The Strawman Illusion

[Bruce Dazzling]

Some food for thought from Canada.

[madeupname452]

i claim no expert knowledge and I advocate nowt
Is this really the first time that question has come up in my studies?
well yes -and you just asked me.
So dont be troubled you poor soul and I forgive you for your rudeness.

[eyeno]

A few months ago I watched a video on the internet of a trial. The trial concerned a girl driving without a license. She used the freeman argument and the case was dismissed. The court was so infuriated they dug up an old warrant on an unpaid traffic violation or something similar and had her arrested on the old warrant. But she did successfully defeat them in court. I do not know where this video is but it could probably be found rather easily.

[Joe Hillshoist]

^^OK -- which case was dismissed? I'm just look for real world examples. Even just one.

Citing stuff that happened before the United States existed makes this seem like an exercise in history instead of an actual path to making changes.

Legal precedent from before the US existed still holds weight in US courts if the precedent can be shown to be relevant and not in conflict with the strict legal definition of everything thats gone before.

So it may be relevant if someone could pull the right semantic aikido off.

But aside from that I agree with your whole take on the value of precedent in US courts in this particular instance. And how that might help the idea gain some actual legal solid ground.

[Joe Hillshoist]

OHhh what was his name ... that fella who always posted about this stuff here?

John something maybe?

haven't seen him for years and he did have some stuff going down. I always wonder what became of him. (To self.) Whats his bloody name!!!????

[Wombaticus Rex]

i claim no expert knowledge and I advocate nowt

!!!! My bad, thanks for your advance forgiveness, too.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Sorry can't find a familiar name in the memberlist at this point.

Slimmouse might know who I'm talking about tho I reckon. (Slim any ideas?) He was into the Diana was killed stuff and was always pulling out info that was quite mind boggling wrt the law. He used to reckon that Crown law topped Australian law and a whole lot of other stuff. There was some interesting ideas in there and right along these lines.

[vanlose kid]

Sorry can't find a familiar name in the memberlist at this point.

Slimmouse might know who I'm talking about tho I reckon. (Slim any ideas?) He was into the Diana was killed stuff and was always pulling out info that was quite mind boggling wrt the law. He used to reckon that Crown law topped Australian law and a whole lot of other stuff. There was some interesting ideas in there and right along these lines.

are you thinking of John Cleary, better known around here as antiaristo?

viewtopic.php?p=234910#p234910

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[Joe Hillshoist]

Cheers v k, thats the one.

[vanlose kid]

trying to keep this in context so i'm quoting my post first:

not that i think my weighing in here will make much of a difference, i'll do so anyway.

the freeman movement as preseneted by the MSM (and to an extent in their own words (a number of them)) seem to consist of kooks and gun mad hatters, but ... as far as i'm concerned, there's a there there.

their concern with the distinction between common law and corporate (admiralty) law/statutes does have some merit.

here are some outtakes from an old thread discussing one aspect of this, i.e. the "runaway jury". (nb! this is from the old board so i had to excise code and the formatting is gone):

chigger, as much as I admire Fitz, I don't think he would inform the jurors of these rights. Why? Because he's a prosecutor and would not like to lose control of the process. If someone were trying to pull the rug out from under him, he would simply go about trying to rectify the situation through conventional channels.Even if there were a runaway gj, remember the gj in the JonBenet Ramsey case? We never did get an answer as to whether they actually did indict one of the Ramseys. They may have and the prosecutor chose to ignore it. What if the Fitz gj returned an indictment he, or Abu Gonzales, didn't like?

**********************************************

http://www.larryflynt.com/notebook.php?id=91

The prosecution saw it differently?

McKINLEY: They sure did. They sealed our indictment</strong>and said, "We're not going to do that." That scene is described in the book, which is where we got the title The Ambushed Grand Jury. The instructions state that in open court, after deliberations, the grand jury will hand its indictment to the prosecutor, and he shall sign it. Well, we handed it to him, and he refused to sign our indictment.

Is there some legal loophole that allows a prosecutor to ignore a grand jury's indictment?

McKINLEY: We're not sure. There are some legal issues in play here that really haven't been tested yet.(emphasis mine)

**********************************************

I cannot as of yet find legal citations on prosecutors being able to ignore indictments, but I'm working on it. Not saying this is what happened, but obviously there is precedent, regardless of whether it's legal.

to which antiaristo replies:

Good ol' Citizen Spook made a post about this very subject

As an aside, this caught my eye

[vk: CitizenSpook]They were common in the 19th century but have become rare since then.

