a simple, and thus cognizable, interaction, under a very limited and precise set of rules, whereas real-world analogous situations take place within longer-term and vastly more complicated games with many more players: "the games of life". Interactions between small games and large games infect most works of game theory, and much of microeconomics, often rendering such analyses useless or worse than useless as a guide for how the "players" will behave in real circumstances. These fallacies tend to be particularly egregious when "economic imperialists" try to apply the techniques of economics to domains beyond the traditional efficient-markets domain of economics, attempting to bring economic theory to bear to describe law, politics, security protocols, or a wide variety of other institutions that behave very differently from efficient markets. However as we shall see, small-game fallacies can sometimes arise even in the analysis of some very market-like institutions, such as "prediction markets." Most studies in experimental economics suffer from small-game/large-game effects. Unless these experiments are very securely anonymized, in a way the players actually trust, and in a way the players have learned to adapt to, overriding their moral instincts -- an extremely rare circumstance, despite many efforts to achieve this -- large-game effects quickly creep in, rendering the results often very misleading, sometimes practically the opposite of the actual behavior of people in analogous real-life situations. A common example: it may be narrowly rational and in accord with theory to "cheat", "betray", or otherwise play a narrowly selfish game, but if the players may be interacting with each other after the experimenters' game is over, the perceived or actual reputational effects in the larger "games of life", ongoing between the players in subsequent weeks or years, may easily exceed the meager rewards doled out by the experimenters to act selfishly in the small game. Even if the players can somehow be convinced that they will remain complete strangers to each other indefinitely into the future, our moral instincts generally evolved to play larger "games of life", not one-off games, nor anonymous games, nor games with pseudonyms of strictly limited duration, with the result that behaving according to theory must be learned: our default behavior is very different. (This explains, why, for example, economics students typically play in a more narrowly self-interested way, i.e. more according to the simple theories of economics, than other kinds of students). Small-game/large-game effects are not limited to reputational incentives to play nicer: moral instincts and motivations learned in larger games also include tribal unity against perceived opponents, revenge, implied or actual threats of future coercion, and other effects causing much behavior to be worse than selfish, and these too can spill over between the larger and smaller games (when, for example, teams from rival schools or nations are pitted against each other in economic experiments). Moral instincts, though quite real, should not be construed as necessarily or even usually being actually morally superior to various kinds of learned morals, whether learned in economics class or in the schools of religion or philosophy. Small-game/large-game problems can also occur in auditing, when audits look at a particular system and fail to take into account interactions that can occur outside their system of financial controls, rendering the net interactions very different from what simply auditing the particular system would suggest. A common fraud is for trades to be made outside the scope of the audit, "off the books", rendering the books themselves very misleading as to the overall net state of affairs. Similarly, small-game/large-game problems often arise when software or security architects focus on an economics methodology, focusing on the interactions occurring within the defined architecture and failing to properly take into account (often because it is prohibitively difficult to do so) the wide variety of possible acts occurring outside the system and the resulting changes, often radical, to incentives within the system. For example, the incentive compatibility of certain interactions within an architecture can quickly disappear or reverse when opposite trades can be made outside the system (such as hedging or even more-than-offsetting a position that by itself would otherwise create a very different incentive within the system), or when larger political or otherwise coercive motivations and threats occur outside the analyzed incentive system, changing the incentives of players acting within the system in unpredictable ways. Security protocols always consist of at least two layers: a "dry layer" that can be analyzed by the objective mathematics of computer science, and a "wet layer" that consists of the often unpredictable net large-game motivations of the protocols' users. These should not be confused, nor should the false precision of mathematical economic theories be confused with the objective accuracy of computer science theories, which are based on the mathematics of computer architecture and algorithms and hold regardless of users' incentives and motivations. A related error is the pure-information fallacy: treating an economic institution purely as an information system, accounting only for market-proximate incentives to contribute information via trading decisions, while neglecting how that market necessarily also changes players' incentives to act outside of that market. For example, a currently popular view of proposition bets, the "prediction markets" view, often treats prop bets or idea futures as purely information-distribution mechanisms, with the only incentives supposed as the benign incentive to profit by adding useful information to the market. This fails to take into account the incentives such markets create to act differently outside the market. A "prediction market" is always also one that changes incentives outside that market: a prediction market automatically creates parallel incentives to bring about the predicted event. For example a prediction market on a certain person's death is also an assassination market. Which is why a pre-Gulf-War-II DARPA-sponsored experimental "prediction market" included a prop bet on Saddam Hussein's death, but excluded such trading on any other, more politically correct world leaders. 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 events. Posted by Nick Szabo at 9:36 PM 15 comments: Anonymous said... This is pure gold. Prediction market may become assassination market 12:00 PM brownboi said... Things are moving quickly... https://medium.com/plain-text/using-scicast-to-find-answers-in-the-bitcoin-b... FYI I'm in full agreement with Szabo. Combinatorial prediction markets, never mind mild futarchy, haven't been proven in real life situations. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are virgin territory as they are. No need to further complicate things. Lets handle this the way the early evolution of the web was handled! 2:15 PM Unknown said... While a "prediction market on Death A" provides a payout to Group X upon A's death (Group X being those who correctly bet that A would die), an assassination market needs to provide the payout to a specific individual Z (usually as only Z knows the date of A's death). In a prediction market, one cannot control or restrict membership in Group X, which makes the incentives different: A rival assassin can spy on Z and steal his payout by front running Z's trade, A can bet on his own death and then fake it -profiting from his enemy's contributions-, Z's co-conspirators can wait for the pro-death trade to go through - make a (now-wildly-profitable) pro-life trade - and then rat out Z to the authorities in exchange for legal immunity. These counterexamples all exploit the unrestricted entrance into the prediction market's Group X. Moreover, consider two large prediction markets instead of one: the first, "A to be assassinated sometime in May 2015?", the second, "Someone to try to assassinate A (successfully or otherwise) sometime in May 2015?". What are the incentives now? The more money on M1="No", the more likely someone is to attempt to assassinate (M2="Yes" should increase), warning the victim of danger, and giving bettors a way to profit by thwarting the assassination itself (but not the assassination-attempt). I'd go as far to say that, by narrowing your focus to a single prediction market, you've made the very fallacy you describe in your post. -Paul 5:30 PM HostFat said... @Paul Is it possible that more than one prediction market will survive? I think that it will be the same as for currencies (on the long run at least) Are there incentives to stay on different prediction markets? (I mean, if they give the same features ...) 4:58 PM Unknown said... @HostFat I think you've gotten a little confused. InTrade.com was a single website, but it contained many, many different prediction markets. There may be only one "prediction marketplace" (ie, one website [InTrade], or one protocol [Truthcoin]), but it would be very bizarre to imagine only one prediction market existing. That would be a little like saying "people can only ever trade shares of one corporation (Apple, for example)". 6:15 PM Anonymous said... This needs to be applied to Game of Thrones immediately 8:48 PM shah8 said... When you see a bunch of public intellectual singing a certain tune that rings dubious to you, but beneficial to a state--predicting how another state is just going to lose, lose, lose in the near future because of x, y, z (made up bad faith stuff), that's coming from the stuff Szabo is talking about up there. For instance, the anti-Greek chorus. There are several themes used over the times, however, let's point out the early May theme of how Greece was going to inevitably capitulate completely, and poor, stupid, and feckless Syriaza was going to be tossed over by the voters they overpromised to. In neither case was that ever likely. The international chorus was there to rattle/communicate with institutional stakeholders. No big if it doesn't work, any more than icing the kicker at the end of an American football game. 10:12 PM Anonymous said... For a real world "prediction market that changes incentives outside that market" with $billions at stake, look no further than CDS vs underlying credit. Here's a good place to start: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-18/radioshack-is-running-on-cr... Or this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-22/blackstone-unit-wins-in-no... Just stumbled across this blog. The Assassination Market quip killed me. Thank you. 8:07 PM Kyle said... The "Assassination market" has been around since the early 90s (see Jim Bell and Wikipedia.) 9:53 AM Anonymous said... Nassim Taleb calls that the ludic fallacy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy 12:56 PM Iang said... Any market cannot be separated from feedback into the price of the good itself, a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Response. The more a market attracts interest from less interested parties, the less it predicts some 'true' reflection of the fundamentals. Prediction markets become assassination markets, but they can also becomes a disinformation market. Saddam Hussein could have bet on the book for his death either up or down for different purposes. Up if he wanted to convince people he was dead (and please stop trying to kill me) or down to convince people he wasn't worth killing. Economist Charles Goodhart of the Bank of England postulated that any measurement of the currency intended as a control became like a corset and activity would bulge out elsewhere, rendering the control useless. Likewise a market can become the driver not the intermediary. We see this with certain commodities markets where the paper issuance is orders of magnitude greater than the physical, and prop trading starts to drive the price away from physical fundamentals. 5:59 PM dhi25 said... Look at what happened with "The Interview" movie. Apparently even making a movie about a fictional assassination is considered enough to incentivize assassination in some people's eyes. And ironically Kim Jong-un's (alleged) reaction could have caused him to be more likely to be killed. Real world feedback loops quickly become entangled in unpredictable ways. 9:53 PM Stewart Harding said... It's nice to read an article that isn't just pictures or misguidance from some ageing hippie. Thanks for sharing. 6:23 PM camp said... I don't see how you stop the assassination aspect. Let's use the example of public election results that is often used when discussing prediction markets. The bets focus on the following question: Will Hillary Clinton be inaugurated as president in 2016? A dead person can't be sworn in. Most questions (perhaps all) are subject to an outside attack in this way. I don't see how this issue can be overcome. But it's not the death of prediction markets imo. Those are useful enough (and effectively inevitable) that it's more likely that we'll transition away from violence as a species than avoid mass adoption of prediction markets. 5:15 PM Zawy said... As in the prediction market problem, expectations of a selfish or cooperative environment results in a selfish or cooperative environment. Hence it's a social disaster to philosophically think in terms of "selfish genes" or selfish individuals as capable of originating selfish forces independent of their origins. The global environment is the only source of physical forces (from potential energy gradients) that guides the creation and sustenance of individuals and genes. Information creation in the specifics of markets is the result of a larger, governing environment. The error is not limited to economics and evolution, but goes back to their fundament, physics: Newton's law is not fundamental because it allows for non-conservative forces (mainly friction) which are not fundamental (see Feynman, "Least Action"). This results in the belief that the thermodynamics 2nd law is "entropy is always increased" which has been supplanted by the standard model and direct observation that entropy in large expanding volumes of the Universe is constant (see Weinberg's "The First 3 Minutes") which means all small open volumes of the Universe (e.g., the Earth's Surface) must have decreasing entropy that is emitting entropy to "allow" the Universe to expand (entropy is conserved). The error in thinking the Universe is doomed to a heat death erringly justifies a philosophy of selfishness. 4:36 AM

