Some bits-and-pieces from here-and-there:
- If you’ve been following along with my Aristotlethon, you may be interested to know that I’ve posted PDFs of the many translations and commentaries I’ve been relying on at a supplemental bibliography page. These are corrected versions of the PDFs available from Google Books. I’ve adjusted the page numbering to accurately reflect the page numbers of the original books, have removed blank, damaged, or duplicate pages, and have added bookmarks that allow you to quickly jump to particular books and chapters.
- Here’s an interesting trick I hadn’t heard of before:
- Overpay your taxes with a substantially too-large bad check.
- The IRS automatically sends you a refund check.
- The IRS notices, too late, that your check was worthless.
- If you’re a tax resister, tax protester, or tax evader, would this interfere with your ability to sponsor your fiancé(e) during the process of getting a visa extension or citizenship? Hmmm… good question. Take it away, immigration lawyer Brad Bernstein.
There’s a new group called “Oath Keepers” that I’ve been hearing about mostly on fringe paleocon sites, but that now is getting big enough to get some MSM buzz.
The gist is that the group purports to consist of members of U.S. law enforcement and the military who have vowed not to obey any orders that contradict their understanding of their duty to the U.S. Constitution, as given in their oaths of office (typically, such oaths include a promise to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”).
They anticipate that the government will become more tyrannical, and that the “domestic” enemies to the Constitution will come from within government and will issue unconstitutional orders to disarm Americans, put them under martial law, eliminate state sovereignty, blockade American cities, enlist foreign troops in the subjugation of American citizens, put Americans in detention camps, and so forth.
In preparation for this, they are trying to build a movement of folks in uniform who insist that they will refuse to obey orders to do such things.
That the group formed with sudden urgency and enthusiasm just as Obama was taking office may lead you to suspect that this is largely a group of paranoid right-wingers of the OMG The New World Order Is Vaccinating Us Against the Flu; Next They’ll Take Our Guns And Lock Us In Concentration Camps Run By ACORN variety. You’d be right. But, like it or not, this is what grassroots dissent from within the ranks is liable to look like, at least at first. And any such movement that advocates that folks in uniform judge and possibly disobey orders is salutary, at least to that extent.
- There are some ominous signs that the IRS may turn on sole proprietors next. The government suspects that many sole proprietors who declare losses on their tax returns are doing so fraudulently — by deducting fake or non-business-related expenses, by not disclosing income, or by pretending that their expensive hobbies are really businesses. The agency estimates that over half of the losses claimed by unprofitable sole proprietorships were not legally justified, and fully 70% of such sole proprietorships reported such losses. In spite of this, the agency has not put much effort into plugging the leak, in part because the losses on each return are typically small and the effort involved in auditing a sole proprietorship return is costly.
