For many years now, decades actually, I have had a friend named "Compleat Patriot."
Compleat Patriot has tried to explain to me that the United States has been organized as a corporation operating under various forms of law. I must admit I have never fully understood what he has been trying to tell me.
Today I finally discovered what he has been trying to explain to me all of these years. My sister sent me a link.
This makes sense. Please watch. 38 minutes. Clif High, Predictive Linguistics.
Let me introduce this topic with an IRS story of my own.
About 5 years ago, my wife cashed in an annuity that had reached maturity. It was a tax free annuity which was purchased with already taxed money. In other words, it was like a savings account where you deposit money and the only tax bill you receive is on the interest.
About 18 months ago, I get one of those soft audit letters in the mail informing me that we owe 14 thousand dollars in back taxes and penalties. We did not report it as income because it wasn't.
So then we have to dig out the 1099. In the box where tax amounts are written in, it says "no tax." I forward that to the IRS thinking that will be the end of that.
About 3 months later, the IRS sends another letter. This is an agree or deny letter for 4000. The IRS says, you are right but you should have added it as income for the year.
To that I replied, "If I close out a savings or checking account, do we list that as income as well?"
This forces me to contact my accountant, refile that year's taxes, and wait for the next round of financial abuse. A couple months ago, I get a letter telling me that my tax liability is ZERO. This is what I had to go through.
Please note that I am an outspoken MAGA style conservative, now criminalized by President Biden in the Red Sermon. Is that a coincidence? Hard to say.
This is what I do know. The IRS can perform some sort of half ass audit on me via the mail. It was my duty to prove my innocence. I have no idea of what the process is exactly, but I do know that no strangers showed up at my door. No agents.
Now I'm no expert in these matters for sure- but if the government was only going to audit billionaires and mult-millionaires, I figure they could do that with an additional 500 agents.
So what do they need the additional 86,500 agents for?
For you.
They've already hijacked your deductions for out-of-pocket medical expenses, losses due to casualty and crime, mortgage interest is virtually nonexistent, and you can't even deduct state or local taxes that you are forced to pay. They are coming after charitable contributions next.
They are going to look at your bank accounts, your transactions, your lifestyle, and your Obamacare. They are going to pay home visits. look at books, look at businesses. You have a cash transaction business like a laundromat, car wash, auto repair, or RV park? Best of luck.
Deductions, business expenses, depreciation, offshore and foreign accounts, Obamacare subsidies.
You have a wife and kids, house, with no visible income? Plan on a visit.
This is an army. It is 40,000 people stronger than the TSA when they launched that bureaucracy.
I honestly can't believe that people are not discussing this. This is an opening shot across the bow from a government that has literally spent us into oblivion. And the only collateral this government has is it's ability to squeeze the collective nuts of every American here and abroad.
All that remains is whether they are going to target conservatives or everyone.
This government makes the Mafia look reasonable.
I met Pidgeon in my very early 20's, shortly after becoming a sheriff's deputy. He was the investigator for our police department.
Pidgeon probably shouldn't have been a cop. He was a funny man, kind of impulsive, and prone to do things outside the box of normalcy. He was a straight shooter and honest. He swore like a sailor, another trait I admired deeply. I think that's why I liked him so much. I think I found someone even more impulsive than I was. Latching onto Pidgeon for a role model cop/mentor probably wasn't the best choice I ever made- but that's what I did.
Very early on in my patrol career, Pidgeon and I went to a burglar alarm. It was a very audible alarm installed in a jewelry store. It was absolutely shrieking so loud that it was damaging my ears. Pidgeon it seemed, was having the same problem I was having as we waited through eternity for the owner to arrive. Pidgeon finally had enough, took matters into his own hands and decided to simply destroy the alarm and the wires connecting it to the audible speakers. It worked. No more shrieking.