Do you know from where you got your grand jury system?

You got them from England.

They were a traditional part of the English legal system.

Until the The CROWN supplanted the grand jury.

It was replaced by the CROWN Prosecution Service.

Decisions that until the 1930's were made by representatives of the commom people, are now made by appointees of the Crown.

Just one more example of how the Treason Felony Act has been used to progressively stifle democracy in England.

The Crown Prosecution Service SUCKS.

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here's the full blogpost by Citizenspook (with someembedded links) that antiaristo cited and linked:

Sunday, August 14, 2005
TREASONGATE: The Federal Grand Jury, FOURTH BRANCH of the US Government

If Patrick Fitzgerald is somehow illegally removed as Special Counsel in the Treasongate proceedings, the grand jury(s) he has impaneled will serve at the mercy of Fitzgerald's replacement, an individual who will have been brought in to shield the Bush administration from criminal prosecution for its many treasons. If that grand jury is aware of their true Constitutional power, it's possible they might stand up, fight, and win a legal battle that is long overdue.

Furthermore, all of us may one day serve as grand jurors in federal court, and I hope this article will educate the reader to his/her true power as granted by the Constitution. For that power, despite having been hidden for many years behind the veil of a legislative fraud, still exists in all of its glory in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. The US Supreme Court has confirmed and reinforced that power.

So please, copy this report and paste it far and wide. It is not spin. It is not false. It is not for sale, it is not copyrighted by me, so paste and quote it freely. This report is the truth and we need truth, now, more than ever.

The Constitutional power of "we the people" sitting as grand jurors has been subverted by a deceptive play on words since 1946 when the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure were enacted. Regardless, the power I am going to explain to you still exists in the Constitution, and has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court despite the intention of the legislature and other legal scholars to make our power disappear with a cheap magic trick.

Repeat a lie with force and repetition and the lie becomes known as truth. In the case of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, the power of the grand jury, to return "presentments" on its own proactive initiation, without reliance upon a US Attorney to concur in such criminal charges, has been usurped by an insidious play on words.

Most of this article is going to quote other scholars, judges and legislators as I piece together a brief but thorough history of the federal grand jury for your review. But the punch line is my personal contribution to the cause:

UNITED STATES CITIZENS SITTING AS FEDERAL GRAND JURORS ARE THE FOURTH BRANCH OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

My input into this vital fight is no more than the analysis of a few carefully used words. It only took a small sleight of pen back in 1946 to hide our power, and it won't take more than a few words to take that power back. But a proper overview is necessary for most of you who are unfamiliar with the issue at hand. So let me provide you with some history and then we'll see what went wrong and how to correct it.

HISTORY OF FEDERAL GRAND JURY POWER

I want to draw your attention to a law review article, CREIGHTON LAW REVIEW, Vol. 33, No. 4 1999-2000, 821, IF IT'S NOT A RUNAWAY, IT'S NOT A REAL GRAND JURY by Roger Roots, J.D.

"In addition to its traditional role of screening criminal cases for prosecution, common law grand juries had the power to exclude prosecutors from their presence at any time and to investigate public officials without governmental influence. These fundamental powers allowed grand juries to serve a vital function of oversight upon the government. The function of a grand jury to ferret out government corruption was the primary purpose of the grand jury system in ages past."

The 5th Amendment:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury."

An article appearing in [url]American Juror[/url], the newsletter of the American Jury Institute and the Fully Informed Jury Association, citing the famed American jurist, Joseph Story, explained :

"An indictment is a written accusation of an offence preferred to, and presented, upon oath, as true, by a grand jury, at the suit of the government. An indictment is framed by the officers of the government, and laid before the grand jury. Presentments, on the other hand, are the result of a jury’s independent action:

'A presentment, properly speaking, is an accusation, made by a grand jury of its own mere motion, of an offence upon its own observation and knowledge, or upon evidence before it, and without any bill of indictment laid before it at the suit of the government. Upon a presentment, the proper officer of the court must frame an indictment, before the party accused can be put to answer it.' "

Back to the Creighton Law Review:

"A 'runaway' grand jury, loosely defined as a grand jury which resists the accusatory choices of a government prosecutor, has been virtually eliminated by modern criminal procedure. Today's "runaway" grand jury is in fact the common law grand jury of the past. Prior to the emergence of governmental prosecution as the standard model of American criminal justice, all grand juries were in fact "runaways," according to the definition of modern times; they operated as completely independent, self-directing bodies of inquisitors, with power to pursue unlawful conduct to its very source, including the government itself."