Yes, Sukumaran's essay is by far the most competent treatment of my Assassination Politics idea and essay.         Jim Bell On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 11:45 AM, grarpamp wrote: http://idsa.in/system/files/strategicanalysis_sukumaran_0604.pdf Sukumaran, R. (2004). "Cryptology, digital assassination and the terrorism futures markets" (PDF). Strategic Analysis. 28 (2): 219–236. doi:10.1080/09700160408450129. S2CID 154847137.             Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the                                         Terrorism Futures Markets R. Sukumaran                                             Abstract     A recent news item indicated that the US Government had been planning     a website that would enable people to place bets on the likelihood of     terrorist events. It was hoped that a study of market trends would enable     intelligence agencies to anticipate and prevent such events.     The idea was mooted by Admiral John Poindexter, head of the Total     Information Awareness Program and bears some resemblance to a     scheme mooted by Jim Bell. Bell, an MIT graduate had proposed a     scheme which uses cryptography and the Internet in order to eliminate     corrupt public officials. His scheme rewards those who correctly predict     the date of death of such officials. However, the identities of the     successful predictors were to be kept secret by using public key     encryption methods. Bell claims that his scheme, if universally adopted,     would lead to the elimination of government itself. Society would     regulate itself by the threat of assassination of those acting inimical to     its interests. No other regulatory mechanism, he claims, would be     required.     This paper attempts to understand Jim Bell's concept which requires     some knowledge of cryptology. It briefly discusses some concepts in     cryptology and electronic banking which are essential to the working     of the scheme. It also discusses the Iowa Electronic Markets which     have been fairly successful in predicting US Presidential elections. It     uses an approach similar to that proposed by Admiral Poindexter's     group. The paper analyses the practicality of both Bell's and     Poindexter's schemes.                                             --*-- Introduction     In late July 2003, the US media was rocked by news that the Pentagon was planning to open a website that would enable investors to place bets on the probability that a particular event -- a terrorist attack or assassination -- would Strategic Analysis, Vol. 28, No.2, Apr-Jun 2004 Revised paper received © Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses                    on May 8, 2004 Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 219 take place.1 The programme, called the Futures Market Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP), was part of the Total Information Awareness Program and was coordinated by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The key figure in the plan was retired Admiral John Poindexter, a prominent actor in the Iran-Contra scandal that bedevilled the Reagan administration. Its purported aim was "to explore new ways to help analysts predict and thereby prevent the use of futures market mechanisms."2     The terrorism futures market bears a certain resemblance to a scheme called `Assassination Politics', propounded by Jim Bell, a disgruntled American cyberpunk and MIT graduate.3 Jim Bell has used the ideas of cryptography and e-banking to develop a concept he calls `Assassination Politics' or `DigitaLiberty'. He conceives of an organisation that would assist in eliminating corrupt officials and oppressive politicians through a system of rewarding those who correctly predict the date on which a particular official or leader will die. The identities of the successful predictors would be kept secret using encryption. Bell believed that the successful implementation of his system would result in the eventual abolition of all forms of state control and even war.     Interestingly, Jim Bell was imprisoned in 1997 for threatening a US federal agent following the publication of his scheme. This, coupled with his refusal to pay tax demands he considers illegal, brought down on him the wrath of the Internal Revenue Service (the American equivalent of the Income Tax Department).4 The apparent co-option of his scheme by the Pentagon therefore deserves closer scrutiny. The Basics of Cryptology Codes, Ciphers and Frequency Analysis     In order to understand Bell's system, we digress a little into cryptology -- "the science of rendering signals secure and extracting information from them."5 This comprises both cryptography -- "rendering information unintelligible to outsiders by various transformations of the alphabet", and cryptanalysis -- the method of breaking down or extracting the message from the intercepted signal.6     Technically, substitution at the word level is known as encoding.7 Thus, if we replace `I am here' by `1 2 3', where 1 represents `I', 2 represents `am' and 3 represents `here', we would have encoded the message. Substitution at letter level is enciphering. This can be done by transposition, where the letters constituting the message are re-arranged, thus forming an anagram or by 220 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004 substitution in which each letter of the alphabet is replaced by another according to a certain pattern.8 If we replaced each letter of a message by another in a certain pattern, we would have enciphered it. Many encryption schemes use a combination of transposition and substitution incorporated in a specific pattern, controlled by a key.9     Encoding messages requires a code-book, which contains an equivalent for every possible word that could be used.10 It would therefore be a fairly hefty tome. Every person in the transmission-reception chain would need a copy. The loss or capture of a code-book would be catastrophic and preparing and distributing a replacement would be a nightmare. Around the 16th century, codes were therefore replaced by ciphers. Ciphers need to cater only for the limited number of letters in the alphabet, instead of for the entire lexicon of words.11     Around the 8th century, the Arabs discovered that some letters of the alphabet occur more often than others in any message.12 They also found that the frequency of the occurrence of these letters is independent of the message, provided it is long enough. In English, the letter `E' occurs most often, followed by `T' and `I'. the Arabs were possibly the first to use frequency analysis to decipher messages, without knowing the `key'. Mono and Poly-Alphabetic Ciphers     The simplest form of substitution ciphers are called Caesar ciphers after Julius Caesar who is believed to have used them.13 These involve replacing each letter in the message by another a fixed number of places away in the alphabet (called a Caesar shift). If `a', `b' and `c' were replaced by `d', `e' and `f' respectively, we would be using a Caesar shift of three. The English alphabet permits Caesar shifts of up to 25. The alphabet re-arranged according to the Caesar shift is called the cipher alphabet. However, we need not stick to simple Caesar shifting. We could also rearrange the letters of the alphabet randomly to form different cipher alphabets. This would give rise to an enormous number of permutations making deciphering much more difficult.     Simple and even random substitution ciphers are however vulnerable to frequency analysis. This led to the development of poly-alphabetic ciphers.14 Here, each letter of the message is enciphered using a different cipher alphabet.15 This is determined by the keyword chosen. Depending on its location in the message and the length of the keyword, the same letter could be enciphered differently. This form of encryption, known as poly-alphabetic encryption, is immune to normal Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 221 frequency analysis. While the enciphering technique might be common knowledge, how the process works depends on the keyword. The Importance of the Keyword     The 16th century de Vigenere cipher was poly-alphabetic. This meant that the cipher changed with every letter of the message. The pattern was decided by the keyword. Keeping the keyword secret therefore became the cryptographic problem. It had to be agreed beforehand by both parties. The keyword decides which particular cipher alphabet of the de Vigenere Table will be used to encrypt each letter. The encrypted message thus contains as many cipher alphabets as the number of non-repeating letters in the keyword. The longer the keyword, the more secure the cipher. The receiver uses the keyword again to decipher the message. The de Vigenere cipher was considered to be practically unbreakable for the next four hundred years since it was invulnerable to simple frequency analysis.16 When it was eventually broken by Charles Babbage and Friedrich Kasiski in the 19th century, deciphering was made possible because of restrictions imposed by the keyword selected.17 One possible solution was not to use meaningful words as keywords. Another was to use keywords as long as the message itself. However, there still remained the problem of informing the receiver what the keyword was.     Many different approaches were used to provide strong encryption. The German Enigma enciphering machine designed by Arthur Scherbius and patented in 1918, used poly-alphabetic ciphering. The Enigma used three scramblers, which meant that every letter went through three stages of substitution. Interchanging the scramblers further increased the number of possible scrambler arrangements. It also had a plugboard, which interchanged six pairs of letters (transposition).18 The total number of arrangements possible on the Enigma was a staggering ten million billion (1015).19 Despite all its features, the Enigma encipherment was eventually broken because it used a key for setting the scrambler positions. Solving the Key Distribution Problem: The Advent of Public Key Cryptography     The main problem the sender and receiver had was that of agreeing on a key. If the key were intercepted, the message could be read. The problem of how to agree on a common key, without an eavesdropper being able to intercept the key, is known as the key distribution problem.20 222 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004     In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman of Stanford University, proposed a solution to the key distribution problem involving the use of one-way mathematical functions. When a number is input, these functions produce a unique output. However, the process is not reversible. Two persons, A and B, use a one-way function of the form yx (modp).21 They agree on values for y and p over an open line, but choose values for x that they keep secret. Both now insert their values for x into the one-way function and exchange their results. These values are inserted in place of y in the one-way function and the result again calculated. The results are identical. This becomes the key and it can be used to operate a symmetrical cipher. A and B have therefore managed to agree, without meeting, on a common key which they can use for enciphering and deciphering messages. To take a simple example, an eavesdropper would know that A and B have agreed to use the values y=7 and p=11, in the function yx (modp), but would be unable to work out their respective values of x. The values of y and p actually used are very large, thus making life more difficult for any eavesdropper. Asymmetric Keys     Thus far, all keys had been symmetric -- the same key being used for both enciphering and deciphering. Whitfield Diffie therefore visualised a system which would use an asymmetric key. One key, widely publicised, would be used for enciphering and another key, solely in the possession of the receiver, would be used to decipher the message. However, Diffie did not have an example of a function that could work in the manner he envisaged. The problem was solved in 1977 by Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, who evolved what is now called the RSA system, after their initials. Public Key Cryptography -- the RSA System     Rivest, Shamir and Adelman used a one-way function. One-way functions are non-reversible. Just by knowing the function used and the output obtained, one cannot work backwards to obtain the input. Rivest and his colleagues used a one-way function based on modular arithmetic. The message is digitised and put into the function which generates another number called the ciphertext. The system essentially uses the fact that it is exceedingly difficult to factor the product (N) of two very large primes. N is called the public key.22 To send a message to A, B inserts her public key and the message into the one-way function and sends the result to A. Merely knowing A's public key is not enough for anyone to decipher the message. He also requires A's private key. The private key is related to the Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 223 primes that A multiplies together to obtain the public key. However, it is difficult to factorise a very large number into the two large primes that are its factors. If the prime numbers used are of the order of 1065, the number N would be of the order of 10130. Factorising such a number could take a 1 GHz Pentium with 128 MB of RAM several months. Actually, the values of N used in important transactions tend to be much higher. Hash Functions and Digital Signatures     Digital signatures were originally suggested by Diffie and Hellman as a method of verifying that a message had not been tampered with and that it had indeed been sent by the purported author.23 These are generated using hash functions. A hash function H takes the message m and transforms it into a sequence of fixed length, whatever the size of the original message. This is called the hash value h (i.e., h = H(m)). Reversing the process should not yield the message m or its length. Hash functions employed in cryptography are usually chosen to be collision- free, i.e., no two messages will result in the same hash value. Further, neither the message nor its length can be extracted from the hash value. A first encrypts a message using B's public key and sends it to him. B uses his private key to read the message. In order to generate a digital signature, A inputs her message into a hash function. She then encrypts the resulting hash value using her private key and sends the result to B separately. B extracts the hash value using A's public key. He then applies A's hash function to the original message. If the resulting hash value is the same, it proves that the message has not been tampered with and that it was genuinely originated by A. Privacy and e-Banking Digital Cash     Personal privacy is now a major public concern. Increased computerisation has resulted in credit card companies and banks creating huge databases on customer preferences and spending patterns. Despite assertions to the contrary, this information is often sold to other commercial interests and can also be linked to virtually build up a dossier on any particular individual. This information can be misused by various agencies, including the government.     Increased computerisation has resulted in the development of digital cash. These are essentially numbers which represent a certain sum of money. A bank would sign (superimpose) a particular series of notes with its digital signature 224 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004 (private key).24 All notes signed with this particular key would have a certain value. These bank notes could be authenticated using the bank's public key. Thus, if A wishes to withdraw a dollar from her bank, she first generates a random number, signs it with her private key and sends it to the bank. The bank verifies her signature with the public key she has earlier agreed for transactions with the bank. It then removes her signature, signs the number with its own private key, certifying that it is worth one dollar and returns the now valid note after debiting her account by one dollar. This note can now be used by A to pay for goods in B's shop. B can verify the note by checking the bank's digital signature. He then sends the note to the bank. The bank verifies its own signature and the note number and notes that it has been spent by A. It then credits B's account with one dollar, simultaneously debiting A's account by the same amount. The note cannot now be double-spent. However, the system described does not have privacy since the electronic notes can be tracked. Blind Signatures and Digital Pseudonyms     In a paper published in the Scientific American in August 1992, David Chaum and his colleagues outlined a scheme to prevent such digital cash being traced. They developed a system they called `blind signatures'.25 When sending a note to the bank, its number is multiplied by a random factor. The bank therefore does not know its number. It only knows that A has sent it. Once the bank has signed and returned it, A removes the blinding factor. Since the bank has no knowledge of the actual note number, transactions cannot be linked. The notes cannot be traced since the blinding factor is unknown.     In the same article, David Chaum also described a concept called a `digital pseudonym' which would ensure privacy while at the same time-enabling a person's identity to be validated. A person could choose different digital pseudonyms for every organisation that he/she does business with. This would be done by using `electronic representatives' and `electronic observers'.26     An electronic representative would reside on a smart card with a keypad and display. It would control all electronic transactions that its owner makes, all data input and generate the private and public keys required for a transaction. This would ensure total privacy and untraceability of transactions.     `Electronic observers' would prevent double-spending of digital banknotes and protect the interests of banks. The observer would reside on the smart card along with the electronic representative and monitor its behaviour. Observer and Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 225 representative would be programmed not to trust each other. In order to protect its owner's interests, the representative would be in overall control and ensure that unauthorised transactions are not carried out. Observers would be validated by validating authorities. These would also authenticate the various digital pseudonyms that a person requires for transactions with different agencies. The validating process would assure any agency transacting business that a genuine person exists behind the digital pseudonym. Assassination Politics or DigitaLiberty     An American anarchist named Jim Bell has integrated all these aspects, into a system for the elimination of corrupt Government officials.27 Jim Bell is an MIT graduate, presently serving a term in prison for threatening a US federal agent. His original grouse seems to have been that he was unfairly taxed. His scheme, which he calls DigitaLiberty, has been published on the Internet under the title "Assassination Politics".28 The effectiveness of Jim Bell's scheme hinges on the concept of digital cash and digital pseudonyms, as envisaged by David Chaum and on securing personal anonymity through the use of Public Key Cryptography (PKC). It envisages an organisation which would act as a combination of bulletin board, mail forwarder and lottery manager. It would maintain a list of particularly disliked public officials and separate accounts for each person. The organisation would also display details of the money that it has received as contributions from the public in each account. This amount would be paid to the person who successfully predicts the date of that individual's death.     An individual would send to this agency, an encrypted envelope containing some digital cash encrypted with the organisation's public key. Inside this envelope would be another, containing his prediction for the date on which a particular official would die. The second envelope is encrypted using the person's private key and hence cannot be opened. The organisation would open the first envelope with its private key and discover the digital cash. It would not, however, be able to open the second envelope without the public key which the predictor retains. It thus does not know whose death has been predicted and when. People aggrieved by an individual could also send the organisation some digital cash to be paid to the person who correctly predicts that individual's death. When the prediction is proved right, the predictor wins the reward which has been posted, for anyone who correctly predicts the death of that individual. Bell suggested that the use of (PKC) and digital pseudonyms would ensure absolute anonymity. This would prevent people being targeted for criminal activity by government agencies like the 226 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004 FBI. In any case, no one would be carrying out any illegal activity because people would merely be predicting the dates on which some particular individuals would die. No one would be incited to carry out a killing. The reward would be due whether the person died a natural or unnatural death. Preventing Frivolous Predictions     In Bell's system, the name of the official and the date of his predicted death are both encrypted using PKC and cannot be read. The prediction would be posted on the bulletin board. In order to ensure that frivolous predictions are not sent in, individuals would also have to enclose some digital money. This money would be added to the amount sent in by all those who have also predicted or wish the death of that particular individual. There would be nothing to indicate the identity of the person sending the prediction. The amounts contributed for the death of a particular person would be publicly posted on the bulletin board. Protecting Identity     If the prediction comes true, the person who has correctly anticipated the death of the particular individual would send the organisation the key to decode his prediction. The organisation would open his envelope and discover the name and date of death correctly predicted. The individual would also send another public key which the organisation would use to encrypt the reward. The public key would be posted to enable anyone else, who wishes to do so, to send money to the successful predictor. The use of PKC, digital pseudonyms and blind signatures would ensure the anonymity of the successful predictor. Further, no one would know what role, if any, he had played in the demise of the individual. Even if it wished to, the organisation could not assist any authority which wished to trace the successful predictor. Even the digital cash would not be traceable to its source.     This is the essence of Jim Bell's system. He summarises its advantages as follows: The prediction can be made in total anonymity. Since the prediction itself is encrypted and revealed only on the death of the `target', the target cannot be warned. The predictor need not reveal his prediction, unless he chooses to. He need not claim the reward either. He can transfer it to anyone else since it can be blinded. The organisation, too, does not know the contents of any prediction and therefore cannot be held liable for any criminal activity. However, for the system to work, a potential predictor would also have to be convinced that the money posted would actually be paid for a successful prediction. Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 227 How It Works     Assume that a citizen is upset with a government official or politician who is corrupt or violates his rights. He mails the individual's name and his predicted date of death to the organisation along with any amount of money that he considers appropriate. If even 1 per cent of the population of India were willing to contribute Rs 1/- towards the reward, the amount collected would total Rs one crore. The successful predictor could collect his money knowing that his identity is safe and not dependent on the benevolence of the organisation. The money he receives would also be untraceable to its source.29     Governments could target the organisation for promoting criminal activity. However, Bell argues that the organisation could not be charged with criminal activity because it is merely forwarding mail. It also could not be charged with being an accessory after the fact since it would not know what information is contained in the encrypted digital envelopes. It would not itself be engaged in any criminal activity. There would be no conspiracy because there are no co- conspirators. All participants would be anonymous. The predictions are themselves encrypted and the name of the target unknown. However, one interpretation of the law suggests that the organisation could be considered to be acting criminally in `endeavouring to persuade' people to murder. However, Bell suggests that the organisation would, in fact, become global and therefore, difficult to target under national laws. It would then bear comparison with international terrorist networks. Further, the mere fact that no laws now exist to combat such organisations does not mean that this will always be the case. It is more than likely that specific laws would be drafted to target any group planning to enter this `niche' business. Revolutionising Society     Bell suggests that the implementation of his scheme would revolutionise society.30 He goes so far as to suggest that even the police and military could be abolished. Leaders of bellicose states could be removed without the dangers of war. No leader would be immune.     In most cases, it is the general population which has the most to lose from war. The availability of such a system would ensure that countries are not pushed into unpopular wars. Bell feels that this would result in a de-bellicisation of international politics and even remove the need for large armies. He suggests that why this has not happened so far is because it has been left to the leaders themselves. Earlier, a deed could be done but the doer could not be rewarded without fear of discovery. 228 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004 The perpetrator could be traced and punished by the police. The beauty of his system is that successful predictors could be rewarded without any risk of discovery. The random nature of the whole process ensures a disconnect between predictor and target.     Such a system would also ensure that no judges or prosecutors would be willing to take up any case on behalf of an unpopular government since they could also be targeted. Any dishonest organisation (one which failed to pay the promised reward for a successful prediction) which goes into this business could itself be targeted or forced out of the market by a similar, but more honest organisation. The ethics of the marketplace! Self-Regulated Policing     Bell also suggests that crime itself would reduce. According to him, the police are generally unable to prevent serious crime and prefer to target `victimless' crimes like pornography, prostitution or gambling. However, the cost of maintaining a police force is enormous. He suggests that a self-regulating system could be created for a fraction of this cost. He feels that people would be willing to contribute a small sum in order to predict the death of a malefactor, say a car thief. Even insurance companies would be willing to reward successful predictors, in order to reduce losses caused by payouts for car theft claims. This would result in car theft becoming a risky proposition. Competition from Criminal Organisations     The other fear is of criminals using similar methods to set up an organisation targeting law-abiding people -- a modern-day variation of extortion. However, with an unethical organisation, there is no guarantee that payment would let you off the list. Such an organisation would be willing to target anyone, not just wrong- doers.31 The advantage of the legitimate organisation is that it would target only evil-doers. The monetary incentive for terminating evil-doers would therefore be higher than for targeting an ordinary individual in whose death hardly anyone would have any interest, The criminal organisation therefore may not continue long in business. The ethical organisation would survive. The Viability of Digital Assassination     From cryptography to the elimination of intrusive government the police, the military and war itself, is truly a giant leap. But does this system stand up under Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 229 examination? It is true that PKC, digital pseudonyms and blind signatures would enable identities to be kept secret. However, it presupposes that, given the public key, determining the private key would be difficult. PKC depends to a large extent on the huge amount of time that it takes to factorise very large numbers. However, computers continue to become smaller and faster. It is also not impossible that mathematical algorithms enabling faster factorisation of huge numbers could be developed. These could significantly reduce the time factor. However, it is equally likely that PKC would then use much larger numbers and also that different encryption methods using asymmetric keys could be developed.     The kind of scheme Bell proposes is likely to threaten established forms of government. It is unlikely that an establishment, aware of the threat such a system would pose to itself, would allow its creation. Such an organisation would need to be visible, accessible and with public support.     The technology proposed to be used is only likely to be found in advanced countries which presumably have an active citizenry concerned about governance and civil liberty. The system also assumes widespread awareness among the public of advances in cryptography and electronic banking. But people in most countries are wary of the claims advanced for new technology. Further, new technology is generally controlled by capital which already owns the technology currently in use. New technology will therefore, generally be suppressed until society has been sufficiently prepared for its introduction -- the aim being to maximise profits. Thus, for example, we may be reasonably certain that the replacements for fossil fuels, as and when they arrive, will be controlled by the likes of Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon, which controlled fossil fuels in the first place.     The fact that this system requires the availability of advanced technology rules out its adoption in the developing world which would possibly benefit the most from the implementation of such a system. It is unlikely that it could work with the kind of primitive infrastructure that is available in most of the developing world. In fact, it is highly likely that it would be an attractive proposition for adoption by criminal organisations in the developing world, given the lack of activist interest in issues of governance and the difficulty of mobilising public opinion. It therefore seems that Bell's scheme will remain an interesting study in the use of technology for the abolition of intrusive government and be added to the many schemes for world government that have cropped up in the past.     Bell does not specify who will run this organisation. It will need capital, equipment and, most important of all, personnel. How will it be funded? It will 230 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004 obviously need to keep a percentage of the donations people send it for its own operating expenses. The key to the organisation is its personnel and their integrity, since it is they who would maintain the website and post the rewards. The Terrorism Futures Market     In late July 2003, news broke that the Pentagon was researching a scheme called the Futures Market Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP). 32 The idea had been broached by Admiral John Poindexter, National Security Adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a prominent casualty in the Iran-Contra affair. The budget for the program was apparently US$ 8 million. The program was part of the Total Information Awareness Program and was coordinated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).     Admiral Poindexter, who has a PhD in nuclear physics, has had a controversial career.33 He has apparently specialised in offering unorthodox solutions to difficult problems. In the Iran-Contra affair, he and Col. Oliver North sold weapons to Iran, then under US sanctions for holding American hostages. With the proceeds, he financed the Contra insurgents to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.     Poindexter's latest idea is to allow investors to bet on their predictions of likely terrorist actions to help law and intelligence agencies anticipate better where the next outrage could take place. This system is supposedly modelled on the Delphi method of forecasting, pioneered by the RAND Corporation. The assumption is that, investors acting en masse, could pool their bits of information together to create a far better picture of reality than they could individually. A better picture of the future of the stock market or the national economy should thus emerge. The Iowa Electronics Markets     This principle is already being used in the Iowa Electronics Markets to predict the outcome of presidential elections. The Iowa Electronics Markets are small- scale real money markets run by the University of Iowa Business School. The most well-known of these is the Presidential Futures Markets, which aims to predict winning candidates in the Presidential elections. Essentially, traders are asked to answer which candidate they think people would vote for on election day. A cocktail of options is offered. The system uses classical statistics, a representative sample of voters and assumes truthful responses to arrive at a prediction of the result.34 This is done on a daily basis. Trading is frozen on the night before the Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 231 election and the results compared with the actual results.     Each market is linked to a specific future event. Traders are offered a bundle of contracts, each contract relating to a particular subset of the main event, for example, the likelihood of a particular Democratic candidate winning against any Republican candidate, or a particular candidate being nominated by a particular party. Each bundle consists of one of each contract available in the market. The bundles are bought and sold by the system at a price which is the aggregate pay- off for that outcome as determined by the market. The system merely introduces contracts into the market. Traders can exchange these at prices that they decide. Traders only know the best bid and ask for prices and the last trade price. They do not know the quantities available at these prices.     Joyce Berg and her fellow researchers at the University of Iowa have discovered that the system is fairly accurate as regards US Presidential elections. Accuracy is enhanced when the event is high profile and arouses general interest by market volume. They have also discovered that markets with fewer contracts, i.e., fewer variables (candidates) are more accurate. FutureMAP     With FutureMAP, Poindexter attempted to extrapolate the Iowa Presidential markets system to the prediction of terroristic events. Each of these outcomes would become a contract. It was assumed that the information available to various players in the market could be used to determine the likelihood of an event and might even yield information on terrorist attacks. The probability would be proportional to the price. Since people would be betting with cash, it was assumed that they would be more truthful.     The assumptions underlying FutureMAP were that human beings are rational economic players and that markets accurately predict the future. The model also assumed that information distribution processes are highly efficient, readily leveraged by players and that markets are free from manipulation.35 All these assumptions may be questioned.     Moreover, unlike Presidential polls, which are scheduled to occur on a known date, the schedule for terror attacks is known only to the terrorists. Even if we assume that the target is known and that the terror event is certain to occur, the day would still be uncertain. The peak price would be no indication, since we would not know that it is the peak. Further, to assume that the information is so 232 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004 widespread that it has filtered into the market, is contrary to what we know of the way terrorists operate. If they allowed this to happen, they would be giving away information which could jeopardise their plans.     A more probable scenario would be one where terrorists pretend to be interested in a particular target. This would enable them to divert attention from the actual target and also enable them to manipulate the odds and the market. Research however indicates that attempts to skew the market only have a momentary impact.     The scheme could also be used by government to enable players to predict the death of enemy leaders like Saddam Husein. In such a case, the resemblance to Jim Bell's scheme would become very marked. In this case, players would attempt to bet on whether Saddam, Fidel Castro or Osama bin Laden would be alive on a certain date. In this case, the government's role would not be passive. It must be presumed that this would be linked to active attempts by intelligence agencies to hasten the demise of these individuals. The facts in this case would be known to the government and individuals would be betting on death dates. This would raise the same ethical arguments as Bell's scheme.     The exposure of Poindexter's scheme resulted in a huge outcry in Congress. The scheme was dropped like a hot potato, essentially on moral grounds.36 However, some analysts feel that it could have been useful as a trend indicator and should have been continued, though perhaps not in the context of terrorism. In a study published by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Professor Abramowicz concludes that information markets could help refine administrative agency predictions about government policy if the possibility of manipulation can be overcome. It, therefore, seems likely that FutureMAP may eventually resurface in an entirely different context as a policy analysis tool. Conclusion     Jim Bell has suggested a scheme to punish corrupt officials which he calls DigitaLiberty. This presumes the existence of an organisation, which would allow those who correctly predict the death of such officials to be rewarded with untraceable cash, while keeping their identities secret. Discussion of his scheme and the eventual abolition of government, which he hopes it will bring about, require some rudimentary understanding of cryptography. Salient encryption systems have therefore been examined to understand better the issues at the heart of cryptology. Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 233     Bell's idea hinges on the use of PKC to preserve the anonymity of individuals who participate in the scheme. It also requires the availability of digital cash and digital pseudonyms on the lines suggested by David Chaum.     Asymmetric cipher systems together with the Internet form the cornerstone of Jim Bell's scheme of DigitaLiberty. It is truly revolutionary. It is a moot point whether it will be implemented. The dangers it poses to existing systems of command and control will probably ensure that it will never be. Bell argues that the system is not criminal. However, since implementation is likely to threaten elites, it seems very likely that laws will be updated to make such activity illegal.     The heavy dependence on advanced technology ensures that the system is not likely to be used in the developing world. While we cannot deny the devilish ingenuity of Bell's scheme, it seems most likely that it will merely be an interesting appendix in a book on the elimination of governments.     The Futures Market Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) propounded by Admiral John Poindexter seems to have been inspired by Jim Bell's `Assassination Politics'. The distinction is that it would be operated in the interest of national security. It would allow punters to bet on the occurrence of certain terrorist events like the likelihood of a terrorist attack, the assassination of a leader or the death of a wanted terrorist to obtain actionable intelligence on likely events.     Unlike Presidential elections, the time-table for terror events cannot be predicted. Terrorists are unlikely to be influenced by market decisions. That FutureMAP was under serious consideration only highlights the fact that no idea is too outrageous to be considered.                               References/End Notes     1  "Amid Furor, Pentagon kills terrorism futures market" , 30 July, 2003, at http://www.         cnn.com /2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market     2  Ibid.     3  Schlegel, Alex, "Jim Bell and Assassination Politics", at http://alex.creartivity.org/         articles/art-200109-assassination_politics.html updated July 30, 2003     4  Ibid.     5  Kahn, David, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. 1966. Weidenfeld and         Nicolson; London. p. xvi.     6  Ibid. pp. xiii-xv     7  Singh, Simon, The Code Book. 1999. Fourth Estate; London. p. 30 234 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004   8  Kahn, David, no. 5, p. xiii.   9  Ibid., p. xv   10 Singh, Simon, no. 7, p. 31   11 Ibid.   12 Ibid., p. 17   13 Kahn, David, no. 5, p 84   14 Ibid., p. 46   15 Ibid., p. 49   16 Ibid., p. 51   17 Ibid., pp. 208-213   18 A working model of the Enigma is available at the site indicated below and will serve       to give a good idea of how it functioned. See "Working Model of Enigma ciphering       machine", Java Applet by Russell Schwager at http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/       ~russell/classes/enigma/enigma.html   19 Singh, Simon, no.7, p. 136   20 Ibid., p. 251   21 Ibid., pp. 264-265   22 Ibid., pp. 274-275   23 Ibid., p. 300   24 Chaum, David, Achieving Electronic Privacy. Scientific American. August 1992,       pp. 96-101   25 Ibid., pp. 97-98   26 Ibid., pp. 98-99   27 McCullagh, Declan, "Crypto-Convict Won't Recant", April 14, 2000 at http://       www.antioffline.com/apol.html   28 Bell, Jim, Assassination Politics", April 03, 1997 at http://jya.com/ap.htm.   29 Ibid.   30 Ibid.   31 Ibid.   32 "Amid Furor, Pentagon Kills Terrorism Futures Market", July 30, 2003 at       http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market   33 "John M Poindexter" at http://www.warblogging.com/tia/poindexter.bio.html   34 Berg, Joyce, et al, "Results from a Dozen Years of Election Futures Markets       Research", University of Iowa, November 2000, at http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/       archive/BFNR_2000.pdf Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Markets 235     35 Ritholtz, Barry L., "Terrorism Futures Market: Much Ado about the Wrong Thing";           The Big Picture: Macro Perspectives on the Capital markets, Economy Geopolitics,           August 02, 2003 at http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2003/08/           terrorism_futur.html     36 "Terrorism Futures Market Plan Cancelled", Fox News Channel, July 29, 2003 at           http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C2933%2C93190%2C00.html                             Wg Cdr R. Sukumaran is a Research Fellow at IDSA.                             He is an Air Force fighter pilot and has operated on both                             INS Vikrant and INS Viraat. His research interests include                             military history, technology and the use of air power. Errata: The name `Lt Cdr Frank Taylor of the Royal Navy' on page 50 of the Jan-Mar 2004 issue of Strategic Analysis should read `Lt Cdr David R. Taylor of the Royal Navy'. -- Editor 236 Strategic Analysis/Apr-Jun 2004