The owner showed up about 15 minutes later, none too happy with Pidgeon's handiwork. That afternoon, I found myself in the Sheriff's Office explaining what happened. The Sheriff pretended to be angry with us and ultimately the office paid for the repair of the alarm system. I think that incident cemented our friendship.
For the next four years, Pidgeon and I worked together. It was probably the best four years I spent in law enforcement. I learned a few things about Pidgeon. He hated enforcing traffic laws and was quite proud of the fact that he had the same 25 ticket, ticket book, that he had been issued when he came to our department 7 years earlier.
I also learned that you did not point your finger at Pidgeon. That set him off. One day at an early morning domestic dispute, there was a foot or so of freshly fallen snow. The angry man half of the relationship emerged from the cabin before we could get to the front door. The angry guy pointed his finger in Pidgeon's face and told us to leave. Pidgeon stripped the car keys from the guy's hand and launched them about 25 yards away in the deep snow. "Go find em!" Pidgeon yelled.
Another time, we were looking for a stolen truck which was being operated by a man from France. He had quit his ranch job and run off with the owner's truck. We scoured the valley and eventually found the guy at a restaurant. We needed the keys to the truck. The French guy came outside and pointed at Pidgeon. I don't recall what he said. Pidgeon immediately became incensed and read this guy the riot act. Pidgeon said we were taking this truck, asked for the keys, and told the guy to get the fuck out of there.
Most of us would have been happy to leave and escape jail. Not the French guy. He kept asking Pidgeon what his name was. As though the French guy was going to call our boss and complain. He kept repeating Pidgeon's name back, calling him "Peeejon." Exasperated, Pidgeon just looked at him and yelled, "tell em I am the old motherfucker with the glasses!" They guy never called our office.
Trying to intimidate Pidgeon always ended in failure. It just wasn't a good move.
A couple of years before he retired, Pidgeon was driving past a scuffle between an unruly drunk motorist and one of our younger cops. Pidgeon hit the brakes of his truck, jumped out in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops, and grabbed the guy so that our bewildered patrolman could cuff him.
Pidgeon was a notorious speeder. I lost count of how many times he had been stopped. Once he got a ticket from the neighboring sheriff's office by the Sheriff himself. He was pissed. Pat wasn't a hypocrite- he didn't ever give anyone a speeding ticket. I think he was angry that the neighboring Sheriff gave him that ticket.
Now Pidgeon had to drive through this guy's county, a very vacant one, once a week about two in the morning. Pidgeon had a second job, a delivery job. When that employer bought a van with a 440 engine, Pidgeon knew that would be the last ticket he would ever get in that county. About a year later, Pidgeon was driving back home from the delivery job at about 15-20 over the speed limit. The Sheriff saw him, pulled out, and began the pursuit. Pidgeon mashed the accelerator to the floor and outran him- losing him at the county line.
I laughed out loud when he told me the story. Vintage Pidgeon.
I helped emcee Pidgeon's retirement party. I couldn't tell many of the stories because there were many children present and any good story about Pidgeon had plenty of profanity. But I told a few of them.
Sadly, Pidgeon passed away about a year and half ago. I spent a little time with him but not nearly enough.
I often think how Pidgeon shaped my life as a police officer. In our time, we didn't have a policy manual to guide every single decision we did or what we could say. We used whatever judgement we had and tried to make the best decisions. Often we did this in a vacuum by ourselves. Pidge locked up a few bad guys. He let many minor offenders go. He had a sense of right or wrong and he saw the big picture. If you could get past the salty language, a minor eruption and some bad judgement here or there, Pidge was a pretty good guy.
He was a character. I don't see these kinds of people anymore. Today, we have these cardboard cutouts for cops, guided by policy on every matter. Thankfully they still give the cops the same discretion we once had- that discretion has contributed quite nicely to my nearly clean, driving record since retirement. Pidge would have liked that.
I live in a quiet little town in the western United States not too far from California.
