The legal heritage of the United States

I have not studied the legal heritage of the United States.  I've heard (and believe it's true) that the United States uses "common law" as the foundation of its legal system because it divorced itself from the rule of the king.  "Common law" is a "term of art" but it is also an English phrase.  The term of art and the phrase have different meanings, and I wonder which one more accurately reflects the legal foundation of the United States.  I root for the phrase rather than the term of art because the "artists" who use that term are lawyers, and lawyers have their own dilemmas.

The gist of the definition of the term of art is "the part of English law that is derived from custom and judicial precedent rather than statutes." (so says Google). But we're not talking about English law, so let's find something that would make sense for the United States.

Right now, Wikipedia says that common law is "law developed by judges, courts, and similar tribunals, stated in decisions that nominally decide individual cases but that in addition have precedential effect on future cases."  It provides some pretty good references for that meaning too, but let's remember that Wikipedia here is defining "common law," not the words "common" (which Wikipedia doesn't do - it just identifies several domains in which "common" can be used), and "law"(which Wikipedia DOES define, but fails to mention the oldest and most obvious source for "law" as a system "of rules that are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior."  What source is that?  Juries.

On the "Jury Trial" page, Wikipedia says "Jury trials are of far less importance (or of no importance) in countries that do not have a common law system."  This claim has been in Wikipedia since 2007, uncontested and unattributed.  It suggests to me that jury trials are important in common law jurisdictions.  This blog post is written to suggest and request anyone who has it to produce evidence that the phrase "common law" is more useful when one considers jury trials to be its main source.

As written above, the term of art does include "courts" as a source for the law described as "common law," but it does not mention juries.  Juries are groups of people that operate in courts, but there are also courts in which no jury is used.  Therefore, the referenced meaning of the term is ambiguous about the importance of jury trials as a source of "common law," but, as Wikipedia shows, a nine-year effort to define the term has steadfastly maintained that juries are important in common law jurisdictions.

The point here is not about the term of art or the phrase.  The point is that juries are important as a source of the laws we and our fellows ought to follow, or, more properly, can, in the eyes of "society" justifiably be punished for breaking. 

Let us suppose that judges were to make decisions based only on what juries decided in courts where two adversaries hashed out their differences, and only when both adversaries agree to allow a judge to decide the case instead of having a jury hear it to make the decision.  There is a theory that life would be far worse than it is today, and an opposing theory (to which I adhere) that life would be far better than it is today.

In 1933, Prohibition was repealed, attributed in part to juries that refused to convict criminals whose offense was related to the use of alcohol.  Lawyer Clay Conrad says "During the Prohibition era nearly 60% of cases ended in acquittals."  Sometimes the system actually enshrines jury decisions into the Constitution of the United States.  Granted, the cost of enforcement and the rise of organized crime also heavily contributed to the motivation to repeal prohibition, but one can see that what processes those circumstances into law could be the jury, if that mechanism was recognized and respected more heavily.

I use the phrase "common law" as the simplest way to identify the system of laws that is created through the judgments of juries because juries best represent the common understanding of "rules that are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior."  Since it's a term of art, I'm looking for a new phrase.  Please let me know if you have any ideas, or help me beat back the perception that politicians, lawyers, and judges, rather than twelve random people assigned to any given situation, should determine how we should behave.

Ring.com Video Doorbell

We recently bought one of these things (not the pro version) and we are considering buying more of their products.  They are kind of closed about how their stuff works, so I sent this in to their customer support, and this post is me making good on a promise I made them.

Dear Ring.com,

Your troubleshooter provides a little bit of useful information and leaves out a "crap load" of useful information. People like me would add it if there was a place to add it, and maybe there is, but I haven't found it. So if you want to help me and everyone else, then provide everyone with access to a common place where we can all share findings.
Examples:

• When the doorbell flashes white at the top, it means the Wifi password was probably miskeyed.
• When the doorbell flashes white on the left, it means the doorbell can't communicate with the Internet (I think! - Can you confirm that?)
• When the doorbell shows a sliding blue, it is trying to connect to a wifi network.
• When the doorbell determines that it can't communicate with the Internet, it ... ??? Is that when it flashes white on the left?

It seems that the doorbell needs a wireless 802.11 b network. The instructions say "Use mode g/b or n/b, but not 'n only'. Why don't you just tell us what kind of network the doorbell needs? I set my router to g/b/n, but I still have trouble. Maybe this is because whatever mechanism Ring uses to store data to the cloud is currently unavailable, and that makes the doorbell act like it can't connect to the Internet.

Here's the thing, and I think it's important. I get the sense that you don't want to tell everyone how your product works because of security concerns. The BEST security in the world is open source because everyone can see that it works, and when it doesn't work, someone figures that out and tells everyone (unless it's the CIA, in which case they save it to use later as in StuxNet, but I bet you that the zero days they used for Stuxnet were mostly if not all in proprietary code). Be open and honest and trust your customers to let you know about problems. You'll be far more successful and you won't piss off smart people who crave the kind of transparency they can use to solve problems.

I will try to find an appropriate place on the Internet to make these comments public. Please pass them up your chain of command and let's see if we can make your products super valuable to way more people.

The Hard Reset Button for Humans

... is death and reproduction.  The contents of our minds comes from two sources, one being genes and the other being the environment.  When we have children, the genes get mixed around, but generally there are two people who are RE-presented to the environment, but the new mind lives in a brain and body that has to RE-assimilate that environment.

In a recent youtube video recommended to me by Francis Burns, I watched Ken Wilber speak for a while, and then read some comments.  One of the comments suggested that we can use the term "awareness" to refer to something that is shared by all sentient beings, and more shared when those beings are in close proximity.  Awareness is not unique to the creature experiencing it.  What is unique to the creature experiencing it is "consciousness" which is a relationship between a piece of physical reality and intention.  The physical reality, in a macroscopic way, obeys rules deterministically.  This is the "Newtonian physics" we learn, and which needs "Quantum Physics" to work in a microscopic (or, let's say nanoscopic or picoscopic) way.  It is at that level where intention can act, as far as I can tell.

I just heard Brett Veinotte mention the idea of living forever because he was telling his podcast audience about an upcoming discussion wherein the implications of living forever would be discussed.  It got me thinking "well maybe I have been."

In the bible, there is a story of a guy named Abraham who told people that "God" told Abraham his name, and it was "I am". To me, this story is hinting at what I described above as "awareness."  It's not just humans.  It's every physical system sensitive enough to have intention (which might be every physical system).  That sensitivity gives such a system awareness, and if it also has consciousness, then intention can be realized in it.