I withdraw nothing of my Assassination Politics essay.         Jim Bell On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 6:22 PM, professor rat wrote: Let the record reflect Jim Dumb-bell Dolton has now washed his hands of ' Section 10 ' of his 1995 Essay on Assassination Politics.  His idea now boils down to a technocratic ' Black Box ' scheme involving strict secrecy and a scheme to be promoted by elitist specialists and apparently enjoyed only by the far-libertarian Right.  He is no longer an anarchist, and judging by the Neo-Nazi criminals he associates with in the last few years he really hates anarchism.  On Monday, 30 August 2021, 05:09:43 am AEST, jim bell wrote: Yes, Sukumaran's essay is by far the most competent treatment of my Assassination Politics idea and essay.          Jim Bell

      On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 11:45 AM, grarpamp wrote:

  http://idsa.in/system/files/strategicanalysis_sukumaran_0604.pdf

To say it is "by far the best" treatment is obviously a comparison, not an absolute scale. All in all, the public's handling of my AP essay has been atrociously incompetent.    For people who claim they love freedom and hate tyranny, I've described the solution.  People have had 26 years to disprove or just cast doubt on AP, and nobody has accomplished that. AP will work, when tried.             Jim Bell On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 7:25 PM, professor rat wrote: Oh please.  You just said this Suk paper was the best take you'd seen on your essay and it elided section 10 completely.  You know you really sound brain-damaged ever since you talked to Jeff Berwick. You could probably use some professional help. On Monday, 30 August 2021, 12:12:37 pm AEST, jim bell wrote: I withdraw nothing of my Assassination Politics essay.         Jim Bell

      On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 6:22 PM, professor rat wrote:

  

Let the record reflect Jim Dumb-bell Dolton has now washed his hands of ' Section 10 ' of his 1995 Essay on Assassination Politics.  His idea now boils down to a technocratic ' Black Box ' scheme involving strict secrecy and a scheme to be promoted by elitist specialists and apparently enjoyed only by the far-libertarian Right.  He is no longer an anarchist, and judging by the Neo-Nazi criminals he associates with in the last few years he really hates anarchism. 

On Monday, 30 August 2021, 05:09:43 am AEST, jim bell wrote:

Yes, Sukumaran's essay is by far the most competent treatment of my Assassination Politics idea and essay.          Jim Bell

...

      On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 11:45 AM, grarpamp wrote:

  http://idsa.in/system/files/strategicanalysis_sukumaran_0604.pdf

Lately the world and the internet has been asking... When will Putin die? And more generally... when will invaders, authoritarians, tyrants, despots, rulers [and bodies of rulers] ruling, their murderers and thievers, their [en]forcers of their will against free-living non-forcing peoples, their system built upon the immoral evil wrong of original force initiated against peaceful others, etc... die? Are there any predictions? Any novel peaceful mechanisms waiting yet untried? Any answers to the world's askings?

Assassination technologies

https://nypost.com/2022/07/08/shinzo-abe-assassin-used-homemade-gun/ Commercial factory produced? No. 3D-Printed? No. Guns and ammo banned? Yes. Homemade? Yes. Pipe, wood, duct tape, zip ties, batteries, glow coils, black powder, projectiles... crude, effective, unstoppable. Models included a nine-barrelled zombie disruptor.

any thoughts on relevance of AP today given increased difficulty in retaining anonymity when there is a significant power disparity?

Anonymity is only needed if a society is intolerant, abusive to individuals / subcultures / ethnicities / etc., has draconian or overbroad laws that are applied in racist, classist, ageist, etc. ways, and similarly broken dynamics.  We need it less than we used to, but the need is uneven around the world and fluctuates. It is of course best for society, with or without anonymity, to eliminate all of those society shortcomings.  And that is precisely what liberal & progressive politics (in most ways), social justice, civil rights, and other movements have been promoting & achieving.  You used to need anonymity if you wanted to have sex out of wedlock, gay anything, interracial anything, use marijuana, talk to people in certain parts of the world, etc. The flip side is that many things considered, and often legally considered, to be bad are enabled by anonymity: fraud, abuses of various kinds, underage sex targeting, extremist indoctrination of those without sufficient mental firewalls who are weak to manipulation, conspiracies for terrorism / overthrowing government / murder / mayhem, etc.  Many people want those stopped at any cost, including deanonymising as needed.  A lot of old & new laws are about this.  Sometimes they seem fair, sometimes not. In recent years & decades, many problematic situations have resolved, laws negated.  We just took a step backward, in the majority of people's minds, where suddenly a big category of anonymity has become important again.  I already had a personal rule never to discuss anyone's abortion with anyone but them forever for just this kind of reason.  I felt it was just too hot of a topic and I didn't want anyone to feel unwanted scrutiny or shame-based regret.  Probably it was bad that many people did that as people could, in their mind, build up this idea that it was rare, bad, abused, not a normal thing, etc. which helped boost, especially in immature & less thoughtful people, that it should be outlawed. People often think that they are anonymous in various ways, when they are not.  People think their votes are secret, and that is true in a limited way, but the bar is fairly low.  I ran for city council in a city in Silicon Valley.  As part of that, I found that for <$100 I could buy a DVD with a file with all of the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of all registered voters in Santa Clara County, including how they voted in 5 races.  Anyone with a justifiable reason, which is a low bar I think as anyone can say they are starting a PAC which I think is a valid justification, can buy such a database for any county in the US.  (I hesitate to point this out here, but surely this is widely known.  Keep in mind: the GOP operatives legally have this for every county in the US, and that they shared it with the Russians for voter targeting via Facebook et al.  That seems like it should be illegal, but apparently was not.) So the FBI & others have sometimes abused their powers & access in the past.  And they may sometimes now, although it is much more difficult presumably, with some kind of auditing & checks.  And certainly many want to avoid their scrutiny out of principle, etc.  But most people, when they directly or indirectly vote and otherwise insist on perfect security & safety from bad actors shooting up a school, poisoning a community, or crashing a plane, are endorsing government agencies deanonymising as needed.  And, given tight controls & narrow usage, with auditing and actual consequences for consequential abuse, I am OK with that.  It is OK if someone somewhere (and their AI / ML booster systems) see 'too much' if they never share or do anything bad with that information.  It has long been the case that we have to trust the IRS with a lot of detailed information, which even includes stating income from illegal activities which they are restricted by law from sharing with law enforcement.  Their are certain other cases where we firewall to gain a greater good. And that counts for large entities with widespread access, even more so: I've talked to many people who are suspicious of Google, Amazon, et al wrt smart speakers, email, browsing data, advertisement tracking, etc.  It always puzzled me why random people feel the details of their lives are so important that companies valued in the trillions would deliberately betray trust in any way for some hard to fathom minuscule benefit.  Some leaking, uncomfortable situations have happened, but they are often corrected or at least they are clear & normalized as necessary. I have been wanting to create a new approach to communications, social networking, and general information sharing.  One problem to be solved is supporting encryption, identity, security, etc. while also avoiding things like extremist / criminal abuses, and things like the India Villiage Rumor Killings gossip problem.  I have some ideas for that, and I've been watching what WhatsApp is doing with limiting forwards.  I actually mentioned one of my ideas to solve this with the WhatsApp team when I interviewed with them a couple years ago. Stephen On 7/10/22 12:31 PM, Karl Semich wrote:

Apologies that I have not been keeping up with this thread, so my commentary may be disruptive. I've kind of been just using the list as a notepad in spam threads, which might be disrespectful.

I'm thinking of anonymity and AP.

Democracies need anonymity, so if democracy sticks around, we'll need to improve how information spreads from citizens, anyway.

In the meantime, murder is legal in many contexts such as self defense in many areas, by government workers such as law enforcement, or probably with support of a major group already participating in it in some way. I imagine such things have been mentioned or thought of before. Seems like "legitimate" assassination fould be a way to rebootstrap things in a surveilled situation.

But really we need anonymity anyway. I wonder how targeted people could support rebuilding common anonymity.

On Sun, 10 Jul 2022 04:33:02 -0400 grarpamp wrote:

The 1960 Assassination of Inejirō Asanuma That Saved Japan From Communism

fucking hilarious - CIA turd grancrap gloating over CIA crimes.

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1546198627814498304 Apparently DC Democrat Operatives are paying $200 to anyone

https://twitter.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1549417453922316288 SWITZERLAND: “Wanted” posters for the elites belonging to the World Economic Forum. https://twitter.com/NerumWim/status/1548425493648588804 Switzerland is awake. Wanted posters for Great Reset criminals being displayed in style at a protest. Who should be added? https://media.gab.com/system/media%5C_attachments/files/111/260/079/playable... Wanted Posters for WEF'rs etc "Could it be Switzerland doesn't want these technocrat con artists and fascist globalist monopolist neo-Communists using their country as an HQ anymore."

Notable uptick within the world's political sphere over recent years in both mentions / rhetoric, and of actual completed assassinations. That old game of thrones. Here's another one... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/member-irans-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corp... https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/08/10/crypto-payments-implicated-in-all...

Notable uptick... Stay out of the crossfire.

Putin Ally Assassination Attempt Reportedly Ends In Daughter's Death https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11130731/Daughter-Ukraine-war-maste... https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1561098991382589440 The daughter of Alexander Dugin - a close ally and adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin - has reportedly been killed in an assassination attempt meant for her father. Darya Dugin was 'blown to pieces' near Moscow suburb of Bolshiye Vyazyomy, according to reports, which say taht Alexander had originally planned to travel back with her from a festival before deciding to ride in a separate car, according to the Daily Mail and other outlets.

Notable uptick... Stay out of the crossfire.

Argentina VP Survives Point-Blank Assassination Attempt https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-62762421 https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_images/Argentina.pdf https://twitter.com/LautaroMaislin/status/1565506730661904384 https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-vp-unharmed-after-assailant... https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-buenos-aires-argentina-3583b98f34338e70... Argentinian vice president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner survived an astonishingly close encounter with death on Thursday night, as a would-be assassin pointed a loaded pistol at her head and seemingly pulled the trigger with no effect. The gun was loaded with five rounds, according to President Alberto Fernández. "Cristina remains alive because, for a reason not yet technically confirmed, the gun, which contained five bullets, did not fire," he said in a nationwide television broadcast, describing the attack as "the most serious incident since we recovered democracy” in 1983. Amidst a throng of supporters outside her home, Vice President Fernández was exiting her vehicle when a pistol emerged from the crowd -- the muzzle just inches from her face. A video captured the astounding incident -- and, it seems, even the click of the would-be assassin's trigger pull: El video del arma contra @CFKArgentina pic.twitter.com/8j1xpMnPoe — Lautaro Maislin (@LautaroMaislin) September 2, 2022 Fernández de Kirchner blinked and ducked down as first the crowd and then her security detail reacted. The assailant was quickly apprehended as he stood amongst her backers. Though his name has not yet been released, authorities say he is a 35-year old of Brazilian origin. Fernández de Kirchner is embroiled in controversy: "The attack came as the vice president is facing a trial for alleged acts of corruption during her 2007-2015 presidency — charges that she vehemently denies and that have led her supporters to surround her home in the upscale Recoleta neighborhood of Argentina’s capital," reports the Associated Press. She stands accused of defrauding the government and corruptly awarding public works projects to her political base in Patagonia. Prosecutors are seeking a 12-year sentence and a lifetime ban from politics. As Senate president, however, she enjoys immunity, which could end with her losing a late-2023 election or if the Supreme Court ratifies her sentence. Mere inches separated Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from near-certain death (Television Publica Argentina via AP) "We can disagree, we can have deep disagreements, but hate speech cannot take place because it breeds violence and there is no chance of violence coexisting with democracy," President Fernández said. Another angle shows the pistol extended as Fernández de Kirchner exits her vehicle (Reuters via BBC) In what might be a seen as an exploitation of the event, Fernández declared Friday a national holiday so that Argentines could "express themselves in defense of life, democracy and in solidarity with our vice president." Witnesses of the assassination attempt console each other in the aftermath (AP photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Notable uptick... Stay out of the crossfire.

Two more... Pelosi gets sordid attempted whack by DePape... Khan feels the sting days later... Imran Khan Undergoes Surgery After Surviving Assassination Attempt, Shooter Confesses Pakistan security services have confirmed an attempted assassination against the country's ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan earlier in the day at a political rally. https://twitter.com/Samurai19801/status/1588192645116985345 CCTV camera footage of the shooter who shot Imran Khan. The shooter was subsequently arrested by PTI members and handed over to Pakistani Police. pic.twitter.com/zrHSs8kq4m — Soviet -Afghan Wars Samurai 1980 (@Samurai19801) November 3, 2022 https://indianexpress.com/article/pakistan/imran-khans-shooter-on-camera-wan... https://twitter.com/HassanAyub82/status/1588156758932889601 “I wanted to eliminate him because he (Imran Khan) was misleading the people. I tried to shoot him and nobody else. I made the decision when he left from Lahore. I acted alone, nobody else is involved,” the alleged shooter was heard saying in a video uploaded by Pakistan journalist Hamid Mir. "Six others, including politician Faisal Javed Khan, were also reportedly injured in the attack," the report adds. Thus it appears a mass shooting and significant assassination attempt on the former head of state and his top officials. As details are emerging, it is not as yet clear who or what group was behind the shooting. https://twitter.com/iihtishamm/status/1588145363529105408 Footage of the firing. Assassination attempt on Imran Khan. pic.twitter.com/fmSgI2E8jc — Ihtisham Ul Haq (@iihtishamm) November 3, 2022 https://twitter.com/MusaNV18/status/1588140040529526789 Imran Khan was shot in the leg but was stable while being taken to hospital.I saw the assassin while firing from top of container, he fired a burst from his pistol & he was on the left side. He celebrated after firing so it was a planned assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/OcNJhHTNcg

Notable uptick... Stay out of the crossfire.

