Category: Uncategorized

Why “your” bank account isn’t yours

The difference between “depositor” and “unsecured creditor”, and the legal implications therein, is explained at Zerohedge:

The law has been in existence for hundreds of years and was established in England by the House of Lords in the case Foley v Hill in 1848.

When a customer deposits money with his banker, the relationship that arises is one of creditor and debtor, with the banker liable to repay the money deposited when demanded by the customer. Once money has been paid to the banker, it belongs to the banker and he is free to use the money for his own purpose.

I will now quote the relevant portion of the judgment of #3b4d81;”>the House of Lords handed down by Lord Cottenham, the Lord Chancellor. He stated thus:

“Money when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be the money of the principal… it is then the money of the banker, who is bound to return an equivalent by paying a similar sum to that deposited with him when he is asked for it.

The money paid into the banker’s, is money known by the principal to be placed there for the purpose of being under the control of the banker; it is then the banker’s money; he is known to deal with it as his own; he makes what profit of it he can, which profit he retains himself,…

The money placed in the custody of the banker is, to all intent and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases; he is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it; he is not answerable TO THE PRINCIPAL IF HE PUTS IT INTO JEOPARDY, IF HE ENGAGES IN A HAZARDOUS SPECULATION; he is not bound to keep it or deal with it as the property of the principal, but he is of course answerable for the amount, because he has contracted, having received that money, to repay to the principal, when demanded, a sum equivalent to that paid into his hands.” (quoted in UK Law Essays,  #3b4d81;”>Relationship Between A Banker And Customer,That Of A Creditor/Debtor, emphasis added,)”

Holding that the relationship between a banker and his customer was one of debtor and creditor and not one of trusteeship, #3b4d81;”>Lord Brougham said:

“This trade of a banker is to receive money, and use it as if it were his own, he becoming debtor to the person who has lent or deposited with him the money to use as his own, and for which money he is accountable as a debtor. I cannot at all confound the situation of a banker with that of a trustee, and conclude that the banker is a debtor with a fiduciary character.”

In plain simple English – bankers cannot be prosecuted for breach of trust, because it owes no fiduciary duty to the depositor / customer, as he is deemed to be using his own money to speculate etc. There is absolutely no criminal liability.

Now, English law is not U.S. law, but being that this decision derives from the Common Law, it should be understood, given recent US court decisions, the same is true in the USA.

One step closer

The Treasury knew:

At the first Congressional hearing into the I.R.S. scandal, J. Russell
George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, told
members of the House Ways and Means Committee that he informed the
Treasury’s general counsel of his investigation on June 4, and Deputy
Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.”

Obama apologists have been quick to point out that there is no evidence that Obama knew anything about the politically driven IRS attacks on conservative groups and the media.

To which the veteran scandal observer can only reply: there is no evidence… yet.

Thus leading to the obvious next question: who did the Treasury officials tell?

Wish list

I don’t bother with tip jars or Amazon wish lists, but if you’re looking for ideas about what to buy me for Christmas, this will do nicely:

The PGF isn’t just a fancy scope on top of a rifle. All together, the PGF is made up of a firearm, a modified trigger mechanism with variable weighting, the computerized digital tracking scope, and hand-loaded match grade rounds (which you need to purchase from TrackingPoint). This is a little like selling both the razor and the razor blades, but the rounds must be manufactured to tight tolerances since precise guidance of a round to a target by the rifle’s computer requires that the round perform within known boundaries.

The image displayed on the scope isn’t a direct visual, but rather a video image taken through the scope’s objective lens. The Linux-powered scope produces a display that looks something like the heads-up display you’d see sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet, showing the weapon’s compass orientation, cant, and incline. To shoot at something, you first “mark” it using a button near the trigger. Marking a target illuminates it with the tracking scope’s built-in laser, and the target gains a pip in the scope’s display. When a target is marked, the tracking scope takes into account the range of the target, the ambient temperature and humidity, the age of the barrel, and a whole boatload of other parameters. It quickly reorients the display so the crosshairs in the center accurately show where the round will go.

