The Picket Line — 21 November 2008

21 November 2008

M.W. Boitano has discovered the secret Code Pink insurgency manual — their malignant and hidden strategy to conspire with known enemies of America to undermine Our National security and interests through covert insurgency tactics. It appears to be the Picket Line topic index. I, for one, welcome our new Picket Line overladies.

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For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic → subtopic → sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.

How you can resist funding the government → my tax resistance → The Picket Line site: ▶; ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦; Every year around this time, the I.R.S. puffs up its chest and says that this year it’s really going to crack down on tax cheats. A citizen oversight board says that this year, they’re talking smack again. Also: The Picket Line has comments enabled now!; Who visits The Picket Line, how do they get here, and why do they come? The available evidence is fragmentary, but I’ll investigate…; American Quakers didn’t stop debating war tax resistance in the 19th century. Some reports from the last New England Yearly Meeting show that the issue is still challenging Quakers today. Also, some brief notes on tax whistleblower payoffs, the authorship of “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”, and lying Army recruiters.; Thoreau marvels that we devote so much attention to foreign wars when the war within each of us rages. Also: war tax resistance in Canada, the I.R.S. plays the moustache-twiddling melodrama villain, remembering Marian Franz, an underground economy taxi service in Baltimore, the government returned half a billion dollars in incorrect education tax credits to 372,000 taxpayers, and a report on the Second Maine Militia. And: look for some changes in the comments system at The Picket Line in the coming weeks.; The Picket Line jumps on the HTML5 bandwagon. Also: doing damage to a new nuclear weapons factory in Kansas City, inviting LulzSec to do the same to the universally vulnerable I.R.S. databases, resisting taxes to protest U.S. funding for Bahrain’s government, and more tax fraud from behind bars.; Forbes tax blogger Peter J. Reilly gets inspired to write up his thoughts on war tax resistance. Also: the Tax Policy Center forecasts how the ranks of “lucky duckies” (American households that pay no federal income tax) will swell or shrink in the coming years under different policies.; I’m working on a new gadget for The Picket Line: a “chronoscope” — like a search engine, only it searches for time, not for text. Here’s a sneak preview.; Some news from the NWTRCC meeting earlier this month. Also: you can test drive a prototype of the “chronoscope.” And: Benjamin Bates petitions the Virginia legislature on behalf of Quaker conscientious objectors in 1810.; The Picket Line is now thoroughly chronologically indexed, and the Chronoscope time-based search engine is live. Give it a spin. See if you can find a good use for it. Also: the Nazarenes were another 19th Century Christian sect that apparently preached tax resistance.
Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → taxation compared with conscription: ▶; ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦; Does anyone feel a draft?; If only the richest 59% of Americans are paying federal income tax, the U.S. tax system must be absurdly unbalanced and unfair to the rich, right? Not. Also: A Republican senator looks at the mess in Iraq, does a quick 180 turn, and says maybe it IS time for a military draft after all.; The cold war is over, so why is the U.S. spending record amounts of our money on nuclear weapons production? Also, why are we debating the when of Iraqi “sovereignty” when we should be debating those quotation marks? And another group finds fault with the I.R.S. enforcement bluster.; The future of the draft, and how reprimands and admonishments can be used when denial is no longer an option.; Satyagraha includes a refined, carefully-selected subset of nonviolent resistance. It seems to be designed to be a means that guarantees a particular quality of ends, and that avoids certain disadvantages of violent, coercive, or humiliating methods of resistance. Is it a pipe dream, or the discovery of a powerful universal law?; William Rivers Pitt asks if maybe a draft would finally get people to take the Iraq war personally. I reply that we’ve already got a draft, and we should take it very personally indeed.

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