We are suffering a tremendous influx of California residents into our area as the California population tries to escape sky rocketing taxes, ridiculous real estate pricing, crime, and a communist Governor and state legislature.
The people in my area are convinced that the Californians are to blame for disrupting their quiet lifestyle, choking our streets, and driving taxes up. I see the plates too, but I know better.
Californians fleeing here are the manifestation of a much larger problem. They are the symptoms not the disease.
In 2008-2009, about the time I began writing on FG, we saw the Federal Government hijack a trillion or so from US taxpayer coffers and bail out their campaign donor banker friends. If that weren't bad enough, they passed the Affordable Care Act to bail out the closely connected health insurance industry which was on the verge of complete collapse also.
Then we saw a federal government go completely off the rails- creating trillions and spending them without restraint. That left us looking like this.
Bear in mind this chart is 10 years old. The new line would look far worse.
I have this kind of crazy, US history, economics, equity trading background despite the fact that I spent my younger years, 24 of them, in law enforcement. I am a voracious reader as well and I comprehend and capture most of what I have read.
So when you read this blog, I am well aware of the history of the civil war greenback, the US dollar, how the Federal Reserve Bank came into existence, how they caused a depression 16 years later, how FDR seized US citizen's gold, and once he had it, he revalued it. I know how the dollar became the world's reserve currency, how Nixon removed the gold standard and replaced it with the petro dollar. From there on in, the early 70's, all of your congressmen and Presidents have spent us into oblivion. Some caused far more damage. Clinton signing free trade agreements, removing all of the banking obstacles put into place after the Great Depression, caused the Great Recession. Just 8 years later.
Throughout the history of the United States, particularly from 1913 forward, we have been plundered by that central bank and by politicians to such an extent- that we are now bankrupt. The dollar is worthless. It is backed by nothing. A share of stock, a piece of paper, goes for 1000 bucks. A puny little house that cost 10,000 in 1950, is now worth 400,000. A candy bar I bought as a child for 10 cents, now is 1.50. That's 1500% for a candy bar.
I am in amazement that you can still buy gold right now for 1850 dollars USD. That is a steal. Were it to be completely valued, given true price discovery and removal of all of the manipulations of investment bankers in the futures market, gold should be worth 30,000 or up.
This latest bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, is a lie and deception on the greatest scale. Watching these journalism idiots and sycophants trumpet that piece of shit as a panacea, showcases just how stupid and out of touch with history most of those writers are.
Why do you think they need 87,000 IRS agents? Because they are desperate. They can't pay for all of this spending they've done for decades but they are going to try.
It's going to suck bad. They have already wrung every deduction they can out of a standard 1040 and it is going to get worse. Much, much worse. Absolute government thievery and exploitation to avoid all of that debt defaulting. This will get very bad. I wish it could go some other way but there is no political courage out there.
Don't blame people as they try to flee to somewhere they can afford, some place safer, where the government boot is not on your throat. Watch California. It is going to shit. It has always been the canary in the US coal mine.
At this point all you can do is prepare. Eliminate as much debt as possible. Keep cash and gold on hand. Ammunition and guns. Prescription meds. A food and water supply. Fuel and generators. God and family.
People should see this for what it is. A complete implosion of the USD with Nero fiddling in Washington. What a shame. This was a great country once but there is no intervention, no stopping this now.
Police Chief here. Wrote many affidavits and search warrants. Executed same. Left receipts for seized property. Now noting the clusterfuck at Mar A Lago. People now rendering opinions about what happened to President Trump. Most of it is conjecture.
So what I'm saying is simply this. Verified and corroborated facts tend to be the best evidence to establish truth- beyond that everything else is just an opinion.
I don't care whether a person has 20 years' worth of credentials and experience- in the absence of verified and corroborated facts or evidence- anything an "expert" utters may or may not be bullshit. I take a real jaundiced view of all those lawyers wearing FBI garments.
Now it doesn't take a college degree to determine what the truth is. Or what the truth isn't. Which leads me to today's topic.
