Bitcoin donations to Snowden Defy King Obama's Executive Order
Posted by freedomforall 9 years, 1 month ago to Government
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Reference UCMJ, and Nuremburg Trials.
UCMJ: Soldiers required to obey all lawful orders.
Inverse, Soldiers obligated to DISOBEY unlawful orders and report them up the chain.
"I was just following orders" proven to be no defense against soldiers violating law.
Snowden did the right thing in exposing the unlawful activities of our Government and he deserves a medal. I hope the next president pardons him and gives him one.
I don't like what was being covered up any more than you do, but the fact remains, that he broke a number of laws.
Essentially, it says that if someone violated a law which you, as a juror, judge to be a "bad law", you may [and should] find the defendant in the case not guilty, even if he is guilty on the facts. We had such a case in Colorado - a juror refusing to find a defendant guilty because she disagreed with the law. She served a lengthy contempt of court sentence. It was argued to the Colorado Supreme Court and the recalcitrant juror won it. The lawyer who argued it, BTW, once ran for governor on the Libertarian ticket.
So, refusing to uphold a bad law is in many ways, equal to disobeying an illegal order. Refusing to obey a bad law is also related to, if not equal to, disobeying a bad order.
Just because something is a law doesn't mean you have to follow it. It was a crime in Nazi Germany to conceal and aid Jews and the rest of the laundry list of "undesirables" - and the people who broke it were heroes.
I think Snowden did the right thing in breaking a bad law, for a very very good reason.
In our original system of jurisprudence, the founders took the elements of English common law that they felt were just and built upon it. One of the things that they set out to do was to make the jury, and not the judge the king of the courtroom. The judge's duty, more or less, was to act as an advisor to the jury. The jury was to accomplish two things in a trial: 1) determine if the accused broke the law and 2) determine if the intent of the law was actually applicable in this particular instance. In other words, putting the law in the particular case on trial as well. The idea was to treat someone who robbed your wages differently from someone who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family. I strongly doubt that the framers envisioned a day when a judge would send a jury back to deliberate when he didn't like the verdict that they returned. That actually happened in New Jersey some years ago.
In conclusion, what I'm saying is that it's a jury's job to determine snow don't measure of guilt or innocence for breaking the law...not the President's.
So based on your statement, all the German citizens who turned in Jews are innocent since they were not soldiers. Bystanders of a murder are innocent. Oh I think not, you can be an accomplice, before, during and after the fact. Being a willing participant in actions that are a blatant violation of higher statutes does make one a criminal. and violating unlawful orders and unlawful rules does not make one a criminal, but instead an ethical person not willing to compromise their integrity.
As things stand now, the courts are not willing to do this, and that does make the law unconstitutional as applied.
Now that I think about it, King George (Bush) created it in defiance of his 'just a GD piece of paper' oath.
Jan
Maybe we should change that term to 'Executive Decree'.
"It's not a defense but a voluntary admission of guilt combined with a plea for clemency or lighter sentence."
Thereafter followed a lecture with discussion on what would constitute an illegal order. Two points.
The individual giving the illegal order would have no protection under the ''officers appointed over" clause.
Neither was the illegal order confined to such things as overtly barbaric acts that violated the Status Of Forces Agreement, Rules Of Engagement or any of the governing laws or Laws of Land (or sea or air) Warfare.
An interesting point for the 60's and 70's was to what extent was the military to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
One point was in the event of a material or legal change without a supporting change by amendment as required.
Given the contents of the Patriot Act it makes one wonder when the military is going to follow it's oath, or what it would take, if ever.
I'm wondering if some future President might repeal all the unamended changes or parts ignored, or slithered around, or redefined and called the current military leaders in front of a General Court - if they would make such a voluntary confession of guilt.
Might live to see it. But not with the present None Of The Above candidates being offered. I do not follow the Jesuit saying that the end justifies the means. Nor do I accept supporting the lesser of two evils defense. Like the accused in the Nuremberg Trials the degree of support for evil only affects the sentence awarded. The guilt is a self proclaimed foregone conclusion.
Case in point is appointing people when Congress was In Session but not holding business on the floor of the Senate. Clearly a power not given to the Chicago Shyster and not excused by the defense ''the Supreme Court hasn't yet visited that particular portion.
To me it was an immediate reason for impeachment proceedings which along with other items having not occurred should have rung bells in the leadership of the military.