Governments Politicians and Corporations around the world assassinate, and plot to assassinate, directly or via proxy, many people every year, some of whom are innocent civilians, journalists, demonstrators for causes, competitors, etc. Such acts have been well documented by historians. These entities have also written papers debating assassination markets, including suggesting them for their own use. A next generation of AI, and AI Chat-GPT Oracle Services, NetBots, and 3D Drones, has recently appeared, and the entities are salivating for their every potential use of it. Beware their crossfire. A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7z8be/torswats-computer-generated-ai-voice-... https://www.vice.com/oembed.vice.com/itnAcZa?playerjs=1 https://www.vice.com/oembed.vice.com/nKdrAAE?playerjs=1 https://www.vice.com/oembed.vice.com/qrqVHig?playerjs=1 by Joseph Cox April 13, 2023 Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. As the U.S. deals with a nationwide swatting wave, Motherboard has traced much of the activity to a particular swatting-as-a-service account on Telegram. Torswats uses synthesized voices to pressure law enforcement to specific locations. "Hello, I just committed a crime and I want to confess," a panicked sounding man said in a call to a police department in February. "I've placed explosives inside a local school,' the man continued. "You did what?!" the operator responded. "I've placed explosives inside a local school," the man said again, before specifying Hempstead High School in Dubuque, Iowa, and providing its address. In response to the threat, the school went on lockdown, and police searched the school but found nothing, according to a local media report. The bombs weren't real. But, crucially, neither was the man's voice. The panicked man's lines sound artificially generated, according to recordings of the swatting calls reviewed by Motherboard. It is unclear how exactly the caller generated the voice, be that some form of artificial intelligence tool or another speech synthesis program. The result, though, is a voice that sounds very consistent across multiple calls. In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one swatter in particular who has weaponized computer generated voices. Known as "Torswats" on the messaging app Telegram, the swatter has been calling in bomb and mass shooting threats against highschools and other locations across the country. Torswat's connection to these wide ranging swatting incidents has not been previously reported. The further automation of swatting techniques threatens to make an already dangerous harassment technique more prevalent. Swatting is when someone calls in a bogus threat in an attempt to direct law enforcement resources to a particular home, school, or other location. Often, swatting calls result in heavily armed police raiding an innocent victim's home. At least one case has resulted in police killing the unsuspecting occupant. Torswats carries out these threatening calls as part of a paid service they offer. For $75, Torswats says they will close down a school. For $50, Torswats says customers can buy "extreme swattings," in which authorities will handcuff the victim and search the house. Torswats says they offer discounts to returning customers, and can negotiate prices for "famous people and targets such as Twitch streamers." Torswats says on their Telegram channel that they take payment in cryptocurrency. In the Hempstead High School case, authorities have charged a 16-year old boy who allegedly ordered the threats with making a threat of terrorism. But Torswats remains operational, publishing a steady stream of recordings of their crimes as recently as last week. Arguably, Torswats' use of synthetic voices allows them to carry out swatting threats at scale with relatively little effort, while also protecting what their own voice sounds like. Motherboard has determined that Torswats` other targets include a CBD shop in Florida; the corporate headquarters of a Bethesda, Maryland, intelligence company that tracks extremism; and multiple private residences across Virginia, Massachusetts, Texas, California, and more. "The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk," Steve Bernd, public affairs at FBI Seattle, told Motherboard in an email. Bernd said FBI Seattle was aware of the threats made against Hempstead High School. "These calls are dangerous to first responders and to the victims. The callers often tell tales of hostages about to be executed or bombs about to go off. The community is placed in danger as responders rush to the scene, taking them away from real emergencies, and the officers are placed in danger as unsuspecting residents may try to defend themselves." Motherboard's reporting on Torswats comes as something of a nationwide swatting trend spreads across the United States. In October, NPR reported that 182 schools in 28 states received fake threat calls. Torswats' use of a computer generated voice also comes as the rise of artificial intelligence poses even greater risks to those who may face harassment online. In February, Motherboard reported that someone had doxed and harassed a series of voice actors by having an artificial intelligence program read out their home addresses. Motherboard has also long reported on the threat posed by deepfakes, which are artificially generated videos of people, often without their consent. Deepfakes started as a tool to create non-consensual pornography of specific people. On their Telegram channel, Torswats has uploaded at least 35 distinct recordings of calls they appear to have made. Torswats may have made many more swatting calls on others' behalf, though: each filename includes a number, with the most recent going up to 170. Torswats also recently shuttered their channel before reappearing on Telegram in February. In all of those 35 recordings except two, Torswats appears to have used a synthesized voice. The majority of the calls are made with a fake male sounding voice; several include a woman which also appears to be computer generated. Torswats is seemingly able to change what the voice is saying in something close to real-time in order to respond to the operator's questions. These sometimes include "where are you located," "what happened," and "what is your name?" Motherboard listened to dozens of calls uploaded by Torswats and cross-referenced them with local media reports to determine some of the impact and geographical spread of the swatter's threats. The media reports did not mention Torswats or the use of a computer generated voice, but Motherboard was able to link multiple reported swatting incidents to the recordings uploaded by Torswats. (Motherboard redacted some private information in some of the calls embedded in this piece.) "In this specific case, the calls to 911 were placed with an automated or synthesized voice." In other cases, Motherboard used the address in the swatting call to identify the target. One example was SITE Intelligence Group, a private intelligence company that tracks extremism. In the Torswats uploaded call, the male synthetic voice claims they are making the threat in the name of the Order of the Nine Angles, a satanic neo-Nazi group. It is not clear if the claimed link to the group is genuine or misdirection. In March, SITE published a report about Telegram users who offer bomb threats and swatting calls for money. SITE did not respond to a request for comment. In the case of Hempstead High School, Brendan Welsh, public information officer at the Dubuque Police Department, which responded to the incident, confirmed to Motherboard that an automated voice was used. "In this specific case, the calls to 911 were placed with an automated or synthesized voice. On a grander scale though, this investigation continues as we believe our local student was working with another subject outside of our jurisdiction to plan and make these threats," he told Motherboard in an email. Welsh added that the Cedar Rapids FBI field office assisted the investigation, and that FBI Seattle is working on a portion of the investigation as well. Last month, VICE News reported that multiple schools in Pennsylvania were shut down after what were believed by authorities to be "computer-generated swatting calls." It is not entirely clear if those threats were made by Torswats or another entity. In August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed to have been swatted. A "computer generated voice" took credit for the call, according to a police report obtained by the Daily Dot. At the end of March, authorities charged a 20 year old man, Ashton Connor Garcia, for allegedly making more than 20 swatting calls in the U.S. and Canada. The Associated Press reported prosecutors believe that Garcia used "voice-over-internet technology." Earlier this month, Torswats allegedly changed their tactics: they claimed to have made a swatting call using their own voice. "One of the first swattings I`ve done with my own voice in a long time ***," they wrote on their Telegram channel. Motherboard cannot verify if this audio does indeed contain Torswats' own voice, but the call does not appear to be using a synthesized voice. In the subsequent recording, they start with much the same script as their automated voice. "I've done something really bad and want to kill myself," they tell the operator. They then claim they came out to their parents as a transgender woman, that they have an AR-15, and will shoot any police who respond. "Forgot to cut off my laugh at the end," Torswats wrote on Telegram. After publication of this article, Torswats deleted the audio recordings from their Telegram channel and claimed they were stopping the service for at least one month. "Time to dip a bit," they wrote on the channel. Update: This piece has been updated to include that Torswats has now deleted the recordings. Tagged: CYBERSWAT Harrassment Artificial Intelligence AI Text to Speech Order of the Nine Angles Privacy Do you know anything else about how AI-powered voices are being abused? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

Notable uptick... Stay out of the crossfire.

Two more violent SocComs expose themselves as such... https://crypto.news/china-allegedly-offers-bitcoin-bounty-to-murder-australi... Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands): "Trump needs to be shot." Hey Chairman Xi aka Winnie the Pooh... go fuck yourself with Stacey's strapon. China allegedly offers bitcoin bounty to murder Australian CCP critic According to an 60 Minutes Australia report, a so-called "bounty email" surfaced that purportedly offers $50,000 bounty in bitcoin (BTC) for the "termination" of Vanessa Pavlou, mother of outspoken Chinese Communist Party (CCP) critic and human rights activist, Drew Pavlou. The emails targeting Vanessa Pavlou were allegedly sent to major shopping centers in Brisbane — in an alleged attempt to reach her employer. No in-person aggression has been reported by 60 seconds. The email, allegedly from CCP actors, also accuses Vanessa Pavlou of running an illicit prostitution ring and being a cocaine addict. However, it remains unverified if this email truly originated from CCP entities, or if this is an intimidation tactic or an actual threat. Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, is favored in many illicit activities due to its relative anonymity and lack of central authority able to stop and reverse transactions. Although each transaction is logged on a public ledger known as the blockchain, the identities of those involved remain obscured by pseudonymous addresses that expert users can cash in from without linking them to their identities. Thus, its use in this alleged bounty raises questions regarding the sender's motives and identity, as tracing back such transactions is difficult, but not impossible. This event follows a string of accusations from Australians who criticize China's government, with reports of harassment and threats of violence. One such instance highlighted by Australian media involves a television commentator critical of the CCP who was taken into custody and questioned, following an erroneous accusation of him sending a threatening email to a Chinese-Australian journalist. Although he was released without charge, his case is purportedly indicative of the alleged tactics used to suppress dissent, even outside China's borders. 60 Minutes Australia's report brought attention to the allegations that China is covertly operating a network of illegal outposts, labeled Chinese Overseas Police Service Stations, in at least 53 countries with some sources reporting more than double. These stations, reportedly run out of private residences and small businesses such as restaurants, are staffed by Chinese public security agents and are suspected of tracking and intimidating critics who have escaped China's jurisdiction. Public documentation reportedly suggests that these overseas police stations have been established without the consent of the host countries, and are illegal. The stations' defenders claim that those stations exist to provide innocuous services like driver's license renewals, which critics argue is a facade for China's international shadow police force that targets dissidents who have fled the mainland and Chinese nationals and foreigners who criticize the Chinese government. The report also brought to light two alleged stations in Australia, including one in suburban Sydney. The 60 Minutes Australia report alleges that China's National Supervision Commission established these stations, not only to enforce domestic anti-corruption campaigns but also to monitor Chinese nationals abroad and intimidate those who voice dissent against the CCP. The Chinese embassy in Australia dismissed these claims as "malicious," and Australian federal police have denied the existence of such stations in the country. As tensions continue to mount, it remains to be seen how the Australian government will respond to the growing concerns of its citizens who face potential threats for their vocal criticism of the CCP.

Assassination Politics (1997) (jya.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32790951 http://jya.com/ap.htm 56 points by Tomte 14 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market https://www.freepatentsonline.com/WO2013101261A1.html neilv 14 days ago | next [–] I met the author, Jim Bell, once or twice, when he came by the computer store I was working in as a kid. He seemed OK, in the few words we exchanged, and maybe a techie/radio hobbyist (IIRC, his car had many antennae on it). At that time, in the 1980s, someone remarked that Bell had "had one good idea" (the SemiDisk persistent storage card). Later on, it looks from Wikipedia like Bell had a lot of troubles. The light joke about "one good idea" IMHO took on new, darker meaning, after some of the choices during the troubles, including the horrifying idea that's the topic of the post. I suppose a good SF writer could've started with that idea, and explored an (IMHO likely) scenario of it playing out as a tool of the most corrupt and the most insane, and then the dystopia that results in. I haven't read much of Bell's writings, so I don't know whether at some point he shifted to a cautionary "we should figure out how to prevent things like this, because they would be bad". thomassmith65 14 days ago | parent | next [–] Sheesh, so the article isn't satire? I assumed the whole thing was making fun of libertarians. santoshalper 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] The line between espousing libertarian beliefs and satirizing them is so thin. droopyEyelids 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] The line dissolves when you ask a libertarian where property rights come from, and how they apply to land. asah 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Lol. So many flaws... but nobody knew in 1997... For one thing, life imprisonment (LiP) is a pretty big deterrent, and among the few willing to risk it, defense tech and the surveillance state are generally winning the arms race against individual actors and small groups ("terrorists"). Lots of people want to kill world leaders and yet assassination attempts (let alone successes!) are quite rare. This leaves the question of less-defended people, and there it's more mixed: it's much easier to do but 10^6-10^10 fewer people want to kill them which makes it a lot easier to catch the conspirators simply by tracking who had motive. Finally, everyday victims don't usually have haters with enough capital to motivate someone to risk LiP - again, making it easy to track down the perps by motive. impossiblefork 14 days ago | parent | next [–] I don't think that's true, that it's fear of imprisonment etc. Such things definitely matter, but I think the reason for the lack of political assassinations is the same as why we don't get horrible viruses that spread like wildfire and kill Ebola (which I believe to be that bioscience professors aren't usually very evil). People who could easily murder politicians and others just don't want to. Perhaps they don't hate them all that much, perhaps they like democracy even though it puts people they dislike into high positions, perhaps they're opposed to murder. We don't see mortar or drone attacks using image recognition (instead of radio control which could conceivably fail if basic precautions had been taken) on presidents and prime ministers in Europe even though such attacks would be trivial and the perpetrators would probably have a decent chance of getting away. It's because people don't hate them all that much and because the people who hate them a lot don't see such attacks as politically productive. Presumably the reason unfriendly countries don't perform such attacks against those governments that oppose them is that it's not politically productive and would lead to a negative reaction instead of just removing the people the unfriendly country would like to be rid of. Teever 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–]

People who could easily murder politicians and others just don't want to. Perhaps they don't hate them all that much, perhaps they like democracy even though it puts people they dislike into high positions, perhaps they're opposed to murder.

I've wondered what makes unstable Americans conduct school shootings but not targeted assassinations? Like, there is a part of the population that has no problem killing, and killing for shock value, but for whatever reason their targets are children and not politicians. The 1960s and 1970s were full of assassinations and plane hijackings by all kinds of people but they seem to have been replaced by the mass murder of children. impossiblefork 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I think it's fear of a power negative media reaction-- that the murder would lead to success for the political position that the murderer attempted to strike at. sekh60 14 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I think political assassination teens to make little sense most of the time. There is a sort of gentleperson's agreement to not do it, is someone breaks that then no one feels safe and leaders will be assassinating other leaders left and right. At least I think that is the great. Teever 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Deterrents only work if they're enforceable. Will you be able to catch someone if they use a drone to take out a target? After watching what is going with the use of consumer drones in Ukraine I've come to the conclusion that we will soon see this in America. People will start to fight back against corrupt law enforcement sooner or later. Imagine the world where people in a community brutalized by law enforcement crowd source drone strikes to take out particularly menacing law enforcement officers after they've been let off with paid vacation for the nth time. The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street. zardo 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–]

The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street.

I don't think that's how this scenario would turn out. Policing would just move explicitly to counter insurgency operations. Laws would change as necessary to give authorities whatever tools they need to do it. Teever 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] But will that be sufficient to stop a technology like off the shelf drones? I have a feeling that we're about to find out. reply Tostino 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Depends on how much rights those in power want to strip away in the name of "safety". reply Teever 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] It's not so simple. If a parent vigilanted an incompetent cop in Uvalde and the political response was to enact the next patriot act people would lose their shit. Politicians can't be so overt about this kind of thing because American society is sitting on a powderkeg and pile of guns. reply fifticon 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Thought: The day-to-day situation in Mexico, for a number of decades, give a sinister data-point for the rate at which someone is willing to murder rather ordinary citizens. pjc50 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Indeed. I'd add that quite a lot of the US mass shootings seem to be "political" in character, in that their perpetrator leaves some kind of manifesto or messageboard postings explaining their motive, but the victims are either random or attending the same school as the perpetrator. There's (fortunately) nobody with an organized program of political violence. michaelscott 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] It definitely makes a lot of assumptions that I don't think hold true in practice. As you say, many world leaders would even want to have one another killed (as individuals with both motive and a lot of power to make it happen) and yet it doesn't happen very often. The practicalities of actually _using_ the digital cash, should you win, in a way that wouldn't point the finger at you are also not so simple. It's an interesting thought experiment though. Would probably make for a cool novel! jim_kreggis 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Yeah, there's no way this would lead to minimal government, the exact opposite would happen. dang 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Related: Assassination Politics (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544251 - Oct 2013 (62 comments) Assassination Politics (by Jim Bell) + Bitcoin = ? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500781 - April 2011 (8 comments) Assassination Politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327329 - Oct 2008 (1 comment) Assassination Politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119173 - Feb 2008 (1 comment) blantonl 14 days ago | prev | next [–] It's downright terrifying to think this was written 25 years ago, and now many of the tools that the author describes as being enablers in some of the described activities are readily available to the average person, let alone nation states and governments. LiquidSky 14 days ago | parent | next [–] You should feel the opposite: this was written 25 years ago, was stupid when it was written, and as these tools have become ever-cheaper and more ubiquitous, nothing at all like this has ever happened, showing how hopelessly naive Bell was (and, judging from his subsequent activity, still is). This was the idiotic rambling of someone with a bit of technical skill and a complete and utter lack of understanding of people, politics, or society. This is something a 14 year old computer geek might come up with hanging out with his friends. jovial_cavalier 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market leashless 13 days ago | prev | next [–] I've known about AP and the problems it poses since it was published. I was also the release coordinator for the 2015 Ethereum launch, and wondered if we would see any attempts to implement AP on our infrastructure. I spent some time thinking about how to fix it. I think the answer is a large anonymous fund, a public good, which simply lists anybody who starts an AP server on a public blockchain on their own AP server. I think the game theory is sound, which says nothing about either morality, reasonableness, or legality. reply some_random 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I love this kind of political writing, unique and incredibly naive. VHRanger 14 days ago | prev | next [–] The author was raising huge red flags citing Waco Texas & Ruby Ridge as a reason to have government employees assassinated. That's the same rhethoric behind Oklahoma city bombing for those at home. It's the same sort of stochastic terrorists that end up in the QAnon hole these days. I don't know why we pay their talking points any attention. HideousKojima 14 days ago | parent | next [–] Just because Timothy McVeigh was a mass murderer doesn't mean the ATF and FBI agents at Ruby Ridge and Waco weren't murderers too. I realize who did what at Waco is highly disputed, but the rules of engagement being used at Ruby Ridge were straight up murder: "If any adult in the area around the cabin is observed with a weapon after the surrender announcement had been made, deadly force could and should be used to neutralize the individual." VHRanger 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Waco and Ruby ridge were effectively the same. The end result of their actions was "How would you execute a warrant against El Chapo" and both forced the feds to act in such a way. There's an initial crime (sex with 12yr old for David Koresh, and selling illegal weaponry to white supremacist criminal orgs for Randy Weaver). Then they don't engage the legal system normally by hiring a lawyer and fighting the charges -- they hide in a hole hoping to be forgotten about. When the feds inevitably try to serve a warrant, in both cases they respond in a hostile manner and kill a LEO. At this point you can basically be expected to be treated like a drug lord -- you're facing charges and responding to warrants by killing officers. So you get besieged like a drug lord. The main difference for Ruby Ridge is that the government took a bunch of decisions (procedural mistakes, over-eager sniper and rules of engagement) that made them unsympathetic. But even with this, it's a little absurd to come out and defend the Weavers for playing very stupid games and winning stupid prizes. You kill a law enforcement office in a hostile manner, don't expect to be treated with courtesy. There's hundreds of cases where LEOs are recklessly killing innocents in manners that should get them lambasted, but Ruby Ridge ain't it. HideousKojima 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–]

There's an initial crime (sex with 12yr old for David Koresh, and selling illegal weaponry to white supremacist criminal orgs for Randy Weaver).

Then they don't engage the legal system normally by hiring a lawyer and fighting the charges -- they hide in a hole hoping to be forgotten about.