The game the universe is playing is to see how quickly intention can be realized.  You know that sometimes you have an intention but it doesn't happen until you actually do it.  I like to play this game in bed sometimes.  "I'm getting up now... Ready, here I go!" but I don't actually get up.  I'm playing with the intention but not actually realizing it because that takes more effort.  Also, feeling like I had the intention but nothing happened seems funny.  I hope I don't get Parkinson's Disease (See the movie "Awakenings" about Dr. Oliver Sachs if you're curious). Executing the intention will destroy some things (chemical bonds, probably some microbes, etc.), but it will create new ones.  So I think the whole universe is playing that game.  But what is the point?

The Landmark Forum showed me that life is empty and meaningless.  There is no point. But it's fun.  Why do we tell jokes?  So if the universe is trying to see how quickly its physical contents can be organized into systems sensitive enough to have and realize intention, then why don't we play along?  I don't think we can avoid plyaing along, but recognizing that that's what we're doing is certainly more enjoyable than feeling like life just keeps kicking us.

Given the world as it is, there are some intentions you can immediately realize (like reading the next sentence), and some that require some steps, the first of which is an intention of the first kind.  That's really all there is when we are conscious and aware, but we often let that light go out and we go onto auto-pilot.  Maybe you just did that while reading.  If so, I recommend going back and letting these words get a little deeper into yourself so that maybe our awareness can be shared across time and space and you and I can be together right now, trying to understand each other a bit more.  If you imagine what I'm going through, just from the evidence of the writing you're reading, you might like it.  You might feel like we have been living forever too.

A message to United Global Shift

I sent the following message to United Global Shift after reading that their mission is very much aligned with my own.

I heard about you through Landmark.  I share your goals.  I'm aware of information that has been hidden.  You may be familiar with the occulting of information, or the omission of important information.  These passively deceptive strategies have been at work since our species began communicating.  They are getting harder to employ (YAY!) but that is because people are talking about them and communicating about them, and sharing information they have discovered that is being suppressed.  So I wanted to do that.

What I learned that's important in the context of this message, I learned from Peter Hendrickson.  He wrote a book about the law ("Title 26, Internal Revenue Code") that created the designation "501(c)(3)" called "Cracking the Code."  The U.S. Department of Justice was asked twice by the IRS to ban the book or issue an injunction against it, and the DOJ declined both times.  The point of the book is to show that most people and businesses (and probably United Global Shift) are deceived into believing that the U.S. federal government has some kind of claim on the money they get.  If that is a deception, then there is a vast amount of wealth available to do things like prevent war, but that wealth is being given to the U.S. federal government and a significant portion of it is being used in a way that encourages war.  "War is the health of the state."

It is in the interest of United Global Shift itself, but also very much aligned with its mission, to discover the deception and work toward diverting the vast amount of wealth currently being used to encourage war into our efforts to discourage it instead.

Do you dare question authority?  Landmark Forum suggests to me that either you do, or you will.  I'm here to encourage you.

An Inventory of Brain Functions

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my body makes too many platelets.  These are the tiny particles in our blood that create clots when there is a hole in our circulatory system.  Having too many of these has some odd but not dangerous effects, like your spleen can grow larger.  Our spleens store up a bunch of platelets, presumably so that they can be released to help seal off the holes so we don't bleed out if we suffer a really bloody injury.  Another symptom is numbness or a tingling sensation in our extremities - fingertips, toes, hands, and feet.  My spleen has never been enlarged, but I think have felt the paresthesia in my fingertips, but I have proven to myself that the feeling can be psychosomatic.

There is a dangerous effect of having too many platelets, and that is the risk of ischemic stroke.  A stroke is the medical term for depriving brain cells of energy, either by creating static pools of blood ("hemorrhagic") or by preventing blood from getting there ("ischemic") by blocking an artery.  Of course, if your blood vessels are too weak, blocking them can lead to a hemorrhage "upstream" from the clot, and then you have both kinds of stroke.  Since I have too many platelets, I'm concerned about getting a clot that prevents blood from getting to where it's needed.

I decided it would be a good idea to create for myself an inventory of brain functions.  According to Wikipedia, brain tissue ceases to function after being deprived of oxygen for sixty to ninety seconds.  Of course, that doesn't mean the tissue is dying, but without oxygen, it will eventually die.  Meanwhile, if that tissue would normally help me restore oxygen to itself, I have only 60 - 90 seconds to use that help.  So I want to be able to run through some mental tests quickly.

There is already a well known acronym that everyone can use to recognize when a person is having a stroke, and that is FAST.  The letters stand for "Facial drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulties, and Time."  So, look in the mirror to see if you look funny.  Well, I always look funny because the left side of my mouth is about half a millimeter lower than the right.  Pretty slight, but the guy who made a portrait of me in art class 25 years ago noticed.  Then close your eyes and raise your arms so they're straight out, and then look to see if they're really straight out.  Then say to someone "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" or something else (maybe "I think I might be having a stroke, how do I sound to you?" might be better). You can say it to yourself first, but we have powerful ways to mask our outward failures, so getting an external opinion would be useful here, especially if you really are having a stroke.  Finally, find the second hand on a clock, or memorize the seconds from your watch, close your eyes, and count off ten seconds and check if you are about right.

That is easy enough for me, but I have more concerns.  I've noticed late at night sometimes that my ability to think is off kilter.  Maybe it would be noticing motion in my field of vision, or naming a color, or doing math, getting a joke, remembering something I just said or something I've always known, or having a reasonable emotional response to something.  I attribute these peculiarities of cognition in myself to parts of my brain going to sleep.  I think "late night humor" is a good example to which most people can relate.  I imagine the same kind of thing could happen if some of my brain tissue ceased to function because it wasn't getting enough oxygen.  So I want to do more than look in the mirror, raise my arms, talk to someone, and look at my watch.  Here's what else I'll do:

• Find the square of some number over 12.  I have most of them up to 20 memorized, so I can also compare the explicit mental multiplication to the memory, if the memory is there.
• Remember my mom's name.
• Read something.
• Stand on one foot.
• Be curious about something.
• Sense something with each of my five senses.
• Fold my fingers together, right thumb on top (normal, for me) and then left thumb on top to make sure it feels weird.
  
• Sense other things with each of my five senses and compare the previous thing to the new one.

That's it.  Now the question is, if I'm having a stroke, how the hell am I going to find this blog post?