So, it's clear that the Constitution intended to give the grand jury power to instigate criminal charges, and this was especially true when it came to government oversight. But something strange happened on the way to the present. That power was eroded by a lie enacted by the legislative branch. The 5th Amendment to the Constitution still contains the same words quoted above, but if you sit on a grand jury and return a "presentment" today, the prosecutor must sign it or it probably won't be allowed to stand by the judge and the criminal charges you have brought to the court's attention will be swept away. And the reason for this can be found in a legislative lie of epic proportions.

Mr. Roots weighs in again:

"In 1946, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure were adopted, codifying what had previously been a vastly divergent set of common law procedural rules and regional customs.[86] In general, an effort was made to conform the rules to the contemporary state of federal criminal practice.[87] In the area of federal grand jury practice, however, a remarkable exception was allowed. The drafters of Rules 6 and 7, which loosely govern federal grand juries, denied future generations of what had been the well-recognized powers of common law grand juries: powers of unrestrained investigation and of independent declaration of findings. The committee that drafted the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provided no outlet for any document other than a prosecutor-signed indictment. In so doing, the drafters at least tacitly, if not affirmatively, opted to ignore explicit constitutional language."[88]"

Rule 7 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (FRCP):

"An offense which may be punished by death shall be prosecuted by indictment. An offense which may be punished by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year or at hard labor shall be prosecuted by indictment..."

No mention of "presentments" can be found in Rule 7. But they are mentioned in Note 4 of the Advisory Committee Notes on the Rules:

"4. Presentment is not included as an additional type of formal accusation, since presentments as a method of instituting prosecutions are obsolete, at least as concerns the Federal courts."

The American Juror published the following commentary with regards to Note 4:

"[W]hile the writers of the federal rules made provisions for indictments, they made none for presentments. This was no oversight. According to Professor Lester B. Orfield, a member of the Advisory Committee on Rules of Criminal Procedure, the drafters of Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 6 decided the term presentment should not be used, even though it appears in the Constitution. Orfield states [22 F.R.D. 343, 346]:

'There was an annotation by the Reporter on the term presentment as used in the Fifth Amendment. It was his conclusion that the term should not be used in the new rules of criminal procedure. Retention might encourage the use of the run-away grand jury as the grand jury could act from their own knowledge or observation and not only from charges made by the United States attorney. It has become the practice for the United States Attorney to attend grand jury hearings, hence the use of presentments have been abandoned.' "

That's a fascinating statement: "Retention might encourage...the grand jury [to] act from their own knowledge or observation." God forbid, right America? The nerve of these people. They have the nerve to put on the record that they intended to usurp our Constitutional power, power that was intended by the founding fathers, in their incredible wisdom, to provide us with oversight over tyrannical government.

And so they needed a spin term to cast aspersions on that power. The term they chose was, "runaway grand jury", which is nothing more than a Constitutionally mandated grand jury, aware of their power, and legally exercising that power to hold the federal beast in check, as in "checks and balances".

The lie couldn't be inserted into the Constitution, so they put it in a statute and then repeated it. And scholars went on to repeat it, and today, as it stands, the grand jury has effectively been lied into the role of submissive puppet of the US Attorney.

The American Juror publication included a very relevant commentary:

"Of course, no statute or rule can alter the provisions of the Constitution, since it is the supreme law of the land. But that didn’t prevent the federal courts from publishing a body of case law affirming the fallacy that presentments were abolished. A particularly egregious example:

'A rule that would permit anyone to communicate with a grand jury without the supervision or screening of the prosecutor or the court would compromise, if not utterly subvert, both of the historic functions of the grand jury, for it would facilitate the pursuit of vendettas and the gratification of private malice. A rule that would open the grand jury to the public without judicial or prosecutorial intervention is an invitation to anyone interested in trying to persuade a majority of the grand jury, by hook or by crook, to conduct investigations that a prosecutor has determined to be inappropriate or unavailing.' [7]

What is the result? Investigating seditious acts of government officials can be deemed inappropriate or unavailing by the prosecutor, or the judge can dismiss the grand jurors pursuing such investigations. Consequently, corrupt government officials have few natural enemies and go about their seditious business unimpeded.