Weaver was acquitted on all charges, with the exception of a charge for failing to appear in court for the original charge that lead to the siege. And the rules of engagement still are and were murder. VHRanger 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] The charge could have been unpaid parking tickets, it wouldn't change anything. The point is they had a charge and they failed to engage with the legal system like functional adults. You can fight the charge like any other. Instead they keep trying to evade the legal system and inevitably get someone knocking at the door. If your response to that knock on the door is to shoot, you get what's coming to you. The other point is that this unsympathetic case is viewed in some special light when there's a ton of cases where the government is much much more clearly in the wrong. The difference is that in those other cases it's generally a "them" (ethnic minorities, urban poor, etc.) whereas for libertarian weirdoes like Weaver they somehow get lumped in the HackerNews zeitgeist's "us". helloworld11 12 days ago | root | parent | next [–] You truly are a disingenuous apologist for disgustingly murderous police tactics, which lacked all reasonable professionalism, duty to the basic idea of policing in a remotely free country or even loosely moral barometers. No, the correct response to the warrant being served against weaver wasn't to shoot his dog after secretly invading his property in tac gear and deliberately provoking a defensive response. No, the correct further axction is not to shoot his 14 year-old son in the back or to shoot through a window at a house in which you know a woman with a 10 month-old baby is standing. No normal notion of good legal procedure or even non-moronic, non-thuggish thinking can defend these and other acts. Even a number of police agree. Here's a claim from one of the U.S Marshalls on site: "Many of the people the USMS used as third party go-betweens on the Weaver case—Bill and Judy Grider, Alan Jeppeson, and Richard Butler—were assessed by the Marshals as more radical than the Weavers. When Deputy U.S. Marshal (DUSM) Dave Hunt asked Grider, "Why shouldn't I just go up there ... and talk to him?", Grider replied, "Let me put it to you this way. If I was sitting on my property and somebody with a gun comes to do me harm, then I'll probably shoot him." Or how about the deputy assistant director of the FBI at the time, writing in a memo that: "Something to Consider 1. Charge against Weaver is Bull S___. 2. No one saw Weaver do any shooting. 3. Vicki has no charges against her. 4. Weaver's defense. He ran down the hill to see what dog was barking at. Some guys in camys [camouflage] shot his dog. Started shooting at him. Killed his son. Harris did the shooting. He is in pretty strong legal position." As one of the comments above states: Let the reader decide what constitutes a reasonable attempt to serve a warrant". reply tb_technical 13 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] "You get what's coming to you" is the language of fascists looking for an excuse to play with their new toy guns. They shot a kid in the back, and shot a woman holding a baby through a window. This case is a barometer for whether or not a person likes the taste of boot leather. reply SlickNixon 13 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

When the feds inevitably try to serve a warrant, in both cases they respond in a hostile manner and kill a LEO.

From the Ruby Ridge wiki:

"On August 21, 1992, six Marshals were sent to scout the area to determine suitable places away from the cabin to apprehend and arrest Weaver. The marshals, dressed in military camouflage, were equipped with night-vision goggles and M16 rifles. DUSMs Art Roderick, Larry Cooper, and William F. "Bill" Degan formed the reconnaissance team, while DUSMs David Hunt, Joseph Thomas, and Frank Norris formed an observation post (OP) team on the ridge north of the cabin. At one point, Roderick threw two rocks at the Weaver cabin to test the dogs' reaction. The action provoked the dogs; Weaver's friend, Kevin Harris, and Weaver's 14-year-old son, Samuel ("Sammy"), emerged and followed the dog "Striker" to investigate. Harris and the younger Weaver said that they were hoping the dog had noticed a game animal as the cabin was out of meat. The recon team (Roderick, Cooper, and Degan) initially retreated through the woods in radio contact with the OP team, but later took up hidden defensive positions. Later, the OP team and the Weavers claimed the dogs were alerted to the recon team in the woods after neighbors at the foot of the mountain started their pickup truck. The recon team retreated through the woods to a "Y" junction in the trails 500 yards (460 m) west of the cabin, out of sight of the cabin. Sammy and Harris followed Striker on foot through the woods while Randy, also on foot, took a separate logging trail; Vicki, Sara, Rachel, and baby Elisheba remained at the cabin. The OP team were anxious at first, but then relaxed. Randy encountered the Marshals at the "Y"; Roderick claimed to have yelled, "Back off! U.S. Marshal!" upon sighting Weaver, and Cooper said he had shouted, "Stop! U.S. Marshal!" By their account, Sammy and Striker came out of the woods about a minute later. When the Marshals' position was revealed by the dog "Striker", a yellow Labrador Retriever, DUSM Roderick shot the dog dead. Seeing this, Sammy Weaver reacted by shooting in the direction of Roderick. DUSM Cooper then shot towards Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris, who both sought cover. Harris, once finding cover behind a tree stump, then returned fire with one unaimed shot, which eventually killed DUSM William Francis "Bill" Degan. Sammy Weaver, now retreating up a hill was then shot in the back and killed by DUSM Cooper." It will be left as an exercise to the reader to determine if the above constitutes an "attempt to serve a warrant". reply chasd00 14 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] wasn't Randy Weaver's wife killed by a sniper with nothing but an infant in her arms? That's pretty bad. coldtea 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Perhaps because reality doesn't stop existing if you don't pay attention to it. Nor do actual threats become any less threatening (if anything, the opposite). So not paying any attention to the talking points, i.e. not reading TFA, wont have any effect. Not to mention that the people "sane" enough head the advice and not read it, are the ones who wouldn't do anything shady even if they read it anyway... eggsome 13 days ago | prev [–] Does anyone know if there is any merit to his patent? https://www.freepatentsonline.com/WO2013101261A1.html reply

Assassination Politics (archive.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327329 http://web.archive.org/web/20041009113523/http://jya.com/ap.htm 5 points by eru on Oct 9, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment eru on Oct 9, 2008 [–] Disturbing. Assassination Politics (outpost-of-freedom.com) http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm 3 points by byrneseyeview on Feb 19, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment randallsquared on Feb 19, 2008 [–] Requires high-volume untraceable payments (digital cash), which everyone thought was around the corner in the late 90s, but never quite happened.

https://www.thoughtsaloud.com/2018/07/08/assassination-politics/ https://www.thoughtsaloud.com/author/troy/ Assassination Politics July 8th, 2018 | Author: Troy Note that I have started a fresh thread for this topic since we are evidently going to continue debating what I consider a frivolous topic. But I must do something to attempt to keep my aging brain alive and this is as good as any I suppose. Let me begin by illustrating what I consider one fatal flaw in Jim/Bill’s reasoning using a direct quote from the essay (emphasis added by me): Imagine for a moment that as ordinary citizens were watching the evening news, they see an act by a government employee or officeholder that they feel violates their rights, abuses the public’s trust, or misuses the powers that they feel should be limited… First, if “they†are watching the evening news, there is an almost certain probability that “they†are being misled to some extent. Second, feeling is the result of an emotional reaction, not a deliberate intellectual review of the facts, including attempts to verify said facts from multiple sources. This hardly constitutes the basis of a death sentence. Now, focus on this very moment in time – a number of Americans who watch the evening news, feel that President Trump is separating Hispanic children from their (possible) parents, presumably because hes does not like children/Hispanics/people in general, and is keeping them in dog kennel like cages. Never mind that the supporting photos of children in kennels were taken during the Obama administration. Would it not then follow that, given your AP proposal, Trump along with a number of Border Patrol personnel should be assassinated? What other conclusion could one arrive at? Yet, those who bother to examine the situation intellectually realize that Trump is merely enforcing laws duly passed by Congress and also enforced by previous administrations. Yes, perhaps Trump has added a degree of added vigor to the enforcement in an attempt to get the Congress off their collective butts and do something for a change. IMHO, in the situation under consideration, it is the Congress that richly deserves every bit of the blame for a sorry situation that has persisted for years – yet feelings prompted by distortions on the evening news lead to quite a different conclusion. You go on to talk about the utility of killing various despots, past and present, rather than engage in war with the nations they seem to control. Do you really believe that a few evil people can control a nation of millions without some level of consent from those millions, even though that consent may be passive or fear driven? If the only way to escape the yoke of a tyrant is by assassinating said tyrant, then, by definition, the United States could never have happened. But it did happen. And the Constitutional system of government bequeathed to us by our founders transformed a rag-tag collection of ex-colonies into the most free, most prosperous and most powerful nation in human history in the historic blink of an eye. Why not simply revert to the system they gave us before we became too spoiled to maintain it? Can you not see why such your AP proposal alarms me​? Think about it. Troy L Robinson 19 Responses to “Assassination Politics” â—„Daveâ–º says: July 8, 2018 at 5:31 pm I must do something to attempt to keep my aging brain alive… I am somewhat willing to assist you with this worthy endeavor, Troy; but it will be difficult to take you seriously, if you persist in labeling this topic frivolous, and categorizing it under humor rather than debate. Since I contend that it is inevitable, I reckon the subject infinitely more debatable, than anything one is likely to see discussed on CNN or MSNBC these days. If the only way to escape the yoke of a tyrant is by assassinating said tyrant, then, by definition, the United States could never have happened. Are you really suggesting that none of the colonial revolutionaries would have assassinated their tyrant, rather than fight his army, if that option had been open to them? Why not? Too “civilized”, perhaps? …into the most free, most prosperous and most powerful nation in human history… Free… prosperous… powerful… NATION? Belonging to a nation, is the antithesis of being free. Troy, you will never be able to take a discussion of this idea seriously, if you are unable to suspend your deeply ingrained statist viewpoint, long enough to at least consider the prospect of truly living a life of Liberty, at peace with your neighbors and the rest of the world. Why not simply revert to the system they gave us…? Because it was not Liberty. Limited government is, by default, limited freedom. Even if it were simple (or even possible) to revert to it, with or without a bloody civil war, it would only be a matter of time until it again evolved into tyranny. It could not be otherwise. All arguments against Jim Bell’s Assassination Politics (AP) that reference any aspect of the us-against-them paradigm, are missing the point entirely. AP, as first described here two years ago at: “Eliminating Authority,” is not about divisive politics, or reforming governments; it is about eliminating them. Remarkably, it appears to counter every objection anyone has ever made, regarding why a coercive government is necessary to implement and secure a cooperative society. I still await anyone who can expose the hidden flaw — in the idea, not its proponents, and without referencing any deleterious effects it would have on favored governments. Those are features, not bugs. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply Troy says: July 9, 2018 at 8:16 am Free… prosperous… powerful… NATION? Belonging to a nation, is the antithesis of being free. Troy, you will never be able to take a discussion of this idea seriously, if you are unable to suspend your deeply ingrained statist viewpoint, long enough to at least consider the prospect of truly living a life of Liberty, at peace with your neighbors and the rest of the world. Dave, I actually consider myself to be one of the freest people who ever enjoyed this life and I am anything but a statist. What I consider myself is a realist. Unlike you, I do recognize that too large a portion of the sheeple, are unwilling and/or unable to behave like free individuals. To assume that they will somehow see the light under your anarchist schemes is nothing more than a pipe dream. I don’t mean to sound overly critical, but you remind me of a committed socialist who clings to a belief, despite years of actual evidence that it simply does not work. At this point, I think it best to simply declare me a hopeless case before anyone says something regrettable. Troy 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 9, 2018 at 2:33 pm I am anything but a statist. I, fairly I think, use the broad term ‘statist’ as the opposite of anarchist. See the discussion in the Wikipedia: Statism can take many forms from minarchism to totalitarianism. Minarchists prefer a minimal state such as a night-watchman state to protect people from aggression, theft, breach of contract and fraud with military, police and courts.[5] Some may also include fire departments, prisons and other functions.[5] The welfare state and other moderate levels of statism also exist on the scale of statism.[6][7] Totalitarians prefer a maximum, all-encompassing state.[8][9] I must note that your surprising advocacy of improved public schooling (indoctrination) and compulsory national service, bespeak a support for the coercive state well beyond libertarian minarchism. One can be one of the freest people ever, and still not have ‘Liberty,’ which is defined as: the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views. To me, ‘Liberty’ is simply the absence of ‘Authority’ in any form. â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply jim says: July 9, 2018 at 9:38 pm I want to respond to your original comment, but somehow I cannot find a “reply” button. So, I will respond here. You said, “First, if “they†are watching the evening news, there is an almost certain probability that “they†are being misled to some extent.” That’s certainly true. People are being subjected to some of the truth, and biased truths, and various grades of falsities. “Second, feeling is the result of an emotional reaction, not a deliberate intellectual review of the facts, including attempts to verify said facts from multiple sources.” Yes… “This hardly constitutes the basis of a death sentence.” But it will act, on average, as a wonderful deterrence to people who do wrong. “Now, focus on this very moment in time – a number of Americans who watch the evening news, feel that President Trump is separating Hispanic children from their (possible) parents, presumably because hes does not like children/Hispanics/people in general, and is keeping them in dog kennel like cages. Never mind that the supporting photos of children in kennels were taken during the Obama administration. Would it not then follow that, given your AP proposal, Trump along with a number of Border Patrol personnel should be assassinated?” As a practical matter, I think each and every employee, of each and every government, should fear being assassinated. (but, of course, not to the same degree.) And if they are bothered, they will quit their jobs and stop doing whatever it is that angers other people. ” What other conclusion could one arrive at?” So what? ” Yet, those who bother to examine the situation intellectually realize that Trump is merely enforcing laws duly passed by Congress and also enforced by previous administrations.” That does not make those laws legitimate. Yet, my goal primarily is not to see ‘them all’ dead: I want to ensure that they promptly resign. ” Yes, perhaps Trump has added a degree of added vigor to the enforcement in an attempt to get the Congress off their collective butts and do something for a change.” I do not generally object to Trump causing the government to enforce “the law”: I object to him, and all previous Presidents, and all current and previous government employees, from doing anything which violates the NAP (Non Agression principle; or NIOFP, Non-Initiation of Force Principle). I don’t claim that other people, ordinary people, don’t have different motivations. They can do so. On the average, people will simply force government employees to resign, and do so quickly. “IMHO, in the situation under consideration, it is the Congress that richly deserves every bit of the blame for a sorry situation that has persisted for years – yet feelings prompted by distortions on the evening news lead to quite a different conclusion.” Yes, but it won’t take a large percentage of the population to identify the CORRECT villains, and donate to get rid of them. 1% of the population should be plenty. “You go on to talk about the utility of killing various despots, past and present, rather than engage in war with the nations they seem to control.” And that’s why it wil work. “Do you really believe that a few evil people can control a nation of millions without some level of consent from those millions, even though that consent may be passive or fear driven?” If anything, I generally conclude that the “other” nation’s people are even more likely to want to get rid of their despots, than we would be. Generally, we have found that we get along well with the populations of former enemies, once the governments that ruled them (or us!!!) have been eliminated. ” If the only way to escape the yoke of a tyrant is by assassinating said tyrant, then, by definition, the United States could never have happened. ” I didn’t say it was the ONLY way. I said it was, by far, the most EFFICIENT way. If “we” could have assassinated Saddam Hussein for $10 million, and assassinated 100 of his successors for $10 million each, that would have been a total of $1 billion. Compared with that, the US spend about $100 billion/year for over 10 years, or about $1 trillion dollars. Would you rather spend $1 billion, or $1 trillion? “But it did happen. And the Constitutional system of government bequeathed to us by our founders transformed a rag-tag collection of ex-colonies into the most free, most prosperous and most powerful nation in human history in the historic blink of an eye. Why not simply revert to the system they gave us before we became too spoiled to maintain it?” You are implying that is possible. Do you know that’s true, or are you merely guessing? “Can you not see why such your AP proposal alarms me​?” I was far more “alarmed” when I thought of it! Eventually, I realized that it was not merely possible, but in fact inevitable. As I said in the AP essay: part 7: “As I pointed out in the essay, if I were running one of the organizations accepting those donations and offering those prizes, I would selectively list only those targets who I am genuinely satisfied are guilty of the violation of the “non-aggression principle.” But as a practical matter, there is no way that I could stop a DIFFERENT organization from being set up and operating under DIFFERENT moral and ethical principles, especially if it operated anonymously, as I anticipate the “Assassination Politics”-type systems will be. Thus, I’m forced to accept the reality that I can’t dictate a “strongly limited” system that would “guarantee” no “unjustified” deaths: I can merely control my little piece of the earth and not assist in the abuse of others. I genuinely believe, however, that the operation of this system would be a vast improvement over the status quo. This, I argue, is somewhat analogous to an argument that we should be entitled to own firearms, despite the fact that SOME people will use them wrongly/immorally/illegally. The ownership is a right even though it may ultimately allow or enable an abuse that you consider wrong and punishable. I consider the truth of such an argument to be obvious and correct, and I know you would too. I realize that this lacks the crisp certitude of safety which would be reassuring to the average, “pre-libertarian” individual. But you are not the “average individual” and I trust that as long-time libertarians you will recognize rights must exist even given the hypothetical possibility that somebody may eventually abuse them. I do not know whether I “invented” or “discovered” this system; perhaps it’s a little of both. I do genuinely believe that this system, or one like it, is as close to being technologically inevitable as was the invention of firearms once the material we now know as “gunpowder” was invented. I think it’s on the way, regardless of what we do to stop it. Perhaps more than anyone else on the face of this planet, this notion has filled me, sequentially and then simultaneously, with awe, astonishment, joy, terror, and finally, relief. Awe, that a system could be produced by a handful of people that would rid the world of the scourge of war, nuclear weapons, governments, and taxes. Astonishment, at my realization that once started, it would cover the entire globe inexorably, erasing dictatorships both fascistic and communistic, monarchies, and even so-called “democracies,” which as a general rule today are really just the facade of government by the special interests. Joy, that it would eliminate all war, and force the dismantling not only of all nuclear weapons, but also all militaries, making them not merely redundant but also considered universally dangerous, leaving their “owners” no choice but to dismantle them, and in fact no reason to KEEP them! Terror, too, because this system may just change almost EVERYTHING how we think about our current society, and even more for myself personally, the knowledge that there may some day be a large body of wealthy people who are thrown off their current positions of control of the world’s governments, and the very-real possibility that they may look for a “villain” to blame for their downfall. They will find one, in me, and at that time they will have the money and (thanks to me, at least partially) the means to see their revenge. But I would not have published this essay if I had been unwilling to accept the risk. Finally, relief. Maybe I’m a bit premature to say it, but I’m satisfied we will be free. I’m convinced there is no alternative. It may feel like a roller-coaster ride on the way there, but as of today I think our destination is certain. Please understand, we will be free. Your libertarian friend,” [end of long quote] +1 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 9, 2018 at 4:37 am …illustrating what I consider one fatal flaw… Only to a committed statist, not to a liberty-minded anarchist. Yes, the transition period will likely be rather chaotic, as noisy political activists of any stripe are winnowed out; but once the AP paradigm is fully implemented, the nature of “news” will be very different than the blatant partisan propaganda produced nowadays. News presenters will need to be extremely careful not to distort the news, or show any bias whatever, which might engender an emotional reaction in viewers toward themselves, else they could literally find themselves in a dead-end career. Personally, I wouldn’t even risk being famous. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply jim says: July 25, 2018 at 9:58 am I’ve just been alerted, by a posting on the Cypherpunks list, to an implementation of a new death-prediction market using the combination of Ethereum and Augur. https://www.ccn.com/first-assassination-markets-appear-on-gambling-platform-... I am not associated with this, and I didn’t learn about it until yesterday. Nevertheless, for a few years I have been anticipating such an event. Ethereum is a distributed computer system, implemented on potentially thousands of individual computers, potentially all over the world. Augur is a program designed to be run on Ethereum, a prediction market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur_(software) As fellow Cypherpunk Nick Szabo once said: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2015/05/small-game-fallacies.html “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 events.” 0 Reply Steel Phoenix says: August 1, 2018 at 5:25 pm The death prediction market is a very interesting concept. The real issue here is one of traceability and governance. The reason governments put so much effort into snooping on everything and maintaining a stranglehold on regulating commerce is the realization of what can happen if they don’t. If someone can really, honestly, come up with an untraceable way to do open commerce between the masses, then your AP would be one of the more minor emergent societal shifts. If there’s one thing I’d put my money on in this though, it’d be that damn near every nation on the planet will be united in doing whatever it takes to crush anything like this that looks likely to succeed, along with anyone associated with it. They’ve likely done so several times already. 0 Reply jim says: August 6, 2018 at 11:29 am Do a Google search for: ‘ethereum augur assassination’ A new system just appeared within the last two weeks to implement an approximation of my AP idea. Only an approximation, but I expect that the deviations from AP that are currently present will be corrected within months. 0 Reply jim says: July 9, 2018 at 1:38 pm I’m not ignoring this thread, but I have been very busy in the last day. I will respond shortly. +1 Reply jim says: July 9, 2018 at 2:05 pm “since we are evidently going to continue debating what I consider a frivolous topic.” One way to determine how serious you can reasonably be in calling AP “frivolous”, is to do a google search for ‘”assassination politics” “jim bell”‘. Can you find anybody seriously claiming that AP is “frivolous”? I certainly cannot, and I have been carefully reading the results of this search for the last 6 years. How “frivolous” can it be? I’ve claimed that it will eliminate tyrannies, all wars, taxes to support militaries, nuclear weapons, etc. Sounds improbable, of course, on first reading. But it is certainly true that if it would work, that would be very important for the future of society. If that is indeed the case, how can it be claimed that the AP idea is “frivolous”? Dave (correctly) points out something that I anticipated before writing and publishing the first part of AP: People won’t want to be “famous”!!! It could be called a very “boring” society. Some day, you will realize how astonished I was, long before I released the AP idea: I discovered something that would, in effect, “fix” every political problem that I was aware of. I delayed for weeks writing the essay, trying to figure out what was wrong, where my error was. I wondered, can I possibly be correct? Naturally, I wanted to avoid the enormous embarrassment that would presumably occur if I announced this system, and it was subsequently be identified as impossible. Eventually, I concluded that if AP were somehow flawed, it must be a very subtle flaw. So I published. 23 years later, I still have seen no more serious criticism than that by Robert P Murphy, who debated his (business?) partner Robert Vroman, about AP. Google search ‘robert murphy “assassination politics”‘ See a positive analysis, by R. Sukumaran. https://idsa.in/system/files/strategicanalysis_sukumaran_0604.pdf +1 Reply ClinicalThinker says: July 27, 2018 at 2:36 am Can you find anybody seriously claiming that AP is “frivolous†? Perhaps others have determined any number of other adjectives that apply to this system. Do you think discussing terminology is worth the effort? If so maybe others do not so they simply pass. I’ve claimed that it will eliminate tyrannies, all wars, taxes to support militaries, nuclear weapons, etc. Sounds improbable, of course, on first reading. But it is certainly true that if it would work, that would be very important for the future of society. If that is indeed the case, how can it be claimed that the AP idea is “frivolous†? Claims are simply that until tested. Gathering enough steam to even test the claim is most likely the biggest issue to over come. If you have ever served on a jury it becomes evident quickly … to get 12 people to agree on one simple thing is difficult. Getting a whole nation to go along with a program is most likely impossible. At which point in waltzes your friendly dictator and the sheep fall obediently in line. Why? Because until pushed to the absolute wall they are not willing to fight. As for “if”? My mother use to say “yes IF your aunt had balls she would be your uncle” … personally I fall into the “if pit” more often than I would like. After quick analysis I actually prefer “what is” to save time and energy. 0 Reply jim says: July 30, 2018 at 10:13 pm Well, I suppose you still don’t understand the AP concept. Fortunately, you have misunderstood in an obvious fashion. You said, ” If you have ever served on a jury it becomes evident quickly … to get 12 people to agree on one simple thing is difficult. Getting a whole nation to go along with a program is most likely impossible.” One of the most amazing characteristics of the AP concept is that it isn’t necessary to get more than a tiny fraction of society to employ it. Certainly not 50%, or even 5%. 20+ years ago, I knew full well that even as little as 1% of the population employing AP would be plenty to make it operate, quite well. It would only take those 1% to purchase the killings of the top 5-6 layers of government bureaucracy in America. And the rest won’t stick around, because they won’t be paid, and many of them will be hunted until they submit. Now do you understand why you misperceived the AP system? 0 Reply clinicalthinker says: August 1, 2018 at 8:42 am I knew full well that even as little as 1% of the population employing AP would be plenty to make it operate, quite well. Since you know full well (for over 20+ years) it is safe to say that needed 1% of the population is not interested in your AP for whatever reason. 😉 0 Reply jim says: August 4, 2018 at 5:18 pm No, a system based on my AP system has not been available during virtually all of the past 23 years. Only within the last two weeks has a system arisen, using the Ethereum distributed computer program, and the Augur prediction-market overlay, to implement a credible death-prediction marketplace. However, for a few technical reasons, this market, initiated by the “Forecast Foundation”, won’t work quite like I anticipated in my AP essay, at least without further modification. But they are getting very close to a “classic” AP system. They need a truly anonymous system for making and collecting bets, for one thing. Second, the current system seems to make bets akin to ‘Will this person die by the end of the year’. Generally, they will have to change things to a more-precise prediction, such as ‘Will this person die on September 1, 2018’, or any other date. 0 Reply Steel Phoenix says: August 11, 2018 at 5:38 pm This is a good opportunity for you. The difficulty in theories like yours is that you need to be extremely good at predicting the ramifications in a complex system as everyone’s behavioral changes alter that system and create a cascade of feedback loops. You’ve made a prediction that deviations from your theory will be corrected within months. If things do indeed go that direction it will work to your credit. If not, then it’s evidence that you’ve failed to account for something in the system or within human nature. +1 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: August 13, 2018 at 3:11 am Way too soon to judge fledgling efforts, Steel. The vast majority of mankind have not yet even heard of the Dark Web, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, or Prediction Markets — much less understand or trust them. Until enough do trust them to be safely anonymous, AP will not be a significant threat to the powerful ensconced behind their Praetorian guards. Not until it becomes too risky to even be a guard, could the full effect of AP be realized. I am still convinced that it is ultimately inevitable; but we are nowhere close to experiencing it. â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply jim says: August 4, 2018 at 5:12 pm A market based on the Ethereum and Augur platforms has appeared, implementing a death-prediction marketplace. There has been a very large amount of publicity in the last week or two. I recommend that you do a Google search for ‘Ethereum augur assassination’ 0 Reply Chris says: August 6, 2018 at 7:23 pm I knew full well that even as little as 1% of the population employing AP would be plenty to make it operate, quite well. It would only take those 1% to purchase the killings of the top 5-6 layers of government bureaucracy in America. Ok I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for this one but seriously? That’s all I have to say on the subject. 0 Reply jim says: August 6, 2018 at 11:12 pm I guess you don’t realize that this is (or, at least, should be) a very old debate. I wrote AP in 10 parts, during 1995-96. Presumably, tens of thousands of people have read it. They have, therefore, had plenty of time to express any negative opinions of it that they want. You express doubt. Is it my AP essay, or is it just you? I suggest that you do a google search for: ‘ “assassination politics” “jim bell” ‘ and find any negative opinions. Also, much more recently, some people from the Forecast Foundation have implemented a death-prediction market on Ethereum and Augur: google search ‘ethereum augur assassination’ to see what people have said in the last couple of weeks. (It’s not exactly like my AP idea; and the details contain enough differences so it is currently rather de-fanged. But it is a good start.) If you can’t find much against it, the problem is not my essay. The problem is YOU.