School is Like a Drug

I made this claim to my youngest daughter a few years ago because I had grown concerned about the effects of government indoctrination.  According to a few different schoolteachers (Brett Veinotte, John Taylor Gatto, and Alexander Inglis), school has six main functions, which, to be blunt, are 1) Remove judgement and opinion, 2) Fashion students to be obedient, 3) Sort students into normalized groups, 4) Create a ruling class, 5) Cut off students who don't fit the desired mold, and 6) Control the students.  I can see these things happening to all students who speak openly enough about their school experience, though they may not be able to see it themselves.

It's possible that I've taken the words of these three teachers too seriously and allowed their views to pollute my thinking, but all my efforts to verify that as the case have failed abysmally.  I conclude that they are correct, and that school tends to create unthinking "yes men."  It also, at least in the case of my own children, attracts many of its victims to itself.

Seeing the damage being done and the victims maintaining a desire for its source, I gave a few minutes of thought to finding a good analogy, and heroin is what I came up with.  Something makes school feel good enough, and the damage it does is subtle enough to prevent some of its victims from rejecting it.  It is my hope and, indeed, my expectation that, just as I did, my children will also eventually think their own way out of the habits that make most people into unthinking yes men.  I can't help but feel that my own relationships with them provide them ample opportunities to judge, have opinions, obey their consciences rather than anyone else, remain the beautiful distinct creatures my wife and I created, disavow power over others as I have, embrace the marginalized, and defy those who attempt to control them.

There are some other elements of drug use which have analogs to school too.  My friend Roslyn Ross shared the insight that what makes something a drug in the psychological sense is that it allows us to "numb out."  She writes that we also use substances as spices (to enhance whatever we're enjoying) and as medicine (to help change what needs to change). 

School demands that we do homework, listen, sit still, raise our hands to pee, and other things which cause a lot of psychological pain, but it numbs us to that pain also.  Gold stars, letters near the beginning of the alphabet, aka "high marks", and certificates of achievement help to salve the damage to our intrinsic motivation.

School forces us to associate with a lot of people our own age with whom we wouldn't normally interact.  It also provides group projects, activities, and sometimes actual discussions in which we get to interact with those whom we do enjoy.  We are wired to remember and appreciate the good things in life, and the togetherness of similarly aged children provides episodes both good and bad.  School magnifies the experience of being a child, and in that sense, it provides an enhancement.

Importantly, school teaches that government is good, which is an altered perception. As we age, our trust in government falls.  Teenage rebellion is a kind of rejection of authority that is natural in cultures that value and teach authority - the coercive kind, not the expertise kind.  It is also only through school that the Rite of Passage goes backwards, pushing students away from their own consciences and back toward authorities as the guides for their lives.  This is the necessary change from the point of view of (coercive) authority, obviously.

I thank Anne Stirling Hastings for motivating me to write this post. I recommend her and her work to anyone with an appreciation and love for humankind.

A Think Tank Game

Would you pay for good little pieces of data?  Would you like to get paid for creating good little pieces of data?  My answer to both is YES, and I bet yours is too.  I will be reaching out to everyone I know because Brett Veinotte has inspired me.  We all share information all the time, and sometimes we thank each other for it.  If we set it up well, as I think Brett has done, we even, sometimes, pay each other for it.  I have, in fact, paid Brett a few times because of all the great information he has provided to me and everyone else who might benefit from it.

The goal of this blog post, I hope, will be met in one of the next few paragraphs.  It will be a few sentences that will catch your eye and uncork your mind.  You will look forward to sitting at your computer, or on your phone, just as you are now, reading and writing.  A seed will be planted in your subconscious driving you to research and brainstorm how you might benefit from or encourage the input of others.

One of my favorite things to do is respond to comments on the Internet. You can browse my comments on Disqus or what I've written on Quora to see what I have to say.  In my experience, most other people don't comment very much, if at all.  It makes me sad.  Most people are good, and that goodness would show up in comments if they were to make them.  Do you comment on the Internet much?

Of course, our foolishness also shows up if we are lazy when we write comments.  Because school teaches us to, we might parrot a claim we read somewhere but which we never bothered to examine, and a response might come back providing us with strong evidence that the claim is wrong.  That hurts because we have presented the claim as our own.

If you do examine my comments on Disqus, you'll see my strategies to avoid that pain.  Most folks who comment a lot follow such strategies, and they tend to improve critical thinking and communications skills.  Either you already know this, or else, since I've (hopefully) planted a seed, you will come to know it soon, and that will make you a great contributor to my "think tank game."

I will soon announce a date for the commencement of the "think tank game."  If all goes well, it will go on for a few days or, if it goes really well, indefinitely.  During that time, you'll visit memeracing.net every now and then to answer or ask questions and maybe invest a few dollars worth of bitcoin.  If you write something good, you'll get an email asking you to visit the site and check out what six other people had to say in the same context.  You'll put these six blurbs, along with your own, in order by quality.  Perhaps you will put yours first, even if you think someone else's was better, or perhaps you'll be more honest.  Either way, you and those six other people will combine your judgements to find the best of the seven things, and bitcoin will be redistributed as encouragement.

That's what I have to offer.  Well, one of the things I have to offer.  I look forward to your suggestions and ideas.

I have some more background information for those who decided to keep reading this far.  Many people, once they understand what memeracing.net is trying to do, say that it's a great idea.  The problem is that a "great idea" is only great until it's old, which takes a few days or weeks.  After that, it's either useful or forgotten.  Memeracing.net has been forgotten by many people who recognized its value.  One might say they are just waiting for it to become useful.  I'm pretty sure that the usefulness will come from the density of traffic, so I wanted to get a lot of people on board for a kind of event on memeracing.

Do you think I should identify some particular topic for this "think tank game" event?  I do.  The link above ("suggestions and ideas") goes to a page where you can enter whatever topic you think would work well.  One of the answers already has about $30 backing it, but it isn't the one I think is best.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to comments as well as input on memeracing.net.

Let's Educate the new IRS Agents

It seems to me that turnover at our favorite government entity is quite high.  In the interest of helping the newbies there learn how to navigate between the mistakes of their coworkers as well as the folks who need to pay taxes or receive refunds and the requirements of the law, I propose that we "in the know" leverage our experiences.