Image recognition routines keep the pip stuck to the marked target in the scope’s field of view, and at that point, you squeeze the trigger. This doesn’t fire the weapon; rather, the reticle goes from blue to red, and while keeping the trigger held down, you position the reticle over the marked target’s pip. As soon as they coincide, the rifle fires.

People occasionally accuse me of being envious of this or that.  But if I’m envious of something, I’ll admit it.  And yes, to be honest, I am totally envious of the guy who thought of software-corrected personal firearms.  Because it essentially defines awesome.  I mean, an 18-button mouse with a joystick, that’s cool.  But a Linux-powered rifle?  How do you top that, with a freaking Death Star?

Of course, being Linux-based, there will probably be annoying package update requests popping up right when you’re busy trying to shoot something.  Or someone.  On the plus side, you can probably play Battle for Wesnoth on it while you’re waiting for the target to present itself.

Post-Christian Ukistan

British post-Christianity is increasingly Muslim:

A new analysis of the 2011 census shows that a decade of mass immigration helped mask the scale of decline in Christian affiliation among the British-born population – while driving a dramatic increase in Islam, particularly among the young.

It suggests that only a minority of people will describe themselves as Christians within the next decade, for first time.

Meanwhile almost one in 10 under 25s in Britain is now a Muslim. The proportion of young people who describe themselves as even nominal Christians has dropped below half for the first time.

This is a bad thing, but for the UK, not for Christianity.  It is the cultural Christians who are on the decline. No religion that grew from eleven frightened men to over a billion adherents has anything to fear from the vicissitudes of history.  The idea that there would be a great apostasy is hardly a surprise to any premillennial Christian.

What is a surprise, however, is the speed with which the secular humanists are being pushed aside by the pagans.

Mailvox: on the importance of doll faces

GV notes that IGN cares an awful lot more about Disney princesses than pretty much anyone who reads it:

I wasn’t going to send this until I saw this story up at IGN three times.  First they reported the new redesign of Merida then they reported two stories on how Disney would not cave in to pressure to go back to Merida’s orignal design.  Here is a link to the third article. 

Basically, Disney decided to change Merida’s goofy appearance into a prettier and more royal looking doll for her coronation as a Disney Princess doll.  It appears that IGN has posted this story a third time to try to bring attention to this issue.  Of course IGN is a video game website where most of their audience is male and it appears to have backfired since most of the comments are making fun of this or saying this is a non-issue.  Now in my opinion there is an obvious reason Disney won’t back down despite a petition of about 205,000, and it’s not because they are against feminism, but instead because most little girls would rather buy the prettier and royal-looking doll as oppose to her original goofy appearance in the movie despite the admittedly great but absurd feminist propaganda that is Brave.

Honestly they would most likely lose a lot of money since most little girls and their mothers would prefer to buy a prettier doll despite all the feminist complaint.  If they were to release a goofy-looking doll of Merida, most little girls and there mothers would most likely just buy a pretty doll from a competitor. 

I wonder if the feminist will get so angry at their failure at altering little girls preconceived notions and desires that they will demand that they play with cars just so they can get them to stop thinking of appearance despite the fact that most women’s natural and honest inclination is to try to look good and put on make-up to look pretty.  I guess in the end Merida’s mother has a happy ending since in the real world most little girls, (because of what they want to buy and play with), are forcing her to be pretty and royal as an actual princess.

Who knows maybe next they will come out with a doll that is her husband which will really make feminist head explode.  What to you bet that he won’t look goofy.

I think the feminists at IGN are in the process of discovering that they’re not going to find a lot of concern over what women think about the appearance of a doll on the part of either a) male gamers, or, b) a lavender corporation.  While Disney cheerfully pays lip service to the Female Imperative, all it really cares about is money and pushing whatever happens to be the lavender agenda at the moment.