https://www.thoughtsaloud.com/2018/07/01/can-a-second-civil-war-be-avoided/ Can A Second Civil War Be Avoided? July 1st, 2018 | Author: Troy It should be quite clear to anyone paying any attention that the massive protests over everything Trump related get ever closer to outright violence. I lived through the Vietnam War protests and clearly remember students being shot by folks in uniform before the then president shirked his duty and surrendered. Even though the shots are not ringing out (yet), this seems to me a far more polarized situation than we have experienced since our first Civil War. One factor that the protesting progressives seem to have overlooked (despite the growing evidence) is that we clod-heads in “flyover country†are heavily armed and, usually, well skilled in the use of said arms. Do these coastal fools really think they can unseat a duly elected president and complete the destruction of our Republic without serious resistance? Not going to happen. Will there be a “winner†in the coming conflict? I can’t see how there could be. As soon as serious blood begins to flow, our enemies will be picking over our dead and wounded bodies worse than the Arabs during the WWII campaigns in North Africa. Then there is the matter of what our military will do once it hits the fan. My suspicion is that divisions of opinion within the military will mirror those of the nation in general. No idea how that will play out. Point is, I truly think we are heading into a situation that will produce only losses – losses that could be easily avoided by talking rather than screaming at each other. That said, the intentional destruction of our national education system is surely about to pay the predictable dividends. The fact that this is taking a bit longer to materialize than I predicted in earlier articles does not change the reality I think I see all around me. The other thing that I see is that the “good people†for the most part are silently hunkering down hoping the whole thing will simply go away. As it such problems ever do. Think about it. Troy L Robinson +1 Posted in Debate, Education, Liberty « Why I Quit The Libertarian Party Assassination Politics » 43 Responses to “Can A Second Civil War Be Avoided?” Jim Bell says: July 2, 2018 at 11:49 am I frequently point out that the MSM (mainstream media; at least, the liberal/Democrat part of it) probably gave Trump $1-2 billion in free publicity prior to the Republican convention in 2016. In effect, they threw the Republican nomination to Trump. This process was made easier because the Republicans started out with 17 candidates, rather than 2 or 3. At each stage, some candidate(s) was/were going to be winnowed, and usually that winnowing was caused by lack of money or interest. Trump was never going to lack money, whether or not he chose to spend it, and the MSM ensured that he had at least apparent interest. This was intentional. Not, of course, that the MSM wanted Trump to be elected; my hypothesis is that they wanted to have him be the easiest-to-beat candidate of those likely to be nominated. Well, they got what they asked for, even if they didn’t want him to be President. I say all this, in large part because I feel certain that the “civil war” talked about is far less likely to occur, if the MSM/Left/Democrats are outed as having been responsible for Trump’s nomination. And ultimately they bear responsibility for Trump’s eventual election. While I, as a lifetime libertarian, would have still voted for whichever libertarian the LP chose, I would have been much happier if the Republicans had chosen Rand Paul or maybe Ted Cruz. So, blame the MSM. I do. If the public is aware of how much, and which direction, they manipulated the nomination of Trump, they will be far less likely to blame each other for the ultimate outcome. +2 Reply Troy says: July 3, 2018 at 7:45 am I frequently point out that the MSM (mainstream media; at least, the liberal/Democrat part of it) probably gave Trump $1-2 billion in free publicity prior to the Republican convention in 2016. In effect, they threw the Republican nomination to Trump. I think this was mostly because Trump made “good copy”. What the MSM wants most of all is to be watched/read, taken seriously and covering Trump made that happen. I also think there is little doubt that the MSM mostly saw Trump as some sort of buffoon who would never be taken seriously in a general election — especially when running against the crown princess herself. Thankfully, a sufficient portion of the nation saw said crown princess as a generally unwashed self-serving crook who is incapable of telling the truth about anything. Like, perhaps, why her daughter is the spitting image of Webb Hubbell rather than her “husband” who is incapable of making babies. I’m thinking this sham “family” needed a child to complete the phony public image, Bill was shooting blanks (if, indeed, he ever even aimed Hill’s way in the first place), good old Webster had a poor sense of smell and no taste in women, and voila, problem solved! Gosh, I am a terrible person. Accurate but terrible. And, I will repeat for the umpteenth time, there is no “popular vote”. Our president is elected by the States, not by the mob. Just had to toss that in. Troy +2 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 2, 2018 at 12:09 pm Bill do you still think Rand Paul or Ted Cruz would have done better than what Trump has so far accomplished? 😉 +1 Reply jim says: July 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm “Bill do you still think Rand Paul or Ted Cruz would have done better than what Trump has so far accomplished?” [more on “Bill” later] You are apparently assuming that each candidate could, and would, have been elected, if nominated. That assumption seems valid enough, in hindsight. Yet, Trump ALMOST didn’t win! Had he lost, he wouldn’t have done “well”, obviously! We are fortunate that Hillary Clinton amassed so many serious scandals that she lost. I think that Rand Paul or Ted Cruz would have been more likely to win the election, against her. If we somehow “know” that the “Republican” candidate would definitely win, we can choose which one we’d prefer. I’d choose Rand Paul, because while he isn’t quite as libertarian as his father, Ron Paul, I think he’d do quite well. But, I think it was more likely that either Paul or Cruz would have won, which is why I would have preferred to see the Republicans run them. [on “Bill”: In my 60+ year life, when I am called by other than “Jim Bell”, it almost always is “Bill”. Interesting coincidence; but one time, about 30 years ago, my FATHER called me “Bill”.] +2 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 2, 2018 at 7:31 pm Sorry Jim… maybe in my old age Jim = Bill for some reason? You are correct it is an assumption that either Paul or Cruz would be chosen by the public over Clinton. My educated guess would be they would. It appears the public was simply fed up FINALLY. Perhaps it is divine providence if there really is such a thing. 😉 So the question stands do you think either of Paul or Cruz had the ability to out perform Trump as it stands today? +1 Reply Troy says: July 3, 2018 at 7:29 am “Bill do you still think Rand Paul or Ted Cruz would have done better than what Trump has so far accomplished?†While I really like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul (although my estimation of Rand has declined a bit lately), and, my name is not Bill (or Jim), I seriously doubt that either could have come near to Trump’s accomplishments. They are simply too “establishment” beholden. (For the record, I supported Governor Johnson in the last election and had serious doubts about Trump.) For whatever reason, Trump’s “take no prisoners” style seems to be exactly what the situation needed. If the progressives would just settle down a bit and start behaving like loyal citizens, we might actually get the nation back into working order. Then again, if elephants could fly… Troy +2 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 4, 2018 at 4:54 pm Paying attention to what Trump has accomplished so far I see no one who could have accomplished the same. I often wondered why business men were not running the country instead of lawyers (for the most part). To top that off Trump’s personality is perfect for what needed to be done. I look at him and am actually astonished he has not flipped a number of these guys the middle finger. There is little doubt in my mind he thinks that. I admire his restraint. It all is fun to watch actually. Especially the progressive media melt down. None of these half-wits appear to have a clue what fools they are making of themselves. I keep thinking at some point career self preservation will kick in … but apparently not. +1 Reply Chris says: July 5, 2018 at 4:46 am Either Cruz or Paul were capable of accomplishing what Trump has save one factor. Neither would have been able to withstand the kind of progressive leftist and media pressure that Trump has. Paul would have wilted like a spring flower and Cruz would have taken the Bush approach and ignored it assuring only one term. Some would say that the liberal gyrations are because it’s Trump. That’s a crock. Obama’s minions and Pac are behind it all with a complicit media. It would be happening no matter what republican were in office. Of course there wasn’t supposed to be. Nobody could outperform Trump because anybody else would be broken by now. +2 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 6, 2018 at 11:10 pm It would be happening no matter what republican were in office. Of course there wasn’t supposed to be. Nobody could outperform Trump because anybody else would be broken by now. I believe you are correct Chris. The powers THAT WERE somehow were overthrown unexpectedly. Clearly the shock remains today. Personally I find it immensely entertaining … almost as entertaining as the cute kitten themes on my browser which makes me smile with each change 😉 +1 Reply Chris says: July 12, 2018 at 7:16 am Entertaining? That dear lady is an understatement. I’ve been laughing so hard I have to go in for hernia surgery next month. +1 clinicalthinker says: July 2, 2018 at 12:21 pm I remember Kent state also. The moral of the story was it did not have to be repeated. I have said all along … put a sniper on a rooftop … pick off a couple protesters who are masked, dressed in black and see exactly how committed they are to beat the opposition over the head with locks for crow bars. It is called behavior modification actually. 😉 +1 Reply Troy says: July 3, 2018 at 7:14 am I have said all along … put a sniper on a rooftop … pick off a couple protesters who are masked, dressed in black and see exactly how committed they are to beat the opposition over the head with locks for crow bars. It is a known fact of war that, sometimes, killing a few avoids having to kill many. Troy +1 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 5, 2018 at 12:38 am Isn’t this precisely the principle behind the efficacy of Jim Bell’s elegant Assassination Politics proposal? Sacrifice a few particularly disagreeable state functionaries, to deter any further participation in tyranny by others, which then precludes the necessity of a more costly revolution/civil war (same thing)… 😉 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply Troy says: July 5, 2018 at 12:26 pm Dave, in the referenced comment, I was referring to an open state of conflict where the lives and property of potentially innocent people are already at risk. While you will, no doubt disagree, if only in an attempt to irritate me, this is different from political assassination which, IMHO, is always wrong. Let me try to explain with a simple illustration — you know from many past contributions that I truly think that Obama gave aid and comfort to our enemy, thereby committing high treason. We also know that the customary penalty for high treason is death by execution. Having said that, I would not perpetrate Obama’s execution, either with my own hands or by paying some murder-for-hire thug via pretend currency. Instead, I would propose that he be publicly confronted for what I believe are his crimes, in a court of law and subject to due process. My reason for this stance is that if the decision and its follow-on are left totally to me, there is simply too much chance that I might be wrong, however right I believe my conclusions to be. Obviously, I form my personal decisions without access to critical evidence and my opinions are biased by my own preconceived notions. That is why we have attempted to replace “vigilante justice” with due process under the law. Now you may well respond that the system is currently too corrupt to render justice for the powerful and you are probably correct. To me, the answer is to fix the system rather than to revert to the law of the jungle. At this point, I will drop out of what I think is a frivolous conversation. Troy +1 Reply jim says: July 5, 2018 at 1:51 pm ” To me, the answer is to fix the system rather than to revert to the law of the jungle.” You said, “the answer is to fix the system”. That reminds me of a joke, a few decades ago, of a (fictional) book Titled, “How to be a successful millionaire”. The first page of the book said, “First get a million dollars”. See the problem? Many things are easily stated: “fix the system”. But how? Can you explain how to solve the problem? How to “fix the system”? Prior to 1995, I had no easily explainable solutions. After I wrote my AP essay, I could point to it as a relatively straightforward way to “fix the system”. If you can actually describe ANOTHER way to “fix the system”, explain it and explain why it’s better than AP. If you can’t do that, then you don’t have a solution. You are merely hoping that another solution exists. +1 jim says: July 5, 2018 at 11:56 pm Let me add, that you said: “At this point, I will drop out of what I think is a frivolous conversation.” It isn’t “frivolous”. In the 20th century, governments killed an estimated 250 million people. (some people get a lower number by not counting people killed in wars: Why, it isn’t clear!}) Unless you think people HAVE to be killed by governments, then you are morally obligated to consider how to avoid that outcome. Do you have any proposed solution? Do you have any proposed solution to solve the problem represented by nuclear weapons? Thousands, maybe millions of very intelligent people have been thinking about how to solve that problem since 1945. No solution in sight. Except one. My AP essay. Tell me why you think it won’t work. If you concede it will work, explain why you aren’t advocating it right now. Do you have a better, faster, cheaper, safer alternative? Describe it. +1 â—„Daveâ–º says: July 6, 2018 at 2:52 am …via pretend currency. LOL! You know very well that ALL currency is pretend money, including and especially Federal Reserve Notes. US FRN’s, Zimbabwe Dollars, Venezuelan Bolivar, Mexican Pesos and stateless Bitcoins, are all just tokens, worth precisely and only what someone is ready and willing to trade for them. The moment traders refuse to accept any of them, they become utterly worthless, no matter how much their state promotes them as ‘money.’ See: “Money.” At this point, I will drop out of what I think is a frivolous conversation. A pity. It bespeaks a lamentable failure of imagination. You can’t imagine the possibility of a world without tyranny, while Jim and I permit ourselves to conceive of such, and are willing to explore, refine, and debate ideas for promoting a society without rulers. While I will grant that I will never see this miracle in my lifetime, as we discussed hereabouts two years ago, I contend that the chances of ultimately abolishing tyranny with technology, are infinitely greater than somehow ‘fixing’ the current Incumbrepublocrat mob-rule duopoly, while continuing to sanction the ruling class with enthusiastic participation in their sham elections. As for ‘vigilante justice’ and the ‘law of the jungle,’ I personally wouldn’t hesitate to join in any serious new revolution/civil war (same thing) effort to violently overthrow the tyranny ensconced in Sodom on the Potomac. It is infinitely more oppressive than King George’s ever was; but now as then, there are loyal Tories who wish to continue to try to petition for redress, rather than upset the status quo. I would suggest that there is now a considerable contingent of dissatisfied Americans, on both extremes of the political spectrum, who could be persuaded to join such an effort. With that in mind, I submit that Jim’s AP idea would be considerably less violent, with infinitely less bloodshed overall. It has the added benefit that it does not promote a new crop of tyrannical politicians, just itching to get their own hands on the levers of government, to dispense retribution, which would just perpetuate the ills of this society. I reckon it is worth a try. â—„Daveâ–º +2 Chris says: July 5, 2018 at 6:16 pm It may be necessary CT. Right now we see little ill prepared ANTIFA masked sissies (I’ll use that term in mixed company) that turn and run when confronted and aren’t capable of taking a punch without collapsing in a heap. They are useful idiots. It’s a bait and switch coming. These sissies are being used to desensitize people to the threat so nobody will take them seriously. Trust me the agitators have far more “competent” people at their disposal that will sooner or later be filtered in. How many inmates are now free from prison because of a certain “community organizers” early release program when he was president? How many of them left prison and found shelter and help within the nation of Islam? If it isn’t stopped it will get bloody and having the false sense of security that it will just be the nose of a yapping snow flake is delusional. They are just the primer. +2 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 6, 2018 at 9:56 pm I am afraid we are heading in that direction faster than any of us expected. This ramping up the mob rhetoric is not a good thing IMO. Mob/group action is an interesting thing. How one gets caught up in it is even more interesting to me … since it did in fact happen to me. Nothing more sinister than a self professed Shinto master coaxing a group of about 20 to walk across a bed of hot coals (i.e. firewalk). Sound stupid? Indeed it was! Much to the objection of my brother and my firefighting cousin … before I knew it I was trudging across a hot coal pit about 8 feet wide and 10 feet long. Landing in a puddle of mud being gently greeted by a Shinto helper who whispered something I will never forget. You completed a challenge most people will never try. He did not include “sane” in the sentence. When I got home my husband heard my brother recount the story. My husband said I never thought you would ever be that stupid. Frankly I never thought I would either. The interesting thing was I only suffered a tiny burn where a coal apparently got lodged under my little toe. My cousin Lorna got no burn at all … amazing … she must certainly been more spiritually minded than I was. That being said it hurt like hell. A solid reminder to never to that again. Lucky I have video of the whole thing or I would not believe I was that stupid either at this late date in life. The fascinating part of the whole incident for me was of the 4 of us. I my cousin Lorna, her brother and my brother … it was the 2 woman that for whatever reason actually did the walk. Had anyone ever said in the beginning … hey guys we are going to walk on bed of fire today there would have been a unanimous WE PASS from all of us! Walking around with my foot in a bucket of ice while preparing for a dinner party at my house that evening was not fun. It was however memorable in that I was now a firewalker. Through the years I have pondered that situation and why I actually chose to go through with the walk. No one pressured me (in fact the opposite from by brother and cousin telling us both we were crazy). I was fully cognizant of what was occurring. I was in the middle of a line where I could have stepped out of line at any time. Perhaps my cousin Lorna being directly ahead of me in line? I do not know. Before I realized it there I was facing a bed of hot coals and thinking best not panic now. So am I surprised at what happens in a large group or crowd? NO! It takes but one leader to start the charge and before you know it the sheeple will follow. The moral of the story you better decide to be a sheep dog ahead of time. +1 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 7, 2018 at 2:25 am Fascinating story, CT. Thanks for sharing. 🙂 â—„Daveâ–º +1 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 8, 2018 at 5:32 am You are welcome Dave. 😉 For me there was a rather interesting psychological outcome I suppose. Challenge in life became less challenging some how. That is where I quite looking at life through an emotional prism and disciplined myself to make all further decisions from a clinical perspective. Funny how emotion seems to offer little or no solution to fixing things but clinical perspective offers an immediate fix every time. An adequate fix according to ??? I suppose would be the question. Clearly to the clinical thinking decision maker it would work. The rest of the world? Who knows and would it matter? For me? My perspective has changed to something simple. I am headed in this direction. If you want to come along we can walk hand in hand. If not I refuse to drag your ass. You might recall in the beginning a tiny discussion over how satisfied we all were with our current lives and I said mine was very good. It is that way because total freedom to be exactly what you choose in life is pretty heady stuff. Those who accept being free tend to get along and are happy. Those who do not make that choice … well they can freely move in a different circle. So where does Jim Bell’s AP fit into that scenario? In the long run universally? Probably perfectly for a sheepdog. For a sheep? Not so much. At that point we are headed in a whole different behavioral/psychological direction. Look at your own life Dave does any of what is going on out in the world alter your life at all? It certainly does not alter mine one whit. Long ago I adopted an outlook that is my creed so to speak. “The world is what you perceive it to be so why not let that be light?” (light being good according to my personal perspective.) So fair warning … lol … step into my world and muck up my UTOPIA and see clinically what happens to you. (You being anyone with the guts or means to try) Make sense? +1 clinicalthinker says: July 8, 2018 at 6:32 am BTW Dave if you did not catch Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast it is always interesting to watch someone with a like mind IMO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xc7DN-noAc Also Sam Harris will be on Ben Shipiro today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdUC8nRVyYY&t=9s Somehow I get the inkling Sam has left his tried and true atheist tangent into some new esoteric “how to live a better life” money making scam (that is hinged on “common sense” for FREE basics). I will see … lol +1 â—„Daveâ–º says: July 9, 2018 at 4:15 am I can’t thank you enough for the links, CT. Particularly the Rogan/Peterson one, which I think may have been the most riveting 3+ hours I ever spent in front of a screen. This new “long form”/”intellectual dark web” business is utterly fascinating, and the lengthy discussion of it on both videos was remarkable. Out of curiosity, I will be exploring it further. Thanks again! â—„Daveâ–º +1 Troy says: July 6, 2018 at 8:28 am Dave and Jim/Bill, OK – despite my better judgment, one more try… Unless I seriously misunderstand the AP proposal, it seems to be based on the notion that if you eliminate a few of what you consider the “bad guys†, the rest will suddenly wake up and think “wow, we had best clean up our act before they come for us too†. An interesting theory that just might work – in a vacuum. One major flaw that I see is that no one gets into a position of power without a constituency of some sort. And, the more corrupt the person in power, the more corrupt the constituency. So, what I really see happening is that you eliminate a “bad guy†and his/her constituency does not like it one bit. In fact, they will surely have to take out some on your side to even the score. And, on and on it goes and nothing has really changed except the excuse for the killing. The alternative is to repeat what happened in the American colonies and again in France where to common people stood together and to tell the powerful “we are not going to take it anymore†followed by whatever action best suits the circumstance. Our Founders stated such grievous claims, defeated the most powerful military of the time, then established a Constitution in an attempt to place rigid bounds around the inevitable government that followed. All that is required of the rest of us is that we defend the Constitutional notion and demand its strict enforcement. This we have failed to do for more reasons than I care to list. I honestly think that most of those reasons could be negated by a combination of a restored education system along with a return to compulsory national service (the latter as a way to instill much needed discipline into young plastic minds and bodies). And, no, such change will not be easy but, IMHO, without it, no other solution can have lasting effect. For those of you who prefer to shoot your way out of the problem, I say “fire away†– just don’t pretend surprise when the other guys fire back. As for the number of people killed in the last century’s wars, I might note that since mankind has used its ingenuity to reduce famine and epidemic but has done little to reduce the overall birth rate, war and climate seem to be nature’s only means of population control. Inference: if we stopped out-of-control reproduction, there would be far less reason to kill each other (or for nature to kill us) in the never-ending quest to control resources. Troy +1 Reply jim says: July 6, 2018 at 9:42 am “One major flaw that I see is that no one gets into a position of power without a constituency of some sort. And, the more corrupt the person in power, the more corrupt the constituency.” You seem to be assuming that in a post-AP world, there will be “positions of power”, just like current society. Why? There will be no “authority” that is deemed to be granted by the public, as in some sort of a vote. People will be able to get into positions (jobs) where they do things, but if they piss people off enough they will have to leave those positions. For a few months or years, there might be a bloodbath, where people who have grudges take their revenge, but I see nothing wrong with this concept. Soon enough, society will probably be very ‘boring’, at least their will be a minimum of dispute, no war as we know it. +1 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 6, 2018 at 10:20 pm For those of you who prefer to shoot your way out of the problem, I say “fire away†– just don’t pretend surprise when the other guys fire back. Actually I think the same thing every time I see Moron Maxine busy ramping up a riot against others. I seriously wonder how long it will be before someone burns a cross on her front lawn. Then she will really have something to gripe about. +1 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 7, 2018 at 2:19 am one more try… Thanks for continuing to engage, Troy; but I can see that you still don’t quite grasp the elegance of the remarkable potential for Jim’s idea. Unless I seriously misunderstand the AP proposal, it seems to be based on the notion that if you eliminate a few of what you consider the “bad guys†, the rest will suddenly wake up and think “wow, we had best clean up our act before they come for us too†. That is too simplistic. To me, the “bad guys” are any and all persons claiming authority to rule, regulate, and/or enforce their model of how the world should behave, over free, sovereign, independent, individuals, who choose not to recognize any such authority. This would necessarily include any coercive agents of any government, including all law enforcement officers or military personnel. Thus, “bad guys” would have to do more than just clean up their act for self-preservation, they would need to find a different line of work. In fact, they will surely have to take out some on your side to even the score. You seem to misunderstand that once implemented, there could be no “sides,” competing for power to rule over each other. Laissez faire would reign supreme. The alternative is to repeat what happened in the American colonies… Are you suggesting that another revolution would be a better alternative to AP? Why? Such, even if your preferred side won, would do nothing to end the us-against-them paradigm — only perpetuate it. …the inevitable government that followed. They desired to continue in international commerce on the high seas, so they deemed it wise to join their existing colonial governments into a federated nation for international respect. Since there was no international internet or cryptographic blockchain technology at the time, they must be forgiven for this failure of imagination. Today, technologically competent libertarians have no such excuse. 😉 I honestly think that most of those reasons could be negated by a combination of a restored education system along with a return to compulsory national service (the latter as a way to instill much needed discipline into young plastic minds and bodies). And, no, such change will not be easy but, IMHO, without it, no other solution can have lasting effect. Yikes! Improved compulsory indoctrination system and compulsory conscription? Are you sure you are still a libertarian? Besides, neither has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever happening anytime soon, so dreaming of them as some sort of lasting solution to what ails America is utterly futile. AP, on the other hand, not only offers a solution with a lasting effect, it is inevitable that it will eventually be implemented. As I predicted two years ago in “Eliminating Authority“: I reckon that it is only a matter of time, before a workable, automated, and unstoppable worldwide system is designed and implemented. If TOR can already circumvent the Great Firewall of China, how could it be stopped, and by whom? Moreover, while mass retirements of politicians, bureaucrats, police, and military officers would undoubtedly soon follow, I don’t see it as being limited to government functionaries. Why not Jihadist leaders and their radical imams? How about dishonest used car salesmen? There could easily be multiple prediction markets, to eliminate all manner of uncivilized behaviors. Being an unpleasant jerk and pissing people off, could become extremely dangerous. If one did something to provoke getting one’s name on a ‘hit’ list, with a sufficient reward to tempt a friend or associate, one’s life would never be the same again. Since the reward funds are donated up front, as anonymously as the ultimate recipient of them, there would be no way to cancel a ‘contract’ once initiated. Yikes! I predict a very polite society in the future of mankind. Those believing that gangs of thugs would naturally terrorize society in the absence of government, need to think again. They wouldn’t dare have any leaders either! Who could a gang leader possibly trust, with a sufficient price on his head? For their bloodthirsty lot, it wouldn’t even need to be a very high price, since it could be collected completely anonymously, with a few keystrokes on a smartphone. Once this genie is out of the bottle, and anonymous cryptocurrency use becomes ubiquitous worldwide, I predict that eventually all oppressive governments will fail, and all military organizations will cease to exist. I am unsure what individuals will then do with their lust for power, when none is available. I suppose they might have to settle for becoming well-paid assassins; but even that would be destined to become a dead-end career, as the survivors did their very best to avoid provoking anyone, in any way. Now, if you have absorbed Jim’s entire essay, please show me the hidden flaw. I can’t find it! â—„Daveâ–º So far, other than personal emotional outrage at the idea, no one has been able to expose a flaw. Perhaps there isn’t one… 😉 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply jim says: July 10, 2018 at 6:30 pm You don’t seem to want to reply, huh? You used the term “frivolous”, TWICE, but you cannot show that the issue (the problem of the existence of government) is of no or little consequence. Chances are you discovered that you couldn’t challenge the issue, both of importance, but also you couldn’t challenge the idea that if implemented, my AP idea would work. +1 Reply Troy says: July 11, 2018 at 7:31 am I have ceased participation in this conversation for several reasons: First, it has gotten far too contentious for my taste. I simply do not take myself (or anyone else) that seriously. Second, you have decided you are correct and will not consider any alternatives so why offer any? Third, this is simply not fun or mentally stimulating — the only reasons I participate in this blog. Troy 0 Reply jim says: July 16, 2018 at 8:55 am You started off by claiming, TWICE, that the subject was “frivolous”. I could define “frivolous” as being “without importance. Yet, do you really think that the issue of the ultimate elimination of government is “without importance? Governments killed 250 million people in the 20th century. Do you really think that the lives of those 250 million people are without importance? I think you were just trying to avoid the discussion, which you knew you would not win. “First, it has gotten far too contentious for my taste. I simply do not take myself (or anyone else) that seriously.” Another example of trying, under different words, to call the issue “frivolous”. “Second, you have decided you are correct and will not consider any alternatives so why offer any?” I suggest that this describes virtually any discussion or debate. And, the fact that I wrote my AP essay 23 years ago, and I have been carefully paying attention to references to it, certainly justifies me “deciding I am correct”. You also haven’t attempted to provide any “alternatives” yet. While people continue to die, you won’t explain how to solve that problem. “Third, this is simply not fun or mentally stimulating — the only reasons I participate in this blog.” Generally, it is painful for everyone to discuss on the losing end of a debate. 0 Reply Troy says: July 16, 2018 at 9:35 am I think you were just trying to avoid the discussion, which you knew you would not win. Jim, we have very different worldviews and concepts. To me, the notion of “winning” or “losing” suggests life is some sort of game. I refuse to accept this concept. For me, the main two reasons to live are: 1. To enjoy simply being alive, and, 2. To learn. Since I assume most others have some form of these same ideas, even though they may state them differently, I also adopt a “live and let live” approach which I try to implement through tolerance of people who do not think exactly like I do. Alas, I find myself lacking any grand solutions and, as stated elsewhere, I simply do not take anyone that seriously. I find it somewhat odd that while you bemoan the number of people “killed by governments”, your solution seems to be even more killing, albeit more selective killing than that done in war. Troy 0 clinicalthinker says: July 9, 2018 at 10:17 pm I think may have been the most riveting 3+ hours I ever spent in front of a screen. Any time Dave 😉 Peterson/Rogan was also my favorite. I have seen so much controversy over what Peterson says of late. Frankly what people think he is saying astounds me. It only reinforces my theory people hear what they want to hear no matter what is actually said to them. I was particularly intrigued when Peterson said something like “this is the first time in history where the spoken word is more important than the written word” … all because of the “intellectual dark web”. All of these guys are slowly putting newspapers and TV out of business. Rogan had an interview with Candace Owens and Ted Nugent this month too. Both interesting IMO. A 3 hour show with one person is pretty telling no matter how many short clips one has seen in the past. +1 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 11, 2018 at 2:51 am Just finished the JRE/Candace Owens one. Wow! Excellent… â—„Daveâ–º +1 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 11, 2018 at 9:56 pm Glad you enjoyed JRE/Candace Dave 🙂 . I have liked her from the beginning when she cropped up. This has been a rather interesting month for me … where suddenly I run across information that causes me to really think and wonder what if. Today was one of these special days. I have thought for a very long time … how egotistical for humans to believe we are the only thinking intelligence in the universe. Looks like perhaps not if one is to believe there is an actual area 51 and perhaps a crash at Rosewell in 1953. Somehow I happened onto a youtube video with Ron Garner talking about his life’s research of Area 51. It was his last interview before his death. One of the people he talked about was a Dr. Dan Burisch who reportedly has an IQ of 200, a trained microbiologist … recruited because of his skills to S-4 of area 51. Part of his job was the study of one of the crash victims called J-ROD who had a degenerative disease. This is a 1 to 12 part series of which I have watched the first 2 so far. Interesting IMO Perhaps to others here also 😉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uq9n7tpmd4 0 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 13, 2018 at 11:48 pm I have now watched episodes 1 – 2 – 6 – 7 and part of 9. I have given up watching because it appears that they have simply chopped up the rest into what was already covered. Burisch seems credible enough. I found it odd that the government allowed this to go on and on. Perhaps they have not since I find nothing after these interviews about him at all. By 6 – 7 things were getting a little far out. Time travel back and forth, multiple dimension slipping, mental telepathy all fascinating and possible I suppose. Most likely I would have to experience it myself to be a gung-ho believer. Perhaps after I rest my mind I will finish the series just out of curiosity for whatever else of might be lurking out there 😉 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 18, 2018 at 12:16 am I finally got around to the Rogan/Nugent podcast. I certainly didn’t expect it to be as fascinating as it was! I learned a lot about both of these guys that I didn’t know. Thanks again, CT. 😀 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply clinicalthinker says: July 13, 2018 at 11:13 pm I have to go in for hernia surgery next month. Oh My Chris … hope the hernia part is not for real but if by chance it is good luck. My hubby had to have that surgery and came thru with flying colors twice 🙂 The laughing part? I look at it this way the more we laugh and smile the less wrinkles we get … LOL Are you enjoying the Peter Strzok BBQ Grill sequences? The democrats put on quite a show. Talk about nailing the coffin lid shut. I have long thought Trump caused these wing-nuts to lost their collective marbles. Now I realize they never had marbles to lose. What does that say for those who voted them into office? Would love to see some charges come out of all this. The country needs to see corrupt people in the “county clink” for some of their misbehavior. 0 Reply jim says: July 18, 2018 at 9:12 am This reply is actually for Troy, but of all the comments above, the one I am replying to is the only one that has no “reply” button!! “Jim, we have very different worldviews and concepts. To me, the notion of “winning†or “losing†suggests life is some sort of game. I refuse to accept this concept.” Don’t play word-games. You know what I mean. “Alas, I find myself lacking any grand solutions” Which, I suspect, is the motive behind some of the opposition to my AP concept. Some people just don’t LIKE it, and mostly because they cannot think of something better. “and, as stated elsewhere, I simply do not take anyone that seriously.” That doesn’t mean that you cannot respond in a non-serious fashion, huh? “I find it somewhat odd that while you bemoan the number of people “killed by governments†, your solution seems to be even more killing, albeit more selective killing than that done in war.” I notice your phrase “even more killing”. This suggests that you believe that there will be even more killing in a post-AP world than in a pre-AP world. Why do you believe that? I concluded, even before I wrote Part 1 of the essay, that the long-post-AP world would eventually be quite peaceful, even boring. Have you ever heard the saying, “an armed society is a polite society”? Well, AP will arm the people in a far more effective way than they have ever been allowed to be armed, before. There will be no government coercion, and certainly because there will be no government. 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: July 18, 2018 at 12:07 pm This reply is actually for Troy, but of all the comments above, the one I am replying to is the only one that has no “reply†button!! Jim, the nesting of comments on this blog is set at 5 levels, because they get too narrow if set higher. This is why there is no reply button on comments in the final level. To make a reply inline, use the first reply button you find in a comment above the one you are replying to. Otherwise, especially if you are quoting something, it is best to go all the way to the bottom of the thread and make a generic reply, as if you were commenting to the main post. This has the effect of moving the comment all the way to the left column, and makes it more likely to be seen by a casual reader not actively engaged in the conversation. BTW: selecting the text you are quoting and then hitting the “quote” button in the reply box, results in this more elegant presentation. 🙂 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply jim says: December 1, 2018 at 12:24 pm Okay, I now understand. I’m not surprised that Troy abandoned the conversation. There is definitely a very important problem, perhaps the most important one humans face. Troy (and most everyone else) doesn’t even pretend to have a solution. I, at least, claim to have described a solution. (AP) https://cryptome.org/ap.htm When I first wrote and publicized my AP essay in 1995-96, I expected there to be a robust debate, but it really never happened. That debate could still occur today, and should. Now that Ethereum and Augur exist (and the Forecast Foundation) this discussion may be forced onto the world. 0 Reply Larry says: January 10, 2019 at 10:33 pm Troy always provided useful contributions on any issue he pondered in this and other forums in which we participated. In this case, he probably should have early on just identified your essay as meaningless, useless drivel. I hope you can do better. +1 â—„Daveâ–º says: January 11, 2019 at 1:21 am Nice to see that you are still kicking, Larry. Happy New Year. 👴 â—„Daveâ–º +2 jim bell says: February 24, 2019 at 10:48 pm “Larry said: Larry says: January 10, 2019 at 10:33 pm Troy always provided useful contributions on any issue he pondered in this and other forums in which we participated. In this case, he probably should have early on just identified your essay as meaningless, useless drivel. I hope you can do better.” I think you need to be clearer. Assuming you agree that government is the problem, then we should be searching for a solution to that problem. I believe I have found it. Can you challenge that, my conclusion? If you DON’T believe that government is the problem, you are part of the problem.