If you have ever gotten the IRS to correct its records regarding:

1. Whether or not you qualify as an "employee" according to USC 26,
   
2. Whether or not you earn "wages" according to USC 26,
   
3. Whether or not you have received "income" as it is used in USC 26,
4. Whether or not something you sent to the IRS was frivolous,
5. Whether or not you sent something early enough according to whatever "statute of limitations" applies,
   
6. Whether or not your submission has been received or processed, or ...

...then you might enjoy calling them back to chat about how it went.  You would do this in the interest of helping the IRS more efficiently administer the tax laws.  During your chat, you could bring up one, some, or even all of the following items for the benefit of myself and everyone else who understands what Peter Hendrickson's Cracking the Code teaches about the income tax laws of the United States:

1. As someone who has found it necessary to contact the IRS, I am aware that some IRS employees are given verbal instructions, and that by following these instructions, they put themselves in danger of violating laws or people's rights, or even simple internal rules, so it's best for the employee to request that all instructions be provided in written form so that they can be passed on to any victim of such accidental violations.
2. When folks call in, it is helpful to let them know that things do not always happen in the order one would expect.  For example, mailing something to the IRS may have no effect until the sender calls the IRS to find out whether or not the mailed item has been processed.
3. Others who have called the IRS have learned that something they sent in was handled a certain way, but often the notes do not identify the something well enough for the caller to know what it was that was handled.  We urge IRS employees taking notes on items received in the mail to identify them in the notes with the date and title (if it has one) of the document for the convenience of anyone who reads those notes.  If the document was mailed with a tracking number, type that in too.
4. It is often very helpful to ask up front if a person is a federal employee, or since the tax administered by the IRS falls only upon activities that involve the exercise of federal privilege, whether or not the caller uses any federal privilege to earn his or her living.
5. Many in the "Tax Honesty" movement have found that employees of the IRS often don't understand nearly as much as those in the movement understand.  Thus, any efforts to narrow that gap would be very helpful.  Let's encourage IRS agents to examine Peter Hendrickson's website and discuss it among themselves.  Suggest that refutations of the material there be made in writing so that information can be vetted and anyone spreading misinformation can be stopped.

From the perspective of IRS employees, it may be the case that the IRS is collecting too much money, or too little.  There are, of course, cases on both sides.  Regardless of who believes it's too much and who believes it's too little, getting it closer to what congress designed it to be is in the best interested of everyone.  It is to that end that I make the suggestions above.  If our nation collected the correct amount of taxes, then we would see positive effects in many areas:

Public education would be significantly improved, not only because the "right" amount of money would be available to schools from the federal government, but also because people would be interested in following through on their promises and obligations, making sure those promises and obligations are clearly delineated, and recognizing and exposing all manner of deception that not only infects the pocketbooks of everyone involved, but also damages the minds of the young people who are exposed to the system.

The national defense apparatus would be resized to an ideal size, not too big, and not too small.  While some may argue that it is already too big and others may argue that it's still too small, the best path forward is for everyone to follow through on their promises and obligations, and make sure those promises and obligations are clearly delineated.

When the proper amount of tax is collected from the people of this country, the welfare of its inhabitants will be optimized.  This means that welfare programs that rest on the backs of the taxpayers would be lighter or heavier, whichever is the case according to what we get when everyone follows through on their promises and obligations, and makes sure those promises and obligations are clearly delineated.

U.S. Government Quotations

During "discovery" in the case where the United States Postal Inspection Service is attempting to steal my money from me (16-01166-DSF), the government had these things to say.  I figured it was important to publish them:

1. "[The question] implies that the decisions of any United States District Judge or United States Magistrate Judge are influenced by the source of their salaries."  The question was "Do you pay the salaries of judges Dale S. Fischer and Kenly Kiya Kato?"
   
2. "[T]he defendant in this action is currency and is not entitled to legal representation."
3. "To the extent claimant asserts that he is an innocent owner of the defendant currency, the assertion is without merit because there is no evidence currently available to the government suggesting that claimant exercised due diligence in obtaining any information about the person to whom he sold the bitcoins, or in determining whether the defendant currency was derived from a legal or legitimate source."
4. "[T]he burden of proof is on claimant in this action to establish that he is the innocent owner of the defendant currency."

I submit that there is a conflict of interest exposed in the first quotation.  Do you see that?  Would you be willing to provide me with a video of yourself stating that if #1 above is real, then you see a conflict of interest?

The government of the United States has admitted that it is using the term "defendant" to describe something that is not a person.  How do we solve that problem?

The government suggests that a person's assertion of innocence is without merit unless that person "obtains information about the person to whom they" are selling or "determines whether the payment was derived" legally or legitimately.  I submit that agents working for the U.S. government are guiltier than I am in this respect because of the corruption of that organization and those agents' sale of their own efforts to it.  I do not think it is fair to blame them, but the government is attempting to blame me.

Zero Days Spoiler Alert

The movie Zero Days answers a lot of questions, but it poses so many more, that I think any good review should be a spoiler.  We are left to wonder and search for what's next, how foolish people with power and financial resources will be, and how clever the better and worse technologists around the world will prove to be while struggling against each other to make things the way they want them to be.

Personally, I'd like to see Siemens spend a few million on a court case against the U.S. government to win a settlement that would pay for A) replacing all existing PLCs that are affected by Stuxnet so that they are not vulnerable to the malware as they currently are, and B) explicate the exploits that were used well enough for the creators of the software containing them to remove them.

My observations on the state of the audience and my personal desire for Siemens are not the reason I'm writing this post.  I wrote those paragraphs in order to provide a setting from which I can propose my theory and hopefully get some of the most important minds working on solving the problem of corruption (if they aren't already).

The ostensible goal of Stuxnet was to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program.  The effect was to release a kind of masterkey to infect and control a variable but very well defined set of Siemens PLCs in any way a programmer wants.  Anyone can get it because it's everywhere.  The idea of Siemens PLCs providing useful logical functions in a secure manner is no longer reasonable.  We are vulnerable to the madmen of the world who have the programming skills.

The madmen of the world generally do not have the programming skills because they are too busy getting elected, whispering in the ears of those who've already been elected, or both, and that is NOT their fault.  It's ours.  Well, not my fault because A) I don't vote, and B) I have no respect for fake (coercive) authority.  So it probably isn't your fault either, but there are loads of people who still believe that obedience to authority is a good thing, and it's entirely their fault. They suffer for it too, which is ok by me, but we suffer too, and that's what I'd like to stop.  I think it's up to us to stop it.