By the way, they made a rule to take care of runaways too, in 1946: Rule 6(g):

'At any time for cause shown the court may excuse a juror either temporarily or
permanently, and in the latter event the court may impanel another person in place of the juror excused.' Now judges can throw anyone off a grand jury, or even disimpanel a grand jury entirely, merely for exercising its discretion."

Now let me add my two cents to this argument:

Most of the discussion about Note 4 to Rule 7 of the FRCP takes for granted that the common law use of "presentments" (as codified in the 5th Amendment) was made "illegal" in 1946 by this act. Nothing could be more false. Note 4 does not contain language that makes the use of presentments "illegal", although it had chosen its words carefully to make it appear as if that is what the legislative branch intended. But let's look at Note 4 again:

"4. Presentment is not included as an additional type of formal accusation, since presentments as a method of instituting prosecutions are obsolete, at least as concerns the Federal courts."

The key word is, "obsolete". Obsolete means "outmoded", or "not in use anymore", but it does not mean "abolished" or "illegal". And therein lies the big lie. The legislature knew it could not directly overrule the Constitution, especially with something so clearly worded as the 5th Amendment, which grants a power to the people which has a long and noble purpose in criminal jurisprudence. But the federal beast legislative branch sought more power to protect themselves from the oversight of "we the people", and in its vampire like thirst for more governmental control, it inserted this insidious Note 4 in the hope that scholars and judges would play along with their ruse, or in the alternative, their ruse would appear to be legally viable.

Let's look at some authoritative legal resources which discuss Note 4:

Susan Brenner, THE VOICE OF THE COMMUNITY: A CASE FOR GRAND JURY INDEPENDENCE:

"Finally, federal grand juries' subservience to prosecutors was exacerbated when the federal system eliminated the use of presentments, which allowed a grand jury to bring charges on its own initiative. (N35) Now, federal grand jurors cannot return charges in the form of an indictment without a prosecutor's consent. (N36) Elimination of the presentment demonstrates the historical trend towards elimination of proactive features in the grand jury system."

Did Brenner fall for the lie or did she cleverly further it when she said, "[T]he federal system eliminated the use of presentments"? The federal system did no such thing. Note 4 said the use of presentments was "obsolete". First of all, Note 4 is not a law in itself. It is a Note to a law, and the law as written, does not have anything to say about presentments. You see the leap Brenner has made? The Constitution provides for "presentments", then the FRCP are enacted and the Rules therein do not mention presentments, nor due they ban presentments, and if they did, such a ban would be unconstitutional, since an administrative enactment regarding procedure can not overrule the Constitution.

Regardless, it's irrelevant, since the FRCP does not mention "presentments". Note 4 simply states that "presentments" allowed for in the 5th Amendment of the Constitution have become "obsolete", or outmoded, which is not to say that they were "eliminated". Shame on you Susan Brenner. You know damn well that the Constitution can only be changed by an official Amendment to it. Nothing can be "eliminated" from the Constitution by an administrative note.

The use of presentments had become obsolete because the grand jurors were not aware of their power. So the use of "presentments" became more and more rare, and then in 1946 the legislative branch seized upon the moment to make this power disappear by waving its magic wand over the Constitution.

Mr. Root got it wrong in the Creighton Law Review as well:

"Before the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure — which made independently-acting grand juries illegal for all practical purposes — grand juries were understood to have broad powers to operate at direct odds with both judges and prosecutors..."

The FRCP did not make it "illegal for all practical purposes". That's patently false. I don't know if Mr. Root, and/or Susan Brenner, were acting as the magician's assistant, but I can't imagine how these educated scholars could be so incredibly ignorant of basic Constitutional law. Give me a damn break.

But if enough people repeat the lie, the lie appears to be the truth.

But we have it on good authority, the Supreme Court, that the lie has no legal effect.

Justice Powell, in United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974), stated:

"The institution of the grand jury is deeply rooted in Anglo-American history. [n3] In England, the grand jury [p343] served for centuries both as a body of accusers sworn to discover and present for trial persons suspected of criminal wrongdoing and as a protector of citizens against arbitrary and oppressive governmental action. In this country, the Founders thought the grand jury so essential to basic liberties that they provided in the Fifth Amendment that federal prosecution for serious crimes can only be instituted by "a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury." Cf. Costello v. United States, 350 U.S. 359, 361-362 (1956). The grand jury's historic functions survive to this day. Its responsibilities continue to include both the determination whether there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and the protection of citizens against unfounded criminal prosecutions. Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 686-687 (1972)."