https://www.thoughtsaloud.com/2016/08/14/eliminating-authority/ Eliminating Authority August 14th, 2016 | Author: â—„Daveâ–º For the first time in our society’s seemingly inexorable death spiral, I have regained a significant measure of hope for the future of America, and indeed all of mankind. Once again, it seems, technology will come to our rescue. Would a world without any rulers, where war was rendered impossible, be such a bad place to live? If there were a way to eventually nullify the power of all states, not just our own, would it be worth doing? “Anarchy is not lack of order. Anarchy is lack of ORDERS.” -unknown What if there were nobody left daring to even follow unpopular orders, much less issue them? Without so-called ‘leaders,’ and disciplined followers willing to execute their orders, no form of tyranny or warfare could possibly exist. Think about that undeniable fundamental truth for a moment. I find it astonishing that I had never heard of Jim Bell, and his 20-year-old 10-part essay, “Assassination Politics,” in which he described and defended a technological method for eliminating unpopular politicians from society. Part 1 begins: I’ve been following the concepts of digital cash and encryption since I read the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American on “encrypted signatures.” While I’ve only followed the Digitaliberty area for a few weeks, I can already see a number of points that do (and should!) strongly concern the average savvy individual: 1. How can we translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life? 2. How can we keep the government from banning encryption, digital cash, and other systems that will improve our freedom? A few months ago, I had a truly and quite literally “revolutionary” idea, and I jokingly called it “Assassination Politics”: I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly “predicted” the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash. I also speculated that using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous “digital cash,” it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given. Even the organization itself would have no information that could help the authorities find the person responsible for the prediction, let alone the one who caused the death. It was not my intention to provide such a “tough nut to crack” by arguing the general case, claiming that a person who hires a hit man is not guilty of murder under libertarian principles. Obviously, the problem with the general case is that the victim may be totally innocent under libertarian principles, which would make the killing a crime, leading to the question of whether the person offering the money was himself guilty. On the contrary; my speculation assumed that the “victim” is a government employee, presumably one who is not merely taking a paycheck of stolen tax dollars, but also is guilty of extra violations of rights beyond this. (Government agents responsible for the Ruby Ridge incident and Waco come to mind.) In receiving such money and in his various acts, he violates the “Non-aggression Principle” (NAP) and thus, presumably, any acts against him are not the initiation of force under libertarian principles. The organization set up to manage such a system could, presumably, make up a list of people who had seriously violated the NAP, but who would not see justice in our courts due to the fact that their actions were done at the behest of the government. Associated with each name would be a dollar figure, the total amount of money the organization has received as a contribution, which is the amount they would give for correctly “predicting” the person’s death, presumably naming the exact date. “Guessers” would formulate their “guess” into a file, encrypt it with the organization’s public key, then transmit it to the organization, possibly using methods as untraceable as putting a floppy disk in an envelope and tossing it into a mailbox, but more likely either a cascade of encrypted anonymous remailers, or possibly public-access Internet locations, such as terminals at a local library, etc. Hopefully, that has peaked your interest enough to go read his thought-provoking essay, because I would love to discuss its potential and/or flaws. Obviously, back in ’95, the internet was in its infancy, and very few individuals had even a dial-up connection to it. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had yet to be invented, nor had the potential for anonymity like TOR. What a difference 20 years can make in technology! Now, internet access by smartphone is ubiquitous worldwide, and the technology necessary to implement Bell’s idea, is readily available. Crowd funding and prediction markets are now commonplace. In fact, it seems that someone has already started a version of it on the TOR network, focused on banking opponents of cryptocurrency. I have read, for instance, that the reward for correctly predicting Ben Bernanke’s death is $75K. I wonder how much that has changed his lifestyle? Even if it is a false flag honeypot, designed by the authorities to try to entrap someone, that wouldn’t help Bernanke; because there would still be no way to trace his would-be assailant, or know ahead of time when and where he intended to act. He could hire armed guards to protect himself 24/7; but how could he trust them? What would happen if their names were then added to the list? I reckon that it is only a matter of time, before a workable, automated, and unstoppable worldwide system is designed and implemented. If TOR can already circumvent the Great Firewall of China, how could it be stopped, and by whom? Moreover, while mass retirements of politicians, bureaucrats, police, and military officers would undoubtedly soon follow, I don’t see it as being limited to government functionaries. Why not Jihadist leaders and their radical imams? How about dishonest used car salesmen? There could easily be multiple prediction markets, to eliminate all manner of uncivilized behaviors. 🙂 Being an unpleasant jerk and pissing people off, could become extremely dangerous. If one did something to provoke getting one’s name on a ‘hit’ list, with a sufficient reward to tempt a friend or associate, one’s life would never be the same again. Since the reward funds are donated up front, as anonymously as the ultimate recipient of them, there would be no way to cancel a ‘contract’ once initiated. Yikes! I predict a very polite society in the future of mankind. Those believing that gangs of thugs would naturally terrorize society in the absence of government, need to think again. They wouldn’t dare have any leaders either! Who could a gang leader possibly trust, with a sufficient price on his head? For their bloodthirsty lot, it wouldn’t even need to be a very high price, since it could be collected completely anonymously, with a few keystrokes on a smartphone. Once this genie is out of the bottle, and anonymous cryptocurrency use becomes ubiquitous worldwide, I predict that eventually all oppressive governments will fail, and all military organizations will cease to exist. I am unsure what individuals will then do with their lust for power, when none is available. I suppose they might have to settle for becoming well-paid assassins; but even that would be destined to become a dead-end career, as the survivors did their very best to avoid provoking anyone, in any way. 😉 Now, if you have absorbed Jim’s entire essay, please show me the hidden flaw. I can’t find it! â—„Daveâ–º +1 Posted in Anarchy, Debate, Liberty, Politics, Technical « Importing War Information vs Wisdom » 12 Responses to “Eliminating Authority” â—„Daveâ–º says: August 15, 2016 at 7:35 pm As long as the states are in cyber-competition with each other, the nimble hackers will continue to win, and frustrate all attempts to control the internet. As long as there is greed for power and wealth, there will always be competition and a lack of real interstate cooperation. Therefore, ultimately, Bell’s brilliant idea is unstoppable! 😈 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply ClinicalThinker says: August 15, 2016 at 8:24 pm At what point does one believe the government or each state for that matter does not have equally nimble hackers who will ultimately find out who gets paid what? It appears Bell relies heavily on honesty and integrity of those in charge of “the system”. Honesty and integrity appear to be in short supply these days. My favorite part was about Howard Hughes and his ball bearings. Leave it to a genius who is a little daffed. 🙂 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: August 15, 2016 at 9:45 pm You have to understand the nature of public key encryption, digital cash, and TOR to realize that the information is simply not hackable, CT. Those operating “the system” don’t know, and cannot possibly learn, the identities of the contributors or recipients of the digital cash either. The only question about their honesty and integrity, could be whether they were actually paying off the winners, with all the donated proceeds (less the agreed overhead percentage – probably 1% or less). There are several factors, which would ensure they performed as expected. One, would be competition. There could easily be dozens of “systems” to choose from, and likely would be. Another, would be the likelihood that a dishonest operator would soon end up on a list himself. Then, it could easily become an completely automated process operating on a distributed computing system, where no corruptible human was even involved, much less in charge. This understanding is part of why I predict that the idea will be implemented, it will work, and there is nothing the powers-that-(currently)-be will be able to do to prevent it. The potential for the peaceful future of mankind is truly mind-boggling. Too bad we won’t be here to enjoy it, CT; but at least we can stop worrying ourselves, over the future for our posterity. I enjoyed the Howard Hughes vignette also. 😀 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply ClinicalThinker says: August 17, 2016 at 2:13 am Since this earth plane has been in existence for eons and has yet to achieve a state without war … my guess would be you are correct we (you and I) will not be around to see it. Frankly I doubt this playground will EVER ADVANCE to that elevated state in our next 50 life times if there is such a thing. 🙂 Perhaps it would be better to choose a more advanced playground next time around … oh wait that would not be as much fun 😉 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: August 17, 2016 at 11:03 pm …earth plane… …playground… …next time around… Sorry, CT. This is more New Age word salad, which is beyond my ken. 😉 â—„Daveâ–º 0 Kaizen says: August 16, 2016 at 7:11 am There is no HIDDEN flaw per se. But taking Bell’s paper(s) to its logical conclusion would necessitate EVENTUALLY a total wipe-out. This is Mad-Max syndrome but on steroids! In the end,(assuming you/me/him/her) lived that long, what’s the point? Which is why when Bell let loose “Assassination Politics” I rejected his methodology/ideology outright, as being just too…………sci-fi! You may disagree, as is your right, but I’ll take some very serious convincing! 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: August 16, 2016 at 1:16 pm I’ll take some very serious convincing! Great! I love a challenge… especially when the implication is that a serviceable mind, is actually open to being changed! Allow me to initiate the process, which I will take in chunks with multiple replies. For fun, I will start with: I rejected his methodology/ideology outright, as being just too…………sci-fi! As a kid growing up in the ’50s, I devoured nearly every sci-fi book in the library. I still think Robert Heinlein’s libertarian-like philosophy had a subtle, yet profound, influence on my own burgeoning contumacy, as I went through puberty, and beyond. I was in the middle of reading his series of space travel and planet colonization classics, when Russia launched Sputnik, so I wasn’t surprised at all… only thrilled. Not having any idea that he would one day become a rather disagreeable politician, John Glenn became a personal hero, after his three orbit space flight only five years later. To me at the time, sci-fi wasn’t just fanciful fiction, it was thought-provoking predictions about the exciting future of mankind. Electronics became my hobby, and I remember when I excitedly got my hands on my first transistor. I built a simple AM radio receiver with it, which was small enough that I was able to use it, to surreptitiously listen to the World Series during class in the 9th grade. Two years later, after mastering Morse Code, I got my Ham Radio license and built my first transmitter. A mere 25 years later, I was regularly communicating digitally via Ham Radio, with the International Space Station as it passed over Hawaii, from my yacht with a laptop computer, a 1200 baud Packet Radio modem, and a VHF transceiver. From my experience, it seems that all it takes is time, for sci-fi to evolve into reality. Another example… do you remember the Dick Tracy comic strip, with his fanciful wristwatch? Knowing what was involved in building a 2-way radio, the notion that it could be miniaturized into a wristwatch, was simply beyond the realm of possibility to my young mind. By the time it evolved into a TV watch in the ’60s, I had already had a part-time job in a TV repair shop, while in high school, and was a technician in the US Army Signal Corps. I knew how CRTs worked, so that idea was patently ridiculous. I think about that often, when I answer my iPhone with my Apple Watch! Dick Tracy’s lame watch didn’t even have text messaging, with the ability to speak to Siri, which does an absolutely amazing job, of converting my nominal voice into text for a reply. All, without ever taking my phone out of my pocket! How about the internet itself? I had my first internet connection through a wormhole at the University of Hawaii, using that same Packet Radio station from my yacht, back in the late ’80s. This was before the WWW protocol was invented, and basically all that was available to civilians, was university databases and libraries. Everything was text based, because the 300 or 1200 baud modems available at the time were so slow. Downloading a research paper could take hours; but that it was coming into my yacht in Hawaii, from a university in New York, was just mind-boggling marvelous. Now, just 30 years later, I have a cable modem that consistently delivers 60mb broadband internet, simultaneously with a couple hundred HDTV channels. The technological changes that have occurred in my lifetime, are truly amazing. I suspect that youngsters today have no idea, how much we old farts have done to develop technology, for their welfare and amusement. I submit that at this point, if the mind of man can conceive it, technology can be designed to achieve it. This is particularly true in the interconnected digital world. Any potential obstacles to implementing Bell’s thesis on technology grounds, could be rather quickly rectified. …more to follow… â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply Chris says: August 16, 2016 at 5:42 pm Just to throw out a bit of a muse that I can’t quite figure out yet. In this day and age anybody can carry in their pocket the wisdom and knowledge of all recorded human history and every technology known. All the great philosophers, leaders, and critical minds works are at our finger tips. Yet we remain so stupid. 0 Reply Kaizen says: August 17, 2016 at 5:19 am Ok Dave, I never disputed the scintillating technological advances that have been accomplished during the past 60+years, with perhaps the most significant during the last 20. However, I’m going to change my mind to prove I’ve got one! I was wrong in my opening line above. There is a hidden flaw and that flaw is Bell himself. Whilst I never meant to dispute the technological CAPABILITY of his hypothesis being accomplished, the man clearly is a wacko and I do not and will not subscribe to wacko-politics. Sure, we all listen to the lunatic fringe,(we have several in the UK and with the internet, their platform(s) expands) but a balanced, logical mind says I’ve listened and rejected it. On that, I shall not change my mind!! Similarly, I dispute Chris’s sweeping generalisation – …”We remain so stupid.” I disagree. I believe that the vast majority of the silent majority are now apathetic to the speed of change because of the speed of change. That, per se, now impinges on every facet of life. And even with access to the world’s knowledge base at the touch of a button, nothing, absolutely nothing replaces common-sense. That, I suggest, is what we (and I do generalise here), the current planet’s inhabitants, have forgotten. Furthermore, we spend too much time just “doing” and far too little time just thinking. If we thought more and did less, my guess would be that Dave and Thoughts Aloud could replace Google! 0 Reply â—„Daveâ–º says: August 17, 2016 at 10:49 pm There is a hidden flaw and that flaw is Bell himself. …the man clearly is a wacko and I do not and will not subscribe to wacko-politics. …a balanced, logical mind says I’ve listened and rejected it. On that, I shall not change my mind!! More’s the pity. I preferred your original challenge. This is the epitome of argumentum ad hominem, in its original meaning. I was not intending to promote Bell’s political viewpoint, wacko or not; I didn’t even mention it. My interest was only in discussing the potential of his innovative ideas, for individual Liberty and peace, in a world without rulers. Challenging ideas themselves, is always fair game. Trying to discredit them, by attacking the character of the man suggesting them, is not. Imagine the book title, “How we Created Freedom in a Ruler-free World.” ‘Wacko-politics’ is in the eye of the beholder. Harry Browne was not a wacko by my lights; but he undoubtedly was considered so by the oligarchs and their sycophants, who preferred to perpetuate the status quo. Had Harry conceived of this solution to “Why Government Doesn’t Work,” I have to believe he would not have hesitated to openly discuss it. I, for one, would have listened carefully, and searched for the hidden flaw in the idea, and could not have found it in Harry’s basic political philosophy… I have tried to move discussion of Chris’s “sweeping generalization” over here: Information vs Wisdom â—„Daveâ–º 0 Reply ClinicalThinker says: August 17, 2016 at 2:05 am LOL Yet we remain so stupid. I am afraid we have not hit the bottom of the pit in stupid yet. After all the arrogance of man is astounding to me. We can send a man to the moon but can be build a GREAT PYRAMID? Are we really as smart and as advanced as a whale or dolphin? Sometimes I wonder if the average man is as smart as my cat …. I am afraid my answer would be NO! … LOL 😉 0 Reply jim bell says: February 18, 2017 at 10:44 am A very interesting discussion! Jim Bell, author of the Assassination Politics essay. 0 Reply