The people who do have the programming skills will be hired by those madmen because too many software engineers (yes, Jerry, I'm talking about you) do not peer deeply enough into their work to see whether or not it will be used for good or evil.  Einstein and Oppenheimer come to mind.  My theory is that the money to be paid to the engineers who can modify the Stuxnet to create grand problems will come from taxpayers and be funneled through black ops for that exact purpose: create grand problems.  Why?  Because that is how fake authority justifies itself.  Check out the Peace Revolution Podcast if you don't believe me.

How do we stop it?  The answer is to make people like Jerry aware of what they are doing so that they can request that more light be shone upon it.  The Jerry about whom I write offered me some work related to "smart meters" and, because it was a government contract, I declined.  Perhaps it was a mistake for me to decline.  Perhaps I would have been able to brighten the lights and scare away some of the development of "grand problems" that I believe is going on.

I don't know if Jerry will ever read this, but if he does, I hope he considers how much his work is related to the Siemens PLCs targeted by Stuxnet and whether or not he's helping create instability in a world that is very altered now that the CIA / NSA / FBI has released this masterkey into the wild.

We are not powerless.

The Bitfinex Hack: Bitcoin versus Hubris

Bitcoin is threatening those who have lived parasitically off the rest of us through clever use of the financial system.  The best way I can think of to postpone the demise of these fiat parasites (by which I mean those who don't need to put much effort into earning money because they have de facto permission to print it from the governments they serve/control/sleep with) is to make the price very volatile.  There is a moral way to do this, but as recent research has shown, bankers don't generally limit themselves to moral means.

The moral way to do this is to allocate a large sum of money and buy up all the bitcoin that is available for sale.  This would take a few generations and make several families not affiliated with the bankers quite wealthy.  This is one of the reasons the bankers won't stick with the moral means: it spreads financial power to those who earn it.

The alphabet agencies of the United States (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc.) have been engaged in immoral projects since they were founded, usually relying on the shortsighted and nearsighted and (actually quite normal) functionaries who, if they could see the whole picture, would not help for the average salaries they earn.  This includes analysts, engineers, coders, couriers, spies, law enforcement, etc.  If you don't believe me, listen to the 91 episodes of The Peace Revolution Podcast.  It provides ample evidence, rather than just claims such as I am making. Do your own research.  It's good practice.

I believe I have identified the immoral method through which the price of bitcoin will be made so volatile that most people will shy away from it.  However, some, such as myself, will simply profit from the efforts, and use the profits to help rebuild things.  The method, or something quite similar, has been called "The Doublecross" and involves the cooperation of law enforcement to avoid enforcing the law in the cases where the criminal act benefits those at the top, such as the murder of that stooge, Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.  There is a warning in here for all of you who are close enough to the powerful to derive some benefit from them.  Aside from any bad karma, you'll eventually be a liability, and your life will end for that reason.  Just walk away, my friends.  Walk away.

Essentially, powerful spy agencies, including the UK's GCHQ and the US's CIA, FBI, and NSA (and even the Kremlin and whatever components of Kim Jong Il's government and China's government and all the rest are responsible for collecting information on people) gather dirt on people.  If you want to hold some power, you have to be dirty so that the power you hold is really under the control of those who have the dirt on you.  If you think about it, this explains why both Victoria Roberts and Nancy G. Edmunds worked (and continue to work) officially and on the record to suborn perjury from Doreen Hendrickson.

This dirt-collection scheme can be used to leverage a large number of insiders in just about every company on the planet.  That's a lot of work, and not feasible, but if you restrict that group of companies to "Bitcoin exchanges" then it's feasible.  The spy agencies, we can assume, have dirt on people like Nejc Kodric and/or several of his employees, along with the same sort of people at other exchanges.  In short, they have enough blackmail material to co-opt bitcoin exchanges, and force someone to provide them with the means to commit a heist such what happened to MtGox a while back, and what happened to Bitfinex a couple hours ago.

Consider all the evidence and history surrounding the biggest bitcoin heists (take that link with a grain of salt - the author says "Billions of Bitcoin are still "missing" in todays economy" which anyone who understands bitcoin knows is impossible), and see if it seems like there might be some kind of powerful (politically powerful, like spy-agency powerful) forces preventing rectification of what is clearly theft.  Where is Karpeles today?  I don't know.

In a nutshell, the strategy I see playing out is that governmental agencies, on behalf of the people who want to control everyone, are deploying their massive resources in black operations to amass bitcoins in ways that will not make honorable people rich so that they can manipulate the price more easily.  Will it work for them?  I don't think it will.  I will profit from their attempts, but since I think their attempts are a net negative for my species, I will spread my theory in the hope that more people will profit from their efforts (thus, defeating them) as I do.

In fact, profiting from their efforts simply means buying when the price goes down and selling when it goes up.  Since dollars are the easiest thing to use to value stuff, choose a dollar amount, and choose a number of valuable assets in which to store your savings, and split your savings up between them.  When the value of one goes up (or down), sell it (or buy it) and buy (or sell) whatever has gone down with the proceeds (or gone up to cover the cost).

If you or someone you know works for one of these spy agencies, consider carefully whether or not your efforts are making things worse or better.  Short term profit is fun and enjoyable, but life gets miserable when karma catches up, and no one knows how fast she is.

I used to be Afraid of the Dark

My older brother slept in a pitch black room.  I idolized him for that because I was afraid of the dark.  I idolized him enough to eventually develop the habit myself. Now I love the dark.  There are a couple ideas that helped me make the transition, and I want to help you make it too, though not in a literal sense.

One idea is that a lack of light is a disadvantage to a victim just as much as it is a disadvantage to an attacker.  I wasn't really afraid of real attackers though.

I was afraid of ghosts and wraiths and poltergeists.  No physical evidence has ever been produced showing that something supernatural was responsible for any kind of suffering.  I eventually mastered something I call "apophatic" reasoning, which is a term I got from Mark Passio.  The lack of physical evidence for supernatural causes of human suffering is powerful when you understand how quickly and forcefully such evidence would spread.

Supernatural causes, philosophically, are impossible.  "Supernatural" means beyond the nature of the universe.  "Cause" identifies a relationship in the nature of the universe.  Supernatural, philosophically, is a euphemism for "I don't know enough."  Roll a die and it will land on a number.  Can you predict the number?  No, you can't, not if you roll it properly, and it's balanced.  That doesn't make the number supernatural.  Maybe you'll roll three sixes in a row.  That also does not make it supernatural.  If you continue rolling sixes and you cannot get the die to land on another number, then you can pretend it's supernatural, but any decent physicist will offer to analyze your die to see if it's loaded.  Perhaps he will not find the reason.  Would you then call it supernatural?