The search of Mar-A-Lago, Trump's estate, was predicated upon some missing documents presumably from NARA, the National Archives. I am in awe that an entire FBI field office had the audacity to do this and kick all of Trump's lawyers out while they searched. Talk about using a cannon to kill a mouse.
NARA. https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/national-archives-and-records-administration
A pretext search occurs when you have a set of proven facts or reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred. You write an affidavit, set it before some pre-selected friendly judge, and get it signed. In this case, the items to be described were unreturned documents from the National Archives. The judge was an Obama appointee who once defended Jeffrey "I didn't kill myself" Epstein, pedophile.
Unreturned or misappropriated documents?? Really?? Big effing deal. Obama and Bill Clinton took all kinds of NARA documents. Are we to expect a search warrant for them in the coming days?
That was the pretext the DOJ/FBI used to obtain the warrant. They could care less about that nonsense. What they are really after are incriminating documents having to do with something else. Maybe Jan. 6. Maybe tax evasion. Maybe other serious crimes. What they were really looking for had nothing to do with the National Archives. They are hoping to find evidence of some other serious crime that they can use to get rid of Trump for good.
A search warrant affiant has to particularly describe the items being searched for in the search warrant affidavit. You must also leave a receipt for the property that was seized.
Now there is well established law that says you can't look for a stolen microwave in a kitchen drawer. So what you must do if you really want in that drawer, is that you must state in your search warrant that you are searching for proof of residency, occupancy, power, gas, cable bills, or some other item that may be small enough to fit in that drawer.
What if you stumble upon ledgers, bank accounts, or other documents that incriminate the suspect for other crimes? Can you seize them? Yes, and you can photo them or write down what's on them and leave those items behind if you are trying to be a little sneaky about it.
The rule is- as long as you were legally entitled to open that drawer in the first place, anything you spot that is evidence of another crime or contraband can be seized as evidence. Even if you just "stumbled onto it" by mistake.
Did I use pretexts to search for evidence of other crimes? Yes, but not intentionally per se. We just knew from experience that we were likely to uncover evidence from other crimes because it happened so often. We generally wrote affidavits that would allow us to search for the tiniest piece of contraband anywhere in a house, property, or storage unit and that allowed access virtually anywhere. Sometimes we found a checking account number, a storage unit key, or something else we could use for additional evidence or other crimes.
So in essence, 30 members of an armed FBI field office, were able to look anywhere they wanted to inside or outside of Mar-A-Lago as they searched for "missing documents."
They used a perfectly legal method to go on a fishing expedition which may or may not yield results evidence of other crimes.
Here's the problem with that. Everyone in the legal community might already suspect this was nothing but a pretext search. People, citizens, do not like the idea of cops abusing the law to conduct pretext searches. Not only do many people see the pretext search as dishonest, it violates a sense of fair play.
People have had it with this never-ending Trump witch hunt. They are tired of the deep state and media. We've had 2 unsuccessful impeachments, the Russia hoax, the Mueller nonsense, the tax return bullshit, and I am sure I am missing some other stuff.
I think this latest round is going to spectacularly backfire. We're not talking about some run of the mill low level drug dealer being abused in a search warrant. This is the President of the United States.
The Dems have crossed the point of no return. They better have Trump dead to rights this time or all hell is about to break loose.
I have a brother-in-law who has been living on government welfare for the last 6 years. This wouldn't be particularly amazing if he didn't have a wife and three kids. His wife doesn't work either. He is not disabled nor is his wife. They simply found a way to escape the regular, routine, work life.
Near as I can tell he gets about 1100 a month on his EBT card. He currently has 3100 in rollover credit on the card. The government also gives him 500 a month in what they call "EBT cash." This is money you can withdraw from an ATM for any purpose. He has also been receiving 750 a month in child tax credits.