The foregoing was personal opinion - yet it makes me wonder what instruction and discussions are being held in the ranks of today's military.
go to youtube and search for "world bitcoin network", James DeAngelo has some very good Bitcoin 101 vids. He has a number of technical, and non-technical vids. They don't seem to list in any order, but that's a youtube thing, so you have to hunt around his channel to find them.
Now that I have that out of my system...
Theft of Bitcoin only occurs if you leave you bitcoin wallet unprotected - they aren't hacked and stolen.
The block chain is freely accessible to anyone. It isn't encrypted.
The safety is that everyone has a copy of the block chain. The challenge would be to convince all those computers to nearly instantaneously accept a false transaction. The only way to do that is to exceed the number of computers that are working the block chain. All it would take is one computer to reject that transaction, and its done.
So, if bitcoins popularity diminished such that only 1000 computers were working transactions, then apparently there is no longer interest in it - so, there is no need to attack it.
As for control, control what? That's the other nice thing about it, there is no control, the control is in the public trust. Ergo, the only way to wreck it, or control it is to destroy the public trust in it. But, that would only destroy the trust in bitcoin, not the block chain technology. Another digital currency would emerge. I think digital currency is here to stay, in some form.
Embrace the coin, for it is good. :-)
If for no other reason than it pisses of the government.
If for no other reason than it pisses of(f) the government."
Hear hear!
Thanks for the tech explanation, but how are virtual machines accounted for in the process?
Miners are usually paralleling ASIC processors, or high speed video cards. Standard Motherboard CPUs just don't have the computational ability to compete. I looked at mining, and the fact is, unless you get some expensive, high speed, water cooled stuff, the electricity cost will exceed your mining gains.
Once people with money got into the mining game, they pushed mom-n-pop miners out. If you wanted to setup a small scale miner on a solar panel, you might make a little scratch off it.
Last I heard, there are 100,000's of processors running. VM's won't do it to over take it. These dedicated processors are running 180,000 MegaHashes/second. You can actually go to ZeroBlock and see what the hash rate currently is. That's what you'd have to over come.
FWIW, I make bitcoin by MicroLending bitcoins. (btcjam.com), and I move bitcoin in and out of gold/silver with bitreserve.org - that takes the volatility out of it. Not wanting to get rich, just keep what I got. I do actually make more purchases through Overstock.com now because they accept bitcoin. they're a bit more expensive then say Amazon, but I really want to do what I can to encourage bitcoin acceptance.
There is no bigger money than the banksters (at present) and the feds not far behind. If destruction/control of the market becomes a priority, processor capability will not be an obstacle. Likely there are investments already in play with the goal of controlling the market.
These organizations exist by controlling financial markets to their advantage and have done so for centuries under constant change. To assume their advantages will be overturned by bitcoin would be naive. I would love to be wrong about this though.
He would be sentenced to two years of cleaning out the latrines in public parks all over the US, living in a van and driving from park to park. (Since it is a hypothetical perfect world, security would not have to be provided to keep someone from ambushing him.) This would put him in casual contact with people all over the US, who could personally tell him their varied feelings about what he did. He would listen, and grow.
At the end of two years, his sentence would be done. Maybe we could have a parade and give him a big freakin' medal for service to the American people. Then he could be put on the president's cabinet as an adviser for security and freedom.
(Unfortunately, the delta between my vision and the real world is large.)
Jan
I don't think anyone is a coward for refusing to subject himself to that. I just hope he doesn't try to sneak home anyway; that's how a lot of other defectors get nailed.
If he's smart, he'll find asylum somewhere better soon. Maybe Germany -- Angela Merkel doesn't especially appreciate having been a US spying target.
There is no justice in the Justice Dept, especially for political prisoners. Snowden would love to come back if he could get a fair trial with jury nullification as a possibility. That is not likely from the gang of looters and thieves in the Dark Center. Republicans and Democrats: United Statists .
I thought that was true under the current administration, but was hopeful that a change of parties might ameliorate that situation. Upon examining my thoughts of the last few years, I may be deluding myself, substituting a desire for reality. Maybe I've been watching too much Law &; Order or Blue Bloods.
It was beyond my comprehension that the USA has gone that far down the totalitarian road. I thought that perhaps in another 10 years or so, but you believe that we're already there. Examining your take and giving a lot of thought I have concluded that you just might be right. You have no idea how much this saddens me, because I was raised and lived through an entirely different country.
It is such a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in. Whistleblowers on the government are in a terrible position. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit...
Respectfully,
O.A.