I wouldn't.  To give up the hunt for the reason your die lands only on the number six is to abandon one of the best faculties human beings have, reason.  It takes a lot of humility to study such a die for weeks and continually admit that you're still "in the dark" about why it always lands on the same number.  Humility is valuable.  It stops us from believing fairy tales.

The non-literal sense in which I wish to help you not to be afraid of the dark is to encourage you to keep looking.  Whatever it is that makes the die always land on six is a metaphor for how we improve the world.  Most people give up, and that's a metaphor for accepting fake authority, also known as relying on government.  When authority is not fake, it does not use punishment.  It has no use for punishment.  It even encourages the kind of thing that fake authority punishes, because that kind of thing (going against the advice of authority) provides great learning experiences.

Governments and police are fake authorities, which is why they punish people for breaking their laws.  A law is a discovery about how the universe works.  Watch a dog with a bone.  If another creature approaches, the dog growls, "This is my bone.  Get away or I'll bite you."  Humans, well, sane humans, do this too.  Perhaps we don't bite (or growl), but we demand that our property rights be respected.  At least we make that demand to other humans whom we view as equals.  Some of us don't make that demand to fake authorities, and that is because we are, figuratively, afraid of the dark.

When we speak truth to power, we are insisting that a balanced die will land on random sides when "rolled properly," no matter how difficult it is to show why a particular die doesn't have this characteristic.  After listening to some lectures on physics by a guy name David Harriman, I blame Immanuel Kant for the idea that it makes sense to give up on finding a reason for the unexpected behavior of the die.  I also lay part of the blame on him for the legitimacy of fake authority.

People like Victoria Roberts and Nancy G Edmunds use fake authority to hurt people, either because they derive some benefit from it or because they don't know any better.  Either way, I wish I were closer to them (geographically) so that I could confront one or both of them.  I'm not afraid of the dark any more.

My MENSA Bio

I joined Mensa a few months ago.  I found a place where members can enter a bio, so here's what I put:

I have always wanted to be a teacher.  I went to UCSD's Teach Education Program (TEP) for one year and decided that there was too much red tape.  Years later, I read John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, and then a few years after that, listened to his Ultimate History Lesson.  The knowledge I gained that way vindicated my abandonment of the TEP.
I ended up being a teacher anyway, though not in any official capacity.  I learn software (or write software) and then teach others how it works and how it fails.  I learned about bitcoin and now I explain it to anyone who is interested.  I buy bitcoin from those who need to sell it and sell it to those who need to buy it.

Jeff Schmidt wrote a book called "Disciplined Minds" in which he points out that most people who go through a higher education curriculum to get a degree, doctorate, or other credential start out with a view to doing the world some good, but the system through which they get that piece of paper degrades that view, slowly (though he doesn't say so, not inexorably) replacing that view with the brass ring of monetary gain, peer approval, and public stature.  I was lucky that I chose the humble path of becoming a teacher, wherein this trend is more obvious.  Had I pursued math, physics, chemistry, or something as complex (and continued living off my parents and inheritance, and perhaps even putting myself in debt), I imagine it would have taken me longer to feel this change.

As a software engineer after the dotcom bust, my ideals were intact and I started looking for tools that would leverage the Internet in the advancement of mankind.  The increasing density of communication provided by the Internet seemed to offer an excellent opportunity for individuals with great ideas to have their voices heard.  I researched the idea of what is now known as "crowdsourcing" the search for quality writing.  A friend of mine suggested taking a look at slashdot, since it allowed members to register their opinion of comments on news stories in a way the machine could use to identify what the group liked best.  On that site, I learned about Condorcet Voting, so I looked for a site that was using it and didn't find any.

I then started litmocracy.com.  With my writing site, I slowly learned something which is now, finally, gaining traction: There is rarely a single "best" choice for a large group, whether we're talking about candidates, pieces of writing, or things to do.  The ideal way to handle it is to allow the large group to break into smaller groups of people who share the same sensitivities.  That means politics is no good.

My friend Brian Gladish challenged me on using the Condorcet Method to elect public officials, pointing out that any political election involves forcing the minority to submit to decisions made by someone they don't agree with.  It's a lesson running Litmocracy for five years drove home for me.  During that time, I followed Brian's libertarian thinking to its natural conclusion, which is voluntaryism.  Now I am the volunteer webmaster for a site that existed for many years before I ever heard of it, called voluntaryist.com.

School was designed, as Gatto's work shows conclusively, to remove the unique features of children that make them difficult to control, but excellent and conscientious adults.  It's the same thing Schmidt was talking about: normalize and regulate the individual so that all the individuals going in come out roughly the same, prepared to do whatever an authority figure tells them to do.  Stanley Milgram studied that too, and found that it's a horrible scourge to the human race, but subtle enough that most people let it go.  Lord Acton put it this way: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  J.R.R. Tolkien turned it into a long saga in which two basically innocent people let it ultimately drag them into a pit of lava.

Tolkien's tale offers us hope.  The reason they both fell into that lava was because one of them knew that's where the ring belonged.  So who am I?  What am I?  I am, to most people, a meat suit, kind, intelligent, hopeful, cynical about authority, but optimistic about normal human beings.  To myself, I am the spirit of disclosure, an old soul working on a problem "The One" created for itself, which is this: How quickly can consciousness make an otherwise mechanistic universe identify and then maximize and realize the potential for joy?  I shine light in dark places, and encourage others to follow suit.

Welcome to the Uber Economy

This came to me today through a comment on a post at liberty.me.  The comment was made by a friend of mine who calls himself Ned.  Here is his comment:

Here are some leads a friend sent me that reveal a number of ways of avoiding the command and control authorities of centralization. Some are already covered in David's fine essay, but a few may be new to denizens of Liberty.me, at least they were new to me.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/walden-reports/Manifesto-for-the-Uber-Economy.pdf

Free Your Mind

Dave.

Toward Voluntary Justice

I have been mulling over the possibility of building a voluntaryist justice system of sorts.  It is already in place in some form, but it is neither recognized nor coherent.  I can see the end result pretty clearly in my head: non-governmental folks flood an area with information about a specific person.  That specific person would be a "normal" state agent on whose authority an atrocity was perpetrated, as well as those agents who obeyed the authority and participated in the atrocity.

The easiest way to make this (already existing) "system" more coherent is simply by getting more people to recognize it. Beyond that, information about the locations of atrocious authorities will give those with awareness and information the motivation to saturate the atrocious authority's locale with the information about their atrocious behavior.

