Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Garbage

Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Garbage

You know, with all the serious problems we are confronting as a society, there's just no time to waste on nonsensical conspiracy theories. Someone sent me a link to this essay about the UCC, gold fringes on flags, and assorted crazy stuff, all designed to prove that if you file the right paperwork, you don't have to file income taxes. (Well, I'm guessing; the essay is so poorly written at the end that it's hard to tell exactly what they are saying:

When you issue your credit to the bankrupt United States they have borrowed it from you and they owe you a return of principal plus interest. To accomplish this quid pro quo exchange, you must report every presentment you receive to the Internal Revenue Service which will, in its turn, adjust the books of account according to which corporation has been using your credit.

That is what the 1040 form is about, and what the 1099OID forms are about. When you report a presentment on a 1099OID forms you are reporting to the IRS to whom you paid taxes or to whom you issued your credit. And you can’t always know who that was because you don’t know how much of your credit was issued for paving the roads in your county or building the schools or funding that Wal-Mart or whatever.

The 1099OID form enables the money to return to its source – You.

One of the reasons that serious scholarly work has footnotes is so that you can look up the claims, and see if the sources say what the author says they do. Not in this "Why the UCC Filing?" essay. Yes, you could probably find the original source documents with a bit of work, but if someone is trying to write a persuasive essay about matters of fact, and they don't bother to give me clear-cut citations of sources, I make one of the following conclusions:

1. They didn't go to college (or even high school), and therefore have no idea why the scholarly apparatus of footnotes exist.

2. They wrote it from memory, without bothering to check if all the facts are correct.

3. They are hoping that you won't try to check up on their claims.

However, there's one claim made in this essay that was sufficiently easy to check that I spent a few minutes doing so:

Until the 14th Amendment in 1868, there were no persons born or naturalized in the United States. They had all been born or naturalized in one of the several states. Up until that point in time there was only state citizenship and was a result of state citizenship. After the Civil War, a new class of citizenship was recognized, and was the beginning of the “democracy” (not the de jure republic) sited in the District of Columbia. The American people in the republic sited in the several states could choose to benefit (receive a benefit) as one of these new United States citizens BY CHOICE (kind of).

This initial nexus for this new citizenship started with the birth certificate under the provisions of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921. This act required that all children born be registered by way of a certificate of live birth, in exchange for which they would receive back a birth certificate describing the property. The specific provisions of the act required that the statement of domicile of the property described on the birth certificate would be Washington, D.C.

When it comes to factual errors, let's just say that these two paragraphs are a target-rich environment. But for laughs, I decided to find out how the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 required birth certificates.

My first guess was that this act required vital statistics on births (which nearly all states were doing by then) to be reported to the federal government, and someone confused this requirement with a requirement for birth certificates to be issued. But apparently no.

Birth certificates were issued in almost every state by this point. The primary purpose of this act was to improve pre- and post-natal care by increasing federal funding to the states to assist poor women. Bad idea or not, it wasn't what caused birth certificates, which were not, and are not, ownership certificates in any sense. Contemporary references to the act are quite clear about its purpose--to increase public health spending and education for pre- and post-natal care.

If there was some concern about expanding federal power over individual citizens, you would expect critics to make that argument. See Maine Governor Percival Baxter's argument against the bill here. He makes some legitimate arguments about federal vs. state power, but nothing that matches this wild description of ownership certificates.

Here's South Dakota's law implementing it: it's all about money going to help pre and post-natal care; nothing about birth certificates.

Nor does this 1922 reference work mention anything about birth certificates.

Or the speech introducing it in Congress.

Or this 1920 discussion of the proposal.

I can't find anything to support this claim about requiring birth certificates (or "ownership certificates") in contemporary sources. Now, that doesn't mean that it's wrong; perhaps there was indeed such a requirement in the bill, and no one at the time bothered to mention it--even critics. Or maybe the Bilderbergers (or the Rothschilds, or the Illuminati, or the Martians) suppressed all contemporary discussion of it--or have censored the Internet today so that you can't find it. But when someone makes extraordinary claims without any verifiable sources, it has zero credibility.