The Note 4 lie is smashed on the SCOTUS altar, "The grand jury's historic functions survive to this day." Take that Note 4!

The wonderful irony of the situation concerns the ultimate neocon Justice, one known as Antonin Scalia, who effectively codified the unique independent power of the Fourth Branch into the hands of all citizens sitting as federal grand jurors. In discussing that power and unique independence granted to the grand jury, the United States Supreme Court, in United States v. Williams, 504 U.S. 36 at 48 (1992), Justice Scalia, delivering the opinion of the court, laid down the law of the land:

"'[R]ooted in long centuries of Anglo-American history," Hannah v. Larche, 363 U.S. 420, 490 (1960) (Frankfurter, J., concurring in result), the grand jury is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but not in the body of the Constitution. It has not been textually assigned, therefore, to any of the branches described in the first three Articles. It "`is a constitutional fixture in its own right.'" United States v. Chanen, 549 F.2d 1306, 1312 (CA9 1977) (quoting Nixon v. Sirica, 159 U.S. App. D.C. 58, 70, n. 54, 487 F.2d 700, 712, n. 54 (1973)), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 825 (1977). ' "

I submit to you that this passage sets the stage for a revolutionary knew context necessary and Constitutionally mandated to "we the people", THE FOURTH BRANCH of the Government of the United States. Besides, the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches, I submit that there is a fourth branch, THE GRAND JURY, and "we the people" when sitting as grand jurors, are, as Scalia quoted in US v. Williams, " a constitutional fixture in its own right". Yes, damn it. That is exactly what the grand jury is, and what it was always intended to be.

Scalia also stated, that "the grand jury is an institution separate from the courts, over whose functioning the courts do not preside..." Id.

And finally, to seal the deal, Scalia hammered the point home:

"In fact, the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people. See Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212, 218 (1960); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 61 (1906); G. Edwards, The Grand Jury 28-32 (1906). Although the grand jury normally operates, of course, in the courthouse and under judicial auspices, its institutional relationship with the Judicial Branch has traditionally been, so to speak, at arm's length. Judges' direct involvement in the functioning of the grand jury has generally been confined to the constitutive one of calling the grand jurors together and administering their oaths of office. See United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974); Fed.Rule Crim.Proc. 6(a). [504 U.S. 36, 48] "

This miraculous quote says it all, "...the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people." The Constitution of the United States, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, gives rise to a FOURTH BRANCH of Government, THE GRAND JURY. We the people have been charged with oversight of the government in our roles as grand jurors.

And at this critical time in American history, we must, for the protection of our constitutional republic, take back our power and start acting as powerful as the other branches of government.

The law is on our side. So please spread this knowledge as far and wide as you can. We the people have the right and power under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to charge this government with crimes by returning presentments regardless of whether the US Attorneys or the federal judges agree with us. As the Supreme Court has so brilliantly stated, we are the "buffer between the Government and the people."

Take the reins America. Pass it on. The Fourth Branch is alive and kickin'.


by Citizen Spook

PLEASE REPOST and LINK

citizenspook@hotmail.com

http://citizenspook.blogspot.com/2005/0 ... ourth.html

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so, yeah, there's a there there, and it's well worth looking into. i think.

how the MSM portrays the freeman movement (as they've been gaining ground) may just be a way of covering the issues in kook.

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to which Wombat replied:

^^Sure, but "The Strawman Illusion" --- that's not MSM. The emails I'm getting from fucking rappers and promoters, those aren't MSM. And not once has the phrase "Grand Jury" come up in any of that material. I think the meme has a life entirely of it's own and I don't think it's on any solid legal ground.