A few examples of atrocious behavior are: Judge Nancy Edmunds' attempt to suborn perjury from Doreen Hendrickson, and Judge Victoria Roberts' handling of Doreen's trial for refusing ("contempt of court") in Eastern Michigan, the imprisonment of Ross Ulbricht, or choose any prisoner who is in jail for trafficking in marijuana.

I wanted to be a teacher when I was young, and I have grown up to be one.  I write software, and then I have to teach people how to use it.  Or I figure out how already-written software works, and teach that.  But mostly what I teach is that there are horrible people doing horrible things.  Very few people like to learn that, and so I don't find a lot of success except among those who are already aware.

Perhaps you can help me spread the ideas behind my voluntaryist justice system by helping me find a better analogy than the very disturbing one I started using today:  No one likes to see a person killing infants.  It's disturbing and we don't like to think about it.  But when there is a person doing that, everyone should know, and that person should be kept away from infants.  I'm the guy who points out this murderer and says "Look!  That guy is killing infants!"  That's what I teach: There are people doing horrible things.  The more of us who know about it, the less it will happen.

In a room full of horrible and ugly things, one may wish to keep the lights off. Not I, for I prefer to see and avoid or rectify such ugliness in the world where I live. Let's turn on the bright lights in the ugly places. How do I inspire others to join me?

Proposed Talks in San Diego

I have proposed to give two talks to Mensa in San Diego this Summer.  Following are the details.  Feel free to contact me if any of this stuff interests you.  I think that interest in these things is growing because 1) they are important, and 2) interest in them is not yet high enough.

1. Anonymity: The Dangers and Benefits of Keeping Secrets

Modern technology makes it possible to have relationships with people through thin media like texting, emailing, telephone calls, and interactions through the Internet. These media allow individuals to misrepresent themselves. This, however, is not a modern problem. Trust has been getting violated since human beings learned to communicate, and this presentation explores the growing awareness of it.

The "Delphi Technique" will be described, as well as common political illusions and demagoguery as well as the problems that can be created by these things. We will discuss the solutions available to those participating in the growing awareness of them and invite questions for further pondering in an open dialog.

The Mensa AG Proposal process will be used as an example of a system that relies on some trust, but takes great risk in breaking that trust if it chooses to do so. As a microcosm of the larger society in which it exists, we will explore how the increasing density of peer-to-peer communications helpfully magnifies that risk, not just for Mensa, but for all systems exploiting the human tendency to trust.

2. Why is Bitcoin Still Around?

In 2009, something called a "bitcoin" appeared and someone got ten thousand of them for buying a pizza. At that point, the market capitalization of bitcoin was about the value of a large pizza. It has since died and risen again about 100 times and now has a market capitalization around six billion dollars.

Following are more questions than there will be time to answer, but audience participation always helps with that problem: What is bitcoin? How does one use bitcoin? How does a bitcoin get created? Who invented bitcoin? Are bitcoins anonymous? Who controls how bitcoin works? Isn't bitcoin a work in progress? What is a block? Does the block size matter? How is cryptography used in bitcoin? What is an elliptic curve? What's a "vanity address"? What backs bitcoin? How can I buy or sell bitcoin? What happened with MtGOX? Does bitcoin make it harder to rule people? Does it make it harder to maintain order? Isn't bitcoin mostly used by people doing bad things? How does it threaten the existing financial system? Will inflation eventually destroy all the value in bitcoin?

After a short introduction, this presentation will be open for questions, and everything is on the table at that point. The questions presented above may not be addressed, so be prepared to ask any in which you are interested.

Notes on the Anti-Gov Movement GuideBook

Here is a magnet link (for the file-sharing software BitTorrent) for the "Anti-Gov Movement Guidebook," a pdf created in 1999 through a grant from the State Justice Institute which awards grants to "foster innovative, efficient solutions to common issues faced by all courts." The rule of man over man has some bad effects. I believe one of the worst effects it has is retarding the development of conscience in every individual.  Since common law courts enable individuals to speak truth to power, I feel it is important to publish my notes on this document.

The document suggests that the roots of "[t]he 'common law court movement,' as it has somewhat clumsily come to be called, [which] now exists in some form in every state in the country" can be traced to people who were both violent and racist.  I myself trace it (in myself) to the Magna Carta and Lysander Spooner as presented at Bill Thornton's site and The Voluntatryist.  So I think the authors of this document poisoned the well a little bit there.

The authors present "Posse ideology" as the basis of the movement toward common law courts and provide three tenets for it (apparently ignoring modern refinements). They suggest that the most important one is comprised of "justifications derived from the revelation of 'hidden history.'"  I can attest to that, although the authors' examples of "hidden history," don't match mine.

My interest in common law courts stems from Richard Grove's Project Constellation and, indeed, all the episodes of the Peace Revolution Podcast to which I have listened.  On a deeper philosophical level, Peter E. Hendrickson's work on the legitimacy of the Internal Revenue Code shows respect for the right of any group to demand compensation for giving others the privilege of using its own resources.  The U.S. Federal Government itself is an institution that provides privileges and exercises its right to collect some kind of payback. Hendrickson's work shows that this debt is improperly imposed even on those who receive no such privileges, and that the implementation of Title 26 therefore amounts to constructive fraud.  The behavior of the courts, for example the attempt by Victoria Roberts, Robert Metcalfe, Nancy G. Edmunds, and other federal employees to suborn perjury from Hendrickson's wife to cover it up, demonstrates the insidious nature of this constructive fraud, as well as its purity as a fraud.

Contrast that with the authors' examples of "hidden history": the "missing 13th amendment" or William P. Gale's recognition of the abandonment (rather than lawful repeal) of the Articles of Confederation.  Of course, this guidebook was written before Richard Grove's team of technologists was murdered in the attacks on the Word Trade Center, but apparently the Posse Comitatus group was onto something.

After introducing and bashing Posse Comitatus for a while, the document moves on to implicate the idea of "common law" in the violent racism attributed to the roots of the movement toward common law courts.  The Posse Comitatus group is still used by the authors for more bashing in case the reader sees value in the common law.  Aside from this, however, the document seems to explain the justification and value of common law quite well, even admitting that "The subversion of the legitimate common law was a long process, with many steps."