And since both little girls and gays like pretty dolls, not goofy ones, we can expect that the pretty doll will prevail.  The primary thing to take away from this: IGN is officially irrelevant.

I’m trying to picture CGW publishing three articles about this issue of vital importance to hard core gamers….

Rubio fails to follow the logic train

The Republican Senator doesn’t think through the logical implications of the accusations he is directing against the Obama administration:

“So in the span of four days, [there were] three major revelations about the use of government power to intimidate those who are doing things that the government doesn’t like. These are the tactics of the third world. These are the tactics of places that don’t have the freedoms and the independence that we have here in this country.”

They are the tactics of the third world.  They are, unsurprisingly enough, the tactics of a president who is himself an immigrant and a third worlder.  They are the tactics of a place that no longer has the freedom and independence and population that it once had. And yet, even as he laments this, Rubio is actively campaigning to legalize millions of third worlders who illegally settled in the country and add tens of millions more to their ranks.

Welcome to Third World America.  This is merely the smallest taste of what it is going to look like.

Tears of a clown

As Dennis Miller noted, at this rate, Obama is going to admit he was born in Kenya sometime next week. Did I not tell you in 2008 that his administration was going to be more entertaining than a barrel of monkeys?  And note that as a general rule, history tends to indicate that the conspiracy theorists often err on the side of being insufficiently pessimistic.

UPDATE: You know it’s bad when even the administration enthusiasts at the New York Times are desperately casting about for something positive to talk about, but wind up throwing in the towel: 

 Maybe, while he’s crisis-managing, the president could also figure out a way to show people government working at something other than reorganizing troubled agencies. Maybe he could start off with passing a bill that’s supereasy. I notice that in state legislatures, when times are tough, parties are sometimes able to get together in order to pick a new state thing. You know, state bird, state animal. Some states find this so relaxing they never stop. (New Mexico has an official state guitar, state tie and state aircraft, which, unfortunately, is the hot-air balloon.)

The United States has a few of these items, like a bird and an anthem, but there’s plenty of territory to cover. The president could demand that Congress pick an official national rock.

The cognitive dissonance of Saint Gay

Bret Easton Ellis isn’t overly impressed with the lavender media’s insistence on whitewashing the sexually abnormal In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves:

Was I the only gay man of a certain demo who experienced a flicker of annoyance in the way the media treated Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and—yes—infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man would come out as gay (let alone a black man) is not only an LGBT triumph but also a triumph for pranksters everywhere who thrilled to the idea that what should be considered just another neutral fact that is nobody’s business was instead a shock heard around the world, one that added another jolt of transparency to an increasingly transparent planet. It was an undeniable moment and also extremely cool. Jason Collins is the future. But the subsequent fawning over Collins simply stating he is gay still seemed to me, as another gay man, like a new kind of victimization. (George Stephanopoulos interviewed him so tenderly, it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy.) In another five years hopefully this won’t matter, but for now we’re trapped in the times we live in. The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.

The Gay Man as Magical Elf has been such a tricky part of gay self-patronization in the media that you would by now expect the chill members of the LGBT community to respond with cool indifference. The Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gay is supposed to be destined to transform The Hets into noble gay-loving protectors—as long as the gay in question isn’t messy or sexual or difficult. The straight and gay sanctimoniousness that says everyone gay needs to be canonized when coming out still makes some of us who are already out feel like we’re on the sidelines. I’m all for coming out on one’s own terms, but heralding it as the most important news story of the week feels to me, as a gay man, well, kind of alienating. We are apart because of what we supposedly represent because of… our… boring… sexuality—oh man, do we have to go through this again? And it’s all about the upbeat press release, the kind of smiling mask assuring us everything is awesome. God help the gay man who comes out and doesn’t want to represent, who doesn’t want to teach, who doesn’t feel like part of the homogenized gay culture and rejects it. Where’s the gay dude who makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It?