Elites, Politicians, Mafioso... waxing each other as usual... See also... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jovenel_Moise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome Top Adviser To Ukrainian President Targeted In "Assassination Attempt" Gunmen opened fire on a vehicle occupied by the top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday in what authorities deemed an "assassination attempt," according to AFP. Sergiy Shefir, 57, the first assistant advisor to Zelensky, was unscathed this morning after a hail of 7.62 caliber rounds fired from automatic weapons penetrated his unarmoured Audi A8L. However, his driver was seriously injured. Speaking with journalists after the incident, Shefir said the attack was intended to spook senior policymakers. "All I can say is that the assassination attempt was carried out to intimidate the highest echelon of power," he said. He explained more details about what happened: "We were driving when, suddenly, shots rang out. They wounded the driver, who was amazing and carried on driving. We sped up a bit. It was a scary moment. I immediately called the police and the interior minister." Shefir went on to say the incident will not intimidate the president, calling him a "very strong-willed and decisive person." Zelensky was in New York City at the time of the incident holding meetings at the United Nations. Shortly after he was briefed on the shooting, he issued a statement condemning the attack and said he would fly back to Kiev this evening. One of Zelensky's aides said the attack was an attempt to "demonstrably kill a key member of the team." Another presidential advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, said the attack was in response to "politics directed at limiting the traditional influence of shadowy oligarchs." So far, the assailants' identity is unknown, and there's a lot of finger-pointing within Zelensky's party. Some have blamed Moscow, smugglers, and crime bosses, while others have said it's too early to blame who is responsible. However, there's agreement within the party that the attack was meant to destabilize the country's political situation.