I would like to be wrong, but I also suspect it would be easier to find a single proof of concept if I was.

now, i accept it as true that you haven't seen the term "grand jury" come up in the emails you've recieved from rappers, but then again, i never said there would be.

what i did say, in short, was that the distinction made between common law and jurisdiction and commercial (maritime/admiralty) law or statutory law seems to be real enough. that was the point i was trying to make.

i have reservations re the freeman movement as such myself. that being the case i still think that what they're concerned with, i.e. questions of jurisdiction and consent of the goverend to be governed is a real concern.

as for e.g. the question of taxes and the campaign against payment of the same, i can see where they're coming from (or maybe it's the case that i can see, for myself, reasons why i would question it).

looking at the broader picture, with the US as a case in point, we know e.g. that taxes are enforced on the public by the US government to fund expenses. in a void, or theoretically, assuming that the payments are a social contribution on the part of the public towards funding public works and services, that's all fine and dandy. but that's in a void.

one problem with that, in reality, today, is that

(1) the US gov raises money by e.g. selling bonds (IOUs, effectively) on the market or to the FED (same thing) which then lends money back to the US gov at interest (by printing it, out of the blue). and as security for that loan the US gov agrees to tax US citizens the loan plus interest to service it. that's a contractual obligation. -- now, how many US citizens know this?

(2) if you then take the US gov as a corporate entity, who are the corporate shareholders and how are they identified? they're US citizens with SSNs (among other things). if the US gov has no money in it's coffers (and it hasn't, Timmah Geithner says so himself) who do the FED to to recuperate what's outstanding?

(3) who owns the FED? does anyone know? do you, as a US citizen know that you're contractually obligated to service and repay that debt contracted on your behalf by the US gov? -- what part of the revunue generated through taxation goes first when "austerity" hits the fan? social services? medicare?

(4) and the money that the US gov borrowed from the FED, what does it go to? how about TARP? QE's I and II? the "war on terror"? -- how and when did anyone, any US citizen, knowingly, sign themselves and their children and possibly their children''s children's children up for this? -- do you think the FED or it's shareholders will rip up that contract?

knowing that, the jump people in the freeman movement make isn't that far fetched. because when you think about it, a great number of US citizens over several generations have been and are being born in debt. and it wil continue to be so for some time in the future.

here's a fitting quote by Jefferson on this:

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty
or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and
in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and
our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...
[we will] have no time to think,
no means of calling our miss-managers to account
but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves
to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers...
And this is the tendency of all human governments.
A departure from principle in one instance
becomes a precedent for [another ]...
till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery...
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt.
Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

a pretty dire but clear warning, and a very good description of not only US citizens but at least half of the world's current population, don't you think?

corporate personhood is a legal fiction for corporations, what stretch of the imagination would it be to think that the same holds for corporate personhood established in the name of a living human being without he/she ever having given consent? a wild one?

the strawman (corporate person) is an illusion.

the question is who is under that illusion and has it legal standing?

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[vanlose kid]

Some food for thought from Canada.

as we're posting videos i'll chip in.

my first brush with the freeman movement was about a month back, reading a post 8probably about economics), following a link, seeing something out of the corner of my eye, clicking and following that... things happen, sometimes.

i found this or these at the end of it:







haven't seen or been able to find pt. 2 of the Gloucester court appearance.

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[vanlose kid]

almost forgot, i know it's the telegrumph but still:


Peers petition Queen on Europe
By Caroline Davies 12:00AM GMT 24 Mar 2001

FOUR peers invoked ancient rights under the Magna Carta yesterday to petition the Queen to block closer integration with Europe.

The Duke of Rutland, Viscount Masserene and Ferrard, Lord Hamilton of Dalzell and Lord Ashbourne were imbued with the spirit of the ancient Charter, thrust on King John in 1215. In accordance with the Charter's Clause 61, the famous enforcement clause, the four presented a vellum parchment at Buckingham Palace, declaring that the ancient rights and freedoms of the British people had to be defended.

The clause, one of the most important in the Charter, which was pressed on King John at Runnymede, allows subjects of the realm to present a quorum of 25 barons with a petition, which four of their number then have to take to the Monarch, who must accept it. It was last used in 1688 at the start of the Glorious Revolution.

The four peers, who were all thrown out of Parliament in November 1999, proved they had that quorum by presenting Sir Robin Janvrin, the Queen's private secretary, with the petition signed by 28 hereditaries and letters of support from another 60. In addition, they claim the support of thousands of members of the public.

They say that several articles in the Treaty of Nice agreed by Tony Blair in December will destroy fundamental British liberties. The Queen has 40 days to respond. Under the Magna Carta's provisions, if the Sovereign does not observe the Charter the people may rise up and wage war on her, seizing castles, lands and possessions until they have redress [under Common Law].


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... urope.html

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[Bruce Dazzling]

Vanlose, your long post (two posts up) is similar to something I was going to attempt to write up this weekend when I had more time, but now I don't have to, and quite frankly, that's a relief, because it's quite a concept to wrap one's brain around. And besides, you and CitizenSpook wrote it better than I could have!