The authors rely heavily on the word "theorist," most likely to suggest that what is offered, provided, supposed, believed, or even proven or demonstrated by a "theorist" is false.  This assumption was brainwashed into the masses by the CIA through the media after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in order to dim the growing amount of light on a project that was to remain dark. In this guidebook about the movement toward common law courts, the word is leveraged using the term "common law theorist."

I am on page 14 of the 180 page document.  Like the project I started on the Bitcoin Javascript code from pointbiz, this one may or may not be continued.  I think both will have future posts, but I'm going to bed for now.  You have several links to follow if this post interests you :-).

Privatization: The Scotese Process

This can be done without the blessing or involvement of the federal government.  All land "owned" by the BLM belongs to the American people.  ANY ONE of those people is perfectly within his rights to choose a parcel and publish that its ownership can be re-designated through a "Scotese Process."

A "Scotese Process" is a commons privatization process through which all interested parties are compensated for their interest proportional to whatever amount of money they are willing to give up to keep that interest.  Here's how it works:

One or more escrow companies defines the commons (parcel of land in this case) to be privatized, and advertises its willingness to manage the process for a fee.  Interested parties are then invited to secure their interest by offering a price for the commons and pre-paying a percentage of that price to the escrow company.  Once the invitation period ends, a synchronizing process must be undertaken.

The synchronizing process requires that all escrow companies who may have defined a Scotese Process that interferes with another escrow compnay's Scotese Process work out the differences.  This can and should be an ongoing effort to eliminate all possible conflicts.  The "staking of a claim" has similar properties, whereby a claimant must define the boundaries in a way that doesn't interfere with already-defined boundaries.  The outcome of a synchronization process is one of two possibilities.  Either there is general recognition that all escrow companies have accepted the same definition of a particular commons, or there is not.  The process can (and usually will) continue until the first outcome is achieved.  On the other hand, difficult-to-define commons may cause (all) interested escrow companies to abandon their Scotese Process.

Once there is general recognition of the definition of the commons, there still may be multiple escrow companies interested in administering the privatization.  In this case, they simply compare their highest-bidders to see who wins, and each escrow company submits the required pre-payment to the others on behalf of their own winner.  In this way, a single owner emerges.

When this single owner is found, the escrow company (or companies) compute(s) the total of the bids to determine what portion of the final price each interested party will receive as compensation for their interest in the commons, by dividing that total by the interested party's bid.  The winning bidder then submits payment in full to his escrow company, and the escrow company divides the proceeds among the other bidders, and refunds their prepayments to them as well.  The entire Scotese Process goes into a public court of record so that everyone will know who the new owner of the commons is, and also see who "sold" their interest to that new owner.

Escrow companies in the synchronization process may find it worth their while to combine their efforts and normalize their processes and act as a single escrow company in this context.  There are several variables that escrow companies will need to specify in their public announcement of the Scotese Process, including the percentage of a price that must be prepaid to secure an interest, the deadline for bids, the definition of the commons to be privatized, and the fee they require for providing the escrow service (to be deducted from the final sale price before it is divided up among losing bidders).

The Scotese Process is something I invented but I have never seen it tried (beyond trivial examples in my own house).  I'm sure there are possibilities for failure, and if anyone can point them out so that I might revise the process to avoid them, that would be greatly appreciated.

Notes on the JavaScript Bitcoin wallet by pointbiz

Software is based on language.  The languages have definite meaning which can (normally) be constrained to produce predictable results when interpreted by a machine.  Conscious awareness is not required to use the language of software to turn input into output.  Hats off to Viktor Frankl for identifying conscious awareness (in human beings) as the place where we find freedom.

As anyone who has employed their conscious awareness to understand things knows, you can always go deeper into the meaning of language.  Software engineers necessarily do this in order to ply their trade.  How deep one has gone into the language they are using to program a machine varies greatly.  The notes I present below are intended for someone like me who has the same goal I had when I wrote them, and who had the same understanding I had when I wrote them.

Brett Veinotte of the School Sucks Project inspired me to realize that we are all creating content that has the potential to be everlasting.  The effects of our lives are everlasting and there's nothing we can do about that.  Some of us (me, for example) don't want to do anything about it.  We live honorably and wish our effects on the universe to last.  My future plans for this post are very vague.  I may update it from time to time, or I may leave it as is forever.

I read through this top hit for the Google search javascript array"primary types" to write this blog. In Javascript, there are three primary types from which everything else is built.  Object is not a primary type, but it is a fundamental concept in Javascript.  It is a collection of properties, each having a name (of primitive type String), and a value (of any primitive type, so String, Number, or Boolean, or a non-primitive type, like Object).  Several useful things in Javascript are Objects, and they are all duplicates of the basic Javascript Object, which provides them with some useful properties, like Prototype.

The first thing bitaddress.org's code does is add a property to the Prototype property of the Array Object (the Prototype property is, itself, an Object too).  The Array Object necessarily exists in all implementations of Javascript because that is one of the things that makes it Javascript.  However, some implementers (Microsoft) don't provide that Array Object with all the properties that the Javascript community likes to use.  They have to provide the Prototype property in order to call their language Javascript, but they don't have to give that Prototype a method called map.  And we like map.  It lets us do something to all the elements of an array.

The Prototype property is what gets duplicated into a new Object whenever a new instance is created, as in x = new Array(); or x = []; bitaddress.org's first task is to give all of the Array objects created that way a new function called map if if they won't already get one.  The implementation of map() is published at http://es5.github.com/#x15.4.4.19

The next task accomplished by the code is to ensure that there is a variable named Crypto which has a property named util.  If not, it creates an object named Crypto and assigns it as a property of an object named window which is assumed to exist (reasonable, since this Javascript is expected to run in a browser).

The implementation of SHA256 comes next and is assigned as a property to the Crypto object.  The property is named SHA256 and the function is short and sweet (calling another function which does the dirty work, _sha256).  The return value of that function uses the condition ? ifTrue : ifFalse operator twice in succession without parentheses.  The "Associativity" of this "Conditional operator" is right-to-left which means the last (right-most) one is evaluated before the one preceding it.  If that were not the case, there would be a point in this code at which the programmer was choosing between a byte array and a boolean, which is silly.

The longest line in the file I analyzed is image data at 181,786 characters.  A cursory review of this file will not identify the presence of '; [malicious code]; image +=' in the long lines contained by the templateArtisticHtml function definition.  For this reason I did some regex searches on the file.

I verified that the file contains only one line on which a single-quote follows a semicolon and it is good code.  I also verified that the 9 nine lines containing a double-quoted string of at least 100 characters and which have a semicolon somewhere after that all contain good code.