Thus far we have about 29k a year in direct payments. He gets a 6k "tax refund" each year. He and his family receive medicare from the state. I'm not sure what else they do to game the system but 35k a year is simply the base case. If they work, they work for unreported cash.
The sum total of welfare I have taken directly from the government works out to about 4 weeks of food stamps in 1981. I also received 2 weeks of unemployment between jobs in 1984. About 800 bucks. In both instances, I found a job and ended those payments.
Some members of the cop hating community like to point out that my retirement is funded with tax money. Partly true and mostly false. I paid into the retirement system for 25 years. The city matched that with a slightly higher payment which amounted to nearly 20% of my salary per month. Those 25 years were in all likelihood, the greatest years of stock market investing and returns. Those years began in 1983 and ended in 2007. Once long ago, I calculated that the 20% sent into our state retirement system, compounded over 25 years amounted to 1.4 million. If I make it to 90, I'll break even in inflated dollars. Most won't.
Welfare was never meant to be a way of living. A way of life. It was initially meant to get people back on their feet again and stop shortly thereafter when folks became self-sufficient again.
Back in my working days as a police officer, we had 4 government subsidized housing projects which amounted to around 400 units in all. The vast majority of our calls for service were at these highly dense, low-income dwellings. Noise complaints, drug dealing, domestic fights, child abuse, theft.
I often referred to those projects like prisons- without the fence. People were incarcerated there until their release date. We were the guards.
So why does welfare fail? It fails because the government is supplying the bottom half of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, food, shelter, and health care. Often, they supply money in the form of EBT cash and unemployment. When you satisfy the most pressing needs of most people- you rob those people of their ambition and motivation. The welfare culture steals any willingness to work or escape their situation. People are more than happy to spend their days drinking, smoking dope, screwing, and receiving payments from the government.
The other problem of course is that this behemoth of a government simply cannot administrate any of these programs in any strict sense of the word. There is not some well-defined drop date where the government applies the rule- These payments last a year. After that they are done. We are not here to provide you with some cradle to grave subsistence living.
That system can only get worse with millions of people flooding across our southern border.
So ideally, a functioning government would not be in the welfare business to begin with. Forced to intervene on behalf of the long term mentally ill or disabled- I could see state government in that business. But this idea of robbing millions of healthy people of utility and a sense of self-worth must stop. People get trapped in those prisons and they become a burden to society. Many never leave and their children see nothing wrong with that way of life. Thus, the cycle repeats.
Give a man a fish, he eats tonight. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
“Even if I were pollinated and fully vaccinated, I would admire the unvaccinated for withstanding the greatest pressure I have ever seen, even from partners, parents, children, friends, colleagues and doctors.
People who were capable of such personality, courage and critical ability are undoubtedly the best of humanity. They are everywhere, in all ages, levels of education, states and ideas. They are of a special kind; they are the soldiers that every army of light wants to have in its ranks. They are the parents that every child wants to have and the children that every parent dreams of having. They are beings above the average of their societies, they are the essence of the people who have built all cultures and conquered horizons. They are there, next to you, they look normal, but they are superheroes.
They did what others could not, they were the tree that withstood the hurricane of insults, discrimination and social exclusion. And they did it because they thought they were alone, and believed they were the only ones.
Banned from their families’ tables at Christmas, they never saw anything so cruel. They lost their jobs, let their careers sink, had no more money … but they didn’t care. They suffered immeasurable discrimination, denunciation, betrayal and humiliation … but they kept going.
Never before in humanity has there been such a “casting”, now we know who are the best on planet Earth. Women, men, old, young, rich, poor, of all races or religions, the unvaccinated, the chosen of the invisible ark, the only ones who managed to resist when everything collapsed.
That’s you, you passed an unimaginable test that many of the toughest Marines, Commandos, Green Berets, astronauts and geniuses could not withstand.
You are made of the stuff of the greatest who ever lived, those heroes born among ordinary men who glow in the dark.”
-Author unknown