I wanted to highlight a smaller bit, though, that I believe is the crux of the argument that we the people have had our ability to hold our government accountable stolen from us. It's a very important idea, and I hope that condensing it gets a few more people to read it (not that RI-ers are lazy by nature, but your post is LOOOONG.)

"[W]hile the writers of the federal rules made provisions for indictments, they made none for presentments. This was no oversight. According to Professor Lester B. Orfield, a member of the Advisory Committee on Rules of Criminal Procedure, the drafters of Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 6 decided the term presentment should not be used, even though it appears in the Constitution. Orfield states [22 F.R.D. 343, 346]:

'There was an annotation by the Reporter on the term presentment as used in the Fifth Amendment. It was his conclusion that the term should not be used in the new rules of criminal procedure. Retention might encourage the use of the run-away grand jury as the grand jury could act from their own knowledge or observation and not only from charges made by the United States attorney. It has become the practice for the United States Attorney to attend grand jury hearings, hence the use of presentments have been abandoned.' "

That's a fascinating statement: "Retention might encourage...the grand jury [to] act from their own knowledge or observation." God forbid, right America? The nerve of these people. They have the nerve to put on the record that they intended to usurp our Constitutional power, power that was intended by the founding fathers, in their incredible wisdom, to provide us with oversight over tyrannical government.

And so they needed a spin term to cast aspersions on that power. The term they chose was, "runaway grand jury", which is nothing more than a Constitutionally mandated grand jury, aware of their power, and legally exercising that power to hold the federal beast in check, as in "checks and balances".

The lie couldn't be inserted into the Constitution, so they put it in a statute and then repeated it. And scholars went on to repeat it, and today, as it stands, the grand jury has effectively been lied into the role of submissive puppet of the US Attorney.

The American Juror publication included a very relevant commentary:

"Of course, no statute or rule can alter the provisions of the Constitution, since it is the supreme law of the land. But that didn’t prevent the federal courts from publishing a body of case law affirming the fallacy that presentments were abolished. A particularly egregious example:

'A rule that would permit anyone to communicate with a grand jury without the supervision or screening of the prosecutor or the court would compromise, if not utterly subvert, both of the historic functions of the grand jury, for it would facilitate the pursuit of vendettas and the gratification of private malice. A rule that would open the grand jury to the public without judicial or prosecutorial intervention is an invitation to anyone interested in trying to persuade a majority of the grand jury, by hook or by crook, to conduct investigations that a prosecutor has determined to be inappropriate or unavailing.' [7]

What is the result? Investigating seditious acts of government officials can be deemed inappropriate or unavailing by the prosecutor, or the judge can dismiss the grand jurors pursuing such investigations. Consequently, corrupt government officials have few natural enemies and go about their seditious business unimpeded.

By the way, they made a rule to take care of runaways too, in 1946: Rule 6(g):

'At any time for cause shown the court may excuse a juror either temporarily or
permanently, and in the latter event the court may impanel another person in place of the juror excused.' Now judges can throw anyone off a grand jury, or even disimpanel a grand jury entirely, merely for exercising its discretion."

Great stuff throughout your post.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Vanlose, that was incredibly well written. But I feel like I agree with all of that and I started this thread agreeing with it, too. I also feel like you're trying to get me to agree that -- what? We're all ruled without our consent? Amen. That the entire edifice of human lawfare is semantics at it's worst, and literally fatal bullshit? Cheers. I am with you on all of that.

What I cannot escape is the Gnosis that all this rules-based skullduggery is doomed, a dead end. If we manage to find smoking guns and loopholes, those glitches will be fixed by people who don't play by their own rules, never have, never will. You know?

It's definitely my Kali Yuga baby bias speaking, but Twitter is more important than anything that happened in Britain or the Vatican hundreds of years ago. The power balance will not be shifted by a lineage of legalese from the Middle Ages, you know? That material is interesting but there's no utility.

Of course, the same could be said for anything we discuss here.

[nathan28]

It amazes me that on page 3 the Freemen's "Common Law", practically ripped out of the Handmaid's Tale, remains confused with common law here, which was largely the point of that poison pill in the first place. Maybe this is too Mao Zedong for y'all, but, like, seriously, the enemy, it's like we want to internalize him or something.

Sorry, I stepped out of bounds there. BUY JUNK SILVER NOW!