I find the Saint Gay thing offensive myself, less because it is a societally damaging attempt to normalize the sexually abnormal, disease-ridden, and not-so-secretly self-loathing, and more because it is an insult to the intelligence of even the intellectually subnormal.

I always find the charge of homophobia from the likes of McRapey to be amusing because I’m far more comfortable around gays than most men are, and not in that fake, perma-smiling, I’m-liberal-so-I-MUST-be-tolerant, politically correct way. I worked at Dayton’s when I was fifteen. I was signed to a gay record label making electronic dance music. I’ve been accustomed to gay men making puppy dog eyes at me as long as I can remember and it doesn’t bother me in the least. Sexual attraction is a compliment and a form of flattery, after all; that’s why women constantly seek it from men towards whom they do not reciprocate it in any way.

Rabbits like McRapey are simply incapable of understanding the difference between the personal and the political, between the micro and the macro. 

It is because I have known many gay men and I know the darker aspects of their psychological profiles and lifestyle that I have such contempt for the Saint Gay propaganda. Being homosexual is hard, not due to “Minority Stress” and other people making it hard, but because reality makes it hard.  Some find it ironic that a number of those who have made It Gets Better videos subsequently killed themselves, but that’s exactly what one would expect.  Gay Pride propaganda has killed far more young homosexuals than the largely mythical gay-bashing ever has; Pierre Tremblay presented a 2000 paper at San Diego State in which he noted: “Empirical data indicates that, to
the age of 16 or 17 years, the lifetime “suicide attempt” incidence for
HOM youth has risen about six-fold, from about 5 to 30 percent from the
1950s to the 1990s.”

Repeatedly beating the young over the head with the idea that something problematic is not only okay, but good, creates a fundamental cognitive dissonance between what they believe they are supposed to believe and what they actually believe.  The Saint Gay approach is nothing more than magical thinking; I’ve exchanged a number of emails with the man I call The Gayfather, the self-proclaimed architect of the Gay is Good theme, and he readily admits that there is nothing empirical, scientific, or even philosophical about his theme.  It’s simply a postulate.  Gay is Good, ergo Gay is Healthy, ergo Gay is Moral, ergo Gay is Normal.

But calling RGB 255,255,255 black doesn’t actually change the color on your screen, no matter how many people you convince to follow your example.  Such propaganda is not impotent, but neither is it capable of reshaping reality.

Coming out as homosexual should not be condemned nor should it be celebrated.  It should be considered more like a diagnosis of diabetes; something that isn’t fatal in its own right, something that may or may not be curable, and something that won’t necessarily prevent the individual from living a reasonably happy, normal life if managed properly.  Even if one doesn’t believe in the existence of sin or its wages, one should be able to grasp that the celebration of Saint Gay has been accompanied by a body count that considerably exceeds that of the dark days of the notorious closet and question its legitimacy on that basis.

Wait, they’re the GOOD guys?

I don’t think the Obama administration was particularly keen in following the neocon cheerleading for yet another American invasion in the Middle East, this time in Syria.  But this sort of thing will pretty much eliminate any public enthusiasm for one, especially in light of the disastrous “Arab Spring” that, as I correctly predicted, led to rule by the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the much-ballyhooed secular democratic liberalization that was supposedly in the works:

The unverified clip, posted by a pro-government campaign group shows Khalid al Hamad-  who also goes by the name Abu Sakkar – the well-known founder of Homs’ Farouq Brigade – standing over the uniformed corpse in a ditch while ranting against President Bashar al Assad.

Using a knife, the man hacks open the torso and removes two organs before holding them up to the camera and declaring: ‘I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog.’

He then raises one to his mouth and takes a bite.

Of course, even if the US military doesn’t invade in order to put men like this in power and import a few hundred thousand of them as the usual consequence of a modern military invasion, the devotees of the Diversity Gospel shouldn’t despair.  They can still hope for men like this to acquire green cards and marry their daughters. Nothing says tolerance like a pagan cannibal from Canaan for a son-in-law.