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Sooo, Congress is bothered by a little corruption? Hah! Also, will there be war with North Korea and/or Iran? (9:30):

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Closing in on its three-thousandth signature, the “Justice for Bradley Manning” petition gets a signature today which, for some reasons, generated an admin email.

Could be because the signatory was attempting to spam something into the petition, I’m not sure yet.

But the domain name used is a treat:

virtualgoodsexchange.tk

So, is that “virtual good sex change” or “virtual goods exchange”? Inquiring minds wanna know!

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This blog post was interesting. A criminal defense attorney made a journal of a typical day in court.

Count the actual number of hours of trial. 8:30-9:30, 10:30-11:30, 2 hours for lunch(!), 1:30-3:30, 4:00-5:00.

In a full day of work, the judge only actually worked for 5 hours! That's a pretty sweet deal. Is it normal for judges to take a 2 hour break for lunch every day?

The blogger's attitude was "ho-hum boring". My attitude was "WTF? The judge works 5 hours a day?"

I think you’ll like this. Give it a listen.

• anarchist action figures. orgtheory.net (2010-07-28). The kids are alright. (Linked Wednesday 2010-07-28.)

• University Website. xkcd.com (2010-07-29). (Linked Friday 2010-07-30.)

• feministhulk: HULK FIND COMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION. RESULT: HULK HAVE VERY DIVERSE PORTFOLIO OF SMASH. Twitter / feministhulk (2010-07-30). Feminist Hulk has a thick conception of liberation. (Linked Friday 2010-07-30.)

• Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet. Aza Raskin, Aza on Design (2010-07-23). The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years. We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post. It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens... (Linked Friday 2010-07-30.)

It’s that time of the month where I get everything together for my monthly Center for a Stateless Society feature. In Liberty and Creativity I explore how creativity will be involved in a successful struggle for liberty and how a free society will foster greater creativity. This includes a brief look at how creators can thrive in the absence of intellectual property regimes.

I also did my regular two news commentaries this week.

In No Boondoggle Too Costly I take a look at what Governor Christie’s support of funding the Meadowlands Xanadu complex says about the mentality of government.

Even a self-styled reformer rules by the logic of government: “We’re digging ourselves into a hole, so let’s get more shovels.” Climbing out of the hole would make you look like a quitter.

It’s easier to dig when you can use taxation to make others pay for the shovels. Government is not funded by individual choice. It is funded through coercion based on the choices of those making the rules.

Liberty For All Means Immigrants Too is a response to people expressing concern for liberty while advocating government restrictions on the liberty of immigrants.

Immigrants should not be seen as a threat to liberty, but as potential allies in the fight for liberty.

Liberty means nothing if the freedom of any group is placed above individual liberty. And people do not stop being individuals if they are born in a different country.

Sarbanes-Oxley is a failed financial reform law. Sarbanes-Oxley was passed after the Enron fraud, to prevent executives from lying about earnings. Sarbanes-Oxley failed to prevent financial fraud at Lehman Brothers. Similarly, the recent financial "reform" law will not prevent the banksters from stealing.

Lehman Brothers used the "Repo 105" accounting trick to hide shaky assets off their balance sheet. Loans were disguised as sales. Lehman Brothers did $50B of Repo 105 fraud. Lehman Brothers raised approximately $50B in capital while lying about their earnings.

If there's no Sarbanes-Oxley prosecution for Lehman Brothers, then State thugs might as well repeal the law. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs are $3M+ per year, for both small and large public corporations. Sarbanes-Oxley is a huge regressive tax on small public corporations.

Lehman Brothers' CEO Dick Fuld was not prosecuted for accounting fraud. Sholom Rubashkin was convicted for accounting fraud, which wasn't the original reason State thugs raided his business and seized his records. There are two justice systems in this country. There's one for insiders and one for non-insiders. It is hypocritical for State thugs to prosecute non-insiders but not insiders.

A pro-State troll says "Enron's fraud is completely different from Lehman Brothers' fraud." Enron used off balance sheet partnerships to hide losses. Lehman Brothers used the "Repo 105" trick to hide losses. There's no similarity at all.

Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs $3M+ per year. The compliance cost is nearly the same for small corporations and for large corporations. If a corporation has $5B+ in revenue, then $3M is negligible. If a small public corporation has $100M in revenue, then $3M is a huge cost.

The CEO of a large corporation likes Sarbanes-Oxley. It's a tax on smaller competitors. Many small corporations have been "taken private" to avoid the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance cost. Some small corporations were bought out by larger corporations, due to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Sarbanes-Oxley particularly hurts the software startup market. Before Sarbanes-Oxley, a startup could "go public" with a valuation of $1B. This enables the VCs and founders to cash out their investment. Now, small startups must sell to a larger corporation or stay private.

Knowing that small startups can't go public, large corporations offer lower buyout prices. Sarbanes-Oxley had a huge chilling effect on software startups. Now, a startup needs to be almost as successful as Google to be a public corporation. Facebook is not a public corporation, partially due to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Sarbanes-Oxley is a failed reform law. The "financial reform" law is no different. The State explicitly encourages and rewards fraud by insiders. There are many ways that the State encourages accounting fraud.

• Negative real interest rates encourage executives to load up on as much debt as they can. Then a bankruptcy or bailout occurs during the next recession.
• Limited liability incorporation provides a free put option for executives to declare bankruptcy and cheat creditors.
• "Too big to fail" means that there's no risk when lending money to a "too big to fail" organization.
• There's the Principal-Agent problem. A CEO is gambling with other people's money. Therefore, he takes unreasonable risks to maximize short-term profits.
• Government regulations and government violence shield insiders from competition. With a fake free market, there's no penalty for inefficiency and waste and fraud.
  

Sarbanes-Oxley and the financial "reform" law are evil fnords. These laws provide the illusion of accountability, while insiders may continue to loot and pillage. The biggest State evils are the Federal Reserve and income tax. They are politically untouchable. Too many insiders profit from the corrupt way things are now. They will never allow real reform. Instead, fake reform is sold to the public as real reform.

If there isn't a Sarbanes-Oxley conviction for Lehman Brothers, then that law may as well be repealed. That law is a huge tax hike, due to excessive compliance costs. Small corporations and startups are hurt the most by Sarbanes-Oxley. That's exactly the way insiders like it.

I remember the media circus around Colin Powell possibly running for president and what party he would choose. The media built him up as the non-partisan military man of honor who was going to save us. What a joke. He disgraced himself with his lying Iraq war sales pitch but now he’s back actually speaking some truth.

If it was up to me I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon. Close it. And I would not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern is well, then they’ll have access to lawyers. Then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what. Let them. Isn’t that what our system is all about. And by the way America, unfortunately, has two million people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus.

In other words, the federal prison system is just as rigged as any military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, so moving the detainees there will end in convictions just as surely. Notice how he starts off sounding like the great civil libertarian and ends up awkwardly admitting how screwed up the federal injustice system is without any more criticism than a muffled ‘unfortunately’. I wonder if he has watched the PBS documentary “Torturing Democracy”? I wonder if he knows what it feels like to go through the federal incarceration system for a victimless crime or on trumped up charges.