There is so much of this conspiracy theory garbage floating around out there (like the 9/11 Truthers, and "We never went to the Moon," and "Jewish doctors inject AIDS into black babies in the hospital") that exists for one reason alone: the belief that one has "hidden knowledge" is very attractive to people that would otherwise have to confront the vastly more common problem of government: stupid people with good intentions.

Understanding Bush Derangement Syndrome

Understanding Bush Derangement Syndrome

It has been among the great curiosities of the last several years is the extent to which otherwise relatively sane people (and the left, also) have gone completely and utterly bananas in their ascribing to George Bush all kinds of demonic intentions and plans. I could understand and disagree with the non-interventionist critique of invading Afghanistan, and even the pragmatic objections to the Iraq War (which would have been much stronger if anyone had realized how badly Bush would screw it up). But when you here otherwise non-tinfoil hat sorts talking about Bush is going to cancel the 2008 elections, for example, or the entire cult that has developed around theories that Bush either actively caused or passively allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place--well, you have to start wondering what's in the water that these people are drinking.

A person I know who spends a lot of time teaching college students suggested an interesting explanation for this recently which just happens to collide with a book that I am currently reading: Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. I'm not done reading it, but she has a new twist on what provoked the Salem Witch Trials.

Many of those who were participants, either as "victims" of the witches, or the witches themselves, were refugees from the Maine frontier, driven back into Massachusetts by a series of ferocious Indian wars. Norton argues that unlike other witchcraft trials of the period, where judges were a lot less willing to accept "spectral evidence," and a lot more willing to give accused witches the benefit of the doubt, many of the participants were dealing with traumatic consequences of the loss of community, and of enormous fear of attack. That the Indians were regarded as Satan worshippers throughout this period made it very easy to see the loss of the Maine frontier as having Satanic overtones.

Anyway, it strikes me that perhaps what we are seeing with the more bizarre theories that are floating about is a modern version of this same problem. George Bush, as much as the left hates him, isn't going to drag any feminists off in the dead of night to be beheaded. He isn't going to be imposing sharia law. Even those with the most liberal politics have to admit, if rational, that if George Bush got his way without restraint, America would still be a far nicer place to be a feminist, homosexual, or atheist, than any Muslim nation. Social conservatives just aren't that scary compared to even "moderate" Islam. Any rational liberal or leftist would look at the enemies that we are fighting, and be scared to death of them.

For those Maine frontier refugees, the enemy "out there" was far more ferocious, far more dangerous, than anyone within their own society. Especially among those who started the Salem hysteria (a bunch of teenaged and younger girls), the enemy that they really feared, and with good reason, was not an enemy that they could do anything about. They were powerless, and they were not warriors. They could do something about people closer at hand, and who were not going to kill and mutilate them--people like Rev. George Burroughs.

I think we are seeing something similar today: liberals have always regarded our military as a necessary evil, and the left hasn't even admitted "necessary." The only tools to fight the Islamofascist enemy are those that the left end of America has never identified with in any way. Like those terrified girls, it is easier for the left to redirect its fear onto a target that is closer, and less dangerous--and most importantly, that they can do something about. George Bush doesn't require an unrelenting battle to unseat--just an election.

Lunatic Left

I was searching for all references to my website, and I found the ultimate expression of left-wing insanity: a blog called Revelations, which is simultaneously a "9/11 Truther," Holocaust Denier, Bush hater, and practically every other left-wing craziness combined. Oh, and the Jews put Hitler in power. (If there wasn't a Holocaust, then I guess it isn't as crazy as it sounds.)

There's a link to what seems to be another blog the same group runs called "The World Can't Wait," with the slogan "Seeking U.S. Independence from the Zionist Yoke."

I can't identify who the author is; I would expect a professor somewhere at a public university.

Bizarre Conspiracy Theory About Don Imus

Pravda is reporting that Imus's firing was part of the conspiracy by "US War Leaders." I can't call it bizarre; then I would need another word to